My Little Pony

I went to visit my parent’s house last weekend, and there I learned that my first and oldest pony Flörchen has died. I am surprisingly un-sad about this; I guess I have plenty of distance to most things around that house by now. Nevertheless, I think after roughly 25 years, Flörchen has earned an obituary in form of a blog post. I got Flörchen when I was six years old. I was one of the horse-obsessed kids, and since my parents had plenty of space for all kinds of animals, it was only a matter of time until I demanded […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]