Misc | chaosworks.org

17 April 2025

Dear producers, please stop with the shaky camera

After I just had to stop watching the 4th TV series within a few months about 10mins into the first episode because I could not handle the shaky, handheld camera, I would like to use my humble blog, which definitely no TV show producers will ever read, to rant about this absolutely stupid trend. I just cannot watch anything with shaky camera. Very similar to how first person (and some third person) video games make me nauseous, so do movies and TV shows that use a handheld camera. It makes me feel dizzy, and in the worst case, nauseous. I’m […]

3 February 2025

Alternatives to Goodreads

If you, like me, are trying to gradually move away from online services that are run by corrupt American megacorporations, then perhaps this overview of alternatives to Goodreads might help you find a new home for your reading journal. I have been using Goodreads since 2009, which was long before it was sold to Amazon. Back then it was the only website of its kind. Goodreads is still the website with the most comprehensive functionality for everything I need to organize my books. The only problem (aside from it being owned by Amazon) I see is that recommendations focus immensely […]

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 […]

29 March 2023

Disconnected

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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 […]

9 October 2017

Hair, Soap and Hair Soap

I’ve had really long hair pretty much all my life. I’m a huge fan of long hair in general, and I think it just looks wonderful when people have really healthy, shiny, long hair – regardless of gender. I’m all for crushing gender stereotypes and destigmatizing long hair in men, but that’s a whole other topic. But let’s get back to my hair; I’ve also had really unhealthy hair pretty much all my life. Split ends have been a part of my hair ever since I started growing it when I was nine years old. But to be honest, I’ve […]

17 January 2013

How the Scandinavians shaped England

Exam time is coming up, that means it’s time for another verbose blog entry about the history of English stuff – in this case, the vikings (yes!). English, though rooted in the West Germanic family, has had significant influence from the Old Norse language (part of the North Germanic language family). So much, that a Norwegian professor even claims that English is a Scandinavian language. That’s of course ridiculous, you could just as well claim that English is a Romance language because of its huge amount of French influence. But the language is still very Germanic at heart. As Bill […]