Recently in December '22

December is concluding and with it, we’re closing in the end of 2022. With the end of this month, I am writing one more retrospective about the events that have happened in my life during the past month. I am still on the fence whether or not I am writing a “year in review”. I will likely do a post for music and one for movies and TV shows with some stats. But I’m not sure I will write a generic year in review.

✍️ Website

I made quite a few updates over the last month to this website, both in terms of functionality and appearances. One of the most (in)visible changes is that I removed support for private posts, as well as login for other people. That is something I ended up not using for over a year so I thought: why not remove it.

In terms of content, I split the “Food & Drinks” section again. Now I have a section for 🥘 Food and a section for 🧋 Drinks. I think this was the right decision. I want those to be a gallery-like view of things I ate and drunk, but not together. I may change how they are displayed in the future in order to be a grid-like setting.

Inspired by Tim’s Logs, I updated my 📚 Readings, 🎬 Watches and ✏️ Articles pages. In addition, I created a new section, called 🚀 Trips. Each trip shows a listing of all the posts published during the trip. How neat is that?

Finally, I updated the way the 🗞️ Blogroll is displayed to include the favicon of each website that I follow. This was inspired by Jim’s External Links page. Sadly, it uses an API from Google. However, I may end up proxying it and caching the results in the future.

🍄 Life

Life-wise, quite a few things happened, but I’m going to be quicker on this section. For once, we finished most of the construction in the apartment. We have almost all furniture and everything is mostly settled in. In addition, we went to Aachen’s Christmas Market, where we had a lot of fun. I love Christmas Markets 🎄! In the end of the month, I spent a week at my parent’s in Portugal and it was a very nice time to meet with a lot of family that I haven’t seen in a while.

Sadly, I’m still “suffering” from my Achilles tendinitis, or tendinopathy, as I think it actually is. I will ask the physiotherapist next time. It bothers me quite a lot and I feel extremely limited. If I walk a bit more, it will hurt, the day after. That’s the thing about tendons: you never know if you’re over-exerting them. And on top of all of it: I’ve lived my all life in hilly areas and never have I had a problem like this. I move to a flat country and this happens… Let’s hope this will get fixed during the first months of 2023!

📚 Reading

I finally finished reading “The Island of Missing Trees”. I had started this book back in June, so this took a long time. Mostly because I procrastinated a while since then and basically took a months long break of reading, which is sad. Nevertheless, it was a very good book, which you can read more about in my little review.

🍿 Watching

I watched quite a few things during December. However, I want to highlight a few. In the movies department, I went to the cinema twice. The first time, I watched The Menu. I had absolutely no clue what the movie was about, but apparently, according to Wikipedia, it’s a “black comedy horror movie”. I’m not exactly sure if I would call it that, but psychological horror, definitely. It was quite nice, in the sense that it was quite unexpected and the idea behind it is quite well executed in my opinion.

The second time I went to the cinema was to watch Avatar: The Way of Water and I absolutely loved it. I watched the first movie years ago when I was a kid, so I first had to watch a recap of the first movie. The second movie is a great continuation of the first. Of course, some will enjoy it more than others, but overall it was worth it.

On the series department, I want to highlight three series. First of all, 1899. 1899 is a series from the same German studios as Dark, and you can clearly see why. Even though the story is extremely different and unrelated, the philosophy behind it, as well as the mysterious tone are highly present and connected. In addition, the multi-cultural nature of the cast was impressive, with actors from all corners of the world. I really enjoyed watching the first season of 1899 and I am thrilled for what’s coming next. I recommend it, as well as Dark, and Making 1899 for the technology behind it.

I also watched the first season of Wednesday, which follows the story of Wednesday Addams. I did not have a lot of background on the Addams Family story, but I enjoyed the execution and storyline. Also looking for the next seasons.

Finally, I want to highlight the second season of White Lotus 🪷, which follows the story of Tanya that was in the first season. It was tragic, but fun and cosy at the same time.

And this was my December in Review. I think this was my longest monthly recap I’ve ever written and I quite enjoy this format, splitting between different sections. I will likely continue to do this!