Blog 4.0

Three years ago I posted about how I got temporarily addicted to Candy Crush . I eventually ended up uninstalling it after they added mandatory ads and I got tired of being told to shop at Temu after every level. I then played an ad-free knock-off for a while (which was also less fun though) and eventually uninstalled that too. Since then, I've remained free of mobile games. ... until about a week ago, when I got sick with a bug that had me bed-ridden for a couple of days - nothing too dramatic really, but I was just too tired to get up on those days. Since I still couldn't simply sleep all day though, I started watching YouTube videos on my phone, something I otherwise do only rarely as I find the mobile interface annoying and the ads even more so (on my desktop I naturally use an ad blocker). In the process of this, I kept getting ads for the same mobile game over and over: a cat-themed puzzle game called Meow Doku . And in spite of myself... I had to admit it looked kind of ...

As mentioned in my last post , we stayed at a friend's place for the past week, up in Wales. And honestly, it was one of the nicest holidays I've had in a while. It's rare that I get to switch off so completely - when I visit my mother I still have to think about her wants and needs as a priority, and when I just have time off at home, I still have all the usual everyday considerations to keep track of - how much food is in the fridge, whether it's time to do laundry etc. This past week I truly didn't have to think about any of that; we just did the bare minimum of planning (e.g. when going to a shop together, we'd talk about what food we'd want to buy) and I went for hours without even looking at the clock. It was so nice. We weren't completely lazy either - though most days were quite chill, we went to the beach more than once, visited Cardiff Castle and watched the solar eclipse together. Our friend had thoughtfully ordered a bunch of special eclips...

I always say that it's been a while since I last went to the cinema - taking a closer look, it turned out to have been almost seven years. The last movie I saw on a big screen was actually  Rise of Skywalker , which... to be honest, the jokes about how that could put you off going to the cinema forever pretty much write themselves. However, the simple truth is that I just haven't felt the need to go to the cinema. I can see new movies soon enough on Disney+ or some other streaming service, and the extra effort of going to town and paying extra to see something sooner and on a larger screen doesn't really feel worth it when you don't have anyone to go with you. (I don't have any friends that are local and my husband isn't a big movie-goer either.) This week, an opportunity arose though. We're staying at a friend's place for a few days and I had just heard about all the rave reviews Nolan's Odyssey was getting, so I suggested that we could go see it ...

In search of something new to watch on Disney+, I came across Rivals . I clicked on it because the name vaguely rang a bell, though I couldn't have told you what I'd heard about it, at what point or said by whom. It's very well produced, with great acting and music, and I found it compelling almost instantly. I'm now caught up to the current season, for which Disney won't release more episodes until winter. And yet... one of the most frequent comments I read about the show was that it was just jolly good fun to watch, and that hasn't really been true for me. I've been finding it compelling, yes, but in the same way a train wreck is compelling. Watching more episodes actually left me feeling actively bad sometimes, and even though I'm still not entirely sure why that is, I think the best explanation I have is that almost all the main cast members are so deeply flawed in ways that are just frustrating - either they keep making other people's lives mise...

Yesterday was apparently the hottest June day in the UK on record, and tomorrow is predicted to exceed it. Before I moved to the UK, I was always making fun of my English friends for being such wusses about the weather, complaining about the heat even at 25°C. Even twenty to thirty years ago, weather over 30°C wasn't unheard of in Austria in the summer, and while it wasn't exactly pleasant, I don't remember ever perceiving it as that bad either. But now that I've lived in the UK for over a decade, I get it. The humidity in the air here is just much higher than in central Europe, and it makes even lower temperatures feel really uncomfortable. Yesterday was a real struggle trying to work from home, as I just couldn't think at all with the temperature exceeding 29°C in our flat. Mostly I just stripped down when I wasn't expected to be on a video call, drank pint after pint of water and wandered the house in search of slightly cooler spots. I'm not looking forwa...

My husband has had chronic back problems pretty much as long as we've been together, so I'm quite used to being the one assigned to do any heavy lifting around the house. (Taxi and delivery drivers often look a little startled to see the woman in the relationship make a dash to pick up all the heavy items while the man shuffles his feet awkwardly.) Except... my time to also have back problems seems to have arrived at last. While I was visiting my mother last week, my back started to ache after a few days, and for the last couple of days of my stay I became pretty useless as merely shambling around the house was already enough of an effort. The husband blames my old bed, which makes his own back ache every time we visit together, but I figured, it's my old bed, surely it can't hurt me ?! But no, it seems my body has reached a point where spending several nights sleeping on a pretty hard mattress that felt perfectly fine to me in my twenties is no longer something I can ...

I've been washing my dishes by hand for more than sixteen years now. At first I didn't mind it too much, but as the years have gone by I've increasingly soured on this particular chore. Part of it was that whenever we visited someone else, everyone and their mother seemed to have a dishwasher, reminding me of what I'd left behind. However, the bigger part of my frustration was probably that my husband developed chronic back pain and (justifiably) noped out of doing the dishes ever again, leaving it to me at all times, even when he was on holiday and I was working - meaning I still had to also do the dishes at the end of a tiring work day, and I hated it. I started talking about getting a dishwasher and was always shot down with the argument that "the landlords would never agree to getting the plumbing for that in", which was probably true, but I couldn't help being wistful about it. The other day I was watching a Technology Connections video about dishwas...

As of yesterday I'm officially on my Christmas break, which at over two weeks long is my longest holiday of the year. I've really been looking forward to it, and this year I think I also really needed it. After my mental health hiatus things at work initially got a bit better. To my employer's credit, they did take the whole thing seriously and made some changes to alleviate the worst of my issues when I came back. Things were a bit awkward for a while, but at least not quite as bad. Then Black Friday/Cyber week came around and all hell broke loose again. Lots of unpaid overtime and artificially created stress. The only thing that helped me power through that one was that I knew it affected others just as badly and that at least there was a definite end date to this particular craziness. On my penultimate day of work, the leader of the division back at HQ gave what was supposed to be a Christmas speech, broadcast to several hundred people at once, and it was some of the mo...

I was pretty enamoured with Hazbin Hotel last year, so I've been looking forward to the second season this year. Amazon released it two episodes at a time over the course of the last month, which I thought worked pretty well... except for the freaking ads! Usually my adblock protects me from that stuff everywhere, so having to sit through 5 minutes of ads for every 25 minutes of episode was surprisingly aggravating. I ended up really liking this second season regardless, though I thought the first two episodes were relatively weak. However, after that, every batch of two was better than the last, culminating in a pretty awesome finale. The songs, too, started out a bit weaker than season one (in my opinion anyway) but got better in later episodes as well. Clean it up had me laughing out loud at my screen and Easy is stuck in my head on endless repeat right now. If I had to pick a favourite and least favourite thing about this season, my favourite would probably be Vox's arc....

Remember me complaining about work a few months ago? Things unexpectedly came to a head this week. On Monday (a working from home day) I had a good cry at the end of the day, but I didn't think too much of it yet at that point because I'm what you could call a naturally weepy person and sometimes a good cry is just the mental equivalent of clearing out your sinuses. I figured I'd feel better on Tuesday in the office, since being around my colleagues often tends to cheer me up. Not this time. By ten I was hiding in the toilet and crying again. I can't be doing this in the office , I thought to myself and vowed to pull myself together. Yet an hour later I was back in the same bathroom stall, once again crying, hyperventilating and shaking. By this point I could tell that this was untenable, and I told my manager that I was not okay and if I could please go home for the rest of the day. He was of course fine with that and I took a train home, quietly sniffling to myself f...

There's a new Netflix show by the creator of BoJack Horseman, in a similar - if more grounded - style. I only know about this due to watching a YouTube video called " The BoJack Horseman Creator Made a New Show! " Long Story Short focuses on a Jewish family over the course of several decades, with non-linear storytelling jumping back and forth to show us snapshots of their lives at different points in time. I hear that Jews find it very relatable, but it still worked for me as someone who's not Jewish and only has minimal knowledge of Jewish culture. For example, the first episode focuses on oldest son Avi bringing his girlfriend Jen home for his brother's bar mitzvah, and I'll say the experience of being the new girlfriend getting introduced to a loud and boisterous family is captured spot-on (as that's something I have also experienced). I was actually sad that there are only ten episodes, and I hope they make many more. I imagine that the non-linear s...

Look, I'm not even talking about the environmental impact, even though that's huge. I'm putting copyright concerns aside, even though those are also huge. But just... the general insanity of it all is getting to me. I'm now running into people in real life who will insert "I asked ChatGPT and" into regular conversation and expect me to treat this like it's something normal and insightful. At this point just seeing or hearing that phrase from someone I know triggers a visceral response of revulsion in me and it's getting tough to deal with. At work, we use the Microsoft suite, and the moment I noticed it, I turned CoPilot off. Since then, Microsoft has decided that my lock screen needs two separate ads for CoPilot on it, and added a greyed out button for it to my Outlook UI - which is otherwise customisable, but this new button for a feature I've turned off can't be removed. If these chat bots are so great, why are you so desperate to shove them...

Work has been getting me down a lot lately. Earlier in the year we got two new websites dumped in our laps, after the entire local staff that used to manage them until then was laid off. Our department manager, who'd been with the company for twenty years or so and was the heart and soul at the core of everything we did, also decided to leave the business. (Incidentally, that's the same guy whose departure I really dreaded in this post from over a year ago. And then it really did happen.) Since then our routine has seemingly turned into a constant stream of alternately being chided for not having enough sales on the three websites we're managing simultaneously (when a year ago we were a bigger team and only had one to look after) and being told that no, we cannot have any more resources or do more discounts or basically anything else that might actually help us achieve the growth they keep asking for. In-between I get emails from complete strangers working in other countri...

I remember being somewhat into the Eurovision Song Contest for a while in my teens. Love Shine A Light (the 1997 winning song from the UK) was played on Austrian radio for ages, and I was fourteen at the time. In 2000, I distinctly remember watching the event with the TV muted and the radio tuned in to a sarcy commentary show that was just making fun of everything. It already seemed like a crazy over-the-top show back then, though the winning song that year, Fly On The Wings Of Love , was just two middle-aged Danish dudes playing their guitars. The next time I remember paying attention to the event wasn't until 2014, when I had just started my job at my current employer, and Austria won the competition with a drag queen performing what sounded like a song straight out of a James Bond movie . Being the only Austrian in the office, I was naturally congratulated on "my" victory. When I looked up the song to know what everyone was talking about, I was mostly baffled.  Fast f...

I don't really like talking about religion nowadays since I've become an atheist for all intents and purposes, just not of the kind who enjoys telling everyone else about it. I have no problem with other people finding meaning, community and comfort in religion either. It's just not for me. I was however raised in the Roman-catholic church and never formally left it, so every now and then something related to that will still make my ears perk up. Such as the pope dying and a new one being elected. Oh the memes I saw on the subject... amazing (and yet never disrespectful, interestingly enough). I'm currently visiting my mother in Austria and she was switching TV channels yesterday just as the white smoke appeared, so we stayed on that channel to watch. I honestly thought it was hilarious how much the whole hubbub resembled a giant football event. They showed some people chanting "habemus papam" to the same tune to which they'd diss their football opponents ...

During my weekly phone call with my mother, the subject of politics came up, and at some point she said: "That X human is also terrible!" "Ex human? Do you mean Elon Musk?" "Yes, him!" "Yes, yes he is." It just amuses me that even my elderly mother in Austria who doesn't use the internet has heard of the guy at this point (and dislikes him).

I haven't written about work since September . The short of it is that our new website went live and was... surprisingly functional, considering the tight deadline for its creation. That said, in the back-end things were less great: there were write-offs due to messed up orders, and our customer ratings started to plummet. We all figured that it would be the business's number one priority to get our house back in order, but no... Instead they immediately dumped another project on us, to help with the migration of another website that we weren't at all familiar with, for another country and in a language most of us don't even speak. Can't say that particularly enthused anyone - but okay, we figured they thought we'd done such a good job with our own website and wanted us to help these other guys now that we knew how to do it. Except - we never got to talk to said other guys aside from one or two people. We repeatedly asked about this, because how can we help whe...

While talking about World of Warcraft's 20th anniversary , I've been finding myself thinking back to my university years (since I was in my early twenties when I first started playing WoW), which is a time period I generally avoid thinking about. In many ways those years were good times - I made friends online who actually shared my nerdy interests for the first time, and I got to visit different countries across Europe because of that. I was also still living with my mother and generally pretty carefree in terms of everyday things I had to worry about. However, over all of that loomed the shadow of causing parental disappointment and being filled with existential dread. You see, I was the Austrian equivalent of a straight A student, always succeeding at everything in school without having to put too much effort in. Then I graduated from high school and life suddenly got complicated, because I was supposed to pursue a career, and one that required a university degree please, as...

I was a Twitter user for over a decade, not because I truly loved the site, but because as far as social media went, it kind of felt like the best of a bad bunch to me. It still allowed you to just see a chronological feed simply containing the posts of people you followed (if grudgingly), it focused on text (even if images and videos were available) and it had a clean layout that wasn't cluttered with ads, games or other "features" I didn't give a damn about. Then Elon Musk came in and things degraded rapidly. An acquaintance gave me an invite code to Bluesky in July last year. It felt more like the Twitter of old again, but was very quiet. Still, I persisted and continued to post there, even if I was still checking Twitter as well. About three months ago, my Twitter account got locked down for not having a birth date tied to it, and since I was already annoyed with the site, I didn't bother to unlock it and switched to posting on Bluesky exclusively. There were...

I feel sorry for my American friends. More than anything though, I've got to admit I just don't get it. I watched a video of some analysts discussing the result and one comment that stood out was to me was something along the lines of: What everyone always gets wrong is that most people don't care about politics and don't pay attention to it. And I do get that to some extent. I'm not blaming people for not keeping track of all the crimes Trump was convicted of for example. But when someone goes out there and openly talks in his speeches about how he wants to let the armed forces loose on his internal enemies, roll back women's rights etc. - that's not complicated or niche. That stuff was broadcast globally and should have given people pause. How so many people can be either totally oblivious to what's in plain sight or just not care, thinking it won't affect them personally, is beyond me.