me

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 […]

16 January 2024

Fear of the personal

This sounds silly from someone having a personal blog, but I’m sometimes having a hard time writing personal things on my blog. How ironic, right? I think this fear stems from having written a mountain of incredibly cringey personal things in the first incarnations of my blog, having made very complicated social experiences in the past, and to some degree, from where I’m from. I used to write literally just what I was thinking in my blog between 2005 and 2008 (and also before that, but on a web 1.0 website rather than a blog). This was a completely disorganized […]

1 December 2023

Evolving as a DnD player through characters

A few years ago, I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons. While initially I was skeptical that this would be for me, especially since I’m very bad at acting and always felt awkward about it, I’ve grown to enjoy it very much. I think I evolved a lot through the characters that I have created, and with each new character, I learned a lot and became better and better at this. I’ve played quite a few characters over the years, some of which I have grown very attached to. Time to reminisce! Here, I’m presenting my evolution through my characters. […]

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.

4 March 2022

My very own “face book”

I have been participating in the daily photo project dailyfratze.de for over 15 years. My profile there is not public anymore, so sorry if you were excited about checking out the past 15 years of my life. I used this milestone to create a printed version of my profile there, with one month per page being displayed in the book. And actually, here is your quick flip-through opportunity to take a look at the past 15 years of my life:

30 December 2016

Twenty Sixteen and Me (and Games)

The year is almost over, meaning that it’s time for my traditional “what I did this year” post. The year of 2016 is universally hated, in my opinion wrongfully – it’s not the fault of a slightly arbitrary measurement of the earth’s rotation that so many bad things have happened. Many inspirational people have died, but many more will likely die in the next couple of years. Many bad things have happened around the world, but considering that soon one of the most powerful nations in the world will be led by a group of imbeciles, I don’t even want […]

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 […]