Do you need high quality news articles on highly technical topics written quickly in English or German? If you do, you can now hire me on Fiverr:

→ I will write easily understandable news stories on complex technical topics

Strava has just alerted me to my running totals for 2021 and I’m pretty happy with how the year went. I managed to run 861 kilometres in total last year, which is up from 792 kilometres in 2020. I’ve also been running my 20 kilometres a week with 8 kilograms of ballast for several months. But I’m probably most proud of how regularly I went running – in the dark, in the cold, in the rain and even in snow. The only times my streak got broken was during two holidays and the 12 days that the three SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations knocked me out for. Other than that, I went running incredibly regularly.

I’ve just released the last episode of The Private Citizen for the year. In this episode I recap the 52 other episodes I’ve recorded during 2021. It’s a very good episode to figure out what episodes you’d be interested in going back to if you haven’t listened to them for whatever reason.

I’m very glad that I’ve once again hit my goal of releasing an episode a week of the show on average over the year.

→ The Private Citizen 103: The Year 2021 in Review

A look back at the second year of the show, through the lens of the topics covered and the things discussed.

If you want to get notified automatically when new episodes of The Private Citizen are released, you can subscribe to the show via a number of methods:

Last night, I released the 100^th episode of my privacy and politics podcast The Private Citizen. This was a very special occasion for me as it marks only the second time one of my podcasts reached that mark (I’m discounting c’t Uplink here as I was only one of team of people who created that show).

To celebrate, I recorded a different kind of episode where I tell listeners a little bit about my life and the things in my past that made me what I am today.

→ The Private Citizen 100: Let Me Tell You a Bit about Myself

For the one-hundredths episode of this show, I’m telling the story of who I am, where I was born and how I was brought up, in the hope that it will help you understand my place in the world and my biases as a basis for further episodes.

If you want to get notified automatically when new episodes of The Private Citizen are released, you can subscribe to the show via a number of methods:

Holy shit! Space Marine II is coming! The first game was one of my favourite console games and the only video game ever that actually made you feel like you are an Astartes. If Skyrim hadn’t come out in the same year, it would’ve probably been my game of the year in 2011. I’ve always wanted a sequel and I’m very glad we’re getting it. I’m a bit worried it isn’t made by Relic, but at least Saber seems to understand how integral visceral chainswords were to the first game.

My latest vlogs from last week and the one from yesterday:

Yes. I am totally putting this in my novel. It is my novel, so go fuck yourself! #NaNoWriMo

Today, I tried streaming my daily NaNoWriMo effort for the first time. It worked amazingly well! I had no idea it would motivate me that much. Thanks, Halefa, for giving me the idea to try this!

Here’s the vlog from earlier this morning:

Here’s the second episode of the Captain’s Log from last night:

I’m starting a video blog again. The first episode of the Captain’s Log explains why and how. New episodes every weekday, if I can manage.

Notes on Deathloop #9

I found this very intriguing Reddit thread on Deathloop’s lore (it’s obviously full of spoilers). There’s some crazy shit in there. And apparently Deathloop is part of the Dishonored universe after all! Looks like I’ll have to play Dishonored again at some point.

Because of my time in Spain and because I’ve plunged myself head-on into work afterwards, I haven’t been posting regularly about new Private Citizen episodes. If you’ve missed some because of that, you’ll have to play some catch-up now:

→ The Private Citizen 87: Afghaniscam?

14 September 2021

You expect me to believe that the best funded, best trained, best organised and most experienced military in history left military arms behind in a hasty retreat that are worth more than the annual military budget of all but two countries on the globe? Seriously?

→ The Private Citizen 88: Jamaican Traffic Lights

6 October 2021

Will the recent German federal election be followed by time of horrible uncertainty, that is will it be the country’s Brexit moment, or is it actually a good thing? This episode discusses the election result and gives a historic explainer of the German parliamentary system.

→ The Private Citizen 89: The Cult of the Vaccine

11 October 2021

How can the hope of a new drug that might help fight COVID-19 get turned into bad news? Bad journalism, that’s how. Let’s look at how Matt Taibbi breaks it down in his exemplary writing on the topic.

→ The Private Citizen 90: Blowing the Wrong Whistle

13 October 2021

What’s more in your interest? Stopping Facebook from leeching off the private data of your life to further its monopoly or forcing it to censor your speech? And now take a guess which of the two politicians want to do and journalists are ecstatic about?

If you want to get notified automatically when new episodes of The Private Citizen are released, you can subscribe to the show via a number of methods: