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.

So it is Autumn again? I have the feeling that this year lasted longer and longer. My september vibe was: exhausted. I just realized that we had every weather this month. At the beginning I was at a Travis concert, just here not far away from home. It was burning hot. I was melting in the venue. The band even apologized for this shitty venue without air conditioning. Other than that the concert was so nice, I was almost at the front stage and the band was so wholesome and lovely as always. I also visted a theater play which was horrible. It was not only bad but also very boring. But besides that it was nice to visit my home town Düsseldorf again. I also planned to go to a podcast live show but then there was an accident and my train didn’t run. I am still very sad that I missed the show…
Other than the this month was full of doctor’s appointments. Had a cancer scare which occupied my mind. No cancer but there was the possibility that I needed a small surgery to remove the thing. Well, fast forward, now it is gone. Worries for nothing. There was also another big thing appointment for which i waited a long time. I was nervous and dying, I am so grateful that a friend was there via text messages to calm me. In the end the appointment was very good. I am so glad that this is over, although now I have to do other stuff regarding this appointment. But it’s nothing urgent.
Other than that the month was full of migraines, insomnia and being on the verge of a breakdown because I was just so overloaded and tired of everything, especially of work things.

Gaming:
A bit of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, all the Clever games, some games of Root (on the computer and on the table, too) and a game of Wingspan. Not much, but nice games anyway.

Books:
Again a month with not so many books. I finished The Realm of the Elderlings Book 2. I still enjoy the series very much, but it is a rather slow read. Then I read Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow. It was ok, but nothing I will remember for long. Another book was Die Rassistin by Jana Scheerer which I found very weird due to it’s narrative style and I kind of regreted reading it because there wasn’t much in it.

Films:
4 films. My fav was Nine to Five with Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton and Jane Fonda. What a fun office comedy but still very sad because almost nothing changed since the 80s. I also liked All of Us Strangers though my expectations where higher from what I heard about this movie. Still a good story. I also liked Breaking Surface, a Swedish survival thriller. What I didn’t like was Poor Things, a Yorgos Lanthimos film. He makes weird films, yes, but this one tried to be feministic, I think, and failed to end more on the sexist side. And it was really boring.

TV Shows:
Currently I am into the Rings of Power which I enjoy very much. It makes me miss my tabletop rpg which was close to the Tolkien lore. (I really can’t warm up to Pathfinder/DnD stuff because it has not magical flavor since it is so overrun by magical beings, a whole humanoid zootopia world, and monsters)
I am also watching The Bear. The show is good but I don’t get the hype about it. We also finished Shogun. I didn’t understand the underlying historical events that much but nevertheless I enjoyed the show. We also finished Decameron which I didn’t like, it was boring and the humor not my kind. Again also hate-watching Emily in Paris Rome. I also finished The Perfect Couple which was again this kind of „rich people are crazy“-plot, I liked the show. But Nicole Kidman is always playing the same character? I also had run through Geek Girl, which was quite wholsome. And I finished Pørni, hope there will be another season soon, I really love that show. Last but not least we finished That 90s Show. I think the kids are annoying and that it is not that authentic considering the 90s (but it is okay to not include the homophobia and AIDS pandemic). But I like everything with Kitty and Red.