adastra

2 March 2023

Back to Work

Today is my second day of re-entering the workforce, and it’s been challenging for me – mentally and physically. Yesterday I started to work in an agency for UX, branding and conversation design, and will continue to do so full time for the next three months. My focus will be on conversation design, chatbot user experience, and related topics. I believe that this will be an interesting and educational time for me, and is a good fit for my experience in linguistics and research, as well as for my background in design. However, on a mental and personal level, going […]

28 February 2023

Friendship

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

23 February 2023

Stone and Sky: Andor

I am by no means a Star Wars fangirl – at least not ever since George Lucas sold his soul to Disney. I do love the original trilogy, with Empire Strikes Back being my unrivaled favorite of the Star Wars saga. However, I stopped following most Star Wars content that Disney continues to throw at us after The Last Jedi. I actually enjoyed the latter—it was very funny, perhaps too funny—but I did not even watch The Rise of Skywalker after I heard that it basically retcons all of Last Jedi and seems to overall have made bad plot decisions. […]

16 February 2023

The World of Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West

About a year and a half ago, I first discovered the world of Horizon in the video game Horizon: Zero Dawn. I was absolutely enamored with this world. It’s so strange and primordial, yet it’s so familiar that it makes you feel like a stranger on your own planet. Horizon is the world about 1000 years into the future, in which an apocalypse has caused humanity to be reverted to tribes of hunter-gatherers. And discovering that world was an absolutely fascinating experience, which went hand in hand with the story of this game. In this game, you play as Aloy, […]

9 February 2023

Unpopular Opinion: Harry Potter is not that great

Due to the release of the video game Hogwarts Legacy, there’s currently quite a bit of controversy about Harry Potter and its creator, who now spends her days spewing hate speech against transwomen instead of writing magical children’s stories. I would like to add my two cents to this discussion. As a millennial, I grew up with Harry Potter. I started reading these books when I was around 14 years old, and they played a significant role in me acquiring the English language, as they were some of the first books I read in English. I read every new book […]

6 February 2023

Experiencing nausea when gaming

Last week I wrote about my issues in gaming with dark mode, which seems to be the standard for video games. In this post, I would like to address another issue that stops me from playing a lot of games: dealing with nausea with gaming due to first person perspective, enclosed spaces, camera shake and related issues. Some time in the past 10 years, I have lost my ability to play first person perspective video games. While I was still able to play Skyrim in early 2012 without any issues (on the XBOX), I have since not been able to […]

31 January 2023

Dark mode as a commonly overlooked user experience issue in gaming

I’ve been a video gamer for over 20 years, starting out with classics such as Diablo I, Diablo II, Grim Fandango and Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption. While I did not always game as much, I’ve been getting back into gaming for the past couple of years with games such as Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Valheim, Wasteland 3, etc. However, I noticed that I’m not as young as I used to be. 20 years ago, I didn’t really have issues playing video games, but these days, the number of games that I can actually play has become […]

29 January 2023

My PhD experience and #LeavingAcademia

If you follow me on Instagram or LinkedIn, you might already know that, since last week, I am officially a doctor (PhD)! And with that, my academic career comes to a close after almost 12 years at university. A good opportunity to reminisce about my experience in academia, and my reasons to not stay there. Bachelor’s and Master’s I started studying in 2011, after previously having worked as a web developer. Why did I leave my career as a web developer in the first place? Well, I wanted a new challenge, and since back then I used my lunch breaks […]

26 January 2023

The pros and cons of AI generated images

Since its release of v4, I’ve been an avid user of Midjourney, one of the currently most popular image generation tools aside from DALL-E and wombo.art. The current popularity of AI image generation tools has created quite an uproar among artist community, who fear for their livelihood. Personally, I think AI is a fantastic tool, that can help artists generate new ideas and improve existing art. Midjourney can create fantastic images, especially in the context of fantasy settings, and I’ve been using it primarily to create images for our Dungeons & Dragons campaign, such as images of the player characters […]