Disovery, learning and activity log

w53

w52

CHRISTMAS

• Finished A Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh and really liked it. I like infrastructure, architecture, and urban planning in general, and this book was a nice mix of all three with an interesting angle of looking at buildings. It made me watch Ocean’s 11 again, or some other heist movie where there is a nice flow of planned sequence, perfectly timed, everyone in their right place doing a specific thing. Very satisfying - though perhaps not good to always glorify the burglars so much in these kinds of movies.
• The book also describes nicely how much the built environment affects how people can move, gather, run away, hide, protest, etc. I got reminded of the fantastic work that Forensic Architecture are doing, reconstructing sites of war crimes and catastrophes in a meticulous way. I saw an exhibition of their work years ago in the Röhsska museum in Gothenburg, where they detailed a missile impact into an apartment block in Gaza, as well as reconstructed a murder that had taken place in a cafe in Berlin.
• Things I got for Christmas: a metronome, a Justin Guitar subscription, Doc Martens Chelsea boots, earrings, Trevor Noah’s autobiography Born a Crime, a collection of short stories about bleeding (Bluten), a zine about making mycelium objects, dehulled soy beans and tempeh starter, Meng Qi’s solar-powered Cricket, In The Field - The art of field recordings (by Cathy Lane), a colourful Duckhead umbrella, nail polish, eyeliner, a book about weekend hikes in Skåne, Around the world in 80 trees (by Jonathan Drori), #22 and #23 of FUKT magazine, and glass nail files from Czechia.
• Two sewing projects this week:
  • A Chalk bucket for my budding bouldering hobby.
  • Four Baby hats for my nephew.

w51

• Duncan and I played a gig at a craft Christmas market at NGBG’s Blå Huset. It was an ambient set with me on guitar through Soma Cosmos and Oto Bam pedals, while Duncan had various Norn scripts, Grid, a selection of synth modules, and field recordings on his new Teenage Engineering TP-7 that he bought used for half price. The field recordings were from my Japan & Korea trip, mostly featuring crickets and other insects, as well as birds. I had written down a little cheat sheet of tricks that I would employ throughout the set, since we had 4-5 hours to fill (and I’m not yet that good on guitar). Some of those tricks were:
  • Play single notes and little sequences of the C major pentatonic scale.
  • Hold the chords C, Am, Em, Dm or G, and play single notes.
  • Fill the buffer of Cosmos with lots of notes to make a drone.
  • Use the padel steel metal bar to make a kind of whale sound (use sparingly!).
  • Hold down a power chord and play some notes of it in a sequence.
  • Play single notes from “Silent Night” to inject a little bit of Christmas.

• I got about halfway through Tausend Arten Blau by Cheon Seon-ra before I stopped. It wasn’t a bad book, it just didn’t really go anywhere that I found interesting. There’s a robot jockey that has more feelings than other robot jockeys and it saves a horse in the first few pages, but then the next 300 pages are about various members of a family and their past and present. Since there are so many books on my pile that I would rather read, I decided to move on.

w50

• I read and finished Derek Siver’s Useful not true in two train commutes. It has high points on Goodreads and many people find it inspiring, but I found it very meh. It’s for people who have not before read any similar self-help-books and had “deeper” thoughts about themselves, life, goals, ambitions, objective truths, opinions, obligations, etc. For anyone else there’s nothing new, and the whole book feels a bit lazy. Siver’s preferred style of not referencing anything makes his anecdotes, metaphors and references seem either badly researched, made up, or just ignorant.
• Got my seasonal influenza vaccination 💪💉
• Made Sauerkraut (mix of white and red cabbage, 0.8% salt) and will ferment it in the beautiful crock that Max Graze handmade.

• Made some linocut Christmas cards.

• We had a very nice potluck with our local Degrowth group. I made (vegan) Semmelknödel (Austrian dumplings). Usually you make them from old, stale bread, but because we never have stale bread at home - we eat fresh as much on the day it gets bought, the rest gets sliced and frozen - I had to buy bread to specifically dry out to make this dish. Bit silly. But the result was delicious.

w48

• Copenhagen Contemporary is amazing, glad I got to see it this week. They have a great James Turrel light installation that makes you feel a bit dizzy and disoriented. They also had some wonderful pieces in the Soft Robots exhibition, including an ethereal soap bubble blowing machine, and a piece with car exhausts surrounded by plants blowing out fog. Some pretty uninteresting AI-stuff as well, I guess that’s unavoidable nowadays.

• Saw Getdown Services in Rust in Copenhagen. It was a wild show. I only really knew their song Eat, Quiche, Sleep, Repeat. They were incredibly entertaining and likeable and did an amazing job making the crowd participate and dance. We even at some point sang Silent Night together (mostly in Danish).
• Bouldering is actually really fun. I tried it this week for the first time. I know a lot of people that love it in an almost cult-like way, which has always put me off more than it intrigued me. But after trying it out now I can see the appeal. In the best moments it makes you feel proud of your body and a little bit like a nimble monkey. It’s social, it has very chill bits in between (at any one point half of the people in the hall are sitting around chatting or watching), it doesn’t require special sporty outfits (other than the shoes) and despite not being drenched in sweat at the end you feel like you really used your whole body. I definitely felt it the few days after.
• Found a great website/blog about music theory, with an emphasis on guitarists. I’m intensifying my guitar learning at the moment, because I have my first gig coming up on the 20th of December. I’m planning to run through the pedals Cosmos and Oto BAM and play mostly pentatonic scale, since you can’t really hit wrong notes there.
• Three books I finished in the past weeks:
  • Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram. I really liked it. More of a YA novel perhaps, but it was a lovely glimpse into life in Iran, and into the life of a half-Iranian teenager who grew up in the US and had never visited his relatives before.
  • The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka. I started reading this a few weeks ago on the flight to Japan, since part of our journey was around the Seto Inland sea and Shikoku, where Fukuoka’s farm was. It’s interesting, but dated, and a little bit … condescending? There are really interesting bits about how rice farming could be done very differently, and how modern plant breeding disregards the “circle of life”. But it’s also a bit naive and anectodal. “Look it works for me, so why isn’t everyone doing it?” But I would love to live in a world where more farms are like Fukuoka-san’s.
  • Ein schönes Ausländerkind by Toxische Pommes. I follow her on Instagram and find her quite funny, but the book was a bit meh. The story is ok and the perspective of a first-generation immigrant kid is interesting, but the language was a bit too simple for me to find it engaging. Basically exactly what this person commented on Goodreads: Für ein Buch, das ohne klaren Plot auskommt, hätte ich erwartet, dass die Sprache stärker im Fokus steht und mehr Tiefe bietet. Leider wirkte der Schreibstil für mich zu schlicht, um wirklich fesselnd zu sein. Das Buch hat dennoch seine Stärken – der Autorin gelingt es, emotionale und kulturelle Erfahrungen im (post)migrantischen Kontext eindrucksvoll zu schildern. Doch durch den fehlenden erzählerischen Aufbau und die einfache Sprache hat es bei mir keinen bleibenden Eindruck hinterlassen.

w47

• First snow this season!! ❄️❄❄ It lasted only for a week though.

• Bought a Mont D’or at the local cheese shop. They advertised that it was in season now. I did not know that there are cheeses that are in or out of season. I also bought an accompanying preserved plum. We will eat both with a friend in the coming weeks.

• Made some tempeh from soy beans and beluga lentils. See Best tempeh practice.

• At Pixlar o Ljud, a “meetup for artists and musicians using programming and technology” this week I started pottering around with my field recordings from the Japan and Korea 2025 trip. I had loaded them into different sampler modules in VCV rack and tried to play around a bit. Didn’t get very far, mostly because I really liked the sound of the samples themselves and didn’t want to distort them or chop them up or overlay them with too much other stuff. I just wanted to listen to Japanese train announcements, or the old guy in Seoul whistling on a blade of grass.

• As every year the last 8? years, we watched Home Alone 1+2. The “no fascists” version, with Trump cut out of the second film.

w45-46

• Organised a kombucha brewing evening with some friends. We brewed some black tea with sugar, but like a TV chef I had also prepared a cooled-down tea so that we could proceed with adding the SCOPY right away. I always use my standard kombucha recipe, and it always works. I find it best after 2-3 weeks at room temperature.
• My dog is the cutest 💕
• At the Degrowth group, we had a book launch event. “Science in Resistance” by Fernando Racimo. His position was that scientists (in whatever discipline) should attend and contribute to climate discourse, demonstrations and events more. It does not help to take the “cautious, objective” position that scientists often (naturally?) gravitate towards. Rather, stand up for the overwhelming scientific research that shows what’s going on with climate change and environmental destruction!
• After living in Malmö for 2 years, we finally went to Bokskogen! A little forest/park with mainly beech trees to the East of Malmö. Despite being located in another municipality, the grounds of Bokskogen belong to the city of Malmö, who bought it in the 1970s to serve as a recreational area for its inhabitants. It’s not big. You hear the road from wherever you are, and you come across a carpark every 10 min. But, it was still nice and autumnal.
• Bought an amazing bright red winter coat at the second hand shop. And a pair of black jeans that fit perfectly.
• We went to an Electrix Six concert at Plan B, which was really fun. I was right at the front, directly in front of the guitarist. And at some point he handed me a pick, and held the guitar towards me, and I could shred it for like half a minute while he was fretting!! 😱 I think I zoned out, I was so shocked. Now I’m telling everyone that I have played at Plan B.

w44

• Finished the game Chants of Senaat. I really enjoyed it. Great linguistics puzzles that tickled my brain in exactly the right way. It was a perfect level of difficult but not frustrating, and I did not have to look anything up (yay!). The vibe falls into the category of “Mesopotamia core”, with flat, warm teracotta hues, sunbaked surroundings, people in long robes, archaic language and religious hierarchies. It’s calm and ordered, and a little bit repetitive in that reassuring way that you won’t actually miss a thing if you don’t quite understand it yet, because you know you’ll get back to it later. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
• Following Jack Cheng’s “Project Jewels”: https://www.jackcheng.com/studio-project-3-a-house-for-oneself/, Duncan and I identified a few key elements that we would like to have in our apartment. It’s an attempt to upgrade a bit and improve some things in our daily surroundings that could be better. The original idea would be to dream up a living space from scratch (taking into consideration e.g. where the light comes and how to design rooms around it), but we worked with the constraints that we have in our flat. One thing I realised is how much I would like the entrance area to be more welcoming and bright and cosy, instead of cramped and a bit dark. A simple solution would be a motion sensor activated LED strip around the door, that turns on as soon as you enter the little hallway space.
• How a chicken keeps its head still https://youtu.be/ZKz0_kSFSP0?si=En34Ze1nw66uIgp9. It looks amazing (and a bit creepy). There’s also a great 3D printing idea in that video for a little gadget that demonstrates the geometric mechanism behind the chicken head phenomenon. Maybe if I get into 3D printing, that would be a cool thing to create. It looks a bit mind-blowing.
• Cybertown is back??!!! I just got their newsletter which I must have signed up to a few years ago when I was digging through the internet to find some remnants of the vague memory I had of the early-2000 futuristic 3D chat plaza I hung out a bit at. https://www.cybertownrevival.com/#/. I swear I wrote a blog post about my attempt to rediscover Cybertown, how I found it and how eerily deserted it was, but I just can’t find any trace of it on my computer.

w42

• Joined the board of the Institute for Degrowth Studies Malmö after being member of the group for a bit more than a year. During that time we’ve had meetings and discussions, I helped organise our participation in the Overshoot Festival, and formed a little working group for Materials & Library. Right now we’re looking into which book to choose for a book circle, and I’m eager to design a “Degrowth walk around Malmö”, utilising the excellent Smarta Kartan that maps out different places in major Swedish cities where you can rent, loan, exchange, use for free, repair, share, etc.

w39-40

I spent 2 weeks travelling around Japan and Korea (Seoul) with Angie, and it was amazing. First long distance travel in 8 years, and the first time back to Japan after 10 years. I’d been 2 times previously in 2012 (also with Angie) and 2015, so now we could focus on the less touristy activities.

Some observations/thoughts:

• Things hadn’t changed as much as I thought they would over 10 years. I didn’t think it was so much more tourists, but it was off-season, and we didn’t go to the mega tourist places. Maybe a bit more English. Still pretty hard to get vegetarian food easily.
• I found the overt Japanese friendliness/politeness less oppressive than the first time, and rather enjoyed it. Maybe because I expected it and was more used to it?
• Hated the flights more than I thought. I don’t rush to have another long distance flight any time soon.
• Being a tourist is SO wasteful. Even ignoring the enormous emissions of the flights. Everything along the travel is single-use and packaged. The slippers, headphones, water cups, etc. on the plane. All the water bottles and plastic iced-coffee cups you buy along the way. Hotel amenities. Snacks. Plastic travel cards you use for 2 days. Etc etc.
• It IS amazing to see and experience another culture and surrounding.
• It’s also nice to come back home. And realise there are a lot of nice things also close by that one can visit.
• I love Japanese shintoism. All the different nature and animal spirits, the rituals, the festivals, the superstitions, the decorations. If I had to choose a religion, it might be this one.
• Jetlag wasn’t bad at all in any direction. I just got massively sleep-deprived during the whole travel and then slept like a baby at night local time.
• Seoul had MUCH bigger, chunkier cars than Japan. Maybe due to the American influence? While Tokyo was actually pleasantly calm and pedestrian & cycle-friendly, and cars along the cycle route very non-threatening, in Seoul I often felt like the cars were much too oversized, disturbing and hostile. Huge and black, tinted windscreens, howling engines.
• The biggest difference to 10 years ago: coffee was now EVERYWHERE. Hot and iced. While 10 years ago I actually got off my caffeine addiction while travelling Japan, this time I drank way too much of the stuff.
• Promise Mascot Agency was a great preparation for Japan. There were so many things I recognised, down to the weird music that is played around shrines. Also, Breath of the Wild, especially the parallels with e.g. shrines everywhere on Miyajima island and shrines everywhere in BOTW.

My favourite parts were Kawagoe, taking cable cars in the deserted, off-season Shigakogen ski resort, cycling along the Shimanami Kaiko route, sitting on the train from Nagano to Nagoya listening to The Radio Dept.

Here are some more photos: Korea 2025 trip

w38

• Malmö Gallerihelg (gallery weekend) happens in a week, when I’ll be travelling around Japan, but Duncan and I made a project together! The Sonification Machine! A box with switches that gets real-time location-dependent data from the internet and turns it into pleasant soundscapes. Here’s a write-up with photos: https://www.loudnumbers.net/sonificationmachine. I really enjoyed making the box and learning CAD (Fusion 360) for it.
• Duncan and I finished playing the video game Promise Mascot Agency, which I loved loved loved. It’s incredibly silly, has great dialogue, fun mechanics, and a surprisingly in-depth story about yakuza and corruption and dying Japanese small towns. The mood is excellent, the characters colourful, and I loved the Japanese vibe with all the shrines and shintoism, glimpses into the clash between tradition and modern life, and quirkiness of mascots and idols. The soundtrack is also fantastic, especially the creepy disharmonic music that plays around shrines. 11/10
• Took part in a Riso printing workshop at https://www.beaststudio.se/ in Malmö, where I designed a poster for the Craft Club (formerly Crochet club) that I organise approximately once a month at STPLN. It was really fun and I would love to get more into printing and designing.

w37

• Participated in a tatreez workshop where we learned more about traditional Palestinian embroidery. It was organised as part of Camp Hurriya , a pro-Palestinian protest camp that also featured interesting talks about anti-colonialism and resistance.
• I also took part in a Tour of Radical Activism in Malmö, which was lead by a historian from Malmö University. We walked around my neighbourhood Möllevången, a traditionally worker class area, and learned about the history, different organisations that were formed here, events that took place, etc. Very interesting! Something that stuck in my mind was that while compared to other major Swedish cities there are still plenty of (somewhat affordable) rental places in the centre of Malmö, there’s no rent control for commercial venues. So the gentrification of people living here proceeds fairly slowly, but the areas still get gentrified by more expensive businesses moving in and pushing out small cafés, community centres, art studios, etc.

• Finally watched the cyberpunk classic Akira in the cinema. Crazy story, beautiful graphics, great soundtrack.
• Another film I watched in the cinema this week was Lawnmower Man in Spegeln (as part of their Dåliga Filmklubben). Of course it was a bit trashy (that was the whole point of the screening), but I also genuinely thought it was a good and entertaining movie.
• An excellent and easy Klassischer Erdäpfelsalat nach Wiener Art.

w36

• Observed a partial lunar eclipse from our courtyard on the nightly dog walk.

• NGBG Festival happened this weekend, and Duncan, Simon and Konstantine played as Tom Runs Alone (for which I made T-shirts a while ago!). It was probably one of the warmest, sunniest days of the year, and they played at 1 pm, so we all got baked. NGBG festival is amazing and fun, but so loud and overwhelming that we only spent about three hours there and then had to go home to lie down.

• Saw Mogwai in Plan B, which was fun (and loud). Since I caught a tinnitus at a little underground show I’m paranoid about putting earplugs in when I go to concerts, and as a result of course the quality of the music suffers. Can’t have it all, I guess.

w35

• Summer is soon over, and I took a spontaneous cycle trip from Malmö to Lomma. I love how empty and calm the city is early on a Sunday morning. Saw storks on the wetlands between Spillepengen trash heap and Lomma beach.

• In Crochet club this week I did some Lino cut & print. The softer material I bought (Mastercut) is SO much more satisfying to work with than old-school linoleum.
• I made Duncan a little planter for the window in his office/studio, with a drier part featuring succulents, and a moister part featuring hibiscus, elefantöron, and a nice cascading leafy plant.

w34

• Kotte and Mati’s kolonilott has several plum trees that were overflowing with fruits the last few weeks, and they said I could take as many as I wanted. Went this weekend with Annita, and we picked a bag full while Kotte and Duncan made ambient synthesiser music. Then I made two different kinds of plum cake. Which was too much. After I was done I did not want to do any more baking ever again. But they tasted pretty good.

• My first and very probably last swim in the sea this year happened this week. The Malmö coast is VERY shallow and full of sea grass and bladder kelp, so you either wade through yucky-feeling vegetation, or you try to swim. I did the latter, and it was really exhausting to try to be as horizontal as possible, so your knees wouldn’t scrape along the bottom, while disentangling your arms constantly from the grip of the bladder kelp. The third, and smartest, option is to walk along the pier out to the deeper water, and I should have definitely chosen that option. The water was pleasant, the waves were strong (at the end of the pier) and the air outside already a tad too cold to warm up after the swim. Autumn is coming.

w33

• A week and a half full of Malmöfestivalen. It’s fun and free, and I love that it’s open to everyone. You see kids and teenagers, people with different immigration or non-immigration backgrounds, old people, etc. No other festival I’ve been to is so diverse. Of course the bands are not usually amazing headliners, but we saw the Swedish institution Bob Hund (finally!), a fun Queen cover band, and an ambient light show in St. Petri church.
• Found a large plastic stegosaurus in our trash room and took it home to live on the balcony. Look how happy this little dog is to have a companion.

• I finished Extremophile by Ian Green this week. I didn’t love it in the beginning; it was a bit too gritty and sweary and “badass” and cyberpunk for me. But it ramps down the grittiness after a few chapters, and also introduces a few different voices that are not all nihilistic and self-destructive, and it really grew on me. It’s a wild story about biohacking, espionage, evil corporations, contract killers, and punk music. By the end I loved it. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Books

w31

• On my birthday we started our summer holidays trip, and went by train to Gothenburg to meet some friends and have the BEST food - deep fried tofu bao buns from Jinx food truck.

• Summer holidays! We took the train up to Värmland and spent a week in Mellerud, Bäckebron, and Hammerö. In Bäckebron we stayed at a place called Bluesberry Woods which was quite lovely. A treehouse-style cabin with all natural materials, a compost toilet, and a little wood stove. We didn’t hike as much as I would have liked, because there were not so many trails around, but it was nice to spend a few days very close to nature. On Hammerö we stayed in Chris’ family’s newly renovated guest apartment, which was fantastic. I swam in lake Vänern several times, and it was perfect. It combines the best things from a lake (fresh water, no algae, no strong waves) with also being as large and vast as the sea, so you don’t feel like you’re just swimming in a little bath tub. I definitely want to go back to Vänern (and Vättern) some more in the future.

• Finished reading The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. LeGuin, which was very good, and quite different to the other books I’ve read by her. Very grim, very transparent a critique on the Vietnam war. Brutal and unfair. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

w29

• Went to Austria for a week. Hung out with Angie and Chris, went for a hike, had beer at a beergarden with Schlagermusik, hung out with my parents and Luna, went for another hike, saw mountains, cooked Marillenknödel, picked raspberries and blueberries, saw the Traunfall, bought Mohnzelten and went to a local flour mill to fill my suitcase with rye flour of different milling degrees.

• Some recipes I took out of my mum’s “most used” recipe folder are here: Recipes (tried & tested).

w24-26

• Finished a few books lately:
  • Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doktorow was a nice quick and easy read. Fast paced, slightly dystopian and cyberpunky, and nicely non-world-shattering. It’s a story about a guy who is a bit unhappy with his life, basically. Doktorow’s writing style was a nice change; it reminded me a bit of Neal Stephenson, but not quite as gritty and druggy, and sillier. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
  • Half-Earth Socialism by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass: I had high hopes for this book, and didn’t quite like is as much as I thought. The first 2/3 is very full of names of economists that I didn’t know about, with a lot of quotes and constant sprinkles of their philosophies and teachings without explaining it well enough for a newbie. Most of it went over my head, and I started skimming a bit at times because I got bored/frustrated. It felt all a bit inside baseball. Interesting ideas though, but painfully unrealistic. We can’t actually rewild half the Earth and live a planned socialism life with drastically reduced power consumption quotas, right?. The last chapter is a glimpse into a Half-Earth Socialism future, but it felt somewhat unappealing. Communal living and centrally planned economy… mhhh. The idea that I perhaps I liked most in the book, and that felt also somewhat achievable with AI in the future, is that you feed different conditions and desired outcomes into “the supercomputer” and it suggest a few different paths to get there, e.g. “rewild 30% and have a 1200 W power quota per person” or “everyone go vegan and no individual car ownership, but use as much electricity as you like”, etc. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
  • The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. A fantasy book that I picked up on a whim because it had such high ratings on Goodreads. And I loved it! Nice to read a page turner again. There are some really shocking and exciting moments, some weirdness, some melancholy, a bit of odd language, great worldbuilding, strong female characters, unforced queer and trans representation. A good package. I didn’t know it’s part of a trilogy, so not sure if I’m happy about tat or annoyed that there was no clear closure at the end of this book. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
• Midsommar! For a change it didn’t rain! It was perfect weather and we spent the afternoon at Kotte & Mati’s INCREDIBLY cute kolonilott.

• It was also Laika’s 8th birthday. She continues to be the cutest and loveliest little beast in the world. On her birthday she just wanted to go on the train, so we went from Malmö Triangeln to Malmö C, and then back again. She was happy. 🐶❤️
• I made Austrian-style buns: Mohnflesserl and Salzstangerl. They were pretty good for a first try. Bit dense, but I didn’t know how much I should knead the dough for (the instructions were from my parent’s local mill and they were very minimal). I liked the Salzstangerl much more than the Mohnflesserl because even though I love poppy seeds, they don’t really do much on a bun. Whereas the caraway seeds on the Salzstangerl really add a nice (if you like caraway) spicy-cool-herbal tinge every once in a while that cuts a bit through the doughiness. I only realised that caraway is such a substantial part of Austrian cuisine when I tried to make Duncan eat traditional dishes, and he didn’t like the taste of it. It’s in everything! Bread, buns, soups, sauerkraut, roasts, etc.

• The Sonification machine is coming along nicely. Duncan and I did some Raspberry Pi Pico tutorials on the breadboard, mostly following this excellent tutorial: https://core-electronics.com.au/courses/raspberry-pi-pico-workshop/. We managed to make an LED pulse. I also got really into the idea of making the case for the machine out of cardboard. I prototyped already a bit with cardboard, but had vaguely planned to eventually make something out of wood. But then I watched this Youtube video by NightHawInLight about waterproofing cardboard, and glueing cardboard sheets together with a starch glue to make a really strong and durable material out of basically free material. I really want to test that a bit more!
• Ok, yet another craft that I want to learn more about is electronic embroidery. I attended a workshop at a local boostore where we embroidered a Pride Frog with beating LED stars. The instructor sent a whole load of resources that I’m now slowly making my way through. Here’s a link to that list: E-textiles & electronic embroidery. The possibilities are endless: lit-up raincoats, knitted radios, embroidered touch-controls for synthesiser modules, etc. etc.
• Florist concert in Loppen in Copenhagen. Definitely my favourite venue there. When we saw Yard Act there some months ago it was AMAZING.
• Joined the non-profit film club Film i Malmö that screens films in Hypnos, a little indie cinema and live venue in Malmö’s “noise zone”. First we wanted to watch The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, but we got caught in a massive thunderstorm and downpour on our way there. A few days later they showed the 2006 film Déjà vu starring Denzel Washington. It was good! Tense and gripping with a nice pinch of out-there time-travelling technology.

w23 2025

• Finished making band t-shirts for D’s band “Tom Runs Alone”. I screen-printed the letters on with silver fabric paint, then stitched the outlines of the offset letters on it with neon-yellow thread. It turned out almost exactly as I envisioned it. I would’ve like all the embroidery to be in the same thickness, but working with the thick thread was just IMPOSSIBLE and really annoying. I managed to finish one letter and then didn’t want to continue, but also couldn’t undo it without leaving big holes. So I compromised on doing the first letter of each t-shirt in thick thread, and then the others in thin thread.
• Had another Crochet Club. Slightly smaller round this time (we were 5, last time we were 12) but very calming and nice, and good chats. 🧶
• The chanterelle sniffing course I’m doing with Laika right now was cut short this week by fireworks. We met in the park with the dog trainer and the other participants, Laika was super happy to meet everyone and running in circles. Then a few bangs could be heard in the distance (it’s graduation time in Sweden right now and students go CRAZY driving around honking all day and setting off fireworks). From then on Laika just wanted to go home, panicky look on her face. Poor thing.

w22 2025

• We went to Aarhus for a long weekend. Easy 3h trainride from Copenhagen. The city is not big (300 000ish) but has a fantastic art museum that alone is worth a visit. I especially liked the big installations in the basement, for example a room (“an abandoned Japanese dentist office”) with a simulated (but very realistic) thunderstorm outside. “Storm Room, 2009” by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. It was so nice to just sit on the floor in this room and watch the rain run down the windows, hear and feel the thunder come closer, and see the lightning flicker and the neon lights occasionally drop out. Very atmospheric and calming. The “Rainbow Panorama” by Olafur Eliason on the roof was of course also a highlight. Like many of Eliason’s works, it’s quite simple - a walkway in different coloured glass panes - but has a really cool effect. It’s a beautiful view from up there, tinted in different hues, your colour perception weirdly distorted. I walked around it at least 3 times.

• I managed to catch a photo of the Pride Parade walk past in front of the museum.

• It always surprises me how much less vegetarian-friendly Denmark is compared to Sweden. In Sweden there will always be at least one veggie option, often also a vegan one, and often more than one. In Denmark it’s common to find not one animal-free option on the menu. I know their pork and dairy industry is strong, but come on! We did find a few nice places to eat in Aarhus, because thank god pizza is vegetarian!

• We (as in our local Degrowth group) participated in this year’s Overshoot Festival in Folkets Park in Malmö, a meetup of all kinds of climate-, environment- and social justice-related organisations. It was windy and a bit chilly, but loads of people came and we had a good turnout. Together with visitors we created a “Vision of the future” collage at our stall that was a hit with kids (who wrote slightly un-degrowthy things on it like “Eat more food!!! or “Playstation 5!“).

w20 2025

• Eurovision week! Some solid songs but nothing AMAZING. Sweden’s “Bara Bada Bastu” is a banger and an earworm to such an extent that it makes me really annoyed after a while. Estonia’s strange Italian “Espresso Macchiato” was better on video, the live performance was very weak. Lots of countries sang in non-English languages, which is nice. Israel participated again and came a close second (thanks to massive campaigns to vote for them) almost causing a catastrophe for the continuation of Eurovision. Luckily Austria made it to first spot with JJ’s skillful (if not too exciting) soprano-style “Wasted Love”. 🇦🇹

w18 2025

• Vibe coding: Vocabulary app with Claude
• I started watching the Chinese Three Body Problem series. Found it for free on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBslwuKKAO8&list=PLDWJ213d2Ucr-3q9LDF9P1_j3Rr3GMJeS&index=3 How does Chinese work? They seem to be able to cram so much more information into a seemingly few syllables. I can barely keep up reading the subtitles! After watching (and liking) the Netflix version of Three Body Problem I was interested in the Chinese one because I read that it’s much closer to the books. It’s also a very different style of TV - almost a bit soap opera. Quite melodramatic, slow scenes, a lot of repetition with dramatic zoom-ins, emotional faces, overacting, etc. I’m only 3 episodes in, there are 30 in total.

w17 2025

• I finished sewing the Violet pinafore dress in dark-green corduroy and it turned out pretty good (even though it was a pain to sew because of the lining).
• Had my first full anaesthesia of my life for a minor surgery. It was exactly like people described; one moment things are happening around you, the next moment you wake up in a bed hours later with someone calling your name. Nothing in between. Wild.
• East weekend was nice (even though the weather wasn’t). We had some friends over and made a vegan version of the Greek Easter soup Magiritsa (usually it’s made with lamb offal, yum!). It was (surprisingly?) good - umami, dilly and acidic. We died some eggs, as is traditional in Austria, and watched Hackers, the amazing 1995 movie (great soundtrack as well!). We also made hotcross buns from the SIFT cookbook - a version with white chocolate, raisins and pistachio. It tasted nice but the texture was more cake-y than bun-y. Despite the dough being sooo stretchy because of the tangzhong that we made. Mh.

• We started playing Blue Prince, a puzzle, mystery and strategy game where you go through a manor of ever-shifting rooms to find a hidden 46th room. To keep track I’m taking detailed notes on it. It’s a good game to play and solve together. 3 Days in it’s interesting, but we have yet to find out what any of the clues mean. I still often think back to the puzzle game we played last year, Outer Wilds, which was a really slow burner for me but OMG did it unfold in a mind-bending and memorable adventure. I still get a special kind of feeling when I hear the first few notes of the theme when the “day” is over (coincidentally I listened to the opening song of The Radio Dept.’s album Pet Grief, “It’s personal” - and isn’t that exactly how the Outer Wild theme starts??!!).

w15 2025

• The Tokyo cherryblossom tree in Pildammsparken is in full bloom!

• I had some friends over for a whole afternoon of fermentation. We made Kimchi, Brussel sprouts with garlic and pepper corns, and Hishio (with some barley koji that I had in the freezer). So much vegetable chopping! But it was fun. With the leftover cooked soybeans and green lentils that we didn’t need for the Hishio I made tempeh later that day, which also turned out very nice. But boy those brussel’s sprouts smell about 3 days into the fermentation, yuck!

• A week full of concerts. On Thursday we saw Merope and Lymland, which were both very calm and nice. Merope, a Lithuanian electronic-folk band, was playing on traditional instruments and at one point was walking around the audience playing the zither while singing a Lithuanian lullaby. Next day it was the complete opposite: Support band NITEFISH and main band Violent Magic Orchestra, a Japanese noise-metal-techno-gabba band with insane outfits, a wild light show, and a tiny Japanese woman growling like the devil. It was SO FUN. I won’t listen to the music on my own, but it was an amazing experience to see it live. Then on Sunday we went to Copenhagen to see Anthony Szmierek in the tiny Vega bar. It was SO GOOD! The vibe was top notch, Anthony was incredible and nice and sweet, great music, great audience, everything perfect.

w14 2025

• For our 12 year anniversary celebration we went to Lyran, a small Michelin-starred restaurant around the corner. Cuisine is New Nordic with very local ingredients. It was very nice (and nicely un-stiff), but I almost had to laugh at how clichee some of the courses were. The first one was literally two thin slices of yellow beetroot stacked on top of each other (yes, it was pickled, and there was some nicely flavoured mushroom-cream in between, but it still just looked like a sad little slice of raw potato when it arrived). It’s interesting how many dishes in fancy restaurants have “foam” as a component.

• The restaurant visit was a good opportunity to wear my recently finished self-drafted shift dress.

w13 2025

• D’s mum was here for a week and we did a lot of nice things. The best I think was the trip to Falsterbo. Half on hour on the bus and you get from bustling Möllan to an empty, windy, sandy beach at the very Southern tip of Skåne. There’s a lovely documentary about the couple that used to live in the lighthouse there for 30 years and recorded weather data every 4 hours and never missed a single reading (not even during the birth of their children!).

• We also spent a whole day in Malmöhus Slott, a museum that houses a lot of historic stuff, as well as an aquarium, a natural history section, an art gallery and a traditional craft section. Really worth a visit! The other arty place we saw was Moderna Museet, which showed hilarious fairy tale-like creatures by Ukrainian artist Marija Prymatjenko. I loved all of them.

• I bought a nice breakfast bowl in a shop that only sells yellow things. And we went to the garden center and I could not resist to get three little raspberry bushes and two red currant bushes for the balcony.
• I attended a collage workshop to make a selfie in collage form. I brought a lot of things that I identify with and love, stickers of fungi, a brochure from my home area Salzkammergut, the fabric from an old duvet cover we bought in Gothenburg (that has since been reworked into a shirt, pyjama pants and shorts), and old Game Boy cover, pictures of trees, bioart, train journeys, science and some self-made clothes.

w11 2025

• https://worldbuildingpasta.blogspot.com/ - Fascinating website about creating different geologically accurate worlds. I came across it when wondering about tides and seasons, and the climate in connection to earth’s tilt, etc.
• Finished Infrastructure book Read 2025
• First signs of spring on the balcony! I need to clean it up after winter soon. Should I trim my Black raspberry bush that I bought last year in the Malmö Garden Show? Or would that destroy the very branches that should bear fruit this year? (I’m still not 100% if it’s summer bearing or autumn bearing, which is crucial to know to answer this question)
• I’m still running semi-regularly (about 2-3 morning as week) for 30 min through Pildammsparken with Laika. It’s surprisingly nice, especially after the shower afterwards I really feel refreshed and warmed up and ready for the day. 💪
• More, very successful sourdough experiments.
• We had another karaoke night at STPLN which was fun and I managed to not lose my voice completely.
• I made a Ribislkuchen! My parents carefully brought me a box with garden-grown juice red currants last September, and I froze them to make into a nice Austrian Ribislkuchen with a fluffy base, a tart layer of current, topped with a fluffy-crunchy cloud of sweet meringue. It didn’t turned out as nice as my mum’s but it was still delicious. Recipe here (though next time I would probably try a different one).

• I brought some of the cake to our Silfawalk to Spillepengen. “Silfawalks” is what D calls walks that are supposed to lead to a nice green area but somehow end up in a (post)industrial place like a port, a deserted car factory or a bleak hill on a landfill. Maybe not perfect, but there is always something educational in Silfawalks, and I really do like industrial areas. This time we planned a Sunday trip to be a Silfawalk and we went to Spillepengen, an area in the outskirts of Malmö that can be reached by walking for half an our through port area (very bleak on a Sunday), along a motorway, past a power plant and a waste incinerator, until you finally reach the rekreationsområde Spillepengen which hosts a shooting range, a pet cemetary, a rabbit breeding station, and a trash-hill. Surprisingly nice view from the trash-hill though, and towards the water it’s actually a nature reserve and we (and a handful of actual bird watchers) could see loads of birds. Having just read the book about infrastructure and walking through industrial areas does make you think about stuff like “Where does our water come from?”, “Where does Malmö’s trash go?”, etc. An investigation for another time. I’ll add it to the list.

• The sourdough experiments continue. Doesn’t this look amazing? The results of the latest experiments are here: Sourdough experiments.

w10 2025

• Soma FM has been my discovery of the week. An internet radio station with a ton of exciting channels, from 70s Hipster Europop to Music for Hacking and Ambient Space Music. After switching from Spotify to Youtube Music almost a year ago, I still haven’t built up my library enough that it recommends me interesting things. Soma FM is a (retro) breath of fresh air. It got me so excited about the thought of turning on “the radio” that I want to refurbish my dad’s old radio with a Raspberry Pi to stream Soma FM.
• Focus month. At the beginning of the year I thought about having a focus month each month, and digging deap into a topic or skill I want to learn about, expand on, improve, build something with. Then January came and went, and so did February, and while I didn’t just do nothing I did not work in a very focussed way on ONE thing. So now it’s the beginning of March, and I finally feel some energy to get started with the concept. So March will be Rasperry Pi focus. Inspired by the radio project, as well as a project I’m doing with Duncan about building a “sonification machine”, I want to dig into what can be done with Raspberry Pis, how they work, how they can be used, etc. I have to be careful to actually start making something even though I don’t know ALL the details of the subject yet.
• The home renovation/improvement work is in full-ish swing. We (cough mostly I) have restructured the bathroom a bit, and painted and repaired an IVAR shelf that we bought from the second hand shop around the corner. I went to the small Järnhandel in town and the guy custom-made little pins for the shelves that were missing. I bought plants and a LED strip with grow lights and now the shelf is a nice indoor plant installation.
• I self-drafted one of my favourite dresses, a very simple, boxy shift dress that I bought years ago and it’s GREAT because it has no buttons or zips, doesn’t need ironing, and can be used as a blouse or a dress. I traced it on paper, then cut out the pieces from a nice flowy viscose I had, and tataa I have a new dress. Worked really well, now I can make this dress in all kinds of different fabrics, with long or short sleeves, just as a blouse, etc.

w10 2025

• Is it ok?. Robin Sloan’s blog post about AI is a well thought-through piece that resonated with me a lot. I have big problems with the use of and push for AI, and I’m very sceptical that there is any real benefit to “normal” people and that the downsides are enormous compared to the upsides. He makes a few good points about the nuances of AI. However, it’s too naive to think that we could pick only the “good” bits of future AI, such as a Babelfish-like translation machine, and not have the bad bits. I agree that there’s a lot to gain from scientific AI, like Alpha Fold, etc. But just harvesting the internet for all of human knowledge and creation to make a sad regurgitation of it for profit is sickening and depressing. And even in the case of Alpha Fold (certain) people nowadays present it as this triumph of technology, while it would be nothing without the painstaking work of thousands of scientists cloning and producing and crystallising proteins, interpreting the x-ray data, etc. It should NOT be ok to harvest accumulated knowledge and make your own for-profit tool out of it.
• The past 2 months have been unreal with crazy news since the orange idiot and his faschist rats have taken over US office. That’s the only thing I will ever write about this, and I’ve had to restrict my consumption of news (also Reddit, Instagram) MASSIVELY to not get too depressed/enraged about the state of the world. But it has affected my ability to be creative, optimistic, excited about new projects, etc. That and a health issue that has forced me to cancel/postpone my upcoming Japan holidays. Trying to refocus on not spending any energy on things I can’t influence, and instead making and contributing to things that give me joy and have a positive effect on my immediate surrounding.
• You can’t post your way out of faschism is a good reminder that I shouldn’t feel bad about not being active in every possible political subject on social media, and that it is instead actively harmful to doing actual work.

w3 2025

• Youtube video Music Theory for Ambient (theory you can actually use!)
• Indoor plant tips How to care for the plants I have at home
• https://interconnected.org/home/2024/12/23/jailbreaking
• I’ve been on a bit of a Youtube kick this weekend, and I watches some really great videos. Here are a few:
  • Easy Chord Theory - Triads and Intervals Gracie Terzian is GREAT in explaining music theory for beginners (and intermediates) in a pedagogical way, asking question of the right difficulty level and leaving just enough time for you to think of the answers themselves. No frills vidoes: simple, clear explanations, with simple, clear presentation. I am currently on the level of learning what differentiates major and minor chords, so quite early in the journey.
  • 5 Things Every Creative Person Should Consider (Inspired By Wendell Berry)] has some interesting thoughts by “American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer” Wendell Berry
  • The 3 essential tips for better travel photos. I’m so looking forward to my trip to Japan and Korea at the end of March, and I want to up my photography game a bit for when I’m there. This kind of video really helps in getting a better (theoretical) understanding of how to go about taking photos of a certain place. Leander Hoefler’s main tip is to think in sets; Establishing, Ambience, Detail. When arriving at a place, take some “iconic” photos to establish and define where you are, wide shots that show the place and the surrounding, some viewpoints of the city, some popular sights. Then proceed to capture the ambience, the life, culture, character, people, architecture, transportation, etc. that feel typical of the destination. Include a good mix of subjects and perspectives. And finally look for details that tell a story, such as closeups of local food, quirky interactions, traditions, to add depth to your photoset.
  • This photos is from the video above, and I loved it so much. Those b.e.a.u.t.i.f.u.l. trees! It was taken in Naples. (How much nicer would that scene be without all those ugly cars in the foreground though.)

w47-51 2024

• The weather has been up and down the last few weeks. Partially typical Skåne depressing grey-wet-windy-not-quite-cold-enough winter. But we also had a few days of snow and below 0, though now it looks like Christmas will be around 10C.

• I’m currently trying to recreate a sandwich that we ate a lot when we lived in Gothenburg’s Majorna district. It’s a vegetarian twist on a Reuben sandwich, and it was so delicious. The shop has since closed, and I’ve never found a similar thing anywhere else (in Sweden). But now that I’m getting into Sourdough, I thought that I can give it a go to make this sandwich as I remember it: What’s the Deli’s sandwich recreation
• I joined a local Degrowth group, the Institute for Degrowth Studies and since then I’ve been looking more into what degrowth actually is and means. Very simply said, it’s the mindset that continuous (or even continuously accelerating) growth under capitalism is neither sustainable nor possible nor desirable. There are a lot of good resources out there, e.g. this video or this excellent talk about Doughnut Economics between husband and wife Roman Krznaric and Kate Raworth. Doughnut Economics is not synonymous with Degrowth, but it’s perhaps one possible model of economics under a Degrowth mindset.
• Duncan released On Standby, a piece of data-driven sound art spanning 10.4 hours with ambient music, voices, poems and sounds from electronic devices that are running over night. It’s a great piece of work, and very calming to listen to. As the audio component of a light show at an ice rink he also made a 2 h version, and we hung out for a few hours in the box, sipping tea and watching people glide through a slightly eerie ambient ice disco.
• Christmas is coming closer and closer, and I’ve been quite crafty this year, making both an Advent calendar for Duncan, as well as a cosy lounge set for my sister (consisting of the Southbank jumper and the Tula pants ), and Aprons for my parents.

• The Christmas crafting didn’t stop at sewing. I also made - sufficiently in advance to be ready in time for Christmas dinner - a new batch of white and read Sauerkraut, as well as a big batch of Soybean tempeh.
• And finally, I tried a recipe for Plant-based solbullar (custard buns) that sounded interesting because it employs a method that uses pre-gelatinized starch, called tangzhong. Recipe is from Brian Levy and Nicola Lamb’s newsletters. The dough turned out pretty good, so fluffy that it was almost focaccia-like when handling. I would make that again for other yeasty buns. But I was a bit disappointed by the custard, it was not as rich and creamy as I would have wished.
• In non-food news: We watched Home Alone with friends (Duncan had made a special version where he cut out the scene with Trump from Part 2). And we got solar panels installed on our building.
• Ok, one more food activity. We went on a smakpromenad through Rosengård. It was a nice way to get a bit of a tour to this district of Malmö that we so far hadn’t really been to. It was only our Pakistani guide (the lady who formerly owned the Indian restaurant in Mitt Möllan - she recognised both me and Duncan!) and us - all other people had cancelled on this drizzly December Sunday. When we left Möllan it was all honking cars and people with Syrian flags, because Assad had just fucked off to Russia. I expected there to be some noise in Rosengård too, but it was mostly quiet. We had a falafel rulle at the first falafel restaurant in Malmö, Falafel Nr. 1. Then we went to a little Bazar and had the much hyped Dubai chocolate, and some dates in a fruit shop. Then further to Rosengård centrum where we had Burek, Pakistani sweets and Samosa shavings, nuts, melon seeds, and another falafel. Finally we ate some manakish with different dips.

w45 2024

• In a little concert at STPLN where four different modular synth and/or noise artists - most of which I know and am friends with - played half an hour each, I got SO many brainwaves about what I want to do and learn and try out and work on. There is something about concerts, especially “instrumental” ones, that makes my brain go into overdrive. I think it’s being presented with creative work, combined with slight boredom, and an inability to get out of there and/or look at my phone. I got all kinds of ideas and thoughts about music, sewing, photography, science, fungi, fermentation, printing, field recording, websites, coding, communications, degrowth, nature, etc. Also had some deeper thoughts about my job situation and professional development, and how I could be more proactive to direct it into a certain direction. It felt good to have such a burst of good and exciting thoughts, especially since I’ve been a bit down and easy to irritate lately. Feeling the weight of the world. Trump’s reelection (and what it means for the world), Palestine and Lebanon, Ukraine, climate crisis, environmental destruction, rich assholes destroying everything, etc. Pessimism/cynicism/helplessness can take over sometimes. So it’s very nice to get an optimistic push into some things that I am actually excited to work on. Now it’s just a matter of deciding what to start with.
• I made sourdough bread! Despite being really into fermentation, I hadn’t tried my hands on sourdough before. Maybe because Duncan was the bread mastermind? But since we moved within 5 min of the most amazing bakery and pizzeria, he completely gave up baking. And while I love Farina’s French/Italian white wheat levain, my Austrian palate craves darker, rougher rye bread sometimes. It just goes SO well with certain things, it has a different texture and a more filling, warm flavour, and it’s what I grew up with. So I made a wholegrain rye sourdough starter over 5 days, which went well, and then tried a full rye sourdough bread. It went really well! Slightly too dense, but I’m pretty happy with my first ever attempt. So now I want to get really into it and try out different recipes, and styles. The only problem is that Duncan is not such a fan of those “central European” kinds of bread. And while I can eat bread for every meal, it still takes a while to get through a loaf.

• For the 10 year anniversary of Interstellar, it was screened in the lovely Spegeln cinema. It’s one of my favourite movies, and I’d never seen it on a big screen, so I had to go. I really enjoyed it, though there were a few things that I noticed for the first time. I hadn’t seen it that many times before (it’s 3h long!), and this time I was maybe more attentive? The whole story about the crops failing and Earth becoming inhabitable was… weak. We only ever see a little glimpse of some folks in the midwest US, but what’s the situation in literally any other place in the world? And does the Earth really become SO uninhabitable that leaving the galaxy through a wormhole to completely start anew on another planet, that might be even less hospitable than the fucked-up Earth, is the better/easier option? Also, despite some dystopian decline in trust in science, a core NASA team survives in an underground (?) bunker and manages to make a spaceship that travels to Saturn? And then within 70 years makes a complete giant, donut-shaped space station that houses people? Ok, even if they manage to make a space station, why the hell does it look like suburban America, with kids playing baseball, and a hospital that looks like straight out of Doctor House? That seems so lazy. Make it at least look rugged, or more functional, or futuristic. It’s not very believable. And I’m aware that a film about worm hole travel can’t always be believable. But it’s odd that the parts in space and other galaxies seem so much more realistic, than the stuff that is closer to Earth. I LOVE the scenes about going to the other planets, and the concept of time dilation and half the crew returning young from the planet’s surface to meet their aged colleague back in orbit sends shivers down my spine. That is SO cool and weird. Also, how had I missed before that the robots are so funny?
• Finished reading Moonbound by Robin Sloan. Very good, with some caveats.

w44 2024

• A very good karaoke app: Karafun. We used it yesterday to host our own little karaoke party with some friends and it works really well, everyone can queue songs, they have a huge selection, and you don’t even have to sign up to test the free version and start singing.

• One year in Malmö! I remember that last year when we moved here we had a wonderful week of autumn beauty, before everything became more grey, barren and cold. The exact same things seems to be happening now. Last week we had some amazing days with colourful leaves and temperatures still above 10, but yesterday was the first day of actually chilly (<5C) weather, with gloves, hats and scarves. It’s been a really good year. Moving here, we made it a priority to try a lot of things to get a connection to the place, see what’s going on, meet people, etc. And we really did that! I joined a crochet club, woodworking course, pottery course, and an ocean exploration course. Through STPLN we met a lot of amazing people that we regularly do things with. We have a nice Whatsapp group where people constantly suggest things and organise things, like hikes, after works, DnD, karaoke, etc. We’ve been to loads of concerts, exhibitions, little events like the Overshoot Festival in Folkets park or the local design market, we’ve explored large parts of the city by walking and cycling, eaten in a lot of great restaurants, support small local businesses, etc. It really feels like we’ve made the most out of our first year here, and the city has been very kind to us. There are so many things I like about Malmö, first and foremost the countless things that are just there for its citizens: the amazing library, the nice parks with impressive trees, the summer streets and squares, Folkets Park with its seasonal decorations, etc.

• My new favourite autumn tree is Ginko. It’s SO beautifully yellow!

• Sewing: I made a whole pyjama set out of an old duvet cover: Tula pants & shorts (Papercut Patterns), as well as a pair of longer shorts for Duncan by copying his favourite (but ripped) Uniqlo shorts. I also finished a nice version of the Helmi tunic dress in a dark-blue cotton.

• While sewing, I binge-watched the whole second season of Netflix’ Outlast, a survival show where contestants can win 1 million USD, but only if they are in a team at the end. It felt quite exploitative watching it, when contestants described that they joined for the chance to pay for their mum’s dementia care, or be able to afford a necessary knee operation. Things that you shouldn’t have to starve yourself on TV for. Then halfway through the show, which is of course rigged with all kinds of mean challenges by the producers, it looked like a team made up mostly of kind individuals who really wanted to work together might win the whole thing. And I thought that it might be a heartwarming finale with the underdogs getting what they deserved. But in the end, two egotistical “Texan boys!!” who talked about spending the money “on a new truck and another house” won it, and it felt like a sad confirmation of how the world works, with people stomping over others to get what they want actually succeeding.
• In other TV news, we’re in the middle of the newest GBBO season now, and Nelly is a gold star!
• And speaking of baking (and food science): These plant-based custard buns look delicious, but even better is the whole thought process described about how to replace the animal ingredients (egg, butter, cream) with plant-based counterparts without losing the texture and flavour contributions. Really interesting!
• We went to see Interpol’s 20th anniversary concert for their “Antics” album in Copenhagen. It took place in the concert hall, which was a slightly odd experience for a rock concert. It was nice though, and made me want to practice more Interpol songs on the guitar.
• I made Barley koji, and subsequently a few different miso versions, as well as condiments/chutneys Hishio and Nattoh miso, which turned out pretty good.

w40 2024

• Cheese. This article in Scientific American explained very well why and how different (dairy) cheeses are melting, stretching, forming puddles or crumble: The Science of Melting Cheese. It again made me think of figuring out how casein works, and if there are plant-based analogues out there that could behave in the same way. Maybe in combination with the right salts? This feels like a problem that food technologists are actively working on, since a proper vegan cheese would be SUCH a game changer. Can a plant-based cheese protein be modelled? Improved by specific proteases? Tweaked by the right conditions, or combinations with other proteins, fats, carbohydrates or salts?

• We hiked around Häckebergasjön on a wonderful, sunny Saturday. Early October, most of the leaves are still on the trees and green, but autumn is strongly in the air. In the morning it was frosty on the ground, in the afternoon we were hiking in short sleeves.

• The balcony is (mostly) bare again. After all the big balcony Plans 2024, and a somewhat successful growing season (mostly tomatoes), it was time to get rid of the old plants, dig out and compost the roots, loosen up the soil, and tidy up a bit. I left the wild strawberries; they should survive the winter no problem. The little peach tree from the neighbours at home I put inside for the winter. The black raspberry will remain outside, and will be pruned some time in early spring. Vague plans for next year: good wall climbers, proper trellis, mostly berries. Also, flower baskets on the railing. I still want some small trees, but they’re such a pain to get. Most plant nurseries are somewhere in the country side, and only really accessible by car. And then I also need big pots and LOTS of soil… But a Japanese maple would be nice.

• I finally made some koji myself! With pearled barley and barley koji spored from LUVI/Fermentationculture. We’re at 40h, and the grains are covered with a fine fluff and smell really fruity. Reminds me a bit of my mycoprotein start-up times, when the Rhizopus smelled SO much like pineapple when grown on bread.
• The New York Times wrote about Malmö, and what to do here. Pretty good tips, I would recommend almost all of them. 36h in Malmö, Sweden

w39 2024

• We had our big birthday family celebration last weekend (27 people!), and booked Villa Söderåsen, a charming 120 year old wooden house in Röstånga. It’s located right next to Söderåsen nationalpark, a supermarket, and a bus stop. Everything you need for a nice hiking weekend. Connection to Malmö C takes about 1h (train+bus). The weekend was really nice! The weather was amazing - sunny and quite warm for mid/end September. We didn’t have much program, so there was lots of time for chats and easy walk, fika and board games, long breakfasts and evenings at the fireplace outside.

• Surprising for the small size of Röstånga, there is a fantastic restaurant - Stationen Röstånga - that we booked for an evening. They served a buffet of, according to our wishes, mostly plant-based dishes and everything was delicious! All seasonal and mostly regional products, and all the vegetables were prepared in a distinct and unique way. Yummm, so good! And the place is very cosy and friendly.

• It was Malmö Gallerihelg, a weekend where a lot of exhibitions and art spaces are open and presenting some stuff. Duncan released The Carrington Event, a data sonification of the biggest recorded solar storm that hit Earth in 1859. Together with Simon they created a bombastic audiovisual experience of distorted guitars, increasingly urgent SOS calls, crumbling buildings and tense build-ups. They showed their 18 min piece at STPLN on a big screen with headphones, which is the best way to experience it. But it’s also on Youtube (and the audio on Bandcamp, Spotify, etc.).

w37 2024

• Went home to Austria for my cousin’s wedding and some family holidays around it. After a summer in Sweden with max. 22C it felt like packing to go to a tropical country! Do I have enough summer clothes? Do I need to get a new bikini? It was around 30C for the whole week I was there, and the only time I wore trousers was on arrival and departure. Though during the same week Sweden got a later-summer heat wave and we reached 27C in Malmö. The train ride this time was the smoothest ever. I’ve done the Malmö-Copenhagen-Hamburg-Wels (or Vienna) journey (either night train or day train Hamburg-Wels/Vienna) probably 10-15 times in the past 10 years, and this time everything was mostly on time, no major hiccups. Well, almost. The Öresundståg over the bridge was cancelled both ways, but since it goes every 20 min one cancelled train is no problem (if annoying because it means the next one is overfull). And of course I have learned to plan in generous buffer times everywhere I need to change. So 45 min in Copenhagen to buy some lunch. 2 h in Hamburg to walk around and get a nice sit-in dinner. Overall, a very good experience. The mini capsule on the ÖBB Nightjet was comfortable and I slept for most of both journeys.
• Salzkammergut is the European Culture Capital 2024 and we took the nice train from Attnang-Puchheim to Bad Ischl, passing Traunsee and the surrounding mountains. We had a heated discussion on the train where the head of the “Schlafende Griechin” actually is, so I looked it up and came across a website collecting local tales (Sagen). This reminded me of the countless tales about gnomes and mountain kings and forest sprites that my dad used to entertain us with on car trips through the Austrian countryside.
• Ai Wei Wei’s exhibition was especially impressive, set in the beautiful surroundings of the Kaiserpark in Bad Ischl. I particularly loved the surveillance-themed wallpaper, the chandelier of skeletons giving the middle finger, and the old Chinese-style vases with scenes of toiling and oppression. His art is dark, funny, kitschy, uneasy, and often grand and impressive.
• Otherwise, Austria was dog walks with Luna, eating raspberries off the bushes in my aunt’s garden, swimming in the pool, eating Pofesen, going to a crazy everything-shop in Frankenburg, witnessing (and partly participating) in very drunken wedding party traditions (Brautstehlen) and trying to memories our house as much as possible since it might have been the last time we all properly stayed there.
• NGBG festival happened this weekend in Malmö. All along Norra Grängesbergsgatan (NGBG) there were stages and food trucks and bars, and loads and loads of people. The weather was fantastic (chilly but sunny) and we listened to some music, had Tanzanian and Ghanaian food, and saw a wrestling match in Plan B. I LOVE that this festival exists and seemingly out of nowhere transforms a boring industrial area into this fantastic place for a few days. There was a bar in a car repair shop, and a disco in a car washing station.

• I finished reading In the Distance by Hernan Diaz. Good writing, but wasn’t such a fan of the storyline. I had expected more of a story about Swedish emigrants in America, whereas it was more of a lone wolfe doing his own thing type of book.
• The Swedish kanin or German Kaninchen (both meaning bunny) seem like they could be etymologically related to canine. Turns out they’re not. Kanin(chen) comes from the Latin cuniculus and old French conin, which means underground tunnel - not from the Latin canis, meaning dog. Interesting bunny fun fact: the Phoenicians on their travels to Europe saw many bunnies in today’s Spain and it reminded them of the hyrax of their home, that they called shaban. So they named the land Ishapan, which became Hispania in Latin.

w34 2024

• I finally tackled re-structuring my office. After trying out every possible layout of the furniture, I actually ended up with the original arrangement. Just a bit neater. I also re-painted three walls plus the ceiling white, and one wall up to about 3/4 a nice juicy mango yellow - NCS colour code S 1060-Y10R. I love how it turned out, but annoyingly the perfectly white wall opposite now has a yellow tinge from the reflection. Oh well.

• Yesterday was Overshoot Festival in Folkets Park, where a lot of climate activist groups were represented. My friend’s group Institute for Degrowth Studies (https://degrowth.se/) was there as well, I’ll check them out in the future.
• I’m slowly exploring Malmö by bike, and it’s crazy how it changes the perspective on the city, and the distances. Long distances shrink, far away places suddenly become so much more easily reachable. I know it sounds obvious, but it’s a revelation when you experience it after either walking everything all the time, or taking the bus that’s quite slow and takes roundabout routes. Cycling suddenly feels like a superpower, and especially zooming along the many excellent cycle paths it feels very liberating. I still don’t like the crossings without lights, where you have to trust that cars see you and stop.
• My friend’s Creator’s Club for the Sea is coming to an end. The past 5 weeks we met on Thursday evenings to talk about selected species of the nearby Öresund, drew pictures, collected seaweed or braided eelgrass. It was super interesting and my sense of where Malmö ends has extended now further out, into the sea. I really want to learn more about some of the species we talked about, especially eels (what a crazy lifecycle!) and blue mussels (how to mussels actually grow their shell??). Apparently the book The Gospel of the Eels is very good, and they have it in the local library.

• After not playing for more than four years, we’ve started a DnD group again! Duncan is DMing. I’m a gnome ranger with heavy eye make-up, but I have to soon make up two more characters, because we are glitch characters in the multiverse and can swap between them.
• I finished reading two books. David by Judith W. Taschler - a intertwined generational novel in the Austrian (Tyrolean) countryside. Not necessarily heavy, but somewhat melancholic. I really enjoyed reading an Austrian book again, should put more German-language books on my reading list. The other was Monster’s Regiment by Terry Pratchett, a book Duncan recommended for a Pratchett novice like me because it’s quite self-contained. It was… a bit confusing. It’s partly the typical Pratchett funny/punny/silly, but also super dark. Deals with war and the senselessness of it, how young people get talked into joining the army, sexism, etc. I liked the story, but wished at times that it would be more plain language, or more tension built-up. Pratchett’s silliness doesn’t work for me with suspense or serious topics.
• The past two years have of course been shaped by the arrival of large lanugage models and the various AI iterations like Chat GPT. I go back and forth between different grades of annoyance about it, but generally I think it’s a more a tool for evil (that includes art “creation”, finding more efficient ways to sell things to people as well as deep fakes) than for anything really useful. Although I wonder how my fungi newsletter filaments would have turned out have I had AI at my disposal at the time. It would be pretty alluring to use Chat GPT to at least find, summarise, and outline things before I go over it, fact check and fine-tune. Maybe I wouldn’t have stopped after five episodes then.
• I spent a few days in Karlshamn for work, where the huge fat and oil producer AAK have their headquarers. Different fats, the compositions and behaviours of them, are an interesting subject that I’ve just scratched during that time. The two guys that showed me around there described for example how candles used to be made with a mix of tallow and stearin, but at some point big homegood’s stored, like IKEA, switched to a non-animal source because to not put off a variety of customers (e.g. vegan, halal). Now it’s paraffin, or soy wax, depending on if you mind a petroleum-derived product or not. But all these waxes have different properties and they got for example a request from restaurants in Sicily that can’t have certain candles on their outside tables any more because due to increasing summer temperatures the candles they used to buy get too soft now.
• Besides learning a lot about fat crystallisation and emulsions, I got reminded again how much I love late Swedish coastal summer evenings, when the sun is low and warm, the shadows are long, and there’s a breeze from the sea.

• The sunflowers on the balcony are still blooming, the tomatoes are slowly winding down. I had a good harvest throughout the summer.

w31 2024

• I turned 40! 🥳
• Jason Lytle had another lovely bedroom concert stream for his subscribers. So nice!
• We walked up to Skånes highest point, a whopping 212.2 m! It was named Skånehatten in 2024 by a reader of Helsingborgs Dagblad.
• I spent 3 days in Karlshamn for work. Lovely town on the Blekinge coast, with an enormous vegetable oil processing facility (AAK) that extracts oil from 95% of rapeseed seeds from the Nordics. Maybe that’s why the whole town smelled a bit like horse fodder.
• The last two weeks have been pretty perfect weather-wise. Max. 23C, sunshine, breeze. I LOVE the Swedish summer. Don’t know why Swedes leave the country during the best season of the year to rather bake in 40C Greece or can’t leave the hotel room because of the heat.

w29 2024

• Finished A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. Ursula K. Le Guin with political intrigue dialled up to 11, mixed memory-implant technology that reminds of the Trill symbionts from Star Trek. The writing is complex but beautiful and intricate, the lack of gender stereotypes is SO refreshing. Bit too much clever strategic back-and-forth conversations that lost me a bit at times, but the last quarter of the book was fast-paced and exciting to make up for it.
• We walked another bit of Skåneleden, this time Löberöd to Hällestad. The weather was great for it, as this summer so far has been - like last year - quiet cool (max. 20C) and overcast. Lots of ripe wild raspberries, lots of wildflowers and insects and butterflies; fields of potatoes, wheat, oat and barley.

w28 2024

• I contain about 170 g of bacteria. This and more fun and interesting numbers in biology are collected on Bionumbers - the database of useful biological numbers.
• I really want to try this veganised recipe for one of my favourite Austrian cakes Marillenkuchen. Also, Ribislkuchen, which has a crispy meringue top.
• My balcony garden has truly exploded into a green jungle now. It’s nice, but there are a LOT of leaves, and not so many flowers, sadly. Especially the nasturtiums are growing like crazy, even though I avoided fertilising them (because it enhances leaf over flower production). So I looked up some recipes for the edible nasturtium leaves, which I will try during my holidays now. Stuffed nasturtium leaves, nasturtium pesto 1, 2, 3, nasturtium soup, nasturtium kimchi, fermented nasturtium, nasturtium risotto, roasted beetroot ricotta and nasturtium salad, etc.
• Maybe this will finally be my year of cold bathing (kallbada). As a first step I joined the local swimming group Söderdoppet. If I start now in summer, and don’t stop when it gets colder, it should be easy, right? Right?
• Against thermochauvinism - From Andrew Dana Hudson’s newsletter. An interesting counter-argument to thinking that it’s unreasonable to live in or move to cities in hot climates.

There is something Eurocentric, colonialist, even quasi-racist about thermochauvinism. Brown and Black people live in warmer places, and are then depicted as lazy or uncivilized for the ways they adapt to the heat. White people live in cooler place and are thought to be industrious for adapting to the cold. A siesta or a dip in the river is a primal throwback, while hygge is advanced cultural technology.

Cooling technology is often more efficient, more easily electrified (heat pumps!) and can conveniently be powered by solar energy which is much more abundant throughout the hotter months. So perhaps places with very hot summers are already more climate-resiliant than those in colder climates that will need to retrofit buildings with cooling units in the decades to come.

C and I have taken to calling this season “hot winter”: a time for staying cool and cozy in air conditioned spaces, writing and reading and playing games, venturing out for excursions to museums or libraries, and generally waiting for Our Great Enemy The Sun to lose its grip on the land.

• I have currently no intention to learn sailing, but I still watched all 34 minutes of this video about the basics. The teacher is very good, and with simple drawings he explains how to handle different wind situations. It hadn’t really occurred to me before that - historically - sail boats were limited by the wind pushing the sails, and therefore tied to travelling on routes along the trade winds. Modern sail boats have sails more like airplane wings, which point in different directions depending on the wind, and can also travel towards the wind. A good follow-up of the above theory video is this more practical one, with a guy sitting in a boat and demonstrating things like luffing and non-ideal telltales. (Re telltales: Who would’ve thought that the most important indicator in a boat worth many thousands of dollars are two little strips of cloth or rope?!). Finally, in the boat-themed link list, I can also recommend this FANTASTIC walk-through of the innards of an 18th century sailing warship.

w26 2024

• Mama visited this week, giving me a chance to show her nice places in and around Malmö. Here are some of the highlights:
  • Pildammsparken with its many huge, old beech trees, with trunks like elephant legs. We saw a concert by Tensta Gospel Choir in the little amphitheatre there one evening.
  • Walking along the sea promenade in Västra Hamnen - an artificial island that’s been accumulated since the 1770s and housed previously (in the 1960s) the largest ship dock in the world - with a view of the Öresunds Bridge and Copenhagen on the horizon, Turning Torso behind us. There’s also a great skatepark and urban gardening area on an old shipyard ramp.
  • Foteviken viking village, a 30 min bus ride south of Malmö, beautifully located at the seaside, with a lot of reconstructed buildings and actors that go about their daily viking life.
  • Restaurants/Cafés Lera, Farm2Table, Sansa and Café No 6. Café No 6 is tiny and has a super cute little garden with tables and chairs on the opposite side of the street.
  • Copenhagen’s hipster district Nørrebro, with the street-arty park Superkilen and my favourite streets Jægersborggade, Blågårdsgade and the cycle highway Den Grønne Sti over Åbuen. And then on the complete opposite side of the city (1.5 h walk or a 30 min bus ride) in a formerly industrial area, Reffen, an amazing, relaxed street food market with beergarden tables, sun chairs and soft DJ beats, and a view of the old town across the water. The waste incinerator Copenhill is also worth a visit, not only for the fantastic view but also just for the impressive building with its calm and constant, white puffs of water vapour dissolving into the blue sky. Nyhavn in Copenhagen is of course also a tourist must, and especially in the evening sun it’s super pretty!

• Hollyhocks (species Alcea) are currently blooming like crazy in Malmö along building walls, and it always amazes me how little actual soil is needed to sprout this enormous plant with its dozens or hundreds of flowers. The other plant that is everywhere right now is Common Mullein (Verbascum), another impressive thing that grows to human height in just a few months.

w25 2024

• I finished The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. It had been on my to-read list for a while, and was one of those books that had either 5-star or 1-star reviews. Saw it in the library the other week and borrowed it on a whim. Then read it within 2 weeks, the fastest I’ve read a book in a while. It is incredibly cheesy, sickly sweet, and predictable. But also lovely and heartwarming, and it made me feel things I haven’t in a while when reading a book. So even though it’s not a literary masterpiece, I have to say I did really enjoy reading it. The story is simple and not super original - protagonist who is a loser but very kind, magical creatures in an orphanage, a mysterious headmaster with a not-very-dark secret, comically evil people but also one-dimensionally good people. But there is a place for feel-good books, and I’m glad I read it. As one Goodreads reviewer wrote: “This book managed to make me cry over a button, how could I not give it 5 stars!“.
• Right after, I started reading A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. It dives right into a complex sci-fi world of empires and colonies, ambassadors and neurolinks, with imaginative language and precise character descriptions that remind me of Ursula K. Le Guin.

A long, slow time on Ascension’s Red Harvest, traversing the sublight distances between the jumpgates that were scattered like jewels throughout Teixcalaanli space. The see-skiff peeled open like a ripe fruit. Mahit’s harness retracted. Taking hold of her luggage in both hands, she stepped onto the gate, and thus into Teixcalaan itself.

• Almost 40 now, I had my first mammography this week. Gosh, I didn’t know you could squeeze boobs that much! With Swedish vårdcental efficiency/coldness, the self-check in on the touchscreen took 1 min, the examination was over in 5 min, and the (thankfully clear) results were ready in another 2. In and out the door in 10 min.
• It was Laika’s 7th birthday this week. She continues to be a very good girl 💕🐶

• The most charming find of the week is Spegeln cinema in Malmö. It’s kind of old-school, with a nice foyer, a bar, comfy chairsm and little lamps. In the cinema hall itself, the chairs were arranged in pairs (though there were some singles as well), with little tables and lamps next to them. You could order drinks and snacks TO YOUR SEAT! I got an ice cream! The film itself was alright, The Fall Guy with Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. Fun and full of action, perhaps a bit too much action (and too long).
• Brilliant as always, Future Ecologies’ newest podcast episode Everything will be vine. Do plants have visual perception? There are competing theories about this, from photoreceptors on the plant surface to a microbiome that sends signals.

w23 2024

• We went to the vet to get Laika a proper teeth cleaning (under anaesthesia and everything). Cost over 6000 SEK, of which the insurance paid… NOTHING. What are we even paying insurance for? Not even my sister, who literally works for an insurance company, has her cats insured. “Better to put some vet money to the side each year, in case you need it.” was her advice. Are insurances just scams?
• I learned how to crochet granny squares. It’s quite addictive, I’ve already made seven of them. Though I don’t really know yet what to do with them. I have a vague idea about a cardigan I found online, but is it really my style? We’ll see.
• Here are some videogames that I really enjoyed playing during the last months.
  • Citizen Sleeper: Atmospheric role-playing game on a dystopian space station. You’re a cyborg, waking up after having escaped from your slave-like job. Your need for a certain drug makes you sign up for various work tasks that you can choose depending on difficulty, likelihood of success or morality. You can join one of several factions on the space station and hack into the station’s system. Your capacity of being nice and helpful to others is often not a choice but rather limited by your resources, and you have to make tough decisions. The gameplay is a very simple dice-rolling mechanic, and the graphics are spares, but it’s one of the most memorable games I’ve played lately. It felt like experiencing a well-written novel.
  • Hollow Knight: Cute and dark platformer with excellent game mechanics. You, a bug, explore an underworld kingdom that unfolds as you go, from wet dripping caves to crystal peaks to thundering worm highways. There are friends and enemies, chubby beetles and annoying mosquitoes. Some of the bosses and jumping puzzles were quite tricky and potentially frustrating for me, so I was happy that Duncan volunteered to fight or solve those for me. But otherwise it’s very well balanced. Fantastic soundtrack.
  • Outer Wilds: At first I was not drawn in and a bit put off by both the blocky, seemingly outdated graphics and clunky game mechanics. But man did that game unfold before our eyes. Duncan and I played it together, since I got too distracted and frustrated by steering the space ship, but really enjoyed solving the puzzles and experiencing the story. And that worked really well. It’s wild how this game just keeps getting deeper and deeper into a mystery about time loops and interstellar travel, exploding suns and underground cities that are swallowed by sand. The hints are very cleverly placed and it feels like it’s not holding your hand and you can explore things in whatever order you want. There were some genuinely creepy scenes, and the mood of the game is both folksy-cosy as well as a melancholic, looming dread of extermination.
  • Animal Well: Somewhat similar to Hollow Knight, in that it is a very well designed platformer that’s very satisfying to play. Precise game mechanics, and cute graphics. Also, an underground world. It’s got less story than Hollow Knight, but incredibly clever puzzles that have several layers once you discover certain items. It’s a bit surreal, has dogs and cats in it, and also a very good soundtrack.
• I joined a modular synth workshop after coming across a poster about it on a dog walk. It’s a 4-parter in the local library, we’re using VCV Rack, and so far it’s both interesting and incredibly confusing. The teacher is going really fast, and without some pre-knowledge of coding, music theory and acoustics I would be even more lost than I am right now. But Duncan is of course helping me, and I’m also watching some tutorials on the side. These two (Part 1, Part 2) were particularly good for beginners, as well as the book Patch & Tweak - Exploring modular synthesis by Kim Björn and Chris Meyer. Here are my notes Modular synthesis and VCV rack.
• We made some magic rocks with air-drying Fimo and embedded programmable NFC chips. The (slightly silly) idea is that if you want someone to go to your website or find your Instagram profile, you can pull out a rock from your pocket and make them tap their phone against it.

w22 2024

• I finished reading The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World by Virginia Postrel. It was a surprisingly interesting book that weaves (😏) history and culture and inventions and chemistry together. I had no idea that there was a lot of silk making in Europe, that during the 1300s and 1400s many European cities had very strict clothing laws that determined what fabric or colour people could wear (and how the people then circumvented those laws), and that fabric dying was the foundation of chemistry and many pharma companies of today.
• Went to Karlshamn for a project meeting. Sleepy town, but nicely located by the sea with a an extensive archipelago and hiking routes, and a smooth 2h trainride from Malmö. Will definitely go there again and explore a bit more.
• My parents picked 16 (!) ticks off their dog after a stroll through the forest. YUCK! It’s truly summer now.
• My company is a sponsor of the Malmö football club Malmö FF and raffles away tickets to the box among employees. On Tuesday it was my turn. Being in the box was a cool experience, felt very VIP and fancy. We got (plant-based) dinner, drinks and soft-serve ice cream and had a great view of the pitch. But the game itself… mh, let’s just say it didn’t convert me to becoming a football fan. After watching, and really enjoying, Welcome to Wrexham, I thought that I might want to be a football fan, but sitting through 2h of a game that consists mostly of passing the ball back and forth brought me back to reality.
• Had a cosy little crochet evening with my friend Tessa. She showed me the gigantic knitting and crocheting resource https://www.ravelry.com/. Drops also has loads of free patterns, and I wanted to make this top. But I didn’t get very far this time, my needle was too small.
• Fascinating article from The New Yorker about solar storms: What a Major Solar Storm Could do to Our Planet.
• Prejudices about capabilities shape what we are actually capable of. “Stupid” and “clever” rats both have the same ability to run through a maze, but our perception of one makes us treat them differently and influence the outcome. Blind people can echolocate and navigate their world amazingly well if they are not overly coddled. How to Become Batman from the NPR podcast series Invisibilia.
• After a bit of a break from my guitar practice, I’ve picked it up again. Currently working on playing the chords to Losing my Religion and the melody of O sole mio. 🎶
• Wou Creative organised the Communitive Festival on Saturday at STPLN, and I helped as a volunteer. It was fun and I chatted to a lot of super nice people. Finding nice communities in Malmö is one of my main goals currently, and there is a lot going on. Alanna and Sári did a great job putting together a little guide to 35 clubs and communities in Malmö - mediation circle, choir, urban art, analog photography, dancing, repair cafe, etc. I might join a communal forest garden group.

w21 2024

• The weather has been loooovely for 2 weeks now - 22C and sunny. Quite breezy/windy though, because it’s Malmö, but that’s ok. Though North India is getting up to 50C this weekend, parts of Mexico hotter than ever at 40-50C ☹️
• We played our new boardgame Earth. The goal is to fill your ecosystem with plants, grow them, compost them, and fulfil some objectives. It’s nice. I especially like all the cards with different trees, flowers and mushrooms, and the range of ecosystems and terrains that you can pick. It’s not very collaborative, and only in the very end competitive. You play more along each other than really with each other, but it’s still a nice activity.
• I started the well-known and -loved Yoga with Adriene on Youtube. Let’s see if I keep up the whole 30 day program. My plan is not to do 30 consecutive days, but rather do yoga at least on the days when I work from home.
• We finally sold the Gothenburg apartment! Relieved, but a bit sad. Also because we got less than what we paid for in 2017; the market was hot at that time, the interest rate low, and we bid with 6 other people to quite a high price. So we knew we couldn’t expect too much now, but for that we got a decent price. Eight people at the viewing, two eventually bid, starting 100 k lower than the starting price, but reaching almost the starting price again.
• The Southern Sweden Design Days were happening this week. We went to Lokstallarna, a cool former train yard with spacious old brick buildings and industrial flair. There were some cool things, especially the student’s projects were very interesting. Some stuff was a bit annoying though - either too arrogant-artsy, or too greenwashing. I did love a model of the Turning Torso made from tempeh, as well as rugs that look like petri dishes or aerial photography.

• Malmö Garden show also took place on the weekend, and Slottsparken was full of stands selling plants, garden stuff or locally made chili sauce, kimchi, or kombucha. We had Jamaican food from a food truck, and I bought a little black raspberry bush that will likely only get fruits next year.
• Lime Garden played a free concert at Plan B. Short setlist, but quite good. I love I want to be you.
• Interesting Standard podcast episode with the director of the World Food Program: Wir könnten den Hunger bis 2030 besiegen.

“Climate (change) is by now one of the most certain things. Whether or not there’ll still be a war in Ukraine this time next year no one can tell, but that it’s getting warmer is for sure.”

• Excellent read: Heat Death of the Internet. Yay for Wikipedia and local libraries.

w20 2024

• Went to the dentist for yearly check-up. She just said that I have very clean teeth and that I should keep doing what I’m doing.
• Workshop about community circles at STPLN, organised by wou creative. It was a small group of people talking about different aspects of communities, and it was the first time I participated in a discussion round with a “talking stone” that goes around and only the person holding it is allowed to talk. It took me some time to get used to that, or mentally let go of the “normal” style of discussion and conversation. But once I had landed in that, it was very calming. It removes the need to have to respond to what is being said, instead of listening and reflecting quietly. And it allows you to collect your thoughts without feeling pressed for time or being talked over by someone faster or louder. So it was a really interesting and nice experience.
• Loud Numbers had a vernissage at Kulturhotellet Helsingborg on Friday evening. Their work was a sonification and visualisation of Skåne’s forest fires in 2018, a particularly dry and hot summer. The whole exhibition was really nice, called Nature’s Harmony. It featured Paul Khedra making music with plants, a tulip-shaped rug mural, a moss-covered heap, a life-sized sculpture of a kneeling person, a big photo of a Swedish forest, wax cloth drapings in the shape of beehives, and decorative pieces by Gothenburg’s own sprayer artist Ollio.
• For the first time in more than 10 years, I am without a Spotify premium account. We decided to jump ship after the most recent 20% price increase and declining quality of playlists, worse payment for artists and lots of ads (in podcasts) despite paid subscription. Since we pay for Youtube (to not be tormented by ads), we thought we’d give Youtube Music a go. So far it’s been fine. There’s a lot of stuff on it, including things that Spotify doesn’t have. Bit tricky is to find the right version of songs, e.g. the “official” version instead of a video uploaded by some random person. Then of course Youtube Music also doesn’t really know my recent music taste very well, so it needs more curating and finding things myself, but that’s part of the fun. It got a bit boring with Spotify suggesting the same things over and over again. So we’ll see how it goes. For podcasts I downloaded the free app Podbean, which does the job.
• It was Mat & Dryckfestivalen at Folkets Park this weekend. We went for an early lunch, had West African food and enjoyed the sun. The weather right now is PERFECT - 22c and sunshine.
• Plant update: I finally got all the soil I need (actually, I could use a bit more, but let’s leave it for now). I placed all plants on the balcony and the tomatoes and peppers are thriving. Sunflowers are also coming up, and I’ve finally seeded corn flowers, poppies, nasturtiums and marigolds.

w19 2024

• Eurovision. OMG. It’s right now (Saturday afternoon, hours before the finale) a clusterfuck burning brightly and it’s still to be seen how much worse it will get. First there were “just” the expected constant pro-Palestinian protests and “genocide!” posters, criticising Israel’s participation in the contest while slaughtering thousands of people. That all came with the biggest police presence anyone had ever seen in Malmö (a journalist mentioned he had only seen anything like it maybe during the G8 summit) - heavy rifles, hovering helicopters, snipers on roofs, constant patrolling, drones. One act in the first semifinals wore a Palestinian scarf. SVT started muting the booing in the arena when Israel performed. For some reason the Italian RAI leaked the numbers of the voting for the second semifinal, and it showed a landslide win for Israel with 40% of all votes (apparently Ukraine in 2022 right after Russia’s invasion had “only” 25%), which in turn suddently caused Israel to shoot up in the chances for winning the contest. On Friday the Dutch contestant was excluded from the finals because of some undisclosed mysterious “incident” with a staff member. Irelands contestant accused the Israeli broadcasting agency of inappropriate comments and called for their disqualification as well. The European Broadcasting Union EBU is still very sparse on any comments about anything, keeping to their stance that “Eurovision is non-political”, LOL. The French contestant stopped halfway through the rehearsal, just leaving the stage. Etc. etc. I love the colourful, crazy, tacky, tongue-in-cheek and uniting Eurovision, and I’m very worried that this will be the end of it.

• I got a lovely book from Duncan’s parents called “Träd i Malmö”, detailing all the different trees that grow here. I’ve much more consciously looked at trees when dog-walking (and right now is also the best time to see differences, with most of them bursting with flowers).
• Fell into a rabbit hole about Schneitelung/Pollarding/Hamling, since we have some many Kopfweiden/Pilevall in the nearby park. The drastic cutting of treetops creates a thick and often hollow trunk that becomes its whole ecosystem for loads of insects and other animals, and has many benefits for surrounding wildlife and even soil and landscape. There’s a nice Arte documentary I found on Youtube: Lebensraum Kopfbaum.
• Interesting Reddit thread about the differences between Austrians and Brits when it comes to apologising. I have to say that I can see myself in some of these comments, and it explains some discussions (miscommunications?) I’ve had with Duncan.
• Malmö city has so far impressed me a lot with their shared public space policies. It feels that much more in other cities I’ve lived so far, drivers, cyclist, pedestrians and public transport feel like equal participants rather than being mostly car-focussed. The bike infrastructure is great, and while there are big roads for cars, they have very frequent zebra crossings and cars stop for pedestrians. And because the big roads are just a few arteries, within city blocks it generally feels calm. Additionally, during the summer months (generous - from April to October) several streets are blocked off for through-traffic, called “sommargata” (summer street) and all along those streets seatings and plants pop up for people to enjoy. It’s sooo nice! This year, they’ve even turned a usually bleak carpark right in the middle of a nice neighbourhood with lots of small restaurants and bars into a “sommartorg” (summer square), creating a lovely space for people to hang out, children to play, and the surrounding restaurants to expand their outside seating. 😍

w18 2024

• Visited the Kejsareträd at Lilla Torget which is right now in full bloom, with light purple trumpets.
• Met Beatrice, a potential dogtrainer for Laika. She was generally very impressed with Laika, calming us that her occasional snappiness with other dogs that she meets on the street is normal and that we don’t need to feel like we need to meet every dog we see. We’ll probably arrange a doggy date with her and her dogs to see how compatible they are. It would be nice to have a solid option for dog boarding in case we want to go somewhere without Laika.
• Went to the 1st of May demonstrations organised by the left party (Vänsterpartiet) with Anna.
• Mitt Möllan organised a spring market and we got some nice earrings, a lino print, a poster, vegan pralines and a pretty mug. I don’t buy many things these days, but it’s always nice to support small local artists.
• Grandaddy (i.e. Jason Lytle) had a little live living room concert for their fan club (which I am part of). It was lovely 💕
• We went on a guided excursion through Limhamns kalkbrott, organised by Vilda Malmö. Usually it’s not allowed to go into the area of the former quarry. It was really impressive - it’s this massive hole in the middle of Malmö’s outskirts that has developed into its own ecosystem.
• This Nature podcast episode was both educational and entertaining: Living on Mars would suck - here’s why. It lays out the realistic scenarios of colonising Mars and Moon. Including incredibly sharp moon dust that clings to everything, ionising radiation that would probably require us to live underground rather than in fancy glass domes with a view, and the fact that a stable outer Earth colony would be a large scale, multi-generational genetic experiment. I’m still a huge sci-fi fan, but over the last decade or so I’ve completely lost my excitement for colonising other planets, since we’re doing such a good job destroying our own. If we can’t take care of literally the only known place in the universe that doesn’t kill us immediately, what’s the use in venturing out and trying to “re-green” Mars?
• I finished sewing two more Donny shirts, one for my mum and one for my sister. I still struggle with the pattern a bit at different stages, but it also massively depends on the

w17 2024

• Plant update! The tomatoes are thriving, the peppers are doing well, the smultron I grew from seeds are still tiny, so is the lemon basil. Nasturtiums germinated a bit erratic, some didn’t do anything and others suddenly shot up. Of the smultron I got as plants from my parents a few survived and look good, and a few dried out.

• Duncan’s parents were here for a week, and we did a lot of nice touristy Malmö things. Malmö is not such a “flashy” city as Stockholm, Copenhagen, or even Gothenburg. It’s a bit harder to find places that make tourists go “oh, let’s take a picture”. Partly because it’s so flat, it rarely offers a view. Partly because it doesn’t really have many important buildings. There’s Malmöhus slott, which stretches the definition of a castle quite a lot. But inside it’s very interesting, explaining mostly about the times when Denmark and Sweden fought about the Southern part of (what is now) Sweden. There’s the technical museum (which has a U-boat!), the art galleries Konsthall and Moderna Museet, the nice long beach to walk along, the inner city with old buildings and pedestrianised shopping streets, the indie mall Mitt Möllan around where we live, nice parks, amazing restaurants and bakeries, etc. They didn’t run out of things to do. And when they did, they went to Lund.
• I went to Gothenburg for 24h to paint some walls in our old apartment before selling. Not sure if it will make any difference tough. But also took the chance to catch up with some old friends and their kids.

w16 2024

• End of April, and it’s still not really above 10C here. I don’t mind, I love being able to wear my puffy, light purple jacket. Though right now Duncan’s parents are visiting and it would be nice to be able to be outside for a bit without having to briskly walk to stay warm.
• Yard Act concert in CPH was amazing, such a good band! (“We make hits!!!“) I was slightly terrified of the venue though, Loppen, an old seemingly completely wooden building in Christiania with quite a low ceiling. The old stock exchange in Copenhagen burnt down just a week ago, so I got a bit paranoid, and during the concert I only felt comfortable near the emergency exits.-
• Another concert the same weekend was Duncan’s performance of The Carrington Event, a data sonification/post-rocky piece about the biggest recorded solar storm in history. 15 min of guitar distorted and modified through modular synth, it was a really great performance.

• And yet another concert, the same day as Duncan’s performance, was our friend’s band Baula’s album release gig at Grand in Malmö. I love Baula’s music, especially mercury in retrograde is my current favourite.
• For some reason I can tolerate things in other languages that I couldn’t in my mother tongue. Trash TV is one of them. I really enjoyed watching Love is blind Sweden. Now Aurora and I discovered that we both want to practice our Swedish and enjoy watching Trash TV, so we met up virtually to start watching the newest season of Gift vid första ögonkastet together. It was really fun!
• Speaking of reality TV: a new season of Race across the world just started, and at least that’s something that Duncan can also tolerate. They are travelling from Hokkaido to Indonesia. Thank god for public transport, I really didn’t want a repetition of last year’s stressful constant hitchhiking through Canada.
• Useful video about How to style a midi skirt video.
• All my plants are growing nicely, so far still all inside. I got some forest strawberry plants from my parent’s garden that should give fruit basically from spring to autumn. I potted the morning after I returned from Austria, and a few looked immediately quite good, but others seemed dead. But now even the dead-looking ones have new growth in the middle, so maybe all of them survived! 🙌
• I joined Grandaddy’s GooDs fanclub for 100 USD a year. I love this band so much, so happy to support them in this way. Maybe they’ll have another living room concert stream soon, they had one a few years ago during Covid and it was sooo nice.

w15 2024

• Went to Austria for a long weekend for Onkel Christian’s 70th birthday celebrations. I did the travel down all in one day by train, leaving Malmö at 6:30 in the morning. I was supposed to arrive in Wels at 20:30, but my connection in Nürnberg was an hour delayed and that caused later connections to not work, etc. In the end my parents picked me up from Attnang-Puchheim and we arrived home just before 12. Long day, but I got a ton of work done on the train, because at least I always had a good seat and an electricity connection.
• Austria had a strange spring heat wave over Easter and the week after, and it was up to 26C when I was there. On the weekend we sat outside in short sleeves, then on Monday it rained and cooled down massively again. Two days later, the weather forecast predicted rain.
• The difference in flora was quite stark when travelling out of Sweden through Germany and Austria. While in the South of Sweden (let’s not talk about the North, they still have snow) the buds on trees juuust now start to open, Germany and Austria are already green and lush.
• Fauna was also interesting in Austria. It seemed like every single Gasthaus we went to had some sort of animals nearby. One had tiny horses, another alpacas and goats. We even did an alpaca walk one day, which was fun. Very gentle and stubborn creatures. Obviously, there were also more insects than at this time in Sweden, cats running around near by parent’s house, and various dogs in various places.

w14 2024

• Just came home from a swift 24h in Gothenburg. We had to go there to pick up a few last pieces from the apartment and meet the real estate agent. On the way to GBG the train was completely overcrowded and no seat reservations were possible, so we were standing for 3.5h. I listened to 3 episodes of the great Empire podcase. Currently I’m on the Ottoman Empire. On the way back to Malmö I watched a lot of sewing Youtube videos. I really like Sew Anastasia’s channel, e.g. how to make a cute blouse out of a large button-down shirt. Also, this in-depth lecture about Tuberculosis is very interesting. And this video about NY’s billionaires’ row of skyscrapes by The B1M not only goes into the structural details of ultra-thin buildings, but also into the socioeconomic details of inflated real estate prices and tax loopholes of the super-rich. And finally, embarrassingly, I only recently learned that the spine is actually completely fused to the pelvic bones! Here’s a little video showing how.
• Easter Monday was chilly and overcast, but I still wanted to go for a longer walk (but maybe not quite a hike). We ended up walking from Möllevångstorget to Bulltofta rekreationsområde and back (15 km in total). No leaves on the trees yet, so everything was still a bit barren, but it will be lovely in a few weeks.
• I finished reading De som inte syns by Micha Foss-Ghazarian. I bought it back when we lived in Gothenburg, because it is a crime novel set in Gothenburg. It’s the author’s first book, and it would need some more editing to make the story more gripping, but for practising my Swedish it was pretty good.
• Went to Naturkompaniet and spent about half an hour flipping through Hiking in Sweden guide books. Blekingeleden looks really nice, it’s been on my radar for a while. Also, a friend wants to hike St. Olof’s leden, but 30 days is a bit of a major commitment.
• We celebrated our 11 year anniversary by eating at Manto, a plant-based Afghan-ish restaurant in Malmö. It was pouring outside, but inside it was super cosy and the food was delicious, especially the dessert: Rose-saffron-coconut ice cream with cardamom soan papdi. OMG so good.

w13 2024

• Easter holidays! I took the whole week off. Did loads of stuff. Too much? Perhaps.
• Lots of sewing, mostly finishing some pieces on my “to fix” pile. I repaired three of Duncan’s trousers that had ripped pockets and/or ripped knees. The knees I embroidered with visible mending. I also made a wearable toile of the Helmi trench blouse and tunic dress from an old bedsheet that was starting to disintegrate on one end. It has a hidden button placket! That’s a first.
• I also dyed my corduroy Stacker Jacket a darker shade of blue. Originally it was very light blue, then it got some stains that didn’t come out, so I dyed it light turquoise about a year ago, but it got blotchy and the colour didn’t really fit me. Now it’s more of a denim blue and I’ve already worn it more in the past week then in the previous year. So that’s a win.
• We walked part of Skåneleden North to South, continuing where we left off last Easter in Hörby. We only did one leg (Duncan had to work during the rest of the week), so we only managed to get to Löberöd (23 km) before taking the bus back home. But it was super nice, especially the part along the old train line on the shore of Finsjön, and Rövarekulan. So much wild garlic!

• I watched Netflix’s new series 3 Body Problem. Some years ago I tried to read Liu Cixin’s novel, but couldn’t focus and stopped again after a few dozen pages. The Netflix series has a slightly different setting, but I did really enjoy it. Bit anticlimactic ending though (for now). Maybe I’ll watch the 30-episode Chinese Tencent version, because I am a bit annoyed at waiting 1-2 years for the sequel.
• I also watched Trainwreck Woodstock ‘99. Similar to the Fyre festival documentary, it’s a rolls in excruciating detail to the culmination of the disaster. It’s very entertaining, shocking, at parts horrifying, and of course there’s a whole lot of guilty Schadenfreude.
• In preparation of the balcony extravaganza (see Plans 2024) I cut down the Christmas tree that was parked there. Chopped off the branches, but kept them for now (for overwintering plants??).
• Ate spinach on Gründonnerstag, as you do. Talked to three different real estate agents who all were different degrees of slimey. Picked the least slimey. Ate Juicy Marbles surprisingly realistic “meat” chunks (but what do I know, it’s been over a decade since I last ate meat). Was good, but overpriced (150 SEK for two small pieces).
• I finished reading Der beste Platz zum Leben (by Anne Weiss), a book I had gifted my mum for Christmas, and she gave it back to me to read myself. The author tests different ways and places to live - countryside, eco-commune, yurts, Berlin flat, etc. - and also writes a lot about the current housing situation in (mostly) Germany. It was interesting, but went far too much into detail about the German housing market, and was too little in my opinion about the real living experiments. Her conclusion was that it’s important to start early on thinking about what and how you want to live when you’re older. And that it’s crucial to identify what is really important for yourself (e.g. not having to be dependent on a car).
• Change to summer time. Ugh. Everyone hates it, everyone agrees that it should be abolished, but still we can’t decide what the “forever time” should be. Given that not even this simple problem can be solved, I’m somewhat pessimistic about the infinitely more complex questions like climate change and biodiversity collapse.

w12 2024

• I started planting some seedlings indoors (cherry tomato, snack pepper, peppermint, tagetes, wild strawberries) for my big balcony Plans 2024 a few weeks ago. So far only the tomatoes and the peppers have germinated.
• Today is Palm Sunday and I took the whole of next week off work! At least a few of these days we want to walk the second half of Skåneleden North-South. We walked the first half last year at Easter. Then we did 5 days in a row with overnight stays, but this time we want to do it spread out over some single day hikes, because we live much closer to the trail.
• Last week, I finished the second woodworking course module at ReFab Lab, where I learned all about joining two pieces of wood together: box joings, mitre joints, half laps, full laps, etc. We got to use the router, which is super fun. When using the machinery with rotating, sharp parts I have all these intrusive thoughts about touching the blade, etc. But it gets better the more I use the equipment.
• I also went to a pottery afternoon to Artibus, part of Duncan’s Christmas present. I made six different things in two hours. Should be able to pick them up any day now.
• Last season of The Expanse. I still love it, though the constant fighting between factions and Earthers, Martians, Inners, Belters, etc. gets a bit tiring. The world right now is in a grim state (Palestine, Ukraine, …), so I could use some peacemaking and getting along with each other, even if it’s only fictional. What I particularly like about The Expanse compared to many other sci-fi shows is that the space travel actually seems believable. Having said that, I also starting watching the Dune movie, because part 2 was just released in the cinema and I want to see it, but need to catch up first. It’s bombastic, slow, theatrical opera. Quite enjoyable, but I need to be in the right mood to be able to sit through it.
• We are starting our apartment selling process. Last week we went to Gothenburg to receive the keys from our tenants and now we’re looking for a mäklare. Hemnet is of course the Swedish real estate site, and all apartments look idential: white, minimalistic, styled, unpersonal. So ours needs to look like that as well. Currently it’s completely empty and perhaps needs a paint job. But I don’t want to paint over our nice Tapetorama wall papers: one graphic, one slightly childish one with thunderstorm clouds.
• IDLES concert in Copenhagen was fun, but we left halfway through because I didn’t feel well and standing in a crowd of drunk, smelly people, not seeing a thing on stage didn’t help. Another concert that was a lot more chill was **Elin Piel **in Inkonst - ambient modular synth music.
• Had a consultancy call about mycoprotein. It’s nice to still be a little connected to the alternative protein and fungal cultivation field. If anything, it gives me a reason to keep myself updated.
• My cousin Carina and her boyfriend visited Malmö, which was very nice. We went to some fantastic restaurants - one of which (Rue Hamra Meza Beirut) literally filled the whole table with platters of (vegetarian) mezze.
• The oatgurt that I helped develop finally launched. Currently only in the DACH market and Netherlands, but I hope that we can also get it in Sweden soon. I love it, it’s the best vegan yogurt I’ve ever had (totally unbiased, obvs).

w7 2024

• Happy Chinese New Year! Baohong at work brought some Chinese sweets to celebrate.
• Tuesday was Fettisdagen/Faschingsdienstag/Shrove Tuesday, which in Sweden of course means semla. I had pre-ordered a semla at our local bakery Farina, but just when I wanted to pick it up I got a text that their booking system had messed up and I wouldn’t get my semla today (but could pick up a free one any other day in the next 2 weeks). To be honest, I wasn’t too sad about it because semlor are quite rich and creamy and I wasn’t in the mood for that on Tuesday evening. So I’m still looking forward to my yearly semla. I’ll report back next week.
• Yesterday was the first sunny day in a weeks filled with dreary grey sky, rain and wind. What a difference! We had “maintenance day” planned, a quarterly day where we fix things in the apartment. I repotted some plants, we put non-slippy things on the carpets and felt-things on the scratchy chair legs, Duncan sharpened the knives, and I cleaned all the windows. We also semi-successfully tried to beat the carpets and mattress on the balcony.
• Grandaddy’s Blue Wav album was released this week, and it’s of course lovely 💕 Quite heart-breaky and melancholic, but very sweet.
• We went to see Alessandro Cortini in Inkonst on Friday - synth music in a dark room with cool visuals. The bass was insane, I’ve never felt music that much. At times I was wondering if it was still healthy. Not the volume, but the amount of vibration that I felt in my whole body. Quite an experience.
• I ordered 120 L of gardening soil for my upcoming balcony project. I’ve been collecting inspiration and information about what to grow and how, e.g. here: General balcony gardening tips, Inspiration pictures, and Plans 2024. I got the soil delivered from Bauhaus, because I didn’t want to drag it halfway across the city on a bus.
• Today it’s Kimchi-making day with Anna.

w6 2024

• I went to the cinema again for the first time since before the pandemic! It was very nice. Went with my friend Anna to see Perfect Days, a Wim Wenders movie about a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Calm and slow, almost meditative.
• We saw a music and light show in St. Pauli church in Malmö. The music was described as “deep house techno ambient undervattenkänsla”. It lasted 50 min and I got into a nice state of calmness and reflection. I thought about the benefit of being “forced” to sit with yourself and your thoughts for an hour, and that religion and church services - if I have anything good to say about them - can provide that.
• My woodcraft course started, after it had to be postpones by a week because of a “blizzard”. I learned how to use table saw, mitre saws and drill press, how to join corners and insert splines, how to measure things well, how to rip and cut wood, etc. It’s fun and we are a very nice small group of people.
• For Stefan and Stephan Stefan’s 40th birthday party I went to Austria. I booked a capsule in the ÖBB Nightjet capsule wagons and really enjoyed it. The only downside really was the cold air ventilation that robbed me of my sleep on the way to Vienna. On the way back I wore my jacket the whole night and was very cosy. Vienna was spring-like with up to 14 c and sunshine. Was nice to see old friends - Martina, Stephan, Stefan, Michi, Teresa, Berntsch, Lebi - even though it felt a bit stiff and school reunion-like at times. Mama, Papa and Luna came also, and we had lunch and coffee with Tante Irmi and Onkel Bertram (who had just fallen down the stairs a few days earlier and had his head wrapped in gauze).
• With Angie I went to Gartenbaukino and saw Poor Things. Crazy, lots of explicit sex scenes, and surprisingly fun.
• Finished reading Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things. Loved the mix of autobiography, descriptions of Japan and the beautiful photos. Really a work of art this book. I read it slowly over a few weeks to really enjoy it and not race through (though you could read it in 2h). It made me REALLY want to go on a multi-day walk again this spring, but not sure if we can fit it into our schedule with work and family visits and the Gothenburg apartment sale.

w3 2024

• I got a haircut! I have a fringe now, and a mid-parting. My millenial self has to be strong not to swipe the hair to the side again. Slowly getting used to the look and the feeling of hair constantly hanging just above my eyes. But I thought it’s nice with a change sometimes.
• Moving to Skåne, and especially Southern Skåne, I really expected to not see snow in the winter at all. But this year so far has been kind to me. When we moved to Malmö in November, I made a bet with Duncan walking past the lake in Pildammsparken that it will never completely freeze over. Already a few weeks later I was proven wrong because we had a period with snow and freezing temperatures. Then over Christmas it was warm and wet again, but almost the whole of January now has been below 0 and on-and-off snow. There were even a few dramatic scenes on motorways nearby where people were stuck in a blizzard for a day, and my first woodworking class was cancelled because of too much snowfall.
• Speaking of woodworking. I signed up for the beginner’s class at www.refablab.com. Partly because I just want to meet people here, and partly because I miss pottering around in a workshop. I also got an afternoon of pottery class for Christmas from Duncan. He’s already very well integrated into some things here in Malmö due to the modular synthesizer community here, but I still need to find some connections. Sports clubs are not so my thing, even though playing in a team is probably the quickest way to make some close connections. I’ll see if there is anything around crafting, fermentation, walking/hiking, gardening, refurbishing, etc. out there. Malmö seems to be a city with a lot of different initatives - people that just try and start something; that feels nice.
• Angie was here for a long weekend and it was fun to show her around. We ate Bento boxes at Mitt Möllan, had nice coffee at Café Jesusbaren, walked along the snowy beach, went shopping (incl. in the dozens of second hand shops here), looked at Konsthall, etc.

• I really enjoy playing/learning to play the guitar right now. In summer we bought a bright red electric guitar (Stratocaster-like?) on Tradera and first I tried JustinGuitar’s app for learning. It was good and his teaching style is great, but somehow I didn’t get hooked. Then I tried Yousician, and I LOVE it! It’s much more gamified, bascially GuitarHero with some exercises in between. But it’s so much fun to play along songs and get an immediate feedback how good you were, etc. Unfortunately I hurt my finger somehow a few weeks ago, probably Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and it’s been burning and unpleasant ever since. Resting the hand over Christmas didn’t do much, so I just started gently playing again. I warm up my hand now before every session with a squeezy ball, and that seems to help. Or it’s just that the healing process takes longer than expected. I want to play some Interpol and Strokes and Muse, and maybe also post-rock kind of stuff like Radio Dept.
• New Year feels already like so long ago… We spent a week in Skillingaryd in Småland, far away from the fireworks craziness of Möllevångstorget. Two days were very soggy, the other days were nice and snowy. Laika had a bad belly on the 29th, Duncan had a MASSIVE migraine on the 30th (likely partially caused by getting up several times in the night because of Laika), but on the 31st everyone was well again. We cooked noodle soup and watched The Big Fat Quiz of the Year on Youtube, an episode of Scavenger’s Reign, and played a few Nanograms. Extremely chill New Year’s eve. The train ride back home was calm and pleasant, very different from the train ride to Skillingaryd where I was trying to contain a Laika shaking with adrenalin for 2 hours because we shared the seats with two cats in carriers.
• I tried some lino cut.
• Started listening to Flashback Forever podcast. Mostly to train my Swedish, and I also like the Gothenburg accent of the hosts. Lots of LOLs. I’ve also watched Love is Blind Sverige, which was pretty awful and cringy. The Expanse continues to be excellent, I’m on season 3 now. I also started reading Jag Är Zlatan to both practice Swedish and learn more about Malmö’s famous son. I’m one chapter in, where he basically only rants about how he is so awesome and his Spanish coach doesn’t see that.

w50 2023

• It’s been a while! We’ve mostly been busy with moving and settling in our new home in Malmö. We love it here so far: very nice area (Möllevången), cool stuff to do, great restaurants, nice parks nearby (Pildammsparken, Folkets Park). We already know some nice people here, hang out with our neighbours who have a small Samoyed puppy, I signed up for Friskis gym and woodworking classes, we already went to several music gigs, etc.
• I just tested positive for the big C :( I managed to avoid it for 3 years, and now caught it probably at the Christmas party a few days ago. Don’t feel toooo bad. During the night I felt quite feverish, but now I’m just a bit drowsy and have a sore throat.
• It snowed here properly a few weeks ago! In Malmö! Didn’t think that would happen, let alone in November. We went out at 11 pm and walked around the park. The snow was SO soft and fluffy and gorgeous, omg. It lasted for about a week, because it was consistently below -5C. But now it’s back to Skåne winter of 4C and drizzle.
• Started watching The Expanse after consulting Reddit if I should read the books first or watch the TV show. Reddit was very split, but what convinced me to start watching was a comment that there are many good sci-fi books out there, but not that many really great sci-fi TV shows. And so far I love it! It feels the most realistic sci-fi I’ve watched (ever?). Starting on Season 2 today, because that’s what’s being ill is for! There was one thing in particular that I remember from one early episode from the first season, where a guy from the Belt and from Earth have a discussion, and the Belter asks something like “Why the hell did you ever leave Earth? To have the SKY above you, you breathe fresh AIR, you feel real RAIN instead of being locked up in a habitation hub!“. And it made me think of the Mars colonisation bullshit that dickheads like Musk are trying to make a thing. Years ago I was fascinated by it because I like(d) all things space, but realising how we so incredibly stupidly destroy the Earth, and then as a solution it’s suggested to colonise and geoengineer Mars?!?!! What the actual fuck.
• We also started with Welcome to Wrexham, about the Welsh football club that Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought. It’s surprisingly heartwarming and makes me almost want to be really into football.
• Books I’ve read lately:
  • How big things get done* (Bent Flyvbjerg). Bit repetitive, as most non-fiction books that want to “get a point across”, but still enjoyable and interesting. In short, more planning and more buffer (both time and money) would make projects succeed better.
  • Masala Lab: The science of Indian cooking (Krish Ashok). Had to stop a quarter through. The writing was insufferable. The author things he’s funny, doesn’t get to the point, talks things up to “uuh, watch out, science!” etc. Bah.
  • A prayer for the crown-shy (Becky Chambers). Lovely, very similar to the first Monk & Robot book. I love her writing and the way she describes things. So evocative without being poetic or flowery or too much.
  • The Immortalists (Chloe Benjamin). Got that one from the library on a whim. Ok story about some kids getting told their time of death and how their lives unfold thereafter. Some things are a bit ham-handed, and there’s not really a tense story arc going on, but I still finished it. Somewhat forgettable though.
  • All systems red (Martha Wells). First one of the Murderbot diaries. I started the second one and then realised that I should probably read the first one first. Nice original take on the whole human-androids-augments-robots thing, self-determinance, etc. Dry humour and still quite good sci-fi elements. Liked it. I just read that they’re going to make an Apple TV show out of it starring Alexander Skarsgård, but in my mind the murderbot was always female…?

w38 2023

• Duncan got Covid after going to England and was pretty ill for a while. We (successfully?) quarantined and isolated at home, and I spent the last two weeks sleeping in the living room while he didn’t really leave the bedroom. Now the trees outside are turning yellow, the air is getting crisp and his Covid tests are finally coming back negative again.
• I fancied reading a book in German again, so I went to the library with my dad who visited a few weeks ago. I got “F” by Daniel Kehlmann, and I really enjoyed it. Particularly the hilariously accurate descriptions of the catholic church service - it really reminded me of my childhood.
• I miss winter ❄️. Moving to Southern Sweden, close to the coast, as well as climate change makes the winters I experience more and more snow-less. Here in Skåne winter is just dark, windy and wet, around 3C and perpetually overcast. Sometimes I lie in bed in the morning, when it’s dark and my eyes are still closed, and I imagine being at home in Austria, 30 years ago, early morning, and just hear the “kkschrrr, kksschrrr” of someone shovelling snow in front of their house. And then I get incredibly nostalgic. I need to see and experience snow again this winter. Last winter we didn’t go anywhere snowy and we had literally two mornings in Helsingborg where it was white on the ground (and gone by midday).
• In preparation of a nice winter holiday, Duncan made something that I’ve been meaning to make for ages: a map of Sweden that shows train lines and supermarkets. This makes it so much easier to plan trips where we want to go by public transport, but also not be too far away from the nearest place to buy food.

w35 2023

• I learned the other days something fascinating about raspberry pollination. The reason why you sometimes see wonky little raspberries that just consist of a few segments (druplet) is insufficient pollination. Basically every single druplet of a raspberry (or blackberry, etc.) is a fruit and had its own pistil that needed to be pollinated. A nice, full, mature raspberry has 100-200 druplets.

w33 2023

• We’ve had a Thermomix TM5 now for a bit more than a month, thanks to my work having one old one “left over” that I could borrow. At first we only used it for a few things and it felt more like a hassle to try to integrate it into our cooking routines. But the past two weeks we’ve been cooking almost exclusively Thermomix-specific recipes from the Cookidoo website, and I’m starting to see the benefit of having this gadget in the kitchen. I particularly like it for starting a cooking process by just throwing in a whole onion, some garlic cloves and some spices and oil, and then letting it chop and simmer while you prepare other stuff. It definitely shines when you make things like stews and soups, or also risottos, where frequent stirring on a medium heat over longer time is desired. It’s not the easiest thing to clean, so recipes with multiple “chop, take out, clean, put in another ingredient” cycles are a bit annoying. In Thermomix recipes I have collected some of my favourite recipes so far and some that we are about to try.

w32 2023

• So it looks like we have found an apartment in Malmö! The Swedish rental market amazes/confuses me once again… So I have about 2 years of queueing points on different sites. Very occasionally an apartment has come up during the last 3ish months of searching that I kind of liked. I visited three (four, if you count the one where we were stuck on a train somewhere near Kävlinge for an hour and missed the viewing): one was claustrophobic and above a heavy smoker, one was amazing but too expensive (though in hindsight we probably should have taken it) and one was cute, a bit oddly shaped and in a great location. For that last one we were on spot 19 when the viewing was taking place. During the viewing some people dropped out and I moved to spot 12. Over the next few days I first got to 9, then to 6. Still not much hope though. Then I was 3, and the message on Boplats said that they were checking the first one in queue for eligibility. Then I was 2, same message. And then during the end of last week I was on spot 1 and the message said that we might get it and that the housing organisation is checking our eligibility. WHAT? How did that happen? Yes, there is a strange little extra room that is half-attached to the living room. And the kitchen is fairly small. But other than that? What’s wrong with the apartment? Or what’s wrong with the other people in the queue ahead of me? Yes, there are some standard requirements, like not smoking anywhere in or near the building, earning at least twice the monthly rent, and some stranger ones like having a job that is less than 2h commute away. But still…? Well anyway, we got it! They’ll send the contract in a few days! And I’m excited and have been watching home styling videos all weekend. I’m a bit sad to leave the considerably greener Helsingborg behind, but also chuffed about having a bit more lively city life again, meeting more people with similar interests, etc.
• At work I’ve been doing more lactic acid bacteria stuff. I spread some yogurt on selective plates to be able to determine how many live bacteria are in it at different points during shelf life. Looks pretty good, I counted about 10^9 per g product on day 1 and then there’s a steady decline to about 10^7 after 3 months. A billion bacteria PER GRAM! And that’s not even that much. It’s always mind boggling how much life there is in everything.
• I gave audiobooks another try after watching a compelling video about the best books of 2023 so far. I’ve had a lot of 60ies sci-fi lately and fancied a bit more contemporary stuff. Instead of the dreaded Audible I tried Xig Xag, which has a different payment system (you pay per book) and is not tied to a subscription. They had Pod by Laline Paull, which had high marks. But after listening to it now for 3+ hours, I’m not sure I want to continue. It’s a bit boring and scattered. Lots of fish being nasty to each other.
• In parallel I’m also listening to Sommaren 1985 by John Ajvide Linqvist, whose other books Låt den rätte komma in and Människohamn I absolutely loved. So far it’s nice, but also more coming-of-age and less tense thriller than I’d like. They found a creepy mermaid, so hopefully something develops there. I don’t get everything of the Swedish, but enough to follow along. And it’s very good practice.
• The weather continues to be a bit dismal here in Skåne. While everywhere else is breaking records with either temperature (Hottest July ever! Hottest sea surface temperature ever!) or floodings or forest fires, Skåne continues to be windy and rainy at a more or less constant 13-16C. So it feels wrong to complain, but it would also be nice to have a few summery days. After the dreadful winter (windy, rainy) I’m longing for some more distinct seasons.
• I got my passport back! And I’ve had the most Austrian interactions in a while with the people from the embassies (both in Stockholm and Copenhagen) - chill, jovial, slightly incompetent but well-meaning. A bit like this video of a recent armed robbery in Graz.
• There was some buzz about an apparent room-temperature superconductor from a Korean lab. Besides the fact that it was only published on arXiv and no one has managed to replicate it yet… Why are people SO excited about it? Woah, we can build maglev trains now! Well, we can already build normal trains now that are fast and efficient (if maintained properly). But still many countries and governments don’t. This is a solved problem (on the technical side).

w30 2023

• In week 29 I went to a Finnish town called Kouvola for a work trip, a 1.5 h drive from Helsinki. Lost my passport somewhere on the way there. Otherwise the trip was good, even though on the first day it looked like we had come for nothing because one pump in the factory didn’t work. But the pump was fixed the next day and my colleague and I rebooked out flights to late on Wednesday, so we could finish the trial. It was an interesting experience going from a lab-made product to a factory scale - there are so many new challenges that I didn’t anticipate. Mostly that there is water in all the pipes that needs to be pushed out before product can travel in them, thereby potentially diluting your recipe. And the all the loss at different stages, because the ends and starts of pumping product from tank A to tank B are usually discarded. Definitely some optimisation that could be done there.
• Finished reading Story of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. Over the last year he’s become one of my favourite writers. He just combined sci-fi and maths and history and philosophy in such a unique way. And I love the unusual settings, like a construction site of the tower of Babel or a industrial age factory with clay golems. I preferred his other short story collection Exhalation, just because the stories seemed a bit more finished and self-contained there, but I really enjoyed it. My favourites were The Tower of Babel and Story of Your Life, which was the basis for the film Arrival.
• Started learning bass, because Duncan is doing an online tutorial (and recently bought a bass second hand) and asked if I wanted to try a few lessons. It’s fun to play an instrument again. Not sure if the bass is my thing though. I am not very good in even picking out the bassline in a song. I somehow feels like it’s almost dispensable. And it’s usually very repetitive to play. It doesn’t have the same impact as the guitar it seems. But maybe that’s just my newbie ignorance.
• Apparently chicken-of-the-woods tastes more chicken than chicken itself (according to some dude on Reddit). That was enough to get me very intrigued. Now looking into if I can find it somewhere here in Sweden, or grow it. Is it possible to grow it in larger scale, like on sawdust? Or even submerged?
• It was my birthday! I got a personalised Heinz ketchup bottle, a mini whisk and mini spatula to scrape out jam jars, the book “How big things get done”, a very nice green pair of Fairphone headphones, some golden iron-on patches to cover stains, and Korean BB cream. Duncan and I went to Chay, the amazing vegan Vietnamese place in town, bought some cakey treats at Bruket Kaffebar, then I cycled to the beach with Luciane and even went into the water twice (a refreshing 16C!), played some Zelda, read a bit, chatted with family, had meze for dinner and watched an episode of Strange New Worlds. Pretty much a perfect day.
• The summer in Sweden has been a somewhat underwhelming so far (usually 12-28C and showers, windy, drizzly, overcast), but I can’t really complain because other parts of the world are literally on fire and July was the hottest month ever in human history.

w28 2023

• SO MUCH Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I’m trying to not rush it because I want to explore every corner of the map first.
• I finished reading New York 2140. I’m glad I read it, because I like to read more somewhat realistic (and ideally utopian/solar punk) climate fiction. But I have to be honest and admit that I didn’t really like it and wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. Towards the end I skimmed entire pages because I got tired of characters just talking to each other while some of the (imo) more exciting plot lines were hung out to dry. The Ministry for the Future is better, even though I would probably also criticise that there is too much filler conversation going on. My preference for writing styles is concise and saying a lot in a few sentences. Carefully crafted sentences, without sounding overly lyrical. Some examples that I read are anything Ursula K. LeGuin, The Mountain in the Sea, or some Japanese writers like Banana Yoshimoto.
• Bought some chayote and some green papaya, because they had it in my local Asian shop. I had never used green papaya myself, and never even heard of chayote. I fermented them (Chayote - plain and Jamaican-style, Green papaya Thai-style): The chayote kept its crunch nicely but doesn’t really have any own flavour (both good and bad). The papaya is also crunchy while also having a slightly fruity note. Next up is a big green squash that I found in the Middle Eastern shop.
• I made another Stacker Jacket. It’s so crazy to construct a lined jacket, especially at the stage where everything is inside out and sewn together with four sleeves sticking out in different directions. Then you just pull it all through a tiny hole in the lining and out comes a fancy jacket. I just have the buttons left to attach, and I’m dreading it. The jacket looks perfect right now, I might mess it all up with the buttons and those damned buttonholes.
• While having all the sewing stuff out, I also made a Donny shirt from leftover linen fabric from my Tula pants & shorts (Papercut Patterns). Everyone online said it’s “such a quick sew!” but it took me probably like 8-10 hours altogether. I re-watched Foundation season 1 while sewing. Such a good show! And season 2 is coming out soon, which is why I wanted to refresh my memory.
• Speaking of TV shows: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2 is also out now. We tried to watch the first episode the other day and realised we had no clue what actually happened in the last season. So we watched a recap video on Youtube. Now I feel better prepared and I’m really excited to start watching because the first season was SO GOOD!

w22 2023

• Some learnings from planning, booking and now being in the middle of a 3 week train travel through Europe (Sweden-Denmark-Germany-Netherlands-Belgium-Luxembourg-Germany-Austria-Germany-Sweden). With our dog 🐶.
  • Don’t chain trains. Delays will occur. It’s so much nicer, and less stressful to stop more frequently, only have a few hours of train travel each day, arrive in the next destination earlier in the day and have a chance to explore it a bit. Also, delays won’t bother you if you don’t have to catch another train. More time to read!
  • Don’t be overly ambitious. We usually left a place at around 10, that leaves time for a nice breakfast and morning walk. Then buy a snack, get on the train for a few hours. Dog sleeps, we read, listen, watch, chat, snooze, eat. Early afternoon, we arrive, walk to the hotel, drop off our stuff, rest a bit and then head out for exploring the city and look for a nice café or restaurant for early dinner.
  • Pick one thing to see in each place. Even in the most boring seeming places, there is something to explore. It’s good to look that thing up before you arrive, so the visits in the various places are not all just aimless wandering. It can be nice to aimlessly wander, but it also gets a bit tiring. For example in Kolding, we visited the model village Miniby and the botanical garden around it. In Hamburg, we went to the Speicherstadt. In Utrecht, we walked along the Oude and Nieuwe Gracht.
  • Bring snacks/food and water. See above: train delays will occur. Therefore, always have water and some snacks on you. Müsli bars, some nice bread rolls, nuts, whatever. Don’t bring chocolate, it might melt.
  • Print out all the tickets. I did get all the 15 different apps for the 10 different inter-European train agencies, but to be honest, I still felt safer printing out all the tickets and bringing them with me. The evening before I take out the tickets for tomorrow’s train, check the time again, and put the print-out in the front pocket of my bagpack. Then during the train ride, I can use it as a bookmark, note down interesting things to see or restaurants to go to in the next destination, and have it handy when/if the train conductor comes (Which so far has not happened! No one has checked any of our tickets so far!).
  • One luggage person, one dog person. I took a small wheely suitcase and a bagpack, and Duncan took a duffle bag and a bagpack. And then there’s Laika. In hindsight it would’ve been much smarter to put all our stuff into one (larger?) wheely suitcase. One person takes the suitcase, gets it on the train and stows it away. The other person takes the dog. Sometimes doggo needs to be carried into the train (many people, large gaps/steps) and having additional luggage is really annoying. Duncan ended up taking the duffle AND the suitcase, which is fine for a bit, but next time we’ll pool.
  • The biggest cities are not always the best to stop. We already learned this during planning when the hotel prices in Copenhagen were SO much higher than in 2-hours-further-South Kolding. But also Hamburg was a bit too stressful for my liking. The station is disgusting and a mess, and the way to the hostel was quite unpleasant as well. In contrast, Osnabrück was a chill little town with a nice, walkable centre. The other advantage of getting on the train a bit away from the transport hubs is that the train stations are calmer.
  • RESERVE SEATS!!! Can’t stress this enough. I would never attempt a trans-European train travel without seat reservations. An exception are maybe commuter trains that run every 15-30 min.

w17 2023

• The Netherlands produces an astonishing amount of food, both vegetables and meat. Here’s an article that portrays the scale of it, and describes how it runs actually very energy- and resource-efficiently (or as good as possible): https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/netherlands-agriculture-technology/

w16 2023

• This week I refreshed my Phython pandas knowledge to analyse and plot some fermentation data. From work I have a lot of recordings of fermentation pH and temperature values over time, and most of them are in huge Excel sheets and it’s a pain to analyse by hand. But I’m always in this dilemma that my datasets are still small enough to be able to do it by hand, and it’s usually faster than sitting down and trying to figure out how to program a pipeline for analysis, that would make things quicker in the long run. Anyway, I finally had some time and watched a few Youtube videos about pandas, and followed some tutorials about [Matplotlib](https://matplotlib.org/. And - tataaa - I have now sucessfully created a Jupyter notebook with a pipeline that cleanes up my data, calculates some essential things, and then creates a nice graph. It still needs some improvements, like some loops over iterative file names, but in general I’m pretty happy that I managed to produce something useful.

• I finished reading the thick novel Jade City. It was recommended somewhere, and I saw it in the library a few weeks ago and just took it. I expected more fantasy elements; it’s essentially a family and clan saga about mafia structures in a tropical, Shanghai-y/Hongkong-y island nation. Yes, they get certain powers by being in contact with jade, but that’s basically all that is different from the real world. If you substitute jade with drugs it would just be a gangster/mafia stroy. There’s lots of underground trading logistics, street fighting, fulfilling family traditions, rivalry, etc. I did enjoy reading it, because the characters and the story were described in a very vivid way, but I won’t read the rest of the trilogy. Too much other stuff to read.

• While reading Jade City, I got a bit annoyed - as I do ocassionally with other stories about “alternative realities” - that the power structures in the fictional nation were quite similar to existing power structures in the real world. Like, why don’t authors paint more diverse visions of fictional societies, but instead always fall back to the common “men are in power, women are not as well regarded, foreigners are suspicious” bla bla bla. It’s so tiring. Same in Jade City, where one of the few main female characters is an incredibly talented jade fighter, but there is constantly this undercurrent of her not being taken seriously, having to convince people much more than her brothers, not being considered for certain roles because she’s a woman, etc. However, at the end of the book there was actually an interview with the author, explaining that this setting was deliberate to make it seem more realistic and relatable, instead of creating a complete fantasy-world. I can understand that, though I would generally really appreciate more escapism in novels and descriptions of worlds that are a bit more diverse - in whatever way - than our current one. Isn’t the whole point of making up fictional worlds that you can think up different ways of how things are run?

• A good summary of what to do with preserved lemons

w15 2023

• This Easter weekend, we walked a half of Skåneleden North to South: SL2 Nord till syd. It was not only a nice walk, but I also learned a lot about the history of Skåne and the areas we walked through, observed trees, birds and insects, visited the geographical centre of Skåne and the location of Sweden’s oldest settlement, and got to know several new mid-sized towns (Hässleholm, Höör, Hörby).

w12 2023

• Finished watching The Last of Us. I thought it was excellently made. The way it keeps you on your toes, without being too graphic or scary most of the time. And the way it has calm epidoses in between the faster ones. It was actually much more slow-paced than I had expected, but that makes the fast scenes even more exciting and important. Something I have problems with in newer Star Trek series, like Discovery: there’s no time to take a breath, every single incident is threatening the whole of the universe, etc. You just get tired of the high stakes and everything becomes a bit meaningless. Thankfully, they manage to get to a better balance (and better storytelling) again in the newest (third) Picard season - it’s really good! I’m halfway through the season.
• Also started watching the BBC show Race Across the World. I LOVED season 1. During the midst of the pandemic in 2020, I was really craving pictures and impressions from other countries and cultures, and it was so nice to follow 5 teams as they make their way over land (and sea) from London, via Greece and Central Asia, to China, Vietnam and finally Singapore. It was varied, both in terms of transport, nature and culture. Season 2 was North to South from Mexico City to Ushuaia, and it was also good but a looot of bus travel, since that’s the only mode of public transport available in a lot of places in Central and South America. So we’ll see how season 3 plays out now, where the teams travel from Vancouver to St. John’s on Newfoundland, via Yukon and Northern Manitoba. So far, car sharing seems to be the way to go in Canda, at least in the part where they’re starting from. The nature is amazing, of course. It somewhat scratches my travel itch, but it also makes me long to go to all of these places.
• Inspired by Race Across the World, I read about Haida Gwaii and found several interesting documentaries I want to watch: Haida Gwaii: On the Edge of the World, Hadwin’s Judgement and Canda Over the Edge: Haida Gwaii South.

w11 2023

• We visited Dalby Söderskog on a half-rainy Saturday. It’s Europe’s smallest National Park, and it is indeed tiny. But still interesting to walk through, and especially to observe and discover all the things that grow and thrieve on and around dead wood.
• Crown shyness:

Crown shyness is a phenomenon observed in some tree species, in which the crowns of fully stocked trees do not touch each other, forming a canopy with channel-like gaps. The phenomenon is most prevalent among trees of the same species, but also occurs between trees of different species. There exist many hypotheses as to why crown shyness is an adaptive behavrious, and research suggests that it might inhibit spread of leaf-eating insect larvae.

Crown shyness observed in Dalby Söderskog:

w10 2023

• The discovery of vast - and somewhat renewable - hydrogen reservoirs (article in Science) all over the world might mean a possible greener future, sooner than with electric conversion alone. This sounds very exciting! I’m already dreaming of travelling without a bad conscience in planes that sprinkle water droplets out of their engines.
• I’ve been reading (and really enjoying) The Mountain in the Sea lately, and connectomes and brain mappings are a central part of the plot. Interesting (and somewhat scary?) that the real world is catching up: The brain of a 6 hour old Drosphila fly has been mapped and a connectome created (article in Nature). The researchers found some resemblance with how neural networks work:

_“The team also found that 41% of the brain neurons form ‘recurrent loops’, providing feedback to their upstream partners. These shortcuts and loops resemble state-of-the-art artificial neural networks that are being used in artificial-intelligence research. “It’s interesting that the computer-science field is converging onto what evolution has discovered,” says Cardona.”. _

w9 2023

• I’ve been reading a LOT about Lactic acid bacteria lately. Partly to reactivate a little dataviz project that I’m working on, partly because I also need it for work, and partly because I am of course interested in all things fermentation. The Lactobacillus genus recently went through a reorganization of the taxonomy, and there’s a great video/seminar (by The Fermentation Association) with one of the authors about why it was done and what the new genera are.
• For a while, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez has been on my to-read list. So I got the audiobook (in German) and started, but after about 6 hours of listening I have to say that it’s just not for me (and I decided to skip the remaining 12 hours). It’s a nice evocative language and I do like the magical realism style. But every other person is called José or Arcadio Buendia (which just makes everything unnecessarily tedious to follow), and the story just trickles along without any build-up to anything, and there’s some yucky marrying children stuff going on, and in general I just got incredibly bored by the whole thing. Not how I want to spend my time, when there’s so many other great books to read. The historical background of South America in the 19th and early 20th century would have been interesting, but it was impossible to know what was actual and what was fictional.
• One book that I did enjoy a lot was A Psalm for the Wild-Built (great title!). I saw it being described as “cosy core”, and I like that. It’s futuristic, utopian, solar punk, but very gentle and connected to nature. The main character is a tea monk, travelling around to find a purpose, and meeting a robot on the way. Best to read with a steaming cup of tea on the side. 🍵

w7 2023

• Started watching The Last of Us about escaping the zombie pandemic caused by a filamentous fungi (the creepy Cordyceps that replaces host tissue with mycelium). I really enjoy it, especially the video-gamey scenes, like when one of the protagonists snipes at hordes of zombies from a high-rise so that his friends can reach a safe zone.
• We finally decided on where to walk for this year’s Easter Hike (this is becoming a tradition after Gotaleden in 2021 and Kullaleden in 2022). It’s going to be part of Skåneleden, the Northern half of the North-to-South route, 133 km from Vittsjö to Hörby.
• I finished my Shop Pants!! They look great and it was a very satisfying project, as the pattern is very precise and has some nice sharp corners, and the Youtube tutorial is top notch. I’m already living in these trousers. 👖 The only annoying thing was - as usual - the buttonhole. It’s just impossible to get anything bulkier than 2 layers under the buttonhole presserfoot. In the end I did the buttonhole “manually” by sewing two narrow rows of zig-zag stitching and connected them with a wider stitch.

w5 2023

• Mycoremediation - cleaning the environment with fungi - seems very appealing. And a lot of people are hoping that fungi can be found that can “eat up” plastic on land and in the ocean. Prompted by the question in the Future Ecologies Discord channel if there are any large-scale projects going on in that area, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole: Bioremediation with fungi. In short, there are loads of studies that show that some fungal strain can degrade a particular, isolated plastic in a specific form (often soluble), at a specific concentration under specific conditions (often with the pH and temperature adjusted and necessary trace elements added). The problem with a real life application is that plastics are very resistant to chemical (and therefore also enzymatic) attack, usually come mixed together with other polymers, are found in difficult environments (ocean, landfills) with or without oxygen, etc. Preparing the substrate in a way that the fungi will just gobble it up, is tricky and costly. Another (in most papers unanswered) question is if the breakdown products are actually less harmful in the environment than the plastic polymer. Will fungal degradation release e.g. plasticizers that then leak into waterways? Will the fungi themselves become toxic? (There is this idea that oyster mushroom could grow on trash and then be eaten - is that healthy?) Fungi also release CO2 and throught he plastic degradation also potentially methane and other substances - is that better or worse for the environment than leaving the carbon more sequestered as a polymer?
• On the weekend we went with Laika to a dog bakery in Gothenburg. It was ridiculous and wonderful. I had red velvet cake for the first time and was a bit disappointed. It looks more impressive than it tastes. Or maybe a dog bakery is not the best place to evaluate cakes for humans?

w4 2023

• Really enjoying the Scales of Change series of the Future Ecologies podcast. Signed up for their Patreon, since it includes a Discord membership that seems pretty nice.
• A job fair for plant-centric food producers https://terra.do/climate-jobs/climate-job-fair/terra-do-plant-futures-initiative-job-fair-2023-02-17/
• I attended my first hackathon this week! (I know, so 2011…) It was organised by Foo Café in Malmö and was about protein folding and the new algorithms that have popped up and become publicly available over the last two years: AlphaFold, ESMfold, Rosettafold, etc. The workshop leader was Amijai Saragovi, a Postdoc in the Baker lab in Seattle. (Here are the seminar notes) I’ve been meaning to look into this stuff a bit more for a while anyway, so it was a good opportunity to be “forced” to do that. We were a nice little crowd of about 10 people, working from Friday afternoon until Saturday afternoon, with some of us (including me) going home to sleep, and some actually doing the whole 24h. My team tried to improve the sweetness of the protein brazzein by using a combination of MPNN, Alphafold, EMSfold, Inpainting and Pymol.

w3 2023

• Tried to make vegan tamagoyaki with silken tofu, mung bean flour and rice flour. Though I couldn’t find mung bean flour in the Indian shop, so I bought the closest I could find - which was urid/urad flour (i.e. black gram lentil flour). The tamagoyaki turned out too fluffy/sticky for a real egg experience, BUT it reminded me of uttapam). So I looked up how to make uttapam, and it is in fact a mix of rice and urid flour (actually, most recipe I found start with soaking the whole kernels and wet grind it later, but this one hereuses flour). Uttapam, dosa and idli are actually all with the same or a very similar dough. Incidentally, I tried to make idli yesterday for the first time. That was from a ready-mix package, and - again - didn’t turn out exactly as I wanted but good enough for a first try. So now with the large bag of urid flour I have, I really want to try out uttapam. I love uttapam, especially with onion and tomato on top, and some sour chutney for dipping. I’ve only been able to get it form a single restaurant here in Helsingborg (called The South Indian).
• Finally managed to get all my self-made clothes from the last 3 (?) years out on the bed, try them on and take pictures of myself. Started to catalogue them here.
• A good way to scope out which hiking routes offer sufficient accomodation and food opportunities along the way is to download the .gpx file of a route (often from alltrails, e.g. https://www.alltrails.com/trail/sweden/orebro—2/bergslagsleden), then going to https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/ and importing that file. Then in different layers and with different colours, things can be added. I made two separate maps so far, one for Bergslagsleden and one for Åhus-Karlskrona, with all the restaurants, supermarkets and hostels along the way in different colours.
• Made vegan hottokeiki, tasted very good!
• For nice ambient music, Duncan’s Jamuary on Bandcamp is a good listen.
• Apparently, De Cecco is a much better pasta brand than Barilla (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_XMTvAgpEw). I will test and report back. I do love Barilla’s tagliatelle, but maybe there is better stuff out there?
• The origin of the single-letter code for amino acids: http://www.biology.arizona.edu/biochemistry/problem_sets/aa/Dayhoff.html

w2 2023

• https://github.com/jasonwebb/morphogenesis-resources
• https://brilliant.org/welcome/where-to-start/?tour=true&signup=1
• Made Keckek el Fouqara (Poor man’s cheese), fermented bulgur that apparantly will taste (at some point) like cheese. We’ll see in a few weeks…
• Oliver Burkman’s masterclass (2x2h) on Imperfectionism. Some nuggets:
  • Pay yourself first. I.e. dedicate the first 10/60/… min of your day to something you think is important and you want to do. Then go to the necessary tasks like answering emails, etc.
  • You don’t have to “clear the decks” to be able to move to the fun or important or more interesting stuff. To do lists are neverending.
  • Accepting your unipresence (i.e. you can only ever be in one place at a time).
• A good primer about Solarpunk: https://mastodon.social/@tsouthard/109685358001761535
• https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/your-money-is-your-carbon
• https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/jan/12/rebecca-solnit-climate-crisis-popular-imagination-why-we-need-new-stories

w1 2023

• Fermenting Data https://fermentingdata.net/. Interesting project from a researcher from Aarhus University about “engaging in sensing and sense-making with data and fermentation”.
• TO READ: An in-depth and interactive explanation of GPS https://ciechanow.ski/gps/
• How Mesopotamian beer was brewed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK4DMt8ARyU&t=873s → Contains great excerpts from old Sumerian poems and stories about making beer, drinking beer and getting drunk. E.g. the story about the god Enki and his daughter Inanna who have a drinking contest and then she convinces him to give her all of his powers. “According to the Babylonian Enuma Elish (c. 1100 BCE), Enki was the oldest son of the first gods, Apsu and Tiamat.

In the beginning of time, the world was undifferentiated swirling chaos from which separated Apsu, the male principle personified by fresh water and Tiamat, the female principle defined by salt water.” https://www.worldhistory.org/Enki/

• It’s fascinating that ancient civilizations had a quite modern-seeming idea of the origins of the universe - an undifferentiated, swirling chaos.
• Looked into nice hiking routes in Southern Sweden for the Easter holidays: Blekingeleden, Bergaslagsleden or Åhus-Karlskrona seem good so far.

• Protein structure prediction with AlphaFold and RoseTTAFold. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00997-5 It makes my head spin to think about what could be done with either accurately predicting structures from amino acid sequences, or even better to design a function and then get the necessary aa sequence to express in a host. THAT’S INSANE!! There’s also now a thing called “hallucinating protein sequences”, which sounds like straight out of a sci-fi novel. There, random aa sequences are fed in, and the AI generates optimize the sequences until the structures resemble something that the neural network recognizes as a protein. 😵‍💫🤯🙌

His team is now using this approach to design proteins that do useful things, such as catalyse a particular chemical reaction, by specifying the amino acids responsible for the desired function and letting the AI dream up the rest. link