Welcome to 2024, everyone! I hope you had a good slide into the new year — “Guten Rutsch!” as we say in Germany. One of the reasons you didn’t hear from me in a while is that I spent a wonderful week in the frozen wastes of the Dales, in Sweden, surrounded by paper books, paper notebooks and with my phone and laptop turned off.

After stopping by some friends in the north of Germany on the way back, I have now returned to my computer refreshed and with much energy and many new ideas for the coming year.

One of these ideas entails that I will, with renewed conviction, endeavour to spend less time on social media and more time writing on this blog. I’ve been trying, for quite a while, to have notes likes these replace the things I usually post on social media. So please, if you are interested in my projects and the things I write, follow this blog – for example by plugging its RSS feed into your feed reader instead of relying on my social profiles on other sites. And if you got any comments or ideas for improvements, please use the comment function under each post — for notes like this one and other smaller snippets, you will have to visit the post’s permalink to do so. You can also comment directly on the forum, of course.

Other plans for the coming year include finally finishing my novel and more regular streams, including a fixed day for the recording and live streaming of episodes of my podcast The Private Citizen. More on this in another post soon.

I wish all readers of my blog a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2024! I hope you have a relaxing time during the holidays and enjoy yourselves as much as you can.

After finishing my emotes, Pewy has now also finished the avatar I’ve commissioned. I love it very much! Thanks, Pewy!

Wow. That was fast. My Discourse hoster Communiteq has fixed my issue of Discourse comment embeds not working. It was indeed a bug in the most recent stable Discourse update. They’ve patched it on my forum instance.

I’m having some issues with the Discourse embeds that are supposed to include forum threads as a commenting feature. Currently, I am suspecting a recent Discourse update. But I really don’t know what has gone wrong. Please have patience with me while I try to fix this. And if you can help, please get in contact …on the forum?

The amazing Pewy has created three emotes for me and I absolutely love how they turned out! They will be deployed immediately on my Twitch channel and I’ll use them here on the blog as well, of course. I am so happy about this!

“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things."

— Rainer Maria Rilke

I wish all of my readers a Happy New Year! May you have a glorious party or a relaxing evening tonight; whaterver you prefer. See you in 2023!

Please be aware that I won’t be posting much on this blog in February. I’m taking the month off to try and finish my novel to do justice to the grant I have received from the German government for this goal. This is something I’m going to call Grim February.

You will find updates about how I am doing with this on the Grim Deep blog and my author account on Twitter.