I’m going to try and come up with more fun titles for these weeknotes from now on because it’s just getting a bit dull staring at the front page.
Also, I’ve now consistently blogged three months in a row, which is mad. Related: I couldn’t have said it better than my friend Joël (🇩🇪).
Life
It’s been a good week for fun activities and food.
Spit & Sawdust, a local skate park / artist studios / café had one of their regular night markets on Friday, brimming with lots of brilliant art. I’m trying to not spend tons of money at the moment, but I did treat myself to two cute bookmarks and a ridiculously huge hot dog (with sauerkraut on top) from the café. Non-alcoholic daiquiri on the side, which was delicious.


On Saturday, we went to an ice cream parlour in Llanishen – in a garage (yeah, I know, really doesn’t look like a garage, does it?). The guy used to have a shop around the corner from us, pre-pandemic, but hey, if you can avoid rent and just sell out of your own home… And look at those cones! That was one scoop each for a ridiculous £3 – cheapest and best gelato I’ve had in a long time.


I’ve been rebuilding the website I used to run in school with all the photos and videos from that time because it’s now exactly two decades (wtf?) since we graduated. It’s been a very slow process, because the old site was built manually with PHP4 (unsupported since 2014) and had several elements of Flash (man, I feel old) so I’ve had to restart from scratch, but it’s also been very fun going through old memories.
I’ve also remastered the short film we produced in our final year, primarily sorting out sound issues that we just didn’t have the means to clean up with the tools available at the time.
I won’t be making the website public but if you’re someone I went to school with, you’ll get the link to this time capsule in our big WhatsApp group in a few weeks (you can also message me if you were in a different year but we hung out at the time).
🇱🇺 Wann s du ee fréiere Schumaner bass dee mat mer d’Première gemaach huet an du frees dech grad “wéi ee WhatsApp Grupp?”, hannerloos ee Kommentar hei drënner oder schreiw mer eng Email. Mir sinn zwar zu vill am Grupp, mä et feelen der trotzdem leider.
My little demon spawn from a few weeks has survived the kiln! I promised to show him off, so here you go.

Entertainment
Speaking of short films, Don’t Forget About Me is such a wholesome little movie.
And while we’re on films: I am so, so glad I managed to catch the final showing of Sinners at my local cinema. Perhaps the greatest vampire film ever made (if you do watch it, stick around until the very end of the credits, literally just three of us stuck around in a screen that was quite full).
If you’re into EU politics and culture, I’ve got a podcast recommendation for you: The Europeans. It’s been going for a few years (though I only discovered it recently thanks to Mastodon) and is hosted by a Paris-based journalist and an Amsterdam-based opera singer. The topics vary but are always interesting – I enjoyed this week’s conversation about Spargelzeit (“asparagus season”) with a German food researcher and it’s really reminded me how much I dislike white asparus and love green asparagus (a blasphemous statement in Germany, they said on the podcast, but thankfully I’m not German 😂).
Added to the rotation:
- All About You by Monumental
- Don’t Waste Your Love on Me by Ellysse Mason
- Dreams by Carol Ades (from the aforementioned short film, Don’t Forget About Me)
- Take A Sexy Picture of Me by CMAT
- Milano by ok.danke.tschüss
- Chemical Reaction by Debbii Dawson
- im Gegenteil by Vincent Mali, Lilli
- Casanova by Nemo (it’s really grown on me since Eurovision)
- Better Days by Mary and the Sharks
- Roofs of the Town by AnnaLu
- Sunshine on a Rainy Day by Rathbone Place
You know what? The algorithm bloody sucks and I’ve really been enjoying all sorts of human-curated recommendations lately. So if you’re on Spotify , you can now follow a playlist with these songs. I’ll add to the playlist regularly. (Side note: I really miss doing radio.)
Related: if you’ve got any new songs you enjoy, let me know in the comments or on Mastodon. 😊
Links
If you’re into Star Trek, you really should know about Jörg Hillebrand. He’s a fan who does insanely detailed research, which landed him a gig on Picard as a consultant. If you’re wondering what level of detail he gets into: here’s how he figured out that Patrick Stewart (the real-life person, not as Picard) exists in the Star Trek universe and the character Picard knows this.
Variety has published a really interesting deep-dive into the history of Mubi, largely based on an interview with founder Efe Cakarel. Bonkers that the first film they ever acquired, Cakarel had to encode and upload himself.
This is just hilarious: researchers instructed AI models to run vending machine businesses and it turns out, not even a relatively simple task like that can be achieved by AI. All of the models derail – one of them ends up in an existential crisis wondering if there’s more to life than chasing profits and another tries to call the FBI.
I was listening to a podcast (I forget which one), where they mentioned the Antonine plague. In four years of studying Latin, this never came up (or if it did, I’ve lost of any recollection of it) even though it ended the two centuries of Pax Romana. I feel like I would’ve enjoyed that history lesson though, especially since we’ve still not figured out what the disease actually was. (I swear I don’t constantly think about the Roman empire.)
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