Hobbies

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 […]

21 October 2016

Stamps and Letters

Well… I’m prepared for my retirement, as I have recently unearthed my stamp collection. Though this is probably the most old-man hobby ever, I actually spend some time in my teens collecting, or rather, organizing stamps. At some point back then, I discovered bags and boxes full of stamps in the attic, which apparently my grandmother had collected. Since apparently I had nothing better to do as a kid, I started putting those stamps into a stamp album… and for a while, I collected stamps of the letters we received. I also got a bag of stamps from some store […]

3 July 2016

Postcards All Around the World

Earlier this year I decided to sign up for postcrossing again, and in this blog post, I’d like to share my experience with this project. It’s a project with a very simple concept – first, you request an address of a random stranger somewhere in the world and send them a postcard. Once you’ve done that, you will receive a postcard in return, but not from the same person – from another random stranger somewhere in the world. In our increasingly digitalized world, this project aims to bring joy to mailboxes that otherwise only see bills and spam these days. […]

29 April 2011

Little Monsters

Two months after having taught myself how to crochet, I have created a monster. Er, actually, a few of them. The two Daleks I knit last year now have company by this fellow Doctor Who “monster”: That is of course an “Adipose” from the 4.01 episode “Partners in Crime”. One of the sillier episodes with one of the silliest monsters, but they are so silly that they’re just cute. The crochet pattern is on ravelry. The body was very easy though mine looks a bit more squashed than the one in the instructions. I also had my trouble with the […]

6 April 2011

Back on the horse

If you have been stalking me and my blog since it’s early days, you may remember me mentioning my horse Daisy a few times. But I doubt both, so I’ll be glad to tell the whole story again. I also daresay my writing skills have become less immature since I last wrote about my childhood passion: horses. Yep, I used to be one of those obnoxious horse-fanatic girls who regularly read trashy horse magazines (thankfully I got tired of them pretty early and read a “real” adult horse magazine, Cavallo in this case, instead). I wonder where my fascination for […]

22 February 2011

Getting hooked

Two weeks ago I spontaneously taught myself how to crochet. Of course I already knew how to knit, but having had too much time on my hands to browse ravelry, I saw some cool crochet patterns which appealed to me. So I dug out those old crochet hooks who I’ve inherited from probably my grandmother plus some leftover yarn, and started crocheting. YouTube has once again been a great help, and about an hour later I created a somewhat crooked swatch. Afterwards I tried my luck with a granny square, which still looks a bit crooked, but I think I’ve […]