Reviews

2 April 2024

Lord of the Rings: 20 Years Wiser

Lord of the Rings is such a vast and epic topic, where to even begin? And what can I write about it that hasn’t been written about it yet? I’d just like to share my own personal experience with this work of art, as I do so often here in this blog. I first became fully aware of the Lord of the Rings around 2000 or 2001, as the marketing for the first movie was starting to gain momentum. I was but a naïve teenager back then and I had very little contact with these books aside from having seen […]

7 March 2024

Fargo: A retrospective of five stories

With the new season having been on the horizon, I decided to (re)watch almost all of Fargo this January. Yesterday my journey culminated in the phenomenal finale of Season 5, and all I can say is: this TV show is absolutely brilliant (mostly). But let’s backtrack a little. Fargo is an anthology show in which every season tells an entirely different story (set in the same universe as the 1996 movie). Thus, each season feels vastly different, and there are very notable fluctuations in quality. What unites them are not only certain characters and cameos, but also the overall vibe […]

23 February 2024

Propaganda and polyamory: Revisiting the Hunger Games

Prompted by having read the prequel novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I recently decided to re-read the Hunger Games novels. First of all, I was curious about the prequel – how can a prequel about the villain of the series tie in? The prequel tells the (love) story of a teenage Coriolanus Snow, who later becomes president (dictator would be the more appropriate term) of Panem. What an odd book to read, because how can you make a novel about an entitled narcissist, who treats people like possessions, possibly compelling? While his rise to patriotism is sometimes interesting, […]

21 January 2024

History repeats itself, as seen in “Berlin: City of Light”

Last week on a whim, I bought the third book in the series of graphic novels Berlin by Jason Lutes. I read the first one in university 10 years ago, and bought the second one a couple of years later. I always had at the back of my mind that one day maybe I should read the third one, which back then wasn’t released. Acquiring the third book prompted me to re-read all of them, and I’m glad I did (but also a bit sad). This story as a whole gives us a glimpse into Berlin in the years 1928 […]

17 December 2023

Arc of a Scythe

In the city where I live, there are quite a few public bookshelves. Whenever I leave my apartment or just happen to pass by one of them, I check them. Some time in the winter of 2023, I did my usual round past the public bookshelf while going to the grocery store. Usually the books in there are literal trash, and it’s so rare to find a good book in good condition, let alone in English. Scythe by Neal Shusterman was such a find, the cover art was striking, and after reading the description, my interest was piqued. Dystopian is […]

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 […]

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 […]