Author: adastra

25 September 2025

Resurrecting Dexter

Just when I thought I was done blogging about Dexter… they released another new show. Yes, another one! I couldn’t quite believe it myself when I saw Dexter: Resurrection popping up a couple of months ago. Skeptical, I read a few opinions about it, and people say it’s actually really good? Well, guess I’ll have to watch it then. The first episode definitely required a bit of suspension of disbelief if you know what happened at the end of New Blood, but they tried their best to make it believable. Regardless of that, the show pulls you right in with […]

18 September 2025

The rise of the local TTRPG community (and how I built it in absentia)

About 2 years ago, I had the idea to start an English-language roleplaying event here in Düsseldorf, where people can try out RPGs, get to know other roleplayers, or find like-minded people. Previously to that, I had already been managing the Düsselgamers community for several years, which originated as the Düsseldorf Boardgamers Meetup group. I used to co-host public weekly board game nights through meetup, until I got a bit tired of random people and now that’s mainly a closed WhatsApp thing. However, since I manage the discord and continue to always have an eye on the community, I saw […]

10 September 2025

In and out of the reading slump

I’ve been having a terrible book hangover ever since I finished reading the Realm of the Elderlings series, about which I extensively blogged. It was such a great series and a deeply emotional reading experience, that I struggled really hard with most books I’ve tried to read ever since. I’ve probably had the worst reading slump I ever had in my time of actively reading books. My first attempt was The Immortal Investigation by Michael Cronk – a very lighthearted, humorous book, and debut novel of an indie author. I realized pretty fast that this is neither my style nor […]

15 July 2025

Death of the Author: Life after Gaiman

I’ve been a fan of the works of Neil Gaiman since roughly 2003, when I read American Gods. During the 00s, I read most of his published works, including Neverwhere, Anansi Boys, The Sandman, and various short story collections. I even went to book readings by him, first in 2007 in Cologne (weirdly, it took place inside a car dealership), and then again in 2014, also in Cologne (but in some more author-appropriate location). I always loved how dreamy and philosophical Gaiman’s works were, and how they weave something magical into something utterly ordinary. Especially their concepts of religion and […]

17 June 2025

The Baltics and a new way to travel (for me)

Last week I visited the Baltic countries, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. I’ve been interested in visiting them for a while since they have such a fascinating history, and they are three countries that are as similar as they are different. Lithuania in particular was interesting to me because the language, Lithuanian, is one of the oldest and most archaic of all the Indo-European languages. For this journey, for the first time in my life I actually booked an organized group travel via Intrepid. There are plenty of similar companies that offer such tours, such as for example GAdventures and WeRoad. […]

22 May 2025

Realm of the Elderlings: The Data Science Edition

I previously wrote a spoiler-free overview, a series by series reading experience report, and a deep dive into the book series Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb. This post here will conclude my blog posts about Realm of the Elderlings with some data, both about the books themselves, as well as my personal reading statistics and ratings. First, let’s look at the books and the series as a whole. I have read the physical paperback books published by Harper Voyager UK, so all my stats are based on those editions. There are 16 books in this series, which can […]

19 May 2025

Realm of the Elderlings: A deep dive

After I gave a a spoiler free overview of the Realm of the Elderlings, as well as a very long series by series review and reading experience report, I want to analyze some aspects of this series as a whole (but mostly regarding the books with Fitz as the main character). In this post, I’ll dive deep into the characters and themes of the series. SPOILER WARNING: This entire post contains heavy spoilers for the Realm of the Elderlings book series! Proceed to read at your own peril! Born a conflict FitzChivalry Farseer is the protagonist of 9 of the […]

15 May 2025

Realm of the Elderlings: Series by series reviews and reading experience

How was it to read The Realm of the Elderlings? After my spoiler-free overview in the previous post, this post will contain more in-depth reviews which were largely written as StoryGraph reviews as I was reading each book, and then later assembled here into a coherent post. Some books or sub-series were definitely a lot easier to read than others. Each was a somewhat different experience, but to summarize it: once I really got started with this series, I was hooked and it was easy to go through these tomes that average roughly 683 pages. The Farseer Trilogy I picked […]

12 May 2025

Realm of the Elderlings: A spoiler free overview

Never in my life before have I undergone such a monumental task as reading a 16 book series. I’ve read a book series here and there, mostly though with only 3 books or in rare cases, up to 7 or 9. This achievement is a first for me, but hopefully not the last. The series I’m writing about is The Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb. Her novels were recommended to me by friends and BookTubers alike, so after having had them on my to-read list for a year, and the first three books waiting on my actual to-read-bookshelf […]