adastra

13 September 2015

The Fall

In a sea of formulaic film fads full of replace heroes and exchangeable plots, it’s getting harder and harder to find films that are truly fantastic, fabulous and fascinating. But they are out there, and one such film which I have seen only this year, is Tarsem Singh’s 2006 film The Fall. The frame story is that of a curious little girl in a hospital in 1920s Los Angeles, who befriends a fellow patient, an injured stuntman (played by Lee Pace). He tells her a fantastic story of five peculiar heroes on a quest to find a woman. In her […]

12 September 2015

Five Places I Want To Visit

I love traveling, but one of the problems I have with traveling is that I can never really decide on new places to visit. In the past ten years, I primarily traveled to English speaking countries such as the USA, Canada, Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales, Australia, New Zealand and Malta – and to many of them, multiple times. In fact, I’ve actually only been to non-English countries four times in the past ten years, which were Austria, France, Sweden and Finland (let’s not count the day trips to the Netherlands for shopping). I’m guessing that is because I just love […]

11 September 2015

Victorian Gothic Embodied: Penny Dreadful

Gothic is a literary genre that is as popular today as it was in the past. First attributed to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), it has inspired an entire array of subgenres, such as horror, the supernatural and even science fiction. Not only do these genres still play an important role in present day literature, film and television – also, the Gothic genre has sparked an entire subculture that mostly defines itself around its music and dresscode. A recent television series that embodies everything about the spirit of Gothic literature is Penny Dreadful, which is set in a […]

9 September 2015

The Upcoming Semester

Even though I’m still in the middle of the semester break, I’m becoming more and more nervous about the upcoming semester which starts on 19th October. It will be my last “real” semester at my university, since I only need to take three more classes to fulfill my curriculum. Out of these three, I will have to take one exam, which will be in the form of a presentation at a conference in February on front of about 20-50 people. For this conference, I will also have to take part in a project seminar which organizes the conference, making this […]

23 May 2015

The Future is looking Grimm

Or is it? Over its past four seasons, Grimm has established itself as a rather serene show. Despite it dark and gritty outward appearance, its serialized plots always tend towards a happy ending – as one would expect of a show that is largely inspired by fairy tales. The world of Grimm is inhabited by creatures (‘Wesen’) that cannot be seen by the majority of the population. They are sort of creatures that live inside people, but the people themselves are the creatures. They only show this when they want to or when they get emotional (‘Woge’). Some of them […]

29 December 2014

Twenty fourteen in tv show stats and other geeky stuff

Every year, I create a “what I did this year” blog post on my blog, meticulously organized by month. But this year I don’t feel like it would enrich my blog. The years are accelerating at an incredible rate. It seems only yesterday that I wrote my 2013 post, and I’m starting to get the feeling that soon my blog will only contain these posts, one every year, since I hardly find the time to blog about other things. Seriously, who still reads/writes a blog…?! 2014 and me The year 2014 was a strange experience. It was the year I […]

11 November 2014

I’ve been taking selfies since before it was (un)cool

Eight years, to be precise! On November 11th, 2006, I joined Michael‘s little daily photo project, which since then has flourished into a wonderful community. Some of my best friendships are a result of dailyfratze.de. Participating in this project has become an integral part of my life, one I can no longer imagine living without. And last year, the English language has even gained a word for what I’ve been doing all these years: selfies. I first became aware of this word in Australia, where I thought not much about it, except, “cool, a word for what I’ve been doing […]

8 November 2014

Ajar

It had been a long day and the sun had already set. A wave of tiredness came over me and I decided it was time to go to bed for the night. I called for Jeannie and she happily followed me. I went up the wooden stairs and reached the top floor. The burnt orange tiles were cold under my feet and echoed under Jeannie’s paws. Quickly, I scurried across the small gallery towards the door that separated the hallway from the gallery, and from there to the door that separated my apartment from the hallways and rest of the […]

30 September 2014

Ett liv som hund

Min familjen har alltid husdjur. De hade hundar före jag föddes – faktiskt, Purzel, hunden som de hade in året när jag föddes (1984) blev gravid och hade tre liten valpar en månad före jag föddes. Mina föräldrar behålls en av de som hetade Mopsy. Hon var min vän när jag var liten och vi spelade ofta på gårdet. När vi—Mopsy och jag—var sex år gammal, blev Mopsy gravid. Det var en olycka med grannes hund Terry… Nägra månade sen forsvann Mopsy plötsligt. Samtidigt blev jag sjuk och jag var tvungen att gå till sjukhuset, när läkare tog ut mina […]