January 2023 in a Nutshell

It's been a while since the last afterthoughts post. I have to admit that I got rather lazy with them, which is mostly because I felt kinda stressed to come up with some neatly written text on recapturing a month. Thus I have decided it's time for a change, i.e. welcome to the first ...in a Nutshell post.

Reading

• I highly recommend Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, especially if you have enjoyed the The Martian. It's a true page turner, and the best: I don't read it in Matt Damon's voice like I did with The Martian as I've seen the movie so many times.

Watching

• Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Boy, there was a lot of noise/hate regarding this one. What an utter bullshit. Don't feel enraged but I actually fancy the approach that the producers took. It makes the whole story way more digestable to an audience who probably hasn't read every single word that Tolkien has ever written. Overall it's entertaining, though the characterization sometimes falls a little flat. Nothing to worry about, I've seen much worse show starts; DS9 for instance.
• The Mandalorian I know I'm late to party but finally I made it and more or less binge watched season 1 and 2. What an engaging and exciting show, especially after these lackluster culminations of the Star Wars saga.
• The Book Of Boba Fett was next in line and it did not disappoint, which was sort of expected as it's highly interwined with The Mandalorian.
• Ultimately I have started to watch Andor (currently at E7) which is a different ordeal in comparision to The Mandalorian or The Book Of Boba Fett. While the latter two are more space western-like, Andor is an more political and conspiracy driven entry to the Star Wars realm which I highly appreciate.

Listening

• I awaited Katatonia's new record Sky Void of Stars with high hopes and luckily I was not disappointed. Where a lot of bands fall short after such a long time in the business when they release a new album, Katatonia was able to even exceeded my expectations. Let me cite Jonas Renske who describes the songs as a dynamic journey through vibrant darkness. This is very much true.
• Skip The Coral Tombs by Ahab when you are afraid of darkness, deep water and alike. This album takes you on a ride, it's big, it's heavy and just as powerful as Ahab has ever been and it's probably the most complete record they've ever released. It still boasts the idiosyncratic fusion of melancholy, beauty and heaviness for which they’re known, with quieter moments which are better than ever.
• Grave Pleasures is back with the first single called Society of Spectres of the upcoming album Plagueboys. This has so much 80s Goth sound that just feels like a throwback. Amazing tune and really looking forward to the new record.
• Sorrowful Land, the one-man metal project of Max Molodtsov, returns for his third addition to the tapestry of mournful doom called Faded Anchors Of The Past. I have been waiting for this release the second when he put out the first track to the public. Is it a doom masterpiece? Probably not, but it's a damn good album which strucks a chord. He takes you on a slow, heavy and mournful doom trip that is certainly influenced by the situation in his home country Ukraine.

Blog

• Under the hood I have fully refactored the books page. I switched from defining the lists in the markdown itself to a combination of zola's shortcodes and a data file. More obvious to you is the new layout; the page now sports fancy tables and links to openlibrary.org for each of the books (at least as far as I could find an entry). Oh, and I also expanded the Current Read section and while being here also added a Backlog of books that are lurking on my Ebook reader and waiting for being read.
• Several links got added to the main navigation. To prevent getting this too crowded on mobile devices, I turned it into a CSS only responsive navigation as showcased by Kev Quirk in his Responsive Navigation Menu Without Javascript post.
• The rather boring bullet point list in the Tags page had to go as well and has been replaced by a Tag Cloud. Still have to finetune the font sizes though.
• Link to my Mastodon profile and a like got moved from the About page to a new page called Elsewhere.
• Unfortunately codeberg.org had a bunch of technical issues throughout January which came in the shape of insane long runtimes for pushing to repositories and constant screw ups of the pages hosting (certificates). There certainly were more issues, but these two were bugging me the most. No doubt, codeberg.org is still my place to be in regards of code hosting, but I might move the page to a different service. Shouldn't be hard, it's just a static html page.

#afterthoughts #review #personal #nutshell