Reviews

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 […]

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 […]

20 April 2023

The many layers of Arthur Morgan

I would like to express a massive SPOILER WARNING for this entire post. If you ever plan to play Red Dead Redemption 2 and would like to not have your enjoyment of it ruined, I urge you to NOT continue reading! Just to put things into context, I would like to point out that I have not played Red Dead Redemption (1), and I only familiarized myself with the story of this game after I played Red Dead Redemption 2. If you know all the games, you will know that knowing certain things will change your perception of certain characters […]

16 March 2023

Mord mit Aussicht

Ich gucke ja viel Zeug (wie man sieht, wenn man sich mal durch meine Reviews klickt), aber etwas das ich sehr selten gucke, sind deutsche Produktionen. Es gibt ungefähr 2 deutsche Filme, die ich in den letzten ~30 Jahren wirklich gut fand, und ebenso ungefähr 2 deutsche Serien (Der Tatortreiniger und Dark). Als Fan vom Tatortreiniger habe ich schon vor längerer Zeit von der Serie Mord mit Aussicht gehört, da sie von denselben Produzenten ist und denselben Schauspieler hat (Bjarne Mädel). Ich weiß ehrlich gesagt nicht, warum ich so lange gebraucht habe, um mir die Serie endlich mal anzusehen. Und […]

9 March 2023

Interview with the Vampire, re-told

One of the most famous vampire books of recent cultural history, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has received a new adaptation last year by American TV network AMC — producer of another bunch of shows full of undead, The Walking Dead and its numerous spin-offs that I lost track of. Interview with the Vampire was previously adapted as the 1994 movie with Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst, which I enjoyed back in its day. As this movie is almost 30 years old now, AMC seemed to believe it was time for something more modern, and IMHO they […]

23 February 2023

Stone and Sky: Andor

I am by no means a Star Wars fangirl – at least not ever since George Lucas sold his soul to Disney. I do love the original trilogy, with Empire Strikes Back being my unrivaled favorite of the Star Wars saga. However, I stopped following most Star Wars content that Disney continues to throw at us after The Last Jedi. I actually enjoyed the latter—it was very funny, perhaps too funny—but I did not even watch The Rise of Skywalker after I heard that it basically retcons all of Last Jedi and seems to overall have made bad plot decisions. […]

16 February 2023

The World of Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West

About a year and a half ago, I first discovered the world of Horizon in the video game Horizon: Zero Dawn. I was absolutely enamored with this world. It’s so strange and primordial, yet it’s so familiar that it makes you feel like a stranger on your own planet. Horizon is the world about 1000 years into the future, in which an apocalypse has caused humanity to be reverted to tribes of hunter-gatherers. And discovering that world was an absolutely fascinating experience, which went hand in hand with the story of this game. In this game, you play as Aloy, […]

9 February 2023

Unpopular Opinion: Harry Potter is not that great

Due to the release of the video game Hogwarts Legacy, there’s currently quite a bit of controversy about Harry Potter and its creator, who now spends her days spewing hate speech against transwomen instead of writing magical children’s stories. I would like to add my two cents to this discussion. As a millennial, I grew up with Harry Potter. I started reading these books when I was around 14 years old, and they played a significant role in me acquiring the English language, as they were some of the first books I read in English. I read every new book […]

6 February 2023

Experiencing nausea when gaming

Last week I wrote about my issues in gaming with dark mode, which seems to be the standard for video games. In this post, I would like to address another issue that stops me from playing a lot of games: dealing with nausea with gaming due to first person perspective, enclosed spaces, camera shake and related issues. Some time in the past 10 years, I have lost my ability to play first person perspective video games. While I was still able to play Skyrim in early 2012 without any issues (on the XBOX), I have since not been able to […]