In an effort to cut down on my mobile apps usage, especially of those apps that save tracking data, I’ve deleted Strava from my phone. I had previously used Strava to log my exercises publicly. If you want to still follow my efforts to get – and stay – fitter, you can now go to this page, where I will be maintaining a detailed personal log of my exercises.
I had Midjourney generate a few fox wizard images for me. Some of these turned out pretty nice:
It took a while for the idiocy of Musk to resurface after he, for once, did something good in the world. But now, he‘s gone and killed the Twitter Files project because of a competing social network feature that will never take off… Or, as Taibbi puts it in his inimitable way:
„I’ve done a lot of drugs and can’t remember ever reaching that level of paranoia.“
I also think Taibbi is right in stopping to use Twitter. They censored visibility filtered me too, so I should really try to do the same thing.
It’s not personal. I just can’t drive traffic for any site that’s censored me. These companies depend on our content to make money, and for years we’ve been rewarding all their dicking around with engagement and reality by handing them more eyeballs to sell. Frankly if all accounts walked away in these situations, the platforms would have to cut this nonsense out pretty quickly.
→ Meet the Censored: Me?, Racket News
Episode 150 of The Private Citizen will be delayed – probably well into next week. I am very sorry about this. Especially considering I had originally planned to record and release it last Wednesday. But last week was incredibly stressful, with little sleep, as my wife was on call and busy with three heart transplants in the middle of the night in one week. And then this week is very busy for me and I feel a cold coming on for good measure.
I continue to be behind on my episode schedule and the topics I need to talk about are piling up like there is no tomorrow. But I promise, I will fix this at some point. Somehow.
I’ve recently released two podcast episodes on the most plausible scenario of the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage. This has been largely ignored in the legacy press, probably for fear what would happen to the US relations with Germany should this theory prove to be true.
→ The Private Citizen 148: An Act of War
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, US President Biden authorised a plan to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines, which the US military executed last summer under cover of the BALTOPS 22 exercise.
→ The Private Citizen 149: The Nord Stream Cover-Up
To cover up Seymour Hersh’s report, the CIA planted a fake story about the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage with the press. Chancellor Scholz might even have discussed this cover-up with President Biden in person.
Microsoft Flight Simulator Crashes Because of Capture One
If you have MSFS installed alongside the Capture One photo editing application, a weird Windows DLL bug causes the game to crash to desktop without any warning or error report. Here’s how you can fix it.
Holy shit! The soundtrack of one of my favourite games, Disco Elysium, is finally on Spotify! I have no idea when that happened, because as I already own that soundtrack, I didn’t check regularly. But I am so glad more people have access to this wonderful album by British Sea Power1 now.
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They renamed themselves Sea Power in 2021, but just like with Prince or the Dixie Chicks, I refuse to acquiesce to this kind of stupidity. ↩︎
I’ve read a lot about what J.K. Rowling has said. People have likewise told me a lot of things that J.K. Rowling has said. But funnily enough, when I then went and listened to J.K. Rowling, she never quite said these things. She said some things that I don’t agree with and others I do very much agree with. But she never said these terrible things people told me about. This leads me to believe that most people actually have no idea what J.K. Rowling actually stands for.
If you want to find out and if you’re not afraid to think for yourself and challenge some of the bullshit people believe and write about, listen to this podcast where she’s interviewed – quite critically, actually – by Megan Phelps-Roper, who’s a remarkable person with a remarkable story in her own right. Believe me, this is an hour worth investing if you care about the truth of things.
Blizzard Is Setting up a Home Run With Diablo IV
A review of the Diablo IV beta and what it means for the long-awaited new instalment in the Diablo series coming in June.
I’ve streamed about 9 hours of Diablo IV yesterday, taking my sorcerer from Level 12 to 21 in the Open Beta. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s shaping up to be a really solid game!
Last month, I recorded a podcast episode on some research by Dr Anthony Fauci reporting on SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in a highly respected medical journal:
→ The Private Citizen 146: Vaccines Were Never Going to Stop the Pandemic
Dr Anthony Fauci, for a long time the man in charge of the US response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, has now admitted that vaccines have failed to stop the spread of the disease and were never likely to.
Interestingly, LinkedIn was of the opinion that this was misinformation. I understand how this judgement came to pass, but it is obviously total nonsense. So I released another episode, reporting on it:
→ The Private Citizen 147: LinkedIn Says Fauci is Spreading Misinformation
Horribly broken content moderation practices at LinkedIn make the Microsoft-owned social network actively hostile to scientific progress and press freedom, it seems.
I actually pre-recorded the next episode of the podcast a while ago, but haven’t had any time to release it until now. It should be out later today. Please excuse the delays on this!
I’ve been working on a more detailed map for my D&D campaign setting. It is far from finished, but here’s a work in progress:
End-World Adventures
A short introduction to the Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting I am working on.
A few days ago, I recommended the Traveler’s Notebook to my friend Halefa, who was looking for a notebook to use as a D&D campaign journal. She has now bought one and wrote a very in-depth blog post on her setup and plans for the notebook, which is well worth a read:
→ Using a Traveler’s Notebook as TTRPG campaign journal, Halefa.com
I’ve published my second in-depth Star Trek TOS review today, on the episode “Charlie X”:
→ Girls in Space Be Wary, Mission Critical Ops
Around 18:00 CET today, I will try to put a kerbal into the orbit of Kerbin. I will be streaming the mission live on Twitch again. Please be patient if the streams starts late, I am going to try and work out some of the performance issues I’ve been having with the game before I go live.
I’ve put the whole recording of my first Kerbal Space Program 2 stream on Youtube.
After heavy initial problems getting this game to not kill the performance of my computer and being able to stream it, and hours of problems in game getting into orbit and actually decoupling the satellite, I finally achieved success at the end of the stream. It made me so proud!
Today, at 16:00 CET, I will stream the start of the Fab Space Industries Bumblebee mission, where we’re trying to put a satellite into the orbit of Kerbin in Kerbal Space Program 2. Check it out on Twitch.
Ten years after the first Fab Space Program, I’m going back to space. Tomorrow afternoon, Fab Space Industries will launch its first mission in Kerbal Space Program 2. We are aiming for a mission launch around 16:00 CET. The plan is to design an unmanned rocket, do some test flights and finally – hopefully – put a satellite in orbit of Kerbin.
If you want to be a part of this historic occasion, join the Twitch stream at around 16:00 CET and hang out. KSP 2 is still extremely buggy, so there will probably be many hilarious accidents and crashes.