chaosworks.org

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 […]

16 January 2024

Fear of the personal

This sounds silly from someone having a personal blog, but I’m sometimes having a hard time writing personal things on my blog. How ironic, right? I think this fear stems from having written a mountain of incredibly cringey personal things in the first incarnations of my blog, having made very complicated social experiences in the past, and to some degree, from where I’m from. I used to write literally just what I was thinking in my blog between 2005 and 2008 (and also before that, but on a web 1.0 website rather than a blog). This was a completely disorganized […]

1 December 2023

Evolving as a DnD player through characters

A few years ago, I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons. While initially I was skeptical that this would be for me, especially since I’m very bad at acting and always felt awkward about it, I’ve grown to enjoy it very much. I think I evolved a lot through the characters that I have created, and with each new character, I learned a lot and became better and better at this. I’ve played quite a few characters over the years, some of which I have grown very attached to. Time to reminisce! Here, I’m presenting my evolution through my characters. […]

18 November 2023

A novel development

It’s been a very long time since I read novels out of my own free will. Having been forced to read some pretty annoying stuff during my time studying literature made me lose interest in this medium. Even though some of the books I read for uni were undoubtedly good, I can’t say that they were really my style or my type of book. Margaret Atwood comes to mind. The Handmaid’s Tale is a brilliant dystopian novel, just my kind of stuff, but some of the other things I read from her – nice, but not really my thing. So […]

8 August 2023

Raiders of the Serpent Sea Character Sheet (A5)

I will be starting to play in a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign soon(ish), and one of the things I always wanted to improve about my own DnD experience was the character sheet. The basic DnD one is too unflexible for me, and even though I really always wanted to re-make it in InDesign, I never had the patience for it during past campaigns. The last campaign that I played, which was Ancient Greek-themed, actually came with a gorgeously beautiful themed character sheet – Odyssey of the Dragonlords. That one I did import to InDesign, and filled it out in […]

17 July 2023

Back back on the horse

Long time readers of my blog might recall my post Back on the horse from 12 years ago. I recommend reading that post for some necessary background information on my history with horseback riding and owning my own horses back in the day. Well, by now it’s been a very long 24 years since I had my own horse, Daisy, and it’s been 12 years since I last rode a horse during the lessons I mentioned in my previous post on this topic. I didn’t actually continue to go riding at the place that I went to 12 years ago […]