chaosworks.org

12 September 2024

Unwind

The Unwind Dystology was by far one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read. It’s a captivating, easy to read series aimed at young adults, but despite that, it’s nowhere near light reading. In this world, abortion is outlawed, but instead parents can ‘unwind’ their children between the ages of 13-18. This means that they ‘continue living’ in a ‘divided state’, as the euphemisms in this book say, but in reality they become glorified organ donors. It sounds horrible and you wonder how a society could ever have sanctioned this way of life. But the books expertly convince you that […]

4 September 2024

A Lifetime

I was a small, clumsy human being and I still needed to find out how to navigate the world. You carried me for the first few years of my life, always with a smile on your face. But one day (or was it the evening, I think the lights were on?), when we you were standing at the kitchen window, I asked you to pick me up and carry me, and you told me that I’m getting too heavy for you to carry me. Perhaps I was looking for different way to be carried, because some time after that, I […]

7 July 2024

Quitting social media (mostly)

About a month ago, I stopped using almost all of my social media (with the exception of Instagram). It’s been an interesting month and I still have mixed feelings about it. I’ve been using Twitter since around 2008, so I’ve been there since its early days. I stopped using Twitter actively a little bit before it was acquired by the Muskrat, and once that happened, I deactivated my account there and moved first to Mastodon, and later also to Bluesky. I have not particularly enjoyed Twitter for a long, long time even before it went to shit. Twitter (and its […]

30 June 2024

Mistborn

Everybody loves Brandon Sanderson, don’t they? Well, as my enthusiasm for reading had been rejuvenated in the past year, I have been spending a lot of time on literature websites and other channels to find the right books for me to read. After some letdowns of overhyped books, I established a firm list of “must reads” and / or “classics” that I felt would be my thing. Reading what you want is so important, and probably why jumping on the hype train is always a disappointment. Anyway, everybody seems to love Brandon Sanderson, and while Stormlight Archive is praised to […]

4 June 2024

Eight years of pen pals

About eight years ago, I revived a very old hobby of mine: writing letters. I used to have a few pen pals when I was a kid in the nineties. Back then, my pen pals were in particular another kid who used to come to my parents’ farm back when we had a vacation apartment business. But with the rise of the internet in the 00s, that hobby fell out of fashion and I lost touch with all of my pen pals. I made new friends on the internet and my primary form of long-distance communication became ICQ and the […]

3 May 2024

Susanna Clarke: Piranesi and Jonathan Strange

Did you ever finish reading a book and then went straight back to the first page to read it again? This happened to me when I read Piranesi, a rather short novel by Susanna Clarke. Piranesi is a magical, mythical and mind-boggling mystery. Probably one of the most unique books I have ever read. I don’t really know what else to say about this book without spoiling it, except that it’s absolutely worth reading. It’s a short (~250 pages) and very captivating read with very brief chapters. It’s an introvert’s dream place. And will stick with you for a while. […]

2 April 2024

Lord of the Rings: 20 Years Wiser

Lord of the Rings is such a vast and epic topic, where to even begin? And what can I write about it that hasn’t been written about it yet? I’d just like to share my own personal experience with this work of art, as I do so often here in this blog. I first became fully aware of the Lord of the Rings around 2000 or 2001, as the marketing for the first movie was starting to gain momentum. I was but a naïve teenager back then and I had very little contact with these books aside from having seen […]

7 March 2024

Fargo: A retrospective of five stories

With the new season having been on the horizon, I decided to (re)watch almost all of Fargo this January. Yesterday my journey culminated in the phenomenal finale of Season 5, and all I can say is: this TV show is absolutely brilliant (mostly). But let’s backtrack a little. Fargo is an anthology show in which every season tells an entirely different story (set in the same universe as the 1996 movie). Thus, each season feels vastly different, and there are very notable fluctuations in quality. What unites them are not only certain characters and cameos, but also the overall vibe […]

23 February 2024

Propaganda and polyamory: Revisiting the Hunger Games

Prompted by having read the prequel novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I recently decided to re-read the Hunger Games novels. First of all, I was curious about the prequel – how can a prequel about the villain of the series tie in? The prequel tells the (love) story of a teenage Coriolanus Snow, who later becomes president (dictator would be the more appropriate term) of Panem. What an odd book to read, because how can you make a novel about an entitled narcissist, who treats people like possessions, possibly compelling? While his rise to patriotism is sometimes interesting, […]