Blog 4.0

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...

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 finally opened my mail-in ballot for the upcoming Austrian national election today and actually had a laugh-out-loud moment when I finished fully unfolding it. You see, the final of the eleven options states: "Keine von denen - KEINE", which means "none of these - NONE", so my first thought was: Wait, did they add an "official" way to spoil your ballot if you want to take part in the democratic process but don't like any of the available choices? But no, it's an actual political party. Their whole thing is that they do say they don't feel represented by any of the current parties, so I guess their mission statement is in the name... but it does seem like a bit of a legal loophole and like they could potentially get a good chunk of votes simply out of confusion. Very Austrian, is all I'll say.

I'm visiting my mother for a week again, specifically to spend tomorrow's Mother's Day with her in person. She's doing alright and we're getting along. It's also been a really good opportunity for me to recharge though. For several months now, I've felt like my brain is constantly in overdrive, between keeping track of tasks at work, doing chores around the house in a timely manner and ticking boxes in multiple MMOs every day. Here, my only real "responsibility" is to ask my mother whether there's anything she wants to do today and to make myself available if she needs help with anything, but otherwise I pretty much just get to eat, sleep and chill. It almost makes me feel like a different person in a way. I'm more serious, without the cute affectations I share with my husband, and I just feel like I have a lot more time to think. It's a kind of mental cleansing that's good to have every now and then I believe. More than ten years a...

I got an email this morning, notifying me that the website sms.at will be shutting down at the end of the year. The title stated that it was "the end of an era" (in German) and that certainly seemed apt. My profile on sms.at was one of the very first online accounts I ever created, all the way back in October 2001. That's 22 years ago now, when I had only just turned 18! I used the site both to send free text messages (something that seems very quaint now in the age of many "unlimited texts" plans, but back then it was useful) and for its free webmail. I had my "official" email account provided by my ISP, and the sms.at webmail for more frivolous purposes such as registering for random websites. I can't say I'm surprised that they're shutting down; to be honest I'm surprised they lasted as long as they did, considering they didn't seem to have much of a business model. I also effectively stopped using the site several years ago, as ...

It was good to visit my Mum for a week. After the whole scare with the cardiac arrhythmia (which is still not resolved, just temporarily on hold), I was worried that I'd find her much worse than when I had last seen her in April, but she didn't seem that different. She had just developed a sudden fear of stairs and hills, as she said that any sort of climb made her feel incredibly exhausted and unwell. Though we did go up one steep road together eventually, and she realised it wasn't actually that bad when it wasn't 30+ degrees out (no duh). I also got to visit the garden one more time and it was very bittersweet. I picked up a couple of keepsakes, but it was weird to think that I likely won't see the place again. I could definitely understand why my mother made her decision though, because seeing her and seeing even the comparatively tiny amount of work that was still to do in late September, such as picking up fallen pears, raking leaves etc., it was still clear...

Today my mother and I went to the local shopping centre to run some errands. First we visited a shop for her landline and cable provider, as I was interested in adding internet to her package, with an eye on me coming to visit more often in the future. I was hopeful that this would be easy, as she was sent a brand-new modem only the other week, which does have wi-fi capacity and everything; it's just not unlocked. First the guy told us that he couldn't just "add" internet, we would have to be changed to a whole new bundle deal. Fine, I thought. And no, we couldn't keep the current modem, in fact we'd need two new boxes installed. With an activation fee. And a monthly rent. And my Mum would need a new landline number. That's where I kind of went "come on", because I couldn't believe that simply amending an existing contract would require a new landline number. The guy called up some higher-level support, chatted with them for about ten minute...

I flew back to Austria yesterday to spend a few days with my mother. It was mostly an uneventful journey, which is kind of what you want when flying, but when we descended to land, something pretty amazing to me personally happened. I always like looking out the window at that point to see all the little houses and trees, and to slowly watch them get bigger, but I'm bad at orientating myself, so I usually can't tell what exactly I'm seeing. However, this time the plane approached the airport in a straight line from northwest to southeast, on a beautiful day with blue skies, and just as the sun was starting to set. Everything was casting stark shadows and for the first time ever, I could clearly see all of Vienna from the sky, recognising what I was looking at and spotting landmarks everywhere. It was like seeing a perfect 3D map of the place. I didn't know what to look at first, I just kept staring as the plane passed by and before the city itself disappeared from view...

One of the things that motivated me to finally create this blog (aside from my birthday) was getting news from my elderly mother that she's planning to sell our little garden. This has made me very sad, and I really wanted to vent about it somewhere. Growing up in Vienna in the 80s, my family spent its summers in our "Kleingarten" - this literally translates to "little garden" though I commonly see it translated as "allotment". I'm not sure whether that captures the meaning entirely , because it wasn't just a place to grow plants; it also contained a tiny house with minimal amenities, which essentially served as a lower middle class family's summer retreat. My family never went on holidays abroad - instead we'd spend the two months of Austrian summer holidays in this garden house every year. To be clear, there wasn't anything luxurious about this setup. As I said, the house was very minimal; just a place to sleep at night and take s...