My birthday month! It felt very celebretory, I got so many wonderful presents and saw my friends for brunch, gaming and BBQ. In addition, May was full of holidays which were very much needed. Work was still stressful but the exhausting part of transitioning to new structures is coming to an end. I also had some doctor’s appointments, one doctor was so nice and empathic I cried happy tears. So all in all May was a good month.

Gaming:
Still playing Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. I still like the storyline and the basic gameplay but oh boy, why are there so many repetitive sidequests and stupid mini games? Yes, the original Final Fantasy 7 had it’s share of mini games and goofing-around but with FF7 Rebirth I feel like half the game is filled with this kind of stuff.
Concerning boardgames May was pretty good. First time I playe Power Struggle, not my kind of game, I don’t like games with bribing other players. I played Wingspan Asia solo which was so much fun that I directly bought all the other expansions. I also enjoyed The Crew very much.

Books:
Ok, too many hyped books I didn’t like that much: Demon Copperhead, House of Flame and Shadow and The House in the Cerulean Sea.
YA books I enjoyed: Moxie, Five Feet Apart and Every Last Word.
The Book I absolutely adored and devoured: The Women by Kristin Hannah.
Oh and as a birthday gift my partner got me the new Tolino Shine Color. I love having an e-reader with color! It’s nice to see all the colorful book covers and the occasionally colored pages in Manga or books.

Films:
I saw the Macbeth theather play with Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma in the cinema, it was very entertaining and Indira Varma the best Lady Macbeth I have ever seen. Then I saw some Batman Anime films which were all ok but sometimes hard to understand if you don’t know the world by heart. Another movie was Unfrosted which I thought would be the worst movie this month but it was topped by Oppenheimer. The acting was good but the storyline and script were, as we would say in German, „nichts halbes und nichts ganzes“. There were different themes and topics going through the story but not in a good way, it felt like 4 unfinished movies meshed into one. But well, the movie got me into nice Wikipedia sessions about the atomic bomb (I’m quite a „fan“ of Radiation and stuff)

TV Shows:
I watched and finished One Day, it was a very cute mini series but I hated the ending. Then I got into a serious obsession (pun intended) with the tv show You. It’s basically about a man who becomes obsessed with a woman and stalks her. But it’s not like a real life crime story (I personally am a bit tired of glorified male murderer stuff with female victims), but actually more of a twisted dark comedy making fun of the characters.

April’s weather in April, what a torture. There were days where we had all the seasons, changing every 10 minutes.
In April, there was a lot of work stuff going on, my colleague and I decided to change to a different department. Actually not much is going to change for us, same offices and stuff, only the people we work for may change. I still don’t know yet. I hate not knowing stuff. Otherwise not much going on, I had some boardgame- and lunchdates, but all in all it was a quiet month with not so much social stuff.

Gaming:
I finished Baldur’s Gate 3. Act 3 was boring and the ending not that satisfying. And I am still very very sad that I didn’t get to date Asterion. So I’m gonna have to play that game again. Then I started playing Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. It’s sooo good. They made some stuff easier (like not having to reload old saves when you want to start a fight over), the artwork is beautiful, Sephiroth still one of the best villains ever and there is so much that remindes me of the old FF7.
I played three new boardgames: Qwirkle: love it. Trade on Tigris: way better than I thought. Expiditions: Clumsy beginning, but then I liked it. I also played some other boardgames like Turing Machine and the Clevers.

Books:
I consumed 6 boooks. My fav was Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. I also liked her other book Babel. And Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher was suprisingly good, it was like an old fairy tale but with some nice twists.

Films:
April was a film month, I watched 12 movies, wow, that is a lot for me. I got many DVDs from the library and worked through my watchlist. What I liked: Saltburn, eXistenZ, Memoir of a Murderer and Mirage. Special note to the Finnish horror movie Hatching that got me nightmares.

TV Shows:
I also watched quite a lot of shows. 3 Body Problem was not as good as the books, there was essential stuff missing. Kevin Can F*** Himself was really good, a show that is half sitcom and half drama. I also watched all episodes of Undone which was a beautiful animated show about the butterfly effect. Then I continued with the third season of Upload. It’s an okayish show about a world where you can upload yourself after dying and then live in a simulated world. Next was Baby Reindeer, a miniseries about a female stalker. It was interesting and shocking because it is based on real events, but I thought both main characters were kind of annoying and horrible by different degrees.
And then we also watched what everybody seems to be talking about: Fallout. I didn’t like the first episodes, I don’t like the world-building so much because there is too much going on. But the last episodes were better and had some good plot twists.

Wow, time flies. Again a lot to do at work and a lot of stuff giving my anxiety the whole month. But also some good things: we had a very nice and entertaining tabletop rpg session of Mausritter. Such a beautiful game and easy to get into. We also played Pathfinder in March and I am not sure if I will ever become friends with Pathfinder. The system seems complicated and clumsy and I still don’t really enjoy playing it. Long and boring encounters and not much to do besides it. I had more fun with my brief experiences with DnD but those were too short to properly compare to Pathfinder. Anyway, a big fun thing in March was our short trip to Hamburg. My third time, but my first two visits were on business trips where Hamburg didn’t leave a good impression. But this trip was so awesome that Hamburg may become my favorite big city in Germany? (Of course after my home city Düsseldorf). It was such a beautiful trip! I love how much water there is in the city, it’s like Amsterdam but not so chaotic I guess? I hope to come back to Hamburg some day.
Oh and there was a visit to a small concert with a pirate metal band. Not my choice of music but it was quite ok. First time in ages that I drank cocktails but they weren’t that expansive and quite good.

Gaming:
I just played the standard boardgames like Azul and Clever. And a lot of Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s a pitty that the third act is so boring and bad compared to the two previous acts (not I didn’t finish the game in March…)

Books:
I finally finished my two too long books: Iron Flame and Crescent City 2. The first was okayish but too long. The second was utterly boring and though I skipped many chapters it still took too long to read.
But after those books I had a streak of cozy nice books: Remarkably Bright Creatures, Lessons in Chemistry and Sweet Bean Paste (ok this is about Hansen Disease/Leprosy, so that part isn’t so cozy).
I also read Unlearning Shame by Devon Price, which got me thinking a lot about my fields of shame (some body parts, some my mind parts, things from the past) but I don’t think that I’ll be able to let go of it soon.

Films:
I watched Aquaman 2 which was fun. Of course I am always in for stories about brothers! I also watched The Last Unicorn for the first time. I didn’t watch it before because everyone was saying how sad the movies was. And it totally wasn’t? I am really confused about people’s childhood memories. (But there were some scenes that I would have been afraid of as a kid). The film was good but not my favorite style of animation.

TV Shows:
We finished the old anime series Queen Millennia. I enjoyed the show very much, it is typically Japanese with a complex story and some wild turn arounds. I also finished Shameless. The ending was good and fitting to the show and characters but yeah I got a bit sad because I am going to miss the Gallagher’s.