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.

October was quite okay. I had a nice vacation with visits to the Oberhausen Gasometer, and old industrial building that now is used for cultural exhibitions. There was an exhibition about the Ocean, mostly showing beautiful photographs. It was quite ok but the hyped media display in the tower was really not that exiting. I also visited the Ramses exhibition in Cologne. It was well done and interesting to see this really old stuff. Then I had a couple of boardgame dates with friends and we also finished our roleplay campaign of Pathfinder Rusthenge. Still don’t like Pathfinder that much, DnD was easier for me to get, but I’ll play what I get to play. The next campaign is already in the planing. Work still annoys me very much, there are many processes dragging along like a snail and I am very annoyed by „political“ things.

Gaming:
I got Hitster from the library and my friends and I had so much fun, that my friend bought the game. I also tried a couple of new games: I really liked Tiny Woodys and would like to have that game in my collection. I also liked Pirates of Maracaibo, much more than Maracaibo. And we tried Orleans which was ok but not my kind of game, too boring artwork, too eurogame-y.

Books:
Had a little challenge with myself to read a lot of books, especially during my vacation. Well I finished 16 books, this is a record. A couple of shorter books, some short stories, but still 3100 pages which is like 3 thick fantasy books.
Short stories I liked: The Deep by Rivers Salomon and Recitatif by Toni Morrison. Totally different stories but both are about identity. I adored The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. Shit My Dad Says by Justin Halpern was a funny read. After reading Muss ich das gelesen haben? by Teresa Reichl, I read a couple of books that she would recommend for reading in school (currently, in German schools we mostly read the same old stuff by old white men): Jacob the Liar by Jurek Becker, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr and La Petite Dernière (The Last One/ Die Jüngste Tochter) by Fatima Daas. If you look for (German) inspirations, check out Reichl’s list.
I also read and like Fake Facts by Katharina Nocun and Pia Lamberty. What I especially didn’t like was Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. It won the Pulitzer price which is usually a sign for me that I won’t like a book. But I didn’t know that beforehand. The book was so boring, like listening to other peoples smalltalk and small-town-gossip.

Films:
Three movies this month. Dune Part Two was better than Part One but still very confusing and incoherent. The Last Voyage of the Demeter was okayish. I really liked Ocean’s Eight. I’m not a big fan of heist movies but the cast was superb. I also finally watched the Oasis documentary Supersonic. It’s a couple of years old but I didn’t watch it out of fear of it making me sad. I only saw a short bit of Liam talking about the abuse of his father towards his brothers and mother. So, now I watched the whole thing and it was really well done. I’m especially interested in the childhood and their mother Peggy’s story about coming from rural Ireland to Manchester to get a better life, so I was happy that Peggy was included into the documentary. The story ended quite early with Knebworth in 1996, which was the concert that really got me into Oasis (watched it 4 years later, I wasn’t there). Funnily, Liam’s solo Knebworth in 2022 got me into listening to his music again and since then I constantly listen to both Knebworths. (Yes, I am very much on the hype train, back in the old days when I was a teen I didn’t have so many stuff to hype over, a fan forum with mean men and the occasional bootleg I found at CD markets.)

TV Shows:
I finished The Bear, still like the show although I don’t get the hype. I loved the second season of Rings of Power. I also finished the last two seasons of Grey’s Anatomy and a couple of episodes of Gen V that were left to watch. I also watched the third season of Heartstopper which I found quite boring. We also watched a couple of missing episodes of Love, Death + Robots and the second season of Domina, where I had a really hard time to get who is who. Last but not least we started with What We Do in the Shadows which I quite like although it is sometimes a little bit too silly.