chaosworks.org

7 January 2025

From the Chronicles of Dawnmaster Aeneas, The Morninglord’s Chosen

SPOILER WARNING: This entire post contains heavy spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3, and in particular The Dark Urge origin! Proceed to read at your own peril! Written in the Year of Three Ships Sailing, 1492 DR, the following are extracts from the Chronicles of Dawnmaster Aeneas, a Bhaalspawn who was at the center of the events of the Mindflayer invasion. Together with a group of similarly lost souls, he was instrumental in the defeat of the Elder Brain that threatened to destroy Baldur’s Gate and most of the Sword Coast. Having woken up without recollection of who he was, he […]

31 December 2024

2024 and the Half-Life of a Millennial

I used to diligentially chronicle my achievements of the year in my blog, back when it was actually a somewhat active blog. With everything being quantifiable I could sure data science the shit out of my life with fancy charts of how many books I read, how many TV shows I watched, how many games I played, how many kilometers I went running, etc. While I love stats, I guess I’m getting too old for this shit and I’d rather read books in my hobbit hole than give myself more work. It was a challenging year for me. Shit blew […]

4 September 2024

A Lifetime

I was a small, clumsy human being and I still needed to find out how to navigate the world. You carried me for the first few years of my life, always with a smile on your face. But one day (or was it the evening, I think the lights were on?), when we you were standing at the kitchen window, I asked you to pick me up and carry me, and you told me that I’m getting too heavy for you to carry me. Perhaps I was looking for different way to be carried, because some time after that, I […]

7 July 2024

Quitting social media (mostly)

About a month ago, I stopped using almost all of my social media (with the exception of Instagram). It’s been an interesting month and I still have mixed feelings about it. I’ve been using Twitter since around 2008, so I’ve been there since its early days. I stopped using Twitter actively a little bit before it was acquired by the Muskrat, and once that happened, I deactivated my account there and moved first to Mastodon, and later also to Bluesky. I have not particularly enjoyed Twitter for a long, long time even before it went to shit. Twitter (and its […]

4 June 2024

Eight years of pen pals

About eight years ago, I revived a very old hobby of mine: writing letters. I used to have a few pen pals when I was a kid in the nineties. Back then, my pen pals were in particular another kid who used to come to my parents’ farm back when we had a vacation apartment business. But with the rise of the internet in the 00s, that hobby fell out of fashion and I lost touch with all of my pen pals. I made new friends on the internet and my primary form of long-distance communication became ICQ and the […]

2 April 2024

Lord of the Rings: 20 Years Wiser

Lord of the Rings is such a vast and epic topic, where to even begin? And what can I write about it that hasn’t been written about it yet? I’d just like to share my own personal experience with this work of art, as I do so often here in this blog. I first became fully aware of the Lord of the Rings around 2000 or 2001, as the marketing for the first movie was starting to gain momentum. I was but a naïve teenager back then and I had very little contact with these books aside from having seen […]

7 March 2024

Fargo: A retrospective of five stories

With the new season having been on the horizon, I decided to (re)watch almost all of Fargo this January. Yesterday my journey culminated in the phenomenal finale of Season 5, and all I can say is: this TV show is absolutely brilliant (mostly). But let’s backtrack a little. Fargo is an anthology show in which every season tells an entirely different story (set in the same universe as the 1996 movie). Thus, each season feels vastly different, and there are very notable fluctuations in quality. What unites them are not only certain characters and cameos, but also the overall vibe […]

23 February 2024

Propaganda and polyamory: Revisiting the Hunger Games

Prompted by having read the prequel novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I recently decided to re-read the Hunger Games novels. First of all, I was curious about the prequel – how can a prequel about the villain of the series tie in? The prequel tells the (love) story of a teenage Coriolanus Snow, who later becomes president (dictator would be the more appropriate term) of Panem. What an odd book to read, because how can you make a novel about an entitled narcissist, who treats people like possessions, possibly compelling? While his rise to patriotism is sometimes interesting, […]

21 January 2024

History repeats itself, as seen in “Berlin: City of Light”

Last week on a whim, I bought the third book in the series of graphic novels Berlin by Jason Lutes. I read the first one in university 10 years ago, and bought the second one a couple of years later. I always had at the back of my mind that one day maybe I should read the third one, which back then wasn’t released. Acquiring the third book prompted me to re-read all of them, and I’m glad I did (but also a bit sad). This story as a whole gives us a glimpse into Berlin in the years 1928 […]