Hobbies

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 […]

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. […]

18 November 2023

A novel development

It’s been a very long time since I read novels out of my own free will. Having been forced to read some pretty annoying stuff during my time studying literature made me lose interest in this medium. Even though some of the books I read for uni were undoubtedly good, I can’t say that they were really my style or my type of book. Margaret Atwood comes to mind. The Handmaid’s Tale is a brilliant dystopian novel, just my kind of stuff, but some of the other things I read from her – nice, but not really my thing. So […]

8 August 2023

Raiders of the Serpent Sea Character Sheet (A5)

I will be starting to play in a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign soon(ish), and one of the things I always wanted to improve about my own DnD experience was the character sheet. The basic DnD one is too unflexible for me, and even though I really always wanted to re-make it in InDesign, I never had the patience for it during past campaigns. The last campaign that I played, which was Ancient Greek-themed, actually came with a gorgeously beautiful themed character sheet – Odyssey of the Dragonlords. That one I did import to InDesign, and filled it out in […]

17 July 2023

Back back on the horse

Long time readers of my blog might recall my post Back on the horse from 12 years ago. I recommend reading that post for some necessary background information on my history with horseback riding and owning my own horses back in the day. Well, by now it’s been a very long 24 years since I had my own horse, Daisy, and it’s been 12 years since I last rode a horse during the lessons I mentioned in my previous post on this topic. I didn’t actually continue to go riding at the place that I went to 12 years ago […]

10 May 2023

The Castle in the Sky

The topic of job search kept me occupied for several months now. During this whole process I often thought about which jobs would be a great fit for me other than those to which I usually applied. In particular, while I was in Berlin two weeks ago for an internship that is about to end, I visited a small board gaming club, and inspired by that, an outrageous idea started brewing inside of me. It made me think about what I would do with my life if I had unlimited funds and wouldn’t need to worry about my career. Actually […]

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 […]

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:

19 March 2018

Chocolate Chunk Cookies

Whenever I make my chocolate cookies, I get a lot of requests for the recipe. A long time ago, this was a recipe that I got from the internet. But I’ve adjusted it so much that it really has nothing to do with that recipe anymore. So here it is! The Ingredients 250 g butter (unsalted), at room temperature 240 g dark brown sugar (the choice of sugar really affects the cookies – the softer, the better; I recommend Dark Brown Muscovado) 2 medium or large eggs 500 g flour (regular white flour) 1 teaspoon salt 3/4 teaspoon baking powder […]