You are not hallucinating like most of the protagonists in The Imperfection, my audiodrama du jour. To combat my Frühjahrsmüdigkeit I redesigned this blog.
Still white, still mostly links (“It’s called ‘curation’ and it’s an art!”), still so many websites to blogroll-review…
At the beginning of this year I started jotting down quotes from books I read. Here are the spoils from the last two.five months:
Mir gefallen die Prostituierten,
weil sie etwas öffentlich machen,
was jeder Mensch tut: warten.“Der Fleck, die Jacke, die Zimmer, der Schmerz” — Wilhelm Genazino
Immer müssen die Denkenden darauf verzichten zu leben,
und die Lebenden haben es nicht nötig zu denken.“Wir töten Stella” — Marlen Haushofer
But there is grass that must be eaten,
pellets that must be chewed,
hraka that must be passed,
holes that must be dug,
sleep that must be slept.“Watership Down” — Richard Adams
It took me about five episodes to figure out which male actor Jodie Foster reminded me of in the recent “True Detective” season. By this point it was also the only mystery I was invested in.
The first episode started strong. It set up its main mystery and introduced its cast of characters as it is wont to do. We get a no-bullshit chief of police played by Foster, an even less-bullshit, demoted, native cop played by Kali Reis (who I just learned is/was a boxer), some trouble in the past, and a corpsicle of research scientists that went FKK-ing in the arctic ice. Some standard fare, but it’s obvious that the cast is enjoying themselves.
Though, over the course of the next four episodes it telenovela-d its way around any kind of mystery and only on a few occasions did it feel like I was watching a detective-show. We get mail-order brides and one too many disgruntled wife instead.
Considering the subtitle – “Night Country” – and the constant reminder via overlays that it has been x days since the sun set, neither darkness nor snow are used to much effect. I still have one episode to go, but I don’t expect anything good like the snowstorm shootout scene from Fargo’s first season. A rehash of the night vision goggles scene from “Silence of the Lambs” perhaps, but I hope somebody vetoed this.
To solve our initial mystery: The actor Jodie Foster resembled, not just physically but also in her mannerisms, is Michael J. Fox. Looks like I’m not the only one who noticed this.
Appendix: The 75 minute finale was okay with spotty but fine resolutions on the major cases. The heroes’ journeys completed once more.
Let’s talk breakfast. I start most days with a cup of coffee or black tea; both milked. Once hunger strikes its first bell of the day, I head to the kitchen and prepare my müesli (I really like the e after the umlaut):
Grab a bowl and pour 50 to 70 gram of rolled oats (they sell a soft and a hard variant here; use the hard one). Throw in a handful of washed and dried blueberries. Top those with additional handfuls of flax seeds, nuts (almonds, go crazy), sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds. As if you want to start a garden in your belly. Dice a banana – not too big (I use a spoon and break off little pieces) – and add it before you top it off with another 50 to 70 gram of “basis müesli“, which is a mixture of different cereals they sell in discounters in Germany. It includes spelt (aka dinkel), wheat, even more oat, etc.
Stir the dry mixture. Finally, fill the bowl with milk until it covers all the cereal and fruits and only the occasional floating blueberry can be seen. Wait 20 to 30 minutes before you eat it. I take a dump and a shower while I wait.
Are other fruits okay? — Sure. I prefer mushy bananas and the acidic stab a blueberry can provide. Dark grapes are also nice. I tried apples and pears, separately, but haven’t found the right variety yet. Most sorts feel too fresh and juicy for my taste.
Why the oats as a basis if you literally use “basis müesli”? — The prices for the basis müesli have risen from 1,79 Euro to 2,29 Euro within the last year or so. There are obvious reasons considering the Ukraine is one of the main suppliers for cereals, but 30% are 30%. So I cut the good stuff with the cheaper basic rolled oats.
I have a folder in my browsers’ bookmarks – ‘listen’ – that houses links to various albums and webradiostations. Last week I thought, how nice it would be if I could click something and it opens a random link from that folder. If only there was a thing I could click on and it would play random music from preselected sources.
Of course, there are extensions for the former but I would need to fill my bookmark-folder with a plethora of links. Problem is, I actually want to slim down on the bookmarking. I feel like I just drop stuff in buckets until they overflow and then I throw them out without ever taking at least a sip of the concoction.
Of another course, there are services that would let me define, or buy, or steal a music collection I could play from my Winamp-clone of choice. This entails ads and mails and ads in mails or, less bugging, viruses. The only service I use in this regard is Soundcloud. It is as close to a social media site as I was willed to register at, where I like and repost electronic mixes which keep me entertained while I work.
What is missing is a solution for non-work related times. Or work-times where I want fewer beats and more guitars for example.
Ergo, JSukebox. It’s a file that lives on my desktop. I doubleclick it, it starts a browser, opens one of about currently 30 links, I press play and – voilà – music. A bookmark within a browser is used when I’m in the mood for a new random selection.
In technical terms it’s an HTML-file with some JavaScript inside (the JS in ‘JSukebox’). The JavaScript has a list of links, picks one at random and redirects to it. When I find new music I can edit the file to append the list. Not exactly rocket science.
If you want to have a go at it, perhaps create your own version or laugh about my middling JS-skills, download the file (rightclick the link and save it) and edit it. If you just want some music, click on it. Please note though, that I probably won’t ever update this first version with further links, like they can be found in the Media Bites category in this blog for example (current ones are all included, bythyway). Subscribe to my RSS feed for that!
I just slapped together a mixtape. My first in a long time and it’s just a best-of of different tracks that I enjoyed listening to in the last couple of years glued together with some toilet-humour. It would have included Nat Baldwin’s “Wake Up It’s Time To Rise” but I couldn’t find it on the Tube.
Mixtape Garden will probably rot faster than the strawberries I bought last saturday and threw in the trash today. But they converted the tracks into an MP3 so I got that goin’ for me which is nice.
Once I hit that “Publish”-button, I will try my hand on another one. Expect an addendum post-haste!
PS: Here are TV themes I listened to a lot in the past 5 10 15 20 years.
PPS: The Bojack theme is too long. I should have used the 45-second outro.
I watch a fair amount of Twitch.tv. It’s my go-to evening entertainment, when I don’t play videogames myself.
Besides the assorted variety streamers I subscribe to, there are some “Magic Online” streamers (mostly AspiringSpike and DemonicTutors), the occasional cryptic crossword one (see my site for more), and lately competitive “Tetris” (CTL & CTM). Their commentators are entertaining and the action is very exciting. Waiting for a longbar to drop to get that tetris in, is pure adrenaline.
Now I won’t start streaming myself. Neither will I begin playing Magic Online (again, because fuck WotC) nor Tetris for that matter (I lack the skills) but some games presented by the variety streamers make me dust off my Steam account, grab my 360 controller and go for it.
I noticed a pattern there. I like to have three games simultaneously in rotation, which differ in genre but mostly differ in length needed to play them.
The shortest at the moment is “Brotato”. It replaced “20 Minutes Till Dawn” and is a game in the vein of “Vampire Survivors”. You shoot monsters, collect XP and/or materials, get better gear, shoot a lot more monsters. So many monsters. Due to the fixed time frame of 20 to 30 minutes, I can easily squeeze in a run (or two, if I fail early enough) between work and other variants of procrastination.
The longest is “Graveyard Keeper”. Closely related to “Stardew Valley” and other work-simulations, I really like the carrot & stick variant in this one (Hail comrade donkey!). There are certain tasks you have to fulfill and they are just out of reach enough that you know what you have to do, but it will take not too much time or effort that it becomes a slog. It will take time, though, which is why I prefer to play it at the end of the day. For most nights in the past week, the motto was, once it’s “Tagesschau”-time I will start digging.
Last but not least, the in-betweener, where I want to play a game with more meat than “Brotato” but not really fuck around for hours like in “Graveyard Keeper”. Metroidvanias and platformers fill this gap perfectly. You play a level or two, progress a bit and feel satisfied. Titles I have enjoyed recently were: “Shovel Knight”, “The Witch & The 66 Mushrooms”, “Axiom Verge”, and “Hollow Knight”. As soon as I finish this sentence, I will return to “The Ramsey”, where I am a hamster with a popcorn-gun.