January was 8 weeks long but still managed to seem very short Schroedinger’s Month. Work was quite exhausting due to new structures but at least we had a nice late Christmas party with everybody. Other than that not that much happenend but I got some doctor’s appointments behind me.

Gaming: We started with Dorfromantik Sakura which is as cute and nice as the previous Dorfromantik boardgame. And I also started to play it on the Switch again. We also tried Captain Flip, quite a nice game but not a must-have. And still going on is my game of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. I have the impression that it is longer than the original game which annoys me a bit. I hate those big open worlds.

Books: Well, I got 18 books on my stats for January. A lot of short stories, but still all of my reads combine to almost 2000 pages.
What I liked:
Far Reaches – a short story collection by a couple of awesome scifi authors.
The Seventh Bride – by T.Kingfisher. If you like her stuff, you’ll probably also like this dark fantasy (no smut) rendition of the fairy tale Bluebeard.
And I finished some biographies.
Freiheit – the memoirs by our last and 16-year lasting chancellor Angela Merkel. Very interesting, a bit dry, but authentic.
Brothers – by Paul Gallagher. I made a playlist out of this book because Paul mentioned so many bands, not only the famous one with his brothers in it. And I hope Paul did some therapy, his childhood with this psychopathic father sounds horrible.
The House of my mother – by Shari Franke. She was raised by a narcisstic mother who played happy youtube family while abusing her children. Disturbing, I wonder how many of these books we will get from all the social media children that grew up now.
I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again – by Caroline Darian, daugther of Gisèle Pelicot. The story is worse (as in: more horrible) than I thought it would be. But it’s good that both women are telling it.

What I didn’t like: Before the Coffee Gets Cold (boring), Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (nothing new to the genre), Hey guten Morgen, wie geht’s es dir (pretentious and boring), Ab Vom Schuss (pretentious and boring, and yes, many German books are pretentious.)

Films:
I was three times in the cinema, must be a new record. I watched Mufasa and Nosferatu, both were okayish but could have been better. Better was Better Man (haha), I didn’t expect to be that entertainend by a movie with a CGI Monkey Robbie Williams. Then I watched a movie about Robbie’s acquaintance Liam Gallagher, my rock star hero since 2000. I kinda broke up with him in 2014 after a shitty Beady Eye concert, his voice’s continuing decline, the band’s break-up and him going totally mental on Twitter. Couple of years later, I got newsletters about his new album but didn’t care because him alone could be no good. 2022, I got a newsletter about his Knebworth gig and I was shocked how this had happened. My crazy fangirl module was re-actived the moment I saw that he wore a similar white parka in Knebworth 2022 as the one in Knebworth 1996, it felt like a sign, like watching a resurrected Jesus. Well, there is a documentary about those years between 2014 and 2022, I watched it to catch up with his rise from zero (Beady Eye were playing very small venues) to rock star, again. Nice one, and I am happy that he is back on track, hope it lasts a couple of years. I need some good stuff in this world.

TV Shows: I finished Only Murderers in the Building. True Crime Podcasts are not my cup of tea but the show was nevertheless entertaining and had some nice guest actors like Paul Rudd, Jane Lynch, Eva Longoria and Meryl Streep.

Hello new year. I was ready for that. 2024 was awesome but at the end of the year I was very exhausted and very much looking forward to my days off from work. I visted my friend in London again, we hadn’t that many plans and the weather was not its best. But it was nice to see the city decorated with many lights, we also visted the christmas market (okayish, but not as good as the German ones that I know). The hightlight of the trip was the Christmas Singing at the Royal Albert Hall, the conductor was very nice and funny, there was a mix of classical Christmas music and some songs to sing along. I didn’t know them but we had the lyrics on a sheet and thanks to a very professional sounding lady behind me I could just tag along with her. Another highlight in London was all the Oasis stuff I bought. There were some books and concerts DVDs that I could get in my youth, they were rare and out of print. Many of them were reprinted in 2022 (I think because of Liam’s rise with his solo career that peaked 2022 with his Knebworth show) and now with the reunion everything was at display at the stores. Liam’s concert in Manchester was one of the best things in 2024, I am so happy that he managed to overcome his troubles. Out of all the happiness I bought a second ticket for Oasis a couple of weeks ago. I was so mad for selling my second ticket for Liam’s gig this year, so I needed some retribution. The ticket I bought is for the first night in Wembley, which still sounds surreal, I listened to their 2000 Wembley CD on repeat when I was in school.
Other than that December was very nice, we had some boardgame sessions with friends, played the ttrpg Pathfinder two times and stayed at home a lot.

Gaming: We finally found some people (who don’t live hours away) willing to play Pandemic Legacy Zero with us, yay. Other new games were Awkward Guests, I think I didn’t get the mechanics quite right, but it was a fun deduction game. I loved Forest Shuffle, its cute and fun. And New Year’s Eve we spent with an Exit boardgame about a mysterious lighthouse. So December was a quite good gaming month.

Books: I didn’t finish that many books because I was hung up on two longer books. Eyes of the Void (The Final Architects Book 2) by Adrian Tchaikovsky, still a very good space opera epic. The Navigator’s Children (The Last King of Osten Ard Book 4) by Tad Williams finished the follow-up-series to Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. I really enjoyed reading it, although the supension curve was a bit weird. Now I am a bit sad to leave Osten Ard, it’s one of my fav fantasy worlds.

Films:
I think the film of the month was Wicked. I saw it with my friend in London, we were so hyped about the movie that we went to the musical the next day. I prefer the film to the musical because it allows more focus on the main characters.
A surprisingly good movie was The Promised Land where Mads Mikkelsen plays former soldier who wants to plant potatoes on a barren land in 18th century Denmark.
Another good one was Alien: Romulus. I could enjoy the movie without knowing much about the franchise.

TV Shows:
I finished The Connors. I really enjoyed the show, it was just like old Roseanne with a mix of comedy and serious real-life topics from the perspective of the poor working-class. We watched the show Dune: Prophecy. I liked it way more than both Dune films. I finished the year with the mini series Mildred Pierce. It was good, thanks to Kate Winslet, but it is probably not a must-see.

I don’t know why but next to May November is my fav month of the year. Even though the weather is usually horrible. But still it was a nice month. I had several playdates with friends, a nice breakfast with colleagues and I had some doctor’s appointments which were positive. My highlight this month was being at the Cologne Philharmonie, but not for a classical concert. It was a live show of my favorite podcast Drinnies. It is a podcast about people who like to stay „drinnen“, inside. Guess the English titler would be Insidies? It was really nice to see so many Insidies gather outside for this event. I had a great time with my insidy friends!

Gaming:
I am still playing Final Fantasy 7 rebirth. I really hate the big worlds, I just want to keep on going with the story. I also got back to Octopath Traveler 2 where I got kind of stuck because many characters needed to grind several levels up before I could continue. Concerning boardgames, I mostly played the usual: some Clevers and Azuls. But we finally played again Battlestar Galactica and this time I was not the Cylon. And lost with my human fellows. Well this sucks, I wanna be a Cylon next time.

Books:
Finished 8 books this month. Suprisingly, I liked Room by Emma Donoghue very much although it is told from the view of a five year old. A book I was looking forward to was Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. It won a lot of prices and is already considered a „classic“. Well, I liked the idea, but the story and the characters were just boring.
Other books were mostly light-hearted young adult books and a comedy book by Giulia Becker (she’s in the podcast I watched live this month). My fav book was Weiter leben. Eine Jugend by Ruth Klüger. It’s about her upbringing as young jewish girl during the time of nationalism in Germany and Austria. It talks about how jews were discriminated against even before the Nazi’s rise to power. As a kid I often got the impression, that Nazi’s „invented“ the hatred against jews, which is not the case, a lot of hatred was already there. Klüger also talks about her time in several labor and death camps (Theresienstadt, Ausschwitz and Groß-Rosen). And then of her escape and what happend after the Nazis lost the war. I wonder why we didn’t read this book in school, it’s such an interesting account of a witness. (In school, we read a book about a jewish boy in the Nazi time. It was not written by a survivor, but by a man who was a German soldier in WW2, how weird is that…)

Films:
Only one film this month: The Color Purple, the new one. It is not really a remake of the previous movie because it combines with many elements and songs from the musical. Very good movie, though a bit too long for my taste.

TV Shows:
I finished the first season of Nobody wants this, it was a nice romantic comedy. Next up was a run through several seasons of What We Do in the Shadows, a funny mockumentary about vampires. I also finished the second season of Sex and the City: And just like that. It was really boring, even Miranda’s queer storyline was somehow bad. Speaking of Cynthia Nixon: I watched another show with her and Christine Baranski: The Gilded Age. It’s a bit like Bridgerton, being about fancy rich people in the 19th century, but more realistic with historic events and even some historic characters. Then we finished the second season of House of the Dragon. Nothing much going on there but I still like the show more than Game of Thrones. And currently I am catching up on The Connors, the spin-off from Roseanne after real life Roseanne turned into an old white man who talks shit on twitter and was fired from her own show. I don’t miss her, Sara Gilbert, John Godman and Laurie Metcalf can really flourish without her.