In the dark ages of Wordpress (a period of ten or so years, when I was cut off from this website), I wrote hundreds of texts that, as of January 2024, are not integrated here. (They might or might not be in due time.) On occasion, I have the wish to write an update on some topic, e.g. to include more recent developments, and there is not always enough to write to warrant a full new text. In such cases, I will write a short update below.
(An alternative would be to publish such updates on Wordpress, but I really wish to avoid that horror of user hostility.)
As a caution: The contents of this page are disproportionately likely to be integrated elsewhere, re-grouped within the page, re-written for a second update, or similar. Quote and link strictly at your own risk.
Due to the amount of texts and the “chronological stream” of publishing used in blogging, as opposed to the more ordered that I use on this website, the links to Wordpress posts will often be merely representative and I do not guarantee completeness of any such listing. (However, individual Wordpress posts will usually contain relevant links to or backlinks from related posts. In the unlikely event that the reader has a strong urge for completeness, the search function might help.)
I will make frequent use of links with a text like “[1]”, The scope of the given number is limited to the sub-topic at hand and numbers will be reduced between sub-topics.
As I mentioned in the previous/below entry, my drip-brew machine broke some months ago. Just a few days after writing, I found a special offer at Aldi and bought a replacement. This leads me to another earlier text, on habits, memory, “autopilot actions”, and the like—including when making coffee.
My procedure for making coffee is so ingrained that I do not really think about what I am doing and still rarely make an error. However, a few months out of practice and within the first two or three dozen (!) cups with the new machine, I have:
Forgotten to add the water at least twice. This has historically been the most common error, but it has still been quite rare and has usually only occurred when I, for some reason or other, was thrown out of my normal order of water–coffee–power. (As noted in that older text.)
Forgotten to turn the machine on at least twice. This has happened in the past too, but might have been a twice-a-year issue.
On one exceptional occasion remembered to put in the filter for the coffee but forgotten the actual coffee.
Even here, I cannot claim past infallibility, but we might have half-a-dozen earlier cases over several decades of making drip-brew coffee.
(In all cases, and in the spirit of this text, with reservations for memory errors.)
This is the more annoying, because a significant advantage of drip-brews over instant coffee and Dolce Gusto, and one of the reasons that I had become motivated to buy a new drip-brew machine, is that it is possible to start the machine, go away for five, ten, or twenty minutes to do some chore, and come back to a cup of ready-to-drink reward coffee, in a manner that is not possible with most alternatives. (The below-mentioned french press is a borderline case, because it also takes some time of waiting, but is much more dependent on waiting for the right time, to get the right taste, to avoid a too hot or too cold beverage, whatnot. Moreover, as with instant coffee, there is the need to boil water first.) Any of the three above errors ensures that there is not a cup of ready-to-drink reward coffee waiting for me.
An interesting related problem is that memories of things done, experienced, whatnot, tend to be quite strong for the new and quite weak for that which has been mechanically repeated on a great number of occasions, implying that I do not have a rescuing memory in the way that I might have with an entirely new activity. This is also likely the explanation for the scenes in humorous fiction with someone wanting to, say, interrupt a multi-hour car drive because, usually, she is uncertain whether she had locked a door, turned off an iron, or similar—even when she actually had locked the door, turned off the iron, or whatever applied. The action is simply so “routine” that she does not remember the very recent performance and, for lack of memory, fears that the action has not taken place.
In an early text on inflation ([1]), I noted that I had yet to see any shrinkflation. Since then (2024-08-30 vs. 2022-09-19), shrinkflation seems to have grown ubiquitous. Earlier today, for instance, I made a rare purchase of Haribo candy. The bag seemed unusually light and small, and I checked the weight: 175 g. For as long as I can remember, these have been at 200 g. (175 and 200 g are, to a rough approximation, 6 respectively 7 ounces.)
Due to the current rarity of purchases, I cannot say when this reduction took place, but it is in the last few months or, on the outside, years. I likely first bought these in the late 1990s, in the early days of my time in Germany, which would give a time span of more than 20 years at 200 g even in my own history—maybe, more than 26. (I arrived in late September 1997; we now have August 2024. How long the 200 g had been standard before my own first exposure, I cannot say. It might have been days; it might have been decades. Larger bags, e.g. 300/400 g, have been available on occasion or in some stores, but 200 g has been the on-most-days and in-most-stores standard.)
(The trigger for this update was a mixture of this purchase and, soon after, claims that Kamala Harris, who shares in the blame for the rising U.S. prices, suddenly wants to be elected to bring prices down ...)
In parallel with shrinkflation, the trend of simply removing “too cheap” products has continued, which leads to an increased price level, even while not raising prices. For instance and for years, I used to buy packages of three small cans of carrots and peas from Aldi, and at a good price, but these simply are no longer available—there have been many months since I last saw them. (The more the shame, because they were very convenient for singles cooking, e.g. by frying two sausages and, then, briefly heating one can’s worth of carrots and peas in the frying pan.) Ditto, the vats of bami goreng and similar Asian or faux-Asian dishes that I could buy for 3-something Euro and divide into four full meals (a division into three occasionally happened, but left me too full).
And, of course, most remaining prices have risen further since [1], leaving a very bad and very unnecessary situation.
In [1] and at least one follow-up ([2]), I also spoke of changing eating habits. Here, things remain approximately the same. The replacement of muesli with rolled oats has been particularly beneficial. Not only have I not grown tired of them, but I actually enjoy them more than even the original version of my erstwhile favorite muesli (let alone the over-powered-by-raisins version).
At least during the summer, I also still eat rote Grütze (and usually with rolled oats and milk, e.g. as a good breakfast), but have switched entirely from Aldi to Akzenta, as the current containers from Aldi are both hard to open and hard to re-seal, relative those from Akzenta (Ja! brand). (Even size and quantity-per-Euro aside, the old buckets were vastly superior to the respective current version and would have been a better purchases even if made correspondingly more expensive.)
An accidental change is coffee: My drip-brew machine broke some months ago and, since then, I have been almost entirely on instant coffee, which works surprisingly well and appears to bring more beverage for my buck. In parallel (and at a higher expense), I have also increased my use of Dolce Gusto, especially after finding an “au lait” version that (a) brings something different from a regular coffee, for which drip brews are superior, and (b) still only uses one capsule per cup. (Regular coffee with milk, while a very legitimate alternative, does not give quite the same effect.)
This is not a change intended for the duration, as the drip-brew is superior in taste, if not in the ability to keep me awake and alert. Sooner or later, I will likely buy a new drip-brew machine and switch back. However, the current state is sufficiently satisfactory that I have not substituted the “french press” that I have owned for years but hardly ever use—the cleaning effort is disproportionate and the resulting coffee, frankly, too “muddy” in taste. (I might be doing something wrong, but, so far, the french press seems to be the most over-rated way of making coffee that I have ever encountered.)
Chewing gum and availability remains a tricky topic and plays in well with the above idea of scrapping “too cheap” brands:
Aldi used to carry cheap-but-decent brands (if not necessarily the same brand at different times), but does not appear to have done so since the COVID-countermeasure era (one or both of price and taste has been off with any replacements; the relative pros and cons for tooth health are more important than taste but harder to judge).
The Ja!-brand alternative that I buy at Akzenta has re-appeared, after the temporary disappearance mentioned in earlier texts, and has had good availability for many months. In the weeks leading up to the visit that triggered this text, however, I have had repeated close calls, with just several packages available. During the trigger-visit they were out entirely. I returned on the following Monday (2024-09-02), despite it “being Aldi’s turn”, because supply was now a priority—and they were out again. In other words, we seem to have a new supply and/or brand crisis. (I can make no prediction of how long it will last or whether the chewing-gums, this time around, actually has been scrapped, as one of the “too cheaps”. It is both clear and understandable, however, that brands with a lower profitability, even if not scrapped outright, are given a lower priority than brands with a higher profitability.)
To make matters worse, I now tried to pick up a more expensive brand, as my stores were down to just several pieces, and, once back home, found that what I actually had picked up were mint pills.
While these are labeled as having some similar cleaning effect, they miss the important chewing aspect: chewing helps both with dislodging small pieces of food and with stimulating saliva production. (Indeed, it has long been my layman’s suspicion that these two aspects are, or just the former is, the most important with chewing gum—not the addition of xylitol and whatnot.)
This was ultimately my mistake, but the type of packaging and labeling increased the likelihood of a mistake considerably and, of course, I only made the experimental buy because my regular brand was out.
An additional complication with store brands is that they are not usually actually produced by the store chain. Instead, some third-party producer is given a contract for production “to spec” of various products of the brand at hand. If some such producer turns down further production, e.g. for profitability reasons, an interruption in supply could take place while a new producer is sought, even should the store chain be set on continuing the brand–product combination.
I have no idea whether this has been the case with some several problems with Ja! products, but it would give a reasonable explanation.
In the overlap between some other items on this page, we have my experiences today (2024-08-06):
Between sabbatical, home office, COVID-countermeasures, whatnot, I have not bothered to buy much in way of clothes for quite a few years. The result? I am running low on socks and wearable t-shirts, and my one pair of shoes is reaching the point where they are so worn that they have become a poor fit. (Normally, I find that shoes fit the better and the more comfortably, the longer that I have worn them—yet another reason why I tend to overwear my shoes. In this case, I seem to have exceed a critical point.)
I decided to finally get things done and went to a near-by shopping district to visit C & A, a store-chain with (at least, in the past) low prices and a decent product quality for various clothing-related items—shoes included.
In an inauspicious first step, I found myself there too early: The store only opened at 09:30, while I might have been there around 09:20. Here, I must make reservations for memory errors, but I am almost certain that I have been in the same store considerably before 09:30 in the past. (Indeed, I almost went before 9 even today, but deliberately held back until after 9 to, as I thought, be on the safe side.) If so, the opening hours have been worsened, and likely for reasons that relate to the profitability issues that are behind various problems.
I killed some time fruitlessly browsing a household-goods store across the street, and then returned. First blow: the best that I could find in “my usual” socks was a 5-pack at 12-something Euro—far above what I paid before the COVID-countermeasure era. (How far above, I cannot say after so long a time, but definitely far.) Second blow: the best that I could find in terms of simple white t-shirts (or any type of shirt or t-shirt, at all) was at almost 8 Euro per item. T-shirts do have a history of being overpriced relative amount of cloth (at least, at C & A); however, there has usually been some type of two-for-8-Euro (or so) deal available somewhere. If one existed today, I did not find it. Third blow: the already small-in-the-past shoe department no longer existed at all. End result? No shoes, implying the need to go elsewhere at a later date; and 5 pairs of socks and two t-shirts for almost 30 Euro. If asked before my visit, I might have guessed at half that price for that quantity and quality of product.
To this, bear in mind that C & A is a low-price chain and that I was looking for low-priced products. That e.g. someone brand-obsessed might end up paying more than 30 Euro for a single t-shirt and no socks, that is another matter entirely.
Going back home, I tried to drop by a (specialized) shoe store that was on my way. I do not think that I had ever bought anything there, through the combination of poor choices, high prices, and intrusive staff, but with my shoes this long overdue, it might have been worth a shot, just to get the issue out of the way. No such luck: the store had closed permanently. (As had several other near-by non-shoe stores—the local shopping district is in much worse shape than in 2018, when I moved here.)
To boot, with both shoes and clothes, I had already been thwarted in previous attempts:
For socks and t-shirts, maybe a month ago, I decided to visit a very cheap store close to my usual grocery stores—only to find that it had closed.
For shoes, just last week, I went to the store where I bought my current pair. There were precious few shoes that were interesting (unless I chose to abandon my usual style of black leather), and none of them seemed to be in my size (German 45). To boot, I was repeatedly molested by annoying and unethical advertising announcements.
I buy shoes too rarely to have a firm impression, but it does seem to me that it has become harder to find shoes in a given size over the years. If so, this could also go back to profitability issues, e.g. in that keeping a greater number of pairs physically in any given store is expensive, because the money tied-up in inventory is not “working”.
In an excursion to an older text ([1]), I suggest a “statute of limitation” of sorts, in that we are only accountable for what we have done in the previous third (or so) of our lives. Revisiting that text, I find that I left out a very important reservation—that continued behaviors do not underlie the same type of expiry.
For instance, if someone turns 16 and celebrates the day by stealing a car and going for joyride, this action would “expire” on the day that he turns 24—provided that he has a sufficiently white vest in related matters. However, if he did the same when he turned 18, it might be warranted to keep both thefts+joyrides on record until he turns 27. If he has done so every year, up to and including that 24th birthday, none of them should expire before he hits 36.
To this, note that a particular motivation behind the idea is how humans change over time and how what is done at 16 does not necessarily reflect the personality, morality, whatnot, of the same human at 24. If a behavior is repeated, this speaks against a change in the area at hand.
Looking more in detail, questions arise like where to draw the border of “related matters” (what if no further car thefts have taken place, but he was caught shoplifting at 18: should this count the same as a theft+joyride at 18 when judging the theft+joyride at 16?) and whether an act can be reinstated (someone has a clean record between 16 and the expiry of the original crime, but goes on a theft+joyride at 25: should the original crime count again?). Likewise, for a more trivial example, a man who forgets his wife’s birthday at age 30 should not have to hear a complaint about it 16 years later—unless later repetitions have taken place.
In addition, I stress that this scheme is intended for matters like evaluation of the perpetrator in the now, but that it does not necessarily invalidate consequences that arise from an earlier action. For instance, if that original joyride ended with a hundred grands’ worth of damage to a Ferrari, a recompensation agreement with the owner would not automatically expire with the 24th birthday. (If in doubt, such an expiry would give great opportunity and incentive to cheat.)
(Present on a separate page, because of eventual length.)
During and after the short Truss era, I wrote several texts on related topics, beginning with [1].
While an early take away was “Not an auspicious start.”, I did have great hopes for “the Liz”—finally, a U.K. leader who might attempt the type of economic, fiscal, and whatnot policies that ultimately benefit the country. Maybe, there was a chance of a return to the Thatcher era of Tory politics.
These hopes were soon dashed, as she was not even given the chance to implement her policies.
Rishi Sunak followed and gave every impression of being yet another Tory dud among Tory duds, yet another definitely-not-Thatcher among definitely-not-Thatchers.
Today, 2024-07-05, less than two years after [1], the latest election results are in. The results are a disastrous routing of the Tories, a great victory for Labour, and a great likelihood of policies worthy of the dark ages of the pre-Thatcher era, less of Blair and more of Wilson or Callaghan, and with additional concerns about what might happen for the worse in areas like the NHS, the environment, migration, and the U.K. stance on Israel vs. Hamas.
And, oh, among the many Tory MPs who lost their seats we find—Liz Truss.
While I will not go into the details of the election, other noteworthy results include a well deserved down-turn for the nutcase SNP, a seat for Nigel Farage, and a potentially troubling success for Sinn Fein. Another point of note is, as I read the reporting, that Labour reached a comparatively low percentage of the vote and gained disproportionately (even by British standards) by the first-past-the-post system. This might be significant through a higher probability that the next election turns things around again and/or that Labour/Starmer has less “safety margins” for future policy with the voters than might have been the case.
(All claims with reservations for a pending finalization of results and correctness of reports in the papers.)
As of June 2024, after half an eternity of anti-Rechtstaatlichkeit, it appears that the issues around Julian Assange have found a resolution, and that he (for now; knock on wood) can walk free.
To this, I note that I wrote very negatively of the highly dubious rape charges as early as 2011 (cf. [1])—and of Anna Ardin, the source of the accusations, even before the accusations were raised ([2]), as she had appeared on my radar as a nutcase Lefty through the ignorance and lack of thought in her blogging. In fact, at the time of [2], my awareness of her was far greater than of Assange.
While the rape charges were dropped several years ago, they were followed by a long saga of potential extradition and prosecution (on unrelated U.S. charges). Between being confined to the Ecuadorian embassy and being locked up awaiting this-and-that, he has been an effective prisoner for around a dozen years and, according to interim reporting, been in a very bad state for long durations. Then we have issues like how his work was hindered through the inability to travel, restrictions on communications with the outside world, etc.
And note how this all took place without a true criminal conviction. Yes, he did receive a sentence for breaching bail conditions (or similar), but this formed only a small part of the overall, and the breach-as-crime seems dubious to begin with. I have, in all fairness, not looked into the details, but my impression is that it would have been impossible for him to gain political asylum while adhering to bail conditions, which would have made such adherence unconscionable. This the more so, as he (cf. [1]) in all likelihood was innocent of any crime that brought on the need for the original bail.
However, I do not share Assange’s assessment that the Swedish charges were politically motivated. A much more economical explanation is “deranged Feminist”, “woman scorned”, or some variation on similar themes. within the context of the sometimes ridiculous Swedish take on matters of sex. Who is in the right remains somewhat academical, as the risks and effects caused by the charges were the same.
The current plea deal (cf. below) also resulted in a conviction, but one that was after the fact and was based on the flaws of plea deals; and where Assange would not have shortened (but rather prolonged) incarceration, had he chosen to remain in the U.K. while refusing the deal.
In a bigger picture, here we see how one or two women, with no proof, can ruin a man’s life through mere accusations. This should have been a warning for the future and something that could have reduced the problems with the “me too” debacle considerably—but which appears to have had no effect at all. Incarcerating someone for a crime with solid proof is one thing—to do so based on unsubstantiated accusations another. Likewise, firing someone for a proved wrong-doing is one thing—based on unsubstantiated accusations another. Etc. (And, yes, this holds even if the accuser happens to be a woman and the accused a man. That Feminists push so strongly for the opposite, including with blanket demands that we “believe women”, regardless of proof, shows what evil Feminism actually is beneath the mask of pretend equality.)
Another potential problem is the apparent involvement of a “plea deal” to free Assange. Here we see an excellent example of how someone can be artificially forced to accept a lesser charge, even while otherwise maintaining his innocence. (A problem with the U.S. system that I have mentioned repeatedly in other texts.)
The “or two women” arises from the role of “SW” in [1], which was much smaller than Ardin’s. (Worst case, she was a “junior partner” of Ardin; best case, her mere tool. SW, much unlike Ardin, is also only known to me through her connection with the Assange case.)
Novak Djokovic was a recurring topic, especially, with an eye at GOAT-hood and the unfair treatment that he suffered during the COVID-countermeasure era.
With the ongoing 2024 French Open, it is time to revisit a statement from [1]:
However, due to Djokovic’s advancing age, I make no claims about how his career will continue. His 2023 is another exclamation mark, but age can hit fast once it does hit (ditto e.g. injuries and lack of motivation), Alcaraz is a very legitimate challenger, several other youngsters show potential, and I would not be surprised to see Djokovic lose his first place on the ATP ranking during 2024—and this time both legitimately and permanently. Then again, I would not be surprised to see him remain on top either.
As is, he has remained on top almost to the half-way mark of 2024, but will, at the end of the FO, drop from number one on the ranking in a legitimate manner. (Possibly, as far down as number 3, depending on yet outstanding matches.)
While I have not followed the detailed news, his post-AO 2024 has, to date, consisted of a mixture of mediocre performances and skipped tournaments, leading up to a walk-over in the French Open due to a knee injury. While this knee injury saw a near immediate and successful operation, Djokovic might also miss the Wimbledon. Factor in the many points to defend in the second half of 2024, and a return to number one before around this time next year seems unlikely—even age aside. Factor in age, noting that Djokovic will be 38 by then, the “permanently” seems likely to join the “legitimate[ly]”.
Slightly surprisingly, measured against [1], his successor as number one will be Sinner, not Alcaraz: the former has had a great year-to-date, and is a very worthy replacement, while the latter has been hampered by continued injury issues. (Something quite troubling in someone so young.)
(2024-06-09)
Alcaraz won the tournament, implying that Djokovic is now third and that things are looking up for Alcaraz again. However, he has a Wimbledon victory to defend and might lose his second place simply by not repeating that victory.
Zverev, who gave Nadal a first-round loss, lost the final over five sets, pointing to a great deal of bad luck for Nadal in terms of first-round opponent. An interesting oddity: Nadal has four losses at the FO, not counting a walk-over, of which three were to the eventual runner-up (!), one to the eventual champion. (The most likely explanation is pure chance, but it is plausible that beating Nadal at the FO is more indicative of Nadal being below his normal level than of oneself having exceeded that level.)
(2024-07-14)
And Alcaraz just won the Wimbledon, taking down Djokovic in the final—just like last year. Two updates:
Firstly, Alcaraz dropped down to third prior to the Wimbledon (presumably, due to some undefended points in a smaller tournament) and, despite his repeat victory, remains there for the time being. (Due to a change in points awarded, he even seems to have lost 100 points relative Djokovic—despite the same outcome as last year.)
Secondly, Djokovic, obviously, did make it to the Wimbledon and even closed the distance to Sinner a bit, increasing his chances to reach number one again. However, earlier claims still hold and simultaneously catching up with Sinner and staying ahead of Alcaraz will be very hard. (Barring renewed injury problems, Alcaraz is the likely year-end number one at this stage. Also note a resurgent Zverev and Medvedev, who pose lesser, but not negligible, risks to Djokovic.)
(2024-08-31)
Firstly, it was recently revealed that Sinner had a, previously unknown, doping issue earlier in the year. While he appears to be cleared as having had an inadvertent exposure, this decision could be challenged and a reversal would, of course, throw over much of what is said in my various predictions, updates, and whatnots. (He also appears to have retroactively lost some points. I have not investigated how this might, equally retroactively, have affected the rankings. Some detail claims of the past might or might need changing, but the big picture remains the same.) Until I hear otherwise, and for the purposes of this discussion, I will assume that no further consequences will follow; all claims must be seen as carrying an implicit reservation for this assumption.
Secondly, Djokovic won the Olympics, filling one of the very few “deficits” of his career. This might be the high-point of his, relatively speaking, weak year.
Thirdly, the U.S. Open is currently on-going. After the early rounds saw the exits of Alcaraz and Djokovic:
This appears to be the first time since 2002 (!) that none of the “Big Three” won a major, and the first time since 2003 that they, jointly, did not win at least two. Even in light of the Olympics, and even given that Djokovic still has a chance at the ATP Finals, their era might now be at an end.
One of Sinner and Zverev, contrary to my pro-Alcaraz semi-prediction, will now likely be the year-end number one.
Djokovic takes a ranking hit, and will now drop from second to, likely, fourth or fifth, depending on how well Medvedev does. At worst, he could be caught from behind by the likes of Rublev and Ruud, but they would have to perform beyond expectations.
A further fall is possible as the season concludes, he might actually miss the qualification for the ATP Finals, and, in an unlikely-but-possible worst-case scenario, he might even drop out of the top-ten.
(Looking at his overall year, he has not only performed worse than in the past, but he has also skipped quite a few tournaments. This implies that his ranking could underestimate his ability. Skipping tournaments might work as long as he wins several majors per year. This year, he did not.)
The exact other ranking outcomes of the U.S. Open are also still in the air, but Sinner will remain number one, Zverev is likely to equal his career-high of number two. (Medvedev has a small chance of passing him.) Alcaraz will likely remain at three, but might fall to four. (Medvedev has a larger chance of passing him.)
I will likely save further updates, including on the on-going U.S. Open, until the season is concluded.
(2024-11-05)
With the withdrawal of Djokovic from the ATP finals, the big-picture results of the year are already in, and I will go for that last update before the ATP finals:
Djokovic barely remained in fourth after the U.S. Open, and has since dropped to fifth. He is bound to fall back further after the ATP finals, where he had a great many points to defend. The issue, however, is partially that he does not play enough to keep his ranking up. In terms of playing strength, he still appears to be a worthy top-5 or better. I am not optimistic for the future in terms of his absolute level of success, and the rest of his career might be more a matter of setting “age records”.
Sinner, who won the U.S. Open, is a clear year’s end number one, regardless of what happens during the ATP finals (with reservations for that doping issue, where the last word might still not have been said).
Zverev and Alcaraz are still in contention for number two, with Zverev currently in that position, but I will not bother with updates on that.
In the interim, Nadal has finalized his retirement plans after a miserable 2024. I note the oddity that he deliberately took most of 2023 off, in order to give his career a worthy conclusion in 2024—which did not pan out at all. (A potential warning to Djokovic and his apparent focus on the majors: Old age and no play can make Djok a dull player.)
Unless something unusually noteworthy happens, I will likely let this be the final update. (At all, not just for the year.)
(Sensitive stomachs might want to skip this.)
Last year, I wrote about a weird illness.
Beginning shortly after midnight 2024-04-27, I experienced an equally odd illness, with a good dose of sickness, in the proper sense, thrown in. The cause, based on rapidity of onset and shortness of duration, might be some type of food poisoning, but I cannot recall eating anything out of the ordinary and I have never had food poisoning based on something prepared by myself or not in need of preparation beyond the state it was bought in. With other cases of food poisoning, I have also spent much more time in the bathroom. As to other illnesses, I had had no recent particular exposure to the germs of others: I had visited a grocery store the day before, but the likelihood of catching something in that manner is comparatively low.
Here, as usual, I use food poisoning in a wide sense, as I am not aware of a good “catch all” term.
For the below, it was genuinely somewhat cold indoors, at around 15 degrees centigrade, as April had taken an unexpected turn for the worse, but it was no colder than the day before, when I had no problems getting along. On the contrary, I might grow a bit too warm when in bed on such days.
I soon became queasy and began to shake very strongly with cold, despite tucking myself into bed very well. Several visits to the bathroom followed, with mild diarrhea. As a security measure, I even brought a bucket back to bed, in case I would have an urgent need to throw up. The bucket went unused, but I did throw up into the sink during a later bathroom visit. I went through the rest of the night and the morning in a mixture of poor sleep, attempts to sleep, and attempts to distract myself with various forms of entertainment, followed by some further hours of better sleep in the evening. The shaking lasted for a long time (how long, I do not know), but was eventually replaced with a slight fever or other borderline over-heating—to the point that I, for some periods, cut my blankets down to what I usually use in the summer.
By now, a bit after midnight a day later, I am mostly fine again, the main current issue being a loss of appetite. (Despite eating nothing solid, not counting a pain pill, in the intervening time. A few big cups of milk, some water, and a single cup of coffee during the day, followed by a cup of pour-hot-water-on-them-to-prepare quasi-mashed potatoes shortly before beginning this text. Even for that one cup, I had to force myself to eat.) There is some remaining queasiness and weakness, but not comparable to earlier. A particular annoyance is that I still feel sleepy, and might have accumulated a sleep deficit even with the hours that I did sleep.
A few further observations:
I was for parts quite weak physically, to the point that I, on one occasion, almost lost my balance when standing up from the floor because my muscles did not act like they normally do. (I have a somewhat Japanese sleeping arrangement.) The cup that I used for drinking felt outright heavy: I just, now closer to full strength, compared lifting the one cup with lifting two of the same kind, and the two felt about as heavy as the one had back then. And this when the cups were empty—a cup filled with e.g. milk was heavier still.
I was quite confused for some stretches, found it very hard to focus on my attempts at entertainment, and did not think clearly.
For some time in the evening, I had an odd tingling feel in my hands, combined with some numbness. This might have been explained by my sleeping with a hand or lower arm beneath me, which happens occasionally. However, such feelings usually disappear much faster and have, for natural reasons, only affected one hand at a time. Moreover, to my recollection, this began at a time when I was not waking up from sleep or otherwise might have been resting on a hand.
This is similar too, but not as strong as, the progress from a “sleeping” limb to an “awake” limb. The issues overlap, but my own cases of sleeping on a hand or lower arm sometimes result in a full “sleep”, sometimes just in some numbness/tingling and a temporary reduction in grip strength.
When waking up in the morning, and again shortly after noon, I found the text on my computer hard to read, as if the screen was too pale. I do not know, however, whether this was related to the illness or a result of more light coming in the window than during the past more-than-half-a-year. (And I do have the backlight set well below the “factory default”, as this is usually much too light, presumably geared at showing off in a well-lit electronics store, as opposed to use in e.g. an apartment.) Right now, feeling better and working in the middle of the night, I have no such problem.
I took a brief shower (“rinse”, might be the better word) in the afternoon and, to my surprise, found that a feeling of being sweaty and itchy followed the shower. It might be that I had sweated sufficiently much, or that the time since the previous shower had been long enough, to block the corresponding signals of irritation, that these were reactivated by the shower, and that the shower had been too brief to remove the underlying cause of the signals. (For reasons discussed elsewhere, I do not have hot running water, which made me very reluctant to take a more thorough shower, and/or to take repeated showers, while ill. This the more so on a very-cold-for-April day.)
For one reason or another, I found it much easier to appreciate music and, in particular, spot details of music. This was likely in part because I, on other days, mostly listen to music in parallel with reading, only turning my full attention to the music for some particularly good piece; however, I suspect that something in my confused state of mind made me more accessible to music. For instance, I woke up to “All you need is love” and I have never enjoyed it as much (by the standards of the Beatles, it has never felt special). This was followed by “Bohemian Rhapsody” and it has been many years since I enjoyed it as much. (It is a truly great song, but I have heard it so often over the years that it now usually leaves me with a “blah”. This time around, it was almost as if I heard it for the first time.) At some later time, I heard “Kung-fu Fighting” from some hits-of-the-1980s album—and this, too, was good, while my take until then had been mostly negative, to the point that I had often just skipped over the song. It will be interesting to see how these songs fare on the next encounter and whether I might draw some lessons for better future appreciation of music.
(In all cases with reservations for the exact name and capitalization of the song titles.)
As of 2024-04-30, I am much better, but my appetite is still weak and my sleeping patterns are still disturbed, with much loss of time. I suspect a problem of reaching REM sleep too rarely during the earlier days, which might then have created an effective sleep-deficit, even at an accumulated 8-ish hours per day. The sight and hand issues, in particular, have not recurred.
(However, too much time in bed has given me some discomfort, including a stiff neck.)
Weight-wise, I was at 220 pound a few days before the onset, 217 on the 28th, and 216 yesterday and today. I am a little surprised that I have not bounced back faster, as I expect the loss to have been mostly water and food-in-processing, but I doubt that it will be very long.
The temperature has turned around entirely, with indoor temperatures, so far, topping out slightly above 20 degrees centigrade, with outdoor temperatures as high as 25. This has brought two paradoxical situations where I woke up, took a (proper) shower, was awake for a few hours, found myself sleepy, and, after a few hours of new sleep, was so sweaty that I urgently needed to shower again, because I had erred on the side of too many covers.
As of 2024-05-21, I am long back in shape, but I did have some problems well beyond 2024-04-30, notably, in the form of lack of energy and unreliable sleep. In this, this illness showed yet another parallel with the previous illness. My weight might have bounced back around a week after the 2024-04-30 remarks (I did not keep exact notes).
A number of texts deal with days that appear to be a bad joke from above, including (but not limited to) problems with e.g. USB, Android, and search engines. (A list of links will have to wait, even at the risk of some of the below being hard to understand without prior context.)
Today (2024-04-19), we have yet another such day:
The USB cable issues have re-surfaced and I now have the problem that the USB connection between my smartphone and my computer is terminated at the slightest “provocation”. I then have to fiddle around until there is a connection again, which, most of the time, is lost at the moment that I put the phone back down, forcing me to start over.
I use the smartphone for Internet access through tethering. A lost USB connection loses me the Internet connection.
The problem, as discussed in older texts, is that a slight movement of the USB connector (often, on the smartphone side; rarely, on the computer side) causes the computer to view the device as detached. In a next step, the device is sometimes immediately re-attached, but often with loss of e.g. the Internet connection until a manual intervention takes place, while it otherwise remains detached until the USB-plug has been pulled and re-inserted.
There can be weeks without problems (likely, through luck in the exact positioning of the phone relative the cable), followed by weeks with problems. As long as I wait for the problem to go away, it seems, the problems continue; as soon as I decide to buy a replacement phone with a USB-C connector (which, supposedly, is far less likely to have such problems), the problems go away and I am lured into a false sense of security for the next few weeks.
(And, no, neither the USB-cable nor the USB-socket has been damaged, beyond, maybe, the wear and tear through the many repeated manipulations.)
During some manipulation earlier today, the background noise that I play from the smartphone to a soundbar died for no discernible reason. I had to pick up the phone again, which, of course, lost me the Internet connection. I restored the sound, only to find it going away again ten minutes later, because a file that I played on a loop was no longer on a loop. I restored the sound again, again losing my Internet connection.
A problem with smartphones is the often over-sensitive touchscreen in combination with an often random user interface, which can cause very unexpected events to take place. The previous phone that I used was quite bad in this regard; the current is, at least, better.
Likewise, on rare occasions things just randomly happen without user interaction of any kind. (Again, my current smartphone is better than its predecessor.)
Ten minutes later, the sound switched to some other file, because the loop was now not over the single file but (somehow) over all files. Restore sound, lose Internet connection.
This was made harder by the idiotic symbols used by the player, VLC, that I have installed, which uses very little text, many icons, and much obscurity. Notably, there are at least two variations of the “loop symbol”, differing only in color. The one appears to repeat the file at hand; the other some greater amount of files. (Exactly what criterion is used is unclear, but my best guess is all sound and movie files are included, as the file at hand is the only one in its directory.) Now, how the hell am I supposed to know what color has what implication?!? Is is so bloody hard to just put out a text of “Looping file”, “Looping all files”, or whatever might apply?!? (Screen space is not an issue.)
(To this must be added some other weird problems, e.g. that the Bluetooth connection is occasionally lost, for no discernible reason, and that any reactivation of the connection arbitrarily, counter-intuitively, almost absurdly, puts the player on pause. A redundant step of manually unpausing the player is then needed, which might be followed by further steps, e.g. ensuring that the volume control has not moved from its correct position. And, no, the player is not paused when the connection is lost, which might have been a legitimate behavior—only when it is re-established.)
I did a few Internet searches to see whether there was a way to e.g. control VLC from my computer per ADB.
Now, I was not optimistic about such a possibility, but the question was academic, as I found myself in search-engine hell: No matter my searches, I ended up with search results like:
How to install ADB!
How to install ADB!
How to install ADB for Microsoft Windows!
What is ADB?
How to install ADB!
How to use ADB from the command line!
How to install ADB!
How to install ADB for MacOS!
How to use ADB to [do something completely irrelevant to my search]!
(With the exact type of pollution depending on the exact query. The above gives the right idea, however.)
I note my past complaints about the low relevance of search results, how many search hits are prioritized (by the search services) over honesty about having few relevant hits, etc. A particular annoyance is that the more specific my queries are (i.e., in an objective sense, better, because they would allow me to find results with a higher relevance), the worse the search results. Presumably, search engines see that specific queries lead to “too few” results and compensate by ignoring search terms or by throwing relevance out the window—but what matters is the number of relevant hits.
A further complication is the time wasted to go through a part of the list to see whether it contains relevant hits. If hits are few-but-relevant, I can just open links. If no relevant hits are found, I can read the “Sorry, no hits were found for your query!” and immediately move on. When I get a screenful of irrelevant hits, however, I have to check whether at least one or two of them might be relevant.
Fucking insanity!
The German IRS and the prescribed tool for tax declarations and whatnots, Elster, are both absolute and utter disasters, through a mixture of inexcusable incompetence and inexcusable disregard for the citizens/tax-payers/users.
(This even the outrageous taxes by side. They, too, are inexcusable, but move on a different dimension, where the politicians, not the IRS, are to blame. I do note that the IRS and Elster is a point where the politicians really could do some good, but that they have chosen to leave the IRS to its own devices—instead they meddle in endless other corners where they, often, do more harm than good.)
A great number of my old Wordpress texts deal with these topics. (Links will be added at some point. Right now, I am still too frustrated with the 2023 tax declaration, cf. below, to go through the trouble.)
Going by the past, there will be at least one update per year, beginning with the declaration for 2023 (submitted in 2024).
Here the annoyances began even before I started on the declaration. A few weeks earlier, I received notification that the certificate used for authentication was about to expire and that I needed to renew it by 2024-04-07, at the latest. This did not only imply more work, but would, in a normal year, have involved either two separate visits or that a major schedule change for the tax declaration was made. (As is, I had no inputs to make, still being on a sabbatical, making the schedule change, per se, painless.)
Now, that an occasional certificate renewal takes place might well be sensible. However, a better way must be available, e.g. in that the deadline coincides with the yearly deadline for the tax declaration (=> the user can renew whenever he happens to work on the tax declaration), or, within reasonable limits, that the renewal is connected to the next login. Likewise, some type of “pre-renewal” would be conceivable, in that someone who submits the tax declaration can still choose to renew the certificate, even should it not be about to expire. (Such a way might or might not already be present, but, if so, is not well announced and the user would be forced to keep track of the expiry himself. Imagine, instead, if every login was accompanied by a display that indicated the remaining lifetime of the certificate and gave an option to “Renew now!”.)
Come 2024-04-06, I went to work, renewed my certificate, and continued to the actual tax declaration. For this, I needed three forms (this year):
VAT: I should have been able to just import last year’s data and then submit. This was not possible, as my city and postal code had not been imported. I now had to re-enter this data, which include a brief search for the actual postal code (which I use too rarely to have memorized). Apart from the annoyance factor, this likely more than doubled the time needed for this form. (And would definitely have done so, except for the awkward interface, which slows regular work down considerably.)
The problem is the more absurd, as the address is present elsewhere too, and the additional entry in the VAT form was already a pointless redundancy.
(Throughout, note that both 2022 and 2023 were sabbatical years, implying that I had no VAT, income, expenses, whatnot to declare. Otherwise, the values actually relevant for each subsequent year naturally have to be added.)
EüR (a profit calculation): Again, I should have been able to just import and submit. In reality, there were several complaints of missing values and similar, which more than doubled the overall time spent on the tax declaration—and still ended in failure.
This began with the “Rechtsform” (an identifier of the type of business, e.g. as a private person, a limited-liability company, or whatnot; I cannot find a good English term on short notice). A value was present from the year before, but was spuriously and arbitrarily rejected. I tried with several other values; these were also rejected. (In all cases, with an error message that amounted to “missing value”. And, no, the way Elster works, I could only have had the wrong field if Elster had indicated the wrong field.)
I tried to fix some other errors relating to revenue and whatnot. That a separate entry of these must be made can be sensible as they usually vary from year to year. (I am a special case, but I note that the VAT form had no such problem.) However, there was no obvious way to make an entry, not even through entering a dummy entry/position of a specific type of revenue with a 0 amount. (The overall amounts are calculated from individual positions.) All conceivably relevant buttons and fields were grayed out and did not react to my clicks.
I gave up and, instead, added a note to the third form (cf. below) about this problem and how the IRS would have to take responsibility for its own errors. (I can already foresee how this will play out: the IRS will categorically refuse to take such responsibility, and I will either be stuck with the need for a renewed redundant visit or suffer some type of spurious fine. Since chances further are that the IRS will not react before the deadline, if at all, it might well be that I receive a blanket fine without any treatment of my case.)
Finally, the “overall” tax declaration. Surprisingly, this worked without a hitch, except for the need to write that note. At least one issue was obvious, even with my minimal entries: The IRS insisted that values that were already known to the IRS, including health-insurance costs be redundantly added to the form. (As the last one or two years, I left the old imported values in and simply pointed out the IRS already knew the real values.)
Around this, I had the additional issue that I had to move away from my very comfortable work in the Linux console to use X and Firefox, had to find and attach a mouse, etc. This cost me some additional unnecessary time. True, this is not strictly speaking an IRS issue, but the IRS could handle the inputs better, either by allowing entry through a text browser or through submitting XML documents that can be edited in the console. Moreover, independent of the reason, this is an additional annoyance leading in to an activity that I already know will be very annoying. There have been worse years, especially when I actually have to make considerable entries, where the tax declaration has literally ruined my mood for an entire day—on top of the effort wasted on the actual declaration.
I have repeatedly written about woke casting and other problems, e.g. in [1], [2], [3].
(If I have not mentioned it elsewhere, a prediction in [1] came true—“The Winchesters” was cancelled after the first season.)
Today (2024-03-31), I watched the first episode of “A Gentleman in Moscow”. This episode shows some early experiences of a (fictional?) Count Rostov in the post-revolutionary Russia, including his being condemned never to leave a certain hotel and, in that hotel, being removed from regular guest quarters to an old servants room. A friend of his is shot for no other apparent reason than that his death was wished for by the regime: the friend is grabbed as he plays the violin in the hotel, in front of an audience, the violin is smashed, he is dragged onto the street, and shot in public.
While the episode deals with Communist Russia, there are great parallels to what goes on in the world today, including the destruction of arts (of which the violin smashing could be seen as symbolic), spurious imprisonment, per- and/or prosecution based on being the wrong thing or having the wrong opinions, whatnot—often exactly at the hand of the woke. (To date, modern events have been far less drastic, but they differ in quantity, not quality, and there is not telling where me might yet end, unless trends are turned with sufficient force.) This while the confinement to the hotel rings an obvious bell of COVID-countermeasure.
Nevertheless, this episode, which could be seen as an indirect critique of the woke and large parts of the modern Left in general, exemplifies woke miscasting.
So far, there have been no Blacks in major parts, but there have been several Blacks in a Russian setting where they would have been extremely rare, including a man in an early court-room scene, who was repeatedly singled out for a face shot. (So prominent was he, in fact, that I assumed that he would play a larger part later in the episode. This did not happen, but I would be unsurprised if this changes at a later point of the series.) There has also been several other unusual (by historical Russian standards) looking characters, including what might be an Indian barber.
This while, to my layman’s eye, the actual racial/ethnic diversity that might more realistically have been present has not been reflected.
In a next step, we have the puzzling woke demand that this-or-that part must be cast with someone with the right credentials (e.g. that an Aspie character must be played by an Aspie actor, a homosexual character by a homosexual actor), which oddly does not extend to characters naturally White. Cast a Russian with a Black actor, or a Russian with a Scottish actor (Ewan McGregor as the count), and everything is in order—but cast someone non-White with a White actor and the world ends. (Note e.g. criticisms of the movies “Gandhi” and “Gods of Egypt”, and of various depictions of Jesus on screen.)
And all this while no-one reflects on the choice of language. Why should, as here, Russians speak English? Why (“Gods of Egypt”) ancient Egyptians speak English? Why (various Jesus depictions) an ancient Jew speak English?
As to what Jesus, and other characters in the same works, would have spoken is a point of some debate, and could have varied in a multilingual society, e.g. in that Jesus spoke predominantly Aramaic, someone else Greek, yet someone else Latin, etc. Modern English, however, is not a candidate.
(My memories of “Gandhi” are too vague for a strong claim, but chances are that some-to-much of the use of English actually was realistic.)
This use of English is a far more legitimate point of complaint for those with a genuine, non-ideological, drive to improve TV and movies—much unlike various woke casting decisions. The reason that this complaint is not made, might simply be that most woke-sters are too poor readers to handle subtitles. (As well as unlikely to be very proficient in foreign languages; however, having mastered the right foreign language for a certain work can be a matter of luck even for the multi-lingual.)
The lack of protests against English, as well as the asymmetry in “ethnic” casting criticism, is a strong sign that the issue is not truly a matter of reaching some ideal of “fairness” or “accuracy”, but of selectively favoring and disfavoring specific societal groups.
While my overall impression was favorable, I have not yet made up my mind whether to watch the rest of the series. Depending on whether I do and on what is shown, I might or might not make updates to the above.
The series appears to be based on a book, with which I am not familiar. (And statements about casting must be seen with a reservation that the real problem could be that the author was more politically than historically correct; however, based on previous experiences, the TV makers are a far more likely source of problems. Moreover, if the author were to blame, it would not alter the underlying problem—just who were to blame.)
I have on many occasions written about the, for long periods, inexcusable noise situation in my apartment building, including a preposterous amount of very loud and very lengthy renovations. (But, with reservations for the character of the disturbances described below, which is not entirely clear, no true renovation noise has occurred for a pleasantly long time.)
In (at least) one earlier text ([1]), I have noted problems with the build up of e.g. anger and irritation, where a metaphorical basin that receives more water from a faucet than it can get rid of through the drain, for sufficiently long, will fill up and, eventually, overflow.
An excellent example of the overlap is given by the last week (time of writing: 2024-02-27), which also illustrates that it does not have to be loud drilling that ruins life:
Days of increasing noise making led to a Friday (23rd) with hours of hammering, banging, stomping, whatnot, with a first occurrence no later than 05:24 and a last no earlier than 21:57. This included repeated interruptions of my sleep.
Saturday was better, but still out of line with what can be considered an even remotely normal behavior, with problems beginning at noon and stretching into the evening.
Sunday began with another forceful wakening at 00:32. (Which might, depending on point of view, be counted to the previous day.) Further disturbances equalled the Saturday, and the accumulated frustration and whatnot left me in a very poor state. I was now reacting negatively to any and all noise.
Monday was a horror show, with hour upon hour upon hour of noise-making, beginning at 06:47 and stretching well into the evening. I was now at a point when I repeatedly shouted at the noise-maker and banged on the walls myself—to no avail. (Here, note that my fuse is still severely shortened through the many horror shows that took place in the past years. By now, I assume a permanent psychological damage in this area, going beyond the ideas of basins, drains, and whatnots discussed in [1].)
Tuesday/today has been much better (as of the late afternoon; knock on wood), but the pent-up frustration and increased sensitivity through this abuse brings me to the point of boiling with even much more limited noise-making. A particular issue is that I protocol noise excesses and am now unable to tell whether the unusually large number of entries for today is caused by an unusual amount of noise-making or by that increased sensitivity. (Today is much, much better than yesterday, or even e.g. Saturday—but how does it compare to a randomly picked day?) Another, compatible with [1], is that I have almost flown off the handle over several non-noise issues that would normally have left me perfectly calm, e.g. finding that I was out of clean bowls. (Of course, that I was out of bowls was another side-effect of the noise-making: I usually and per schedule wash my dishes on Monday, but had postponed it due to the noise-making.)
From another angle, this, again, demonstrates how weak the nominal protections against noise are in Germany—and this is a special case of far too weak legal protections of citizens in virtual any area. For all practical purposes, whatever brain-dead neighbors lacking entirely in common sense, basic human decency, consideration for others, whatnot, want to do—they can do. Specifically construction noise is outright, if indirectly, encouraged by the government through tax breaks for renovations in “own to rent” apartments. And, no, this was far from the first time that several consecutive days of highly excessive to entirely inexcusable noise-making took place, even outside the long phases with construction noise.
Another very annoying twist, that I had not foreseen when I bought this apartment: As a renter, I had the right to shorten the rent, should something, e.g. noise disturbances, affect living conditions in an unconscionable or disproportionate manner. As an owner, I have no-one to turn to and am stuck with the entire damage. (Not that the rent can be shortened enough to cover the damage through e.g. months of construction work, but it is at least a consolation and can allow some counter-measures, e.g. a day or two in a hotel, without exceeding the normal monthly budget.)
Several posts dealt with issues around supply, pricing, and/or “ply-ing” of toilet paper. (Including, at least, [1], [2], [3].)
Yesterday, I bought yet another 16-roll of 3-ply. To my surprise, it was listed as 220 sheets per roll, compared to the 200 that were discussed earlier (and, in my impression, 600 ply seemed to be standard per roll, with sheet numbers only varying according to the ply number, e.g. with 600 / 3 = 200).
Unfortunately, I failed to note the exact date of “Yesterday” before being side-tracked by other writings. It was approximately one year after the publication of [3] on 2023-01-11, however. Thus, 2024-01-11, give or take.
By an eye test, the amount of paper on my last unopened “old” roll appears to be approximately the same as that of the new rolls, and certainly deviates by less than 10 percent. (The comparison is a little hindered by deformation and I lack the depth of interest to put in more effort than an eye test.) Likely, then, the amount of paper per ply has been reduced.
This is a welcome improvement to the trend of increasing this amount at the cost of fewer sheets per roll (through increasing plies-per-sheet). Going back to 2-ply would have been better, however. (Cf. the older posts.)
Looking at the new receipt, I find a price of 5.69 Euro, for 0.36 Euro per roll or 0.16 Euro per 100 sheets. The last number given on Wordpress was 4.05 Euro for a 10-pack, which gives 0.41 resp. 0.20 Euro for the same measures. This might reflect a lowering of price or just be a “bulk buy” difference.
A related issue was supply of toilet paper and chewing gum. Since my last posts, the supply of the “good” toilet paper has been intermittent. Yesterday, very shortly after the store opened, there were both 10-packs and 16-packs, but neither were present earlier in the week. (4-ply or otherwise overpriced paper has always been present.) The same applies to the “good” chewing gum, with the incidental conclusion that my speculation about a remaining supply being portioned out was almost certainly wrong. More importantly, we are now well past the COVID-countermeasure era, the feared gas crisis has not truly hit, and supply chain issues and similar does not seem plausible at this stage. All in all, the situation is puzzling. Sheer incompetence could be an explanation; so could a very low prioritization of lower-markup products.
As I wrote in [1], a house close to the nearest grocery store had already been in renovation for years. As of 2024-01-17, more than another 14 months later, the renovation is still on-going. Going by optics, the end might finally be nigh, but it is still not here. These 14 months appear to be longer than the time it took to build the entire Empire State Building—and never mind the years that preceded these 14 months.
As of 2024-11-05 (!!!!!), the building is still not done.
It also appears that putting up a footbridge in current Britain takes longer:
Construction was already 10 years overdue when it began in January 2023 and it is not expected to open until spring 2024. In contrast, the Empire State Building, which was for decades the tallest building in the world, took just one year and 45 days to complete.
(https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/01/network-rail-pedestrian-bridge-empire-state-building/e)
Even allowing for the greater manpower available for the Empire State Building, it is absurd that merely renovating a much smaller house, and despite access to far newer technology, materials, whatnot, should take several times as long. (With similar remarks applying to the footbridge.) Again: I feel safe in assuming that the original time to build the same house, from scratch, was shorter or considerably shorter than the time taken for renovations.
The German department-store crisis seems unwilling to end: According to e.g. (in German) Tagesschaue, Galleria Karstadt Kaufhof is again insolvent and, as of 2024-01-09, in the approximate equivalent of “Chapter 11”.
(Older discussions include [1], [2], [3].)
This is the last major chain left after the merger of Karstadt and Kaufhof, it follows in the wake of existing plans to considerably reduce the number of stores, and could turn department stores into a niche phenomenon in Germany—much unlike even 1997, when I moved here, and very much unlike earlier days yet.
Of course, if and when this chain dies or shrinks enough, some new competitor(s) might arise and actually do something useful.
As I have noted repeatedly in the past, e.g. in [1] and [2], digital evidence is highly problematic. A strong further indication that it should not be allowed in e.g. court proceedings is the horror of the British Horizon scandal, which became a major news item in January 2024.
Here, digital evidence from the faulty Horizon software was used in court to convict hundreds upon hundreds of (sub-)postmasters on charges like fraud—despite their innocence. (I do not guarantee, of course, that they all were, as even a blind hen occasionally finds a corn and such crimes occasionally do take place. The vast majority, however, appear to have been innocent.)
In a bigger picture, the scandal is also a good illustration of what can happen when the rights of the individual are neglected in favor of some organisation, collective, or whatnot. Ditto of what happens when technology is taken to be infallible. (Technology is created by highly fallible humans, which makes the idea of infallible technology ridiculous.)
A few texts dealt with comics, including [1], after considerable readings of Doctor Strange (DS).
Now in early 2024, I have spent some time reading old Spider-Man (SM) comics and I see a similar tendency as with DS. Beginning with the 1960s, I have read my way forward and am now, arrived in the late 1980s, uncertain whether to continue my readings, be it at all or “forwards”. (My readings of the covered decades is by no means complete, and I do not rule out that more readings of earlier works might take place, even should I not continue into the 1990s.) A potential watershed is the 1985 appearance of the tiresome “Secret Wars II” story lines and the beginning of the cross-over era. More symbolically, 1986 saw the 25th anniversary of Marvel Comics (by that name), and could be seen as the end of one meta-volume of comics and the beginning of another. (Marvel often divides its titles into volumes, which seem to match a single continuous publication, potentially of years or decades each.)
Notably, the cross-over and arc situation is far worse than with DS (note earlier complaints about e.g. the “Infinity” story lines). The character is spread over three titles and entire story lines jump from the one to the other in a highly chaotic manner, similar to e.g. the “Infinity” nonsense, but without the partial justification for the jump that characters “belonging” to different titles are involved. In addition, but more understandably, various long-term developments in the overall life of the main characters end up in different titles, which makes it harder to follow these developments. To make matters worse, there seems to be cases where no reading order gives all events in a consistent sequence.
I use “cross-over” in a sense of “involves more than one title”—not “involves more than one hero”. I have a very negative view of the former, but raise no objections to the latter.
(My feelings on overly long, poorly made, whatnot, arcs are discussed in several older texts.)
From a reader’s point of view, it would have been vastly better if the character had had one title with a higher publication rate and/or page count, or one main title supplemented by something like the earlier “Marvel Team-Up”. (The latter, based on my incomplete encounters, featured SM in a team-up with some varying other hero, in a separate story that only tangentially touched the overall life of SM. On at least one occasion, there was a team-up that did not feature SM at all.)
From a publisher’s point of view? Well, it might have made some readers buy issues of titles that they otherwise did not read, but whether this outweighed the damage in readability, reader loyalty, reader satisfaction, whatnot, that is more dubious. For younger subscription readers, we also have the issue of how to justify three different SM subscriptions to the parents. A single subscription with more issues per year, even at a higher price, would almost certainly have been easier to justify.
(A secondary issue with the multiple titles is that the quality of story became more uneven. Stories ranged from the truly excellent to the mediocre to the barely readable.)
One of my complaints in [1] was the graphical development of comics. Again, we have the same development, but with an unexpected twist. During my teenage readings, Todd McFarlane left a very favorable impression through his originality, the amount of detail, and a general “style” (for want of a better word). Thirty-ish years later and through a more discerning eye, I see McFarlane as a disaster—chaotic, erratic, untrue to the characters’ look, too far from what is a realistic drawing (even by the standards of comics), and even annoying in his style of drawing. (What causes the annoyance, I have not been able to pinpoint.) McFarlane-drawn issues might also be prime examples of putting too much emphasis on the graphics relative the story—the equivalent of a movie that drowns in special effects but has little to offer beyond those special effects and/or where the special effects draw too much attention away from the other components of the movie.
An interesting good use of graphics, however, was the Vulturions. As villains go, they were B-list, maybe even C-list, but the mixture of colored wings and sky brought a true additional value without interfering with e.g. readability and story.
A negative development was the increase of what some might refer to as “socially conscious” stories: Earlier SM had its share of stories dealing with e.g. racial issues, but usually in a restricted manner and with some intelligence. In the 1980s, there was an undue amount, many pushing a naive Leftist worldview, many distorting the reasonable views of others, etc., in a manner quite similar to what can be found in many modern TV shows. A particular disappointment was a story that first seemed to deal with the evils of terrorism, neglect of respect for civilian life, etc., based on the Irish situation—but where the ruthless terrorists turned out to be lackeys of evil capitalists and engaging in false flag operations to increase weapon sales. (Or some such—at this point I sighed, stopped reading, and tried to forget the entire story.)
I increasingly found myself skipping issues at the first sign of such agenda pushing, even at the risk that some later intelligence, value, whatnot in the stories might be missed. (This, of course, partially motivated by the extreme amount of such stories everywhere today. My metaphorical pain-threshold in this area has been lowered by the constant bombardment with Leftist hate, intolerance, and disinformation, especially of the Evil White Men type.)
A more specific negative is the various symbiote stories: I did not enjoy them as a teen; I do not enjoy them today. (That many of them were drawn by McFarlane was a partial saving grace back then and is an additional negative today.)
In the past, I have often used the name “Spiderman”. This arose through most of my exposure (until recently) having been in Swedish translation. Firstly, the character name is translated to “Spindelmannen”, without a hyphen. Secondly, most other English super-names that (a) were “-men”, and (b) reached my awareness, were not hyphenated. Note e.g. “Superman” and “Batman”. Likewise, but less important, regular names are typically not hyphenated in similar combinations. Note e.g. “Foreman”.
(I have a superficial impression that Marvel is/was more prone to hyphenation than DC, but this could be my imagination.)
The following is an automatically generated list of other pages linking to this one. These may or may not contain further content relevant to this topic.