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Sunday Morning Snippets (Mostly Complaining About a TV Show) – 292/2025

Posted on 19. October 2025 / 1 Comment

Whenever I type the “day in the year” thing in the blog title my fingers want to go “2050”. Why?

Books: I ended my up in the city centre of Münster yesterday and I remembered they have a big Thalia (bookseller chain) shop there, so I went there before I drove back home. It turns out they have a whole extra shop just for English books next to the regular one. I seriously lack impulse control.

I need to rearrange my shelves at home to make space for all those books and not just stack them on top of already full shelves.

Podcasts: I read an article about the success of podcasts [€, SZ, in German] this morning and I nodded to some of the findings, didn’t agree with others. They postulate that these podcasts are often used to fill a void and to provide background noise for people. I can see that and I might use podcasts the same way sometimes. They also stated that the most successful genres are crime, comedy and cringe. I listen to neither of those. I like interviews style podcasts, I prefer female to male hosts these days, because we hear men talk everywhere all the time anyway. I’m not a big fan of the two people just chatting about stuff with each other genre.

The Diplomat: [Spoilers for Season 3, if you’re planning to watch it and haven’t yet]

I watched the final episode of season 3 this morning and still feel quite let down by where they have taken the storyline(s). Maybe that serves me right for having such high expectations for this new season. What I enjoyed about the show before was the focus on the UK / USA dynamic seen from the embassy people’s point of view and their part in it all. Season 3 shifts the focus much more on the USA / White House dynamic with their counterparts in the UK and I don’t like that as much. I watched the West Wing. Multiple times and I love the show dearly. But I don’t need a similar bit here now. The showrunners are good though at coming up with plots I did not see coming, I have to admire that. Grace, Hal and the Poseidon? WTF?!?!?

To be honest most of all I had high hopes for the Kate Wyler / Austin Dennison dynamic. I’m a shipper, but this ship seem to have sailed. Or not? They planted a bit there in the end again… I don’t know. As mentioned two days ago the thing that bugged me with Kate hooking up with a new guy – Callum Ellis – was not just that it shoved Austin out of the picture without any explanation, but the way it was done. No build up and introduction of the guy, no getting to know him (from Kate’s point of view and as audience). What does she like about him? Why is she attracted to him? Instead we get a “5 months have passed and she’s having sex with a new guy” exposition. While I’m moping: the sex we saw felt gratuitous in a “oh, let’s show how they have the hots for each other” kind of way. And if the “what about the condom?” bit was supposed to be foreshadowing to something in season 4, I’m going to scream, because then it was so poorly done. Austin meanwhile gets married impulsively to a previous girlfriend. WTAF? And Kate realizes she’s always undermining her own happiness and it’s Hal she wants after all? I’m not buying it.

Properly let down on that front. Yesterday – before I had watched the last episode – I spent at least one hour of my walk (more on that in another post later today) to basically planning out a fanfic for how I would want the Kate/Austin thing to play out. I also did sacrifice Callum Ellis (but in my case getting killed for his country), let a few years pass and Kate and Austin meet again. In my scenario Austin hadn’t married in the meantime though. Ugh… the writers made such a clusterfuck with all that.

Two Days of Snippets – 289/2025

Posted on 16. October 2025 / 0 Comment

Sleep: Not enough the night before, which led to me being super knackered yesterday afternoon. I cancelled the movie visit I had planned, got stuck in traffic on the motorway, but at least was home early-ish enough to get a decent amount of sleep. (Also managed to combine three random stories into one “snippet” for whatever kind of accomplishment that should be)

Daily Dose of AI: Using it came up at work; I might have brought it up in fact. At some point I started joking about how I grew up with using a rotary phone and only three stations on TV, but only to illustrate how old I already am and how old I feel when I think about getting used to this technology and how it will change all our lives in ways we can’t comprehend yet. An article I read in the morning compared it to the “steam engine”, which is fitting in a way. Though the steam engine changed the world in a much slower pace, I guess.

Clean Desk: Coming out of the pandemic our office started a desk sharing policy, mainly because we didn’t have enough office space for the amount of new staff we were hiring at that time. We had worked out proper plans and ‘rules’ and such; Ccean Desk and all that.We are still waiting for our movable containers / cabinets and other stuff, we actually need to adhere to a strict clean desk / desksharing directive. Everyone usually picks the same desk in the same 2-persons office. My office mate and I have been there the longest, so we are still in ‘our’ office and share our desks rarely with anyone. That’s why ‘my’ desk isn’t as clean and orderly as others. The construction work outside my office window made me change location mid-day, because it was just too loud and annoying.

Work: It’s busy. Today I’ve tried to block off time periods for certain tasks and I kept track of how I was doing with that. Turns out, I’m not good yet at properly estimating how long certain tasks might take me and I was seriously overbooking myself. It used to make me feel unorganized and bad at my job and the fact that I underestimate the time I need, is something I need to work on, I think. Because I got two big items off my to-do-list and I should consider that a win. And not beat myself up over the two other big items I had scheduled for today as well and didn’t get around to doing it. Small steps.

“The Diplomat”: I was sooo excited about this new season and have watched 4 full episodes already. I enjoyed the first episode a lot, but admit that I’m not a fan of the turn the story took then, because it takes the spotlight of the UK a bit and I’m not interested in another version of “The West Wing”. I was getting super giddy and happy during episode 4

Kate and Dennison — Someone shared “actionable intelligence”

And I started episode 5, because I wanted to know if the “actionable intelligence” plot was continuing in a way I hoped for. Just to get to a “fast forward 5 months” and a whole different setup of people! I could live with that had it been a proper weekly TV series and something like a longer break over the holidays or something. But back to back this feels off and weird. Of course things might change again over the next few episodes, but right now I feel a bit letdown to be honest.

I will still binge the rest of the series tomorrow. Obviously.

More Snippets – 287/2025

Posted on 14. October 2025 / 0 Comment

Instead of starting to gather my random thoughts I spent 10 minutes looking up WordPress themes. Every once in a while I think I might want to change things around here. Then I have a look and think…. noooo! Too much change! I can’t take that at the moment. I feel old as fuck a lot of times these days.

Sleep: Solid 7+ hours. Yay.

Coffee: From a new mug, I bought at the home textile store yesterday. It’s closing down as more and more specialised stores are these days, which is sad. I went to make good use of the “closing / sell out” discount and there wasn’t all that much stock left yet. Got a new set of towels and sheets and all. And a maritime mug. As you do…

Language & Gender Bias: Not sure if that’s a right prompt. I am an advocate to use gender specific nouns in German (or any language that has it) – like actress for a female actor – because, even though we women are supposedly always also meant to be included in the generic masculine, our brains often don’t work like that. Millenniums of patriarchy so it’s no wonder. My Daily Calm meditation this morning was a parable about a poet and a juggler. Of course I – even I – automatically pictured the male version of it and thus was surprised when the narrator mere moments later used”she” and “her” about both these persons.

Daily AI (x3): This might become a prompt category, because it is EVERYWHERE these days. Every once in a while I think I should sit down and write a long post about what I think about AI. Most of it is critical and negative and I realize a lot of it might have today that it’s new and overwhelming and I feel so old for not being well informed or experienced in using it.

#1 Yesterday I read an article about how the BKA (Germany’s central police agency) is starting to use it. They seem to be doing it quite responsibly re: personal data and which company in which country will gain access to the data. I was positively surprised, especially about what the people interviewed said about the Palantir software, which some federal states are already using. With help from Palantir staffers and without really know what happens to the data they feed in.

#2 comes from the latest newsletter of the wonderful Caroline Criado Perez. If you don’t follow her yet, what’s stopping you? Go subscribe, follow and all that.

[….] that will make everything…well, worse actually because AI is trained on existing scripts and as you may remember from Invisible Women AI doesn’t just reflect our biases back to us, it amplifies them. A lot. For example, when an algorithm was trained on an image database where pictures of kitchens were 33% more likely to have a woman than a man in them, the algorithm then went on to associate pictures of kitchens with women 68% of them. That is, it was labelling men as female simply because they were standing in a kitchen. [….]

So much more interesting – aka enraging – information about biased language on children’s TV and much more. Seriously, read and subscribe.

#3 happened during an online workshop on “plain language” this afternoon, where in the end we were asked to use AI to help us simplify our words so that people, who don’t speak much or none German or who are cognitively impaired understand what we are trying to bring across. What can I say: AI does it so much quicker and better than any human could have done. That’s the whole point, right? I’m impressed, but still not a fan. Like I said… old AF.

Privilege: I was a bit of an outsider at a workshop today, which mainly was meant for people who work with refugees, immigrants or families with such background, of which the city I work in has quite a lot. All the women – because of course this kind of social work / care work is 95% female – in the workshop seemed motivated to learn how to simplify their own language to better reach the people they want to reach. And that was heartening to see and hear. Takeaways from the workshop for me: I am so glad I live in a country where I’m fluent in the spoken language and also that I’ve had the chance to develop the skill to maybe learn another language or to work out the basics of it. Some of the exercises we did, gave us a tiny glimpse of how hard it is, if you can’t understand what’s in the letter the council is sending to you or you can’t express what you need. A privilege to be able to express these random thoughts in writing. In a different language than the one I’m actually speaking. A privilege to be able to read! For information, for education, but also for fun. Which I will keep doing after I’ve published this….