Die Aufenthaltsqualität eines großen Waldes in Mitten einer Stadt ist meiner Meinung nach nicht zu unterschätzen.Dabei dehnt diese sich so weit aus, das, je tiefer man in den Wald vordringt, die typischen, städtischen Geräusche nicht mehr wahrzunehmen sind.

Den Wald vor lauter Bäumen… (Eigenes Werk. Lizenz: CC-BY-SA.)

Die Eilenriede wird von Fuß- und Fahrradwegen durchzogen. Leider auch von zwei vielbefahrenen Straßen, der Bernadotteallee und der Waldchaussee. Zumindest letztere wird am Wochenende regelmäßig für den motorisierten Verkehr gesperrt und ermöglicht dadurch ein angenehmes Fahren mit dem Fahrrad auf der Straße. Während der Sperrung ist die Waldchaussee auch bei Rollerbladern und Skateboardern beliebt.

In der Eilenriede gibt es viele Spielplätze, sehenswerte Orte oder temporäre Installationen wie die Tafeln zur Geschichte des Stadtwaldes.

Beispielbild zu einer Tafel über die Geschichte der Eilenriede (Eigenes Werk. Lizenz: CC-BY-SA.)

Fazit

Ob “nur” auf der Durchfahrt oder als bewusstes Ziel ist die Eilenriede immer einen Besuch wert.

Wenn man in der Nähe von Älmhult ist, lohnt sich der Besuch des Loshult Handelsbod. Super leckeres frisches selbstgebackenes bio Sauerteig-Brot, Zimtschnecken, bester Kaffee, aber das schönste ist das Ambiente in dem alten Handelshaus und die sehr freundlichen Gastgeber Salli und Raphael.

As a constant reader of Stephen King’s many works, I continue to be impressed by his ability to put a fresh spin on familiar tropes. Billy Summers is the hitman with a heart who only kills “bad guys”, and who is hired for “one last job” that quickly goes off the rails.

Summers is an Iraq vet, who has since turned his sniper skills towards more profitable ends while maintaining a personal moral code. For his last job, he has to blend in with the locals in Red Bluff, a small town east of the Mississippi, awaiting the extradition of his mark from out of state, for a hit at the local court house. That could be months away, but the job promises a payday to make it worth it.

The details make the story work. Summers cultivates a “dumb self” towards his employers, slowing his speech and pretending to have a reading level barely sufficient for Archie comics while secretly stashing away a book by Émile Zola. In Red Bluff, he gets to know his neighbors and the people in his office building, owing to his ability to become quick friends with almost anybody.

The cover story for Summers’ stay is that he is a writer working on a novel, which is an excuse for him to actually write the story of his own life. This “book within the book” focuses on Summers’ childhood and his time in Iraq. (Billy Summers only includes short excerpts of Summers’ biography, and the timelines of both books eventually meet.)

Of course, the story doesn’t end after Summers takes his shot. A series of confrontations follows, and a young woman enters the story, who plays a crucial role towards the end. While the book doesn’t break any new ground, Stephen King incorporates both world events and references to his own works into the story to keep things interesting.

If you’re looking for a recent King novel that heavily tilts towards the supernatural, I would recommend Later (2021), The Institute (2019), or The Outsider (2018) instead. But if a more conventional thriller with King’s touch sounds interesting, you’re unlikely to be disappointed by Billy Summers.

When they are 11 years old, tragedy strikes the lives of twins Tyler and Alyson Ronan. Their mother Mary-Ann threatens Tyler with a shotgun after Alyson cut his hair short. Tyler stabs their mother with a pair of scissors, and she falls into the lake near their house and drowns. That, at least, is what the twins tell the police.

Tyler is admitted to a residential treatment facility, and doesn’t see his sister for the next 10 years. During that time, Tyler, who identified as a boy from a young age, completes his transition as a trans man. At age 21, Tyler and Alyson finally reunite to sell their mother’s old house—and to unravel their family story.

Mystery in beautiful environments

In three episodes, Tell Me Why by Dontnod Entertainment (Life is Strange) puts the player in control of both Alyson and Tyler as they explore their childhood home, question old family friends, and relive the past. Was their mother unable to accept Tyler as a trans child, or did she suffer a mental breakdown for other reasons?

The game is set in a fictional small town in Alaska, giving it a backdrop of snowy mountains, forests, and the lake near the family home. Indoor environments, too, are rendered in rich detail, from the Ronan residence to the local police station and the town’s grocery store.

Even indoor environments like the Ronan residence are rendered in exquisite detail, with beautiful lighting and gorgeous views of the outside scenery. (Credit: Dontnod Entertainment. Fair use.)

With choices on top

The gameplay follows the pattern established in the Life is Strange games: you walk around, talk to people, look at and for objects, and sometimes complete (typically very easy) mini-games or puzzles. Occasionally, you make choices that will influence your relationship with other characters for the rest of the game.

There’s a supernatural element to story and gameplay, as well. Without spoiling anything, suffice it to say that Tyler and Alyson share a deep bond that may help them in their quest to learn the truth.

I almost immediately fell in love with the game’s characters and was captivated by the story and graphics. On the other hand, I found the choice mechanic and its relationship with the story underdeveloped.

After important choices, the game indicates whether the bond between Tyler and Alyson has increased or not. But it’s rarely clear how this relates to the progression of the story, or why the player would want to weaken the bond between the two, who clearly love each other. The choices felt layered on top of the story, not like an integral part of the game.

The Verdict

Tell Me Why is not a masterpiece, but it is a beautiful narrative adventure, and I enjoyed the time I spent with it. The developers deserve kudos for a good faith (and, it seemed to me, largely successful) effort at representation of trans and queer characters and of indigenous (Tlingit) culture.

I played the game in Proton on Linux without issues (aside from a tiny bit of stuttering during cut scenes, which may be due the limitations of my hardware). It takes about 5-10 hours to complete, more if you want to explore all sides of the story and find all collectibles hidden in the game’s different environments.

The first chapter is free and gives you a good feel for the game. I paid the full price of $20; you may be able to get it at a steep discount if you wait a few months (in June 2021, the full game was given away for free to celebrate Pride Month).

The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit by Dontnod Entertainment is a free promo game—its purpose is to get players interested in Life is Strange 2 (reviews). But it’s a standalone game that only has a small hook into the franchise at the very end.

You play as Chris Eriksen, a young kid living in a town in Oregon with his father Charles. It becomes clear quickly that Charles is an alcoholic whose behavior sometimes becomes abusive.

Chris, meanwhile, has his own fantasy world to escape into. He dons a cape and becomes Captain Spirit, a hero with telekinetic powers. Captain Spirit fights alongside an Avengers-style team against a team of supervillains led by a mysterious figure called Mantroid.

Chris in his Captain Spirit gear. (Credit: Dontnod Entertainment. Fair use.)

As you explore the house and the snowy outdoors, you can play out Chris’ fantasies, complete some chores for his dad, and learn more about his family, including his mom.

The game is rendered in beautiful 3D graphics; the outdoors environments are especially gorgeous. You walk around and look at objects or talk to people (mostly of the imaginary variety); occasionally the game switches to mini-game sequences, such as aiming snowballs at a beer can pyramid.

Captain Spirit offers only a brief window into Chris’ life, projecting a short narrative arc. In 1-2 hours of playtime, it manages to be engaging and charming while tackling difficult subjects. I would recommend the free download without reservations to anyone who enjoys exploratory games like Firewatch (reviews) or Gone Home (reviews). I played it on Linux using Proton without issues.

Logo (Credit: AnonAddy. Fair use.)

AnonAddy is an open source service that allows you to create anonymous email aliases. Emails arriving into these aliases will be forwarded to a real email address of your choice. Of course you can do something like this with “plus email addresses” but it’s inferior in terms of security and usability both. You can also send emails from AnonAddy aliases.

The common use case is to create a new email alias every time you register to a site or start emailing with someone new. When using shared domains, the email addresses cannot be linked together. Furthermore, when some email alias starts to receive spam, you can just simply deactivate it.

There is a quite limited free plan, so basically you have to pay 1$/3$ per month. The one dollar lite plan should be enough for most. I would even say that the lite plan is actually what makes AnonAddy more attractive than it’s very similar competitor SimpleLogin. You can make the payments with crypto.

Of course you could just host the service yourself, but then you lose the anonymity provided by sharing domains with other users. I would recommend against it, but there are good looking instructions for this as well.

I have used AnonAddy for a while now and I’m really happy with it.

What is the meaning of life? In much of our philosophy, humans are the only ones qualified to answer the question. But why not seek the answer in life itself, in its grandeur of, as Darwin put it, “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful”? In The Overstory, Richard Powers narrows it down to trees.

Through several narratives interwoven like a forest canopy, the novel implores us to slow down, to look, to listen, and to appreciate nature for what it is, not what it can be used for.

Powers knows that a novel about trees still needs humans to hold the reader’s attention. He brings to life the cast of characters like a skillful painter creating a vibrant landscape with a few brush strokes. As if they were the trees the book is about, he writes about his characters’ roots, their ancestry, their relationships with nature.

There’s Nicholas Hoel, descendant of a long line of farmers originally from Norway. Nick decides to become an artist; the family’s remarkable chestnut tree (a rare survivor of the chestnut blight that wiped out millions of trees in North America) inspires in him a fascination with nature that later turns to devotion.

The world tree Yggdrasil from Norse cosmology as depicted by Danish artist Lorenz Frølich. (Public domain.)

Or there’s Mimi Ma, engineer, ambitious firstborn daughter of a Chinese immigrant father and a mother from Virginia. Mimi finds peace and purpose in her schedule-packed life when it’s on hold—when she’s sitting under the trees near her office during lunch. Her love for nature is rooted in many childhood trips to national parks, and in the family’s mulberry tree that she and her sisters were not supposed to climb, her father’s “silk farm”.

The stories of Mimi, Nick, and the book’s many other characters eventually intersect, as they find themselves called upon to do whatever they can to challenge and confront humanity’s suicidal trajectory of growth without limits or reason.

The Overstory explores different approaches to the natural world: the scientist’s journey, the activist’s march, the programmer’s search, the artist’s ramble, the conservationist’s last stand. It does not judge our failure to act in a specific way, but our failure to notice nature and to listen.

At 502 pages (paperback edition), The Overstory is quite hefty, but I found myself breezing through it over a weekend. Like a forest, it warrants scrutiny both as a whole and in its parts, and I was quite moved by many of its intersecting stories.

My only significant criticism is that Powers repeats certain ideas and phrases—about what life wants and is, about its interdependence and brilliance—to the point of wearing them down: a bit too much tell and too little show. Still, The Overstory makes its point beautifully: it’s time to listen to nature.

Im Marvel-Film gibt es einiges an fantastischer Technik und Lebewesen zu sehen, mit einem guten Ende. Es wird gekämpft und Leute werden verletzt oder sterben sogar, weswegen der Film wohl erst ab 12 Jahren empfohlen wird. Die Figuren sind klar in gut und böse gezeichnet und wechseln das auch nicht.

Der koreanische Film zeigt, wie sich Sohn, Tochter, Vater und Mutter einer sozial wenig priviligierten Familie von einer reichen Familie im Haushalt anstellen lassen. Die Kinder sind Privatlehrer, der Vater Schofför, und die Mutter Haushälterin. Was mit einigem Witz beginnt wird mit der Zeit immer skurriler - und führt über eine Katastrofe in ein verträumtes, etwas einsames Ende. Der Film lässt sich daher etwas schwer einordnen in die klassischen Kategorien, er hat Elemente eines Familiendramas, prangert soziale Ungleichheit an, ist eine Farce mit Elementen von Horrorfilmen, auch Liebesszenen und Intrigen fehlen nicht. Die Handlung ist flüssig erzählt, und hat ein etwas saures Ende. Zum Schluss nimmt sich Regisseur Bong Joon-ho nicht mehr die Zeit Handlungsstränge wieder zusammenzuführen und lässt damit das Publikum auch über das Filmende hinaus etwas nachdenklich zurück.

Für diejenigen die DVDs mögen: Die DVD hat leider nur die Originalsprache mit einer weiteren Sprache, also nicht geeignet um deutsch - englisch zu lernen.

Schön seit einiger Zeit erfasse ich meine Bücher in inventaire.io, einem kostenlosen Webdienst zur Erfassung bibliografischer Dinge. Egal ob Bücher, Zeitschriften oder sonstige Schriften können mit diesem Dienst erfasst und verwaltet werden.

Dabei werden neben Autor und Titel verschiedene Dinge, wie Genre, Erstveröffentlichung oder die offizielle Webseite des Werkes erfasst. Darunter gliedern sich die Ausgaben des Werkes, die als eigenständiges Objekt erfasst werden. Die geschieht meist über die ISBN, welche auch bequem mit der Kamera eines Smartphones oder Tablets durch einen Strichcode erfasst werden kann. Die meisten Daten werden danach automatisch ergänzt, so das hier nur wenig Nacharbeit notwenig ist.

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