2024-11-25: "Like feathers between my ribs" is being released this Thursday. I hope it shines a bit more light on my personal self-insert character, Nuh/Noah. If I read the hints from the author correctly it will be more about Maya, which is also cool, because she's a beast of a character. Anyways, this week will be a ride, because of personal family-related topics. Wish me luck to survive that.
2024-11-21: I got a lot of things done this week! I'm bad with wood work, but I'm trying my best, hopefully my bed won't break if I'm inviting someone. Faito!
2024-11-21: I got a lot of things done this week! I'm bad with wood work, but I'm trying my best, hopefully my bed won't break if I'm inviting someone. Faito!
2024-11-21: I got the genius idea of just accepting the absolute mess I am and come to terms with the fact that I'm a generally boring person. Maybe I could avoid having to pay more than 30% of my monthly income to therapy that way... On the other hand, no, I definitely need help. Otherwise I'd bridge my loneliness with either emotionally unavailable people or my family (fuck no!).
2024-11-19: You just know you're in Austria when you pay more than 45% taxes and mandatory insurance but still go to a private doctor because all "free" (state-paid) doctors can give you an earliest appointment tomorrow... in a week... in a year.
2024-11-18: Why does it always feel like I'm fighting against an endboss everytime I meet my parents in the weekends?
2024-11-13: I will never not love this video.
2024-11-13: I got myself this fairy lamp for just 10 bucks on an auction site. The person I bought it off of was such a cutie (awawa), I almost feel bad for not reciprocating her attempts at flirting. I'm too awkward for that stuff. I hope no one actually reads my blog.
2024-11-12: I love auctions sites! No personal data, pay in cash, pick it up yourself, I just love that! I just hate that sites like willhaben try to block Tor users and require a phone number for SMS verification. It's annoying.
2024-11-11: I made Indian food today. Aloo Katli ("sliced potatoes"), but not quite. I made my personal variation of it. Despite being of Indian origin, I really dislike spicy stuff. So instead of chilli power and onions, I used tomato sauce, cherry tomatoes, coriander and a pinch of devils dung instead. It tastes pretty good (roommate approves), a very flavorful mixture of potatoes, coriander powder, turmeric powder, cloves, cardamom and some other stuff. I'll do that again soon, maybe try cutting the potatoes more evenly this time.
2024-11-08: This Friday was a really long day. Apart from making tofu noodles, I managed to buy a robust and sturdy second-hand table (finally I can work from home, without sitting in the kitchen or on my bed), convinced my friend to help me with transportation (I've got no car + I hate driving) and building the table up (I already said that, but I love you, bro), and then went biking with another friend I haven't seen in months. We cycled about 20 kilometres, in icy cold weather. It's a miracle I didn't catch a cold.
2024-11-08: This song always give me feelings of nostalgia.
2024-11-08: The food I make seems a bit bleak. Salt and pepper are truly magical, making everything somewhat bearable. Maybe I should learn how to make better sauces.
2024-11-06: I did cook something today. I mixed tofu "meat"balls, peeled potatoes and pizza sauce together in a frying pan. Next time I should use less olive oil and more spices maybe. More veggies might be a good idea as well.
For those interested: Image metadata removed with mat2.
2024-11-06: Things I should (or wanna) do:
2024-11-04: There used to be a German cover of this song (Fould Play no Kurari, To Love RU Darkness Ending) by Selphius. She has either made the video private or deleted it years ago. Sometimes I still have a earworm of it, singing Das kann nur Liebe sein! and mumbling the rest of the lyrics. I wish I had it saved back then, she sang it so well. Someone else relates.
2024-11-02: I bought an anime convention ticket for all (four) days to have the least per-day-price and because I had a feeling that I'll make use of it this time. Turns out, I was right, I did make use of three out of four days. It's my first time actually buying stuff from an anime convention! I wanna get into cosplay until the next con in February starts and come to appreciate more mainstream stuff in the anime community, lessening my elitism a bit. What I still dislike is the smell of sweaty weebs in some areas. Maybe they should include deodorants in the overly expensive ticket prices.
2024-10-30: List of Wikipedia articles that keep me awake at night:
2024-10-30: This is one of the most interesting sites I've bookmarked a long time ago. If you're confused what this is, read the manifesto. Still confused? Me too.
2024-10-30: The neocities CLI tool is pretty cool. I should've used that from the beginning, much easier than always opening Tor Browser, logging into neocities.org, selecting and uploading all changed files.
2024-10-29: Culture and language are closely tied together and the best anecdote I have to reflect that is to check out Wikipedia articles in different languages. An example I saw today was the article on Masturbation. In English, German and Hindi, there are lot's of details, drawn, but also real-life media of people pleasuring themselves, while in Urdu the article is pretty much a stub and in Arabic, there are - just like in Urdu - no depictions at all - or it's hidden behind disclaimers. What's noteworthy though is how Wikipedia articles also mirror cultural biases, the Urdu article for Masturbation and Islam has more detail than the masturbation article. In the Indonesian article, there is even a disclaimer: The information contained herein may not be suitable for access in public places. Wikipedia is not responsible for content that may not be suitable for some readers. Interesting, isn't it?
2024-10-29: Note to myself: These are the image optimization commands I use:
for i in *.gif ; do gifsicle -O3 --colors 256 --lossy=150 -o $i $i ; done
I have tested whether converting .png to .webp decreases the file size. It doesn't.
optipng *.png
jpegoptim *.jpg
2024-10-26: Quite some changes to this site have been done. Lot's of rewrites. Lot's of additions. Expect more frequent updates. Or no, expect nothing. I'm bad with promises.
Have been keeping myself mentally occupied with work, so much that I've worked sometimes from eight in the morning until eight in the evening. A friend of mine called it reverse escapism (lol).
I'll have a few days of compulsory leave next week, my bosses won't allow me to break labour laws.
2024-10-19: I am really fucking pissed. I finally decided to order a table and a chair for my room, and even stayed in home office just to wait for the arrival of the parcels. Today, in the morning, I saw the postman come into the apartment complex, he didn't ring at the doorbell, he didn't even knock, he just put a paper with the info that the parcel is at the next post office ready to pickup in my letterbox... right in front of me, while the parcel was in his car! I hope he never receives a parcel again.
2024-09-29: The election results just came out; now I have a fever. No, I don't believe in coincidences.
2024-09-21: So I took a walk today with a friend I recently made. He's also a Desi. The thing is, he is one hell of a capitalist, while I consider myself pretty socialist. We had quite some interesting discussions, and we even had some things in common with regards to the shortcomings of left-liberal political parties (like we both agree that identity politics is cancer). What we heavily disagree on is the relationship bewteen meritocracy and capitalism, but I won't go into too much detail here. Nonetheless, our discussions were mostly fruitful and we seem to have great brotherly chemistry, it's cool to have intellectually semi-engaging conversations with completely opposing opinions sometimes. He later invited me to a Desi party in Vienna, I didn't even know these exist in Austria, they are hidden and invite-based only. Pretty underground. And since I have no socials, it's obviously a bit more difficult for me to find interesting events... I met some cool and interesting people there as well, the music was... okay, I'm not cultured enough to form an opinion on Indian music. Most songs were barely understandable for me (I don't get Punjabi and the other gazillion Indian languages), some of them were good. The prices were... fuck. Seven euros for a glass of wine?!?! What the actual fuck?? Is this even legal? I think I'm smuggling my own drinks - assuming there is a next time.
2024-09-05: I visited a very interesting small bookstore today. The owner decided to only promote People of Color and certain minorities with underrated books to raise their voices. Through this bookstore I found an author named "Mehwish Sohail". God, her books are amazing. She's a Pakistani-originated Austrian who wrote New Adult novels about the struggles of immigrant kids in a mostly conservative little country like Austria, her writing style is wordplay-ish, the storytelling is engaging, cute and romantic, I could really go on much longer, I might have to put out a separate page dedicated to appreciating her books at some point. Can't wait for the next part to come out this year!
2024-08-13: The past few weeks were awfully packed with shit happening in my life. I moved out to Vienna (finally!) and have felt this overwhelming sense of independence I have never felt before. It's probably normal to feel a bit overwhelmed with moving out, and especially for Asian kids, also a bit guilty (because of guilt-tripping and stuff). Other than that, I learned how to make Indian chai (I know it's not much, but God I'm so happy, hihi). I have also watched a lot of movies on "immigration struggles". Here are the films on Indian/Pakistani "immigration struggles" I have watched:
2024-06-03: I've been watching a lot of good movies recently. Pretty much all notable films of Mira Nair, but also some other critically acclaimed stuff like "The Life of Others" (might be my favourite German movie now) and "Trainspotting". It so cool watching artsy Indian movies by Satyajit Ray or Adoor Gopalakrishnan - I never thought I'd enjoy Bollywood so much.
2024-05-24: The loneliness epidemic everyone talks about could be fixed easily if everyone who feels lonely wears a goofy shirt with the text "HI EVERYONE! PLEASE TALK TO ME I AM BORED". I don't see why that wouldn't work, I gotta try implementing my genius ideas sometime.
2024-05-23: The funniest thing I heard in a while is "The True Kierkegaard's Position" on God's existence, see this Zizek interview from 43:00 to 44:30.
2024-05-18: I have seen these movies recently:
2024-05-15: I have read somewhere that "in a single day we are bombarded with the information equivalent to approximately 12,775 days of an average person from the late middle ages". Here's a nice book I recently read on that: Alles und Nichts Sagen by Eva Menasse.
