June. The halfway point. Like clockwork, the year marches on unimpressed by day-to-day shenanigans. I keep on standing on the sidelines, watching the scenery move past me. No, that’s not quite it. That’s the wrong image. I am still on the train but I have misplaced my ticket and there are no destination displays anywhere to be found. “The journey is the destination”, I tell myself. The meanings of “journey” and “destination” however becomes quite unclear when it feels like one is constantly being tugged in a direction that does not look very promising.

So, all this to say: I am turning to move forward again. I spent a lot of time in June figuring out what is blocking me, and quite a bit of time to remove those blockers. What’s annoying me most is that I don’t dedicate as much time as I would need for happiness toward coding and my main creative outlets - composing music and 3D modelling. I also felt constantly behind on what’s going on in the world.

Acknowledging that creative output works best with a hungry but rested mind, I tackled the latter first and finally got on to setup a FreshRSS instance for myself. It is ridiculous that I do this kind of infrastructure setup all day at work but when it comes to my own stack, I somehow forget that this is a skill I gained. Now, FreshRSS seems like a good solution for the server side, but frankly, that web client? It’s horrendous. Me being me I did not arrive at that conclusion by accident. I didn’t intend to use that web client for more than the few necessary admin-y tasks now and then. Back in the day, when Google Reader (R.I.P.) still existed, I discovered the wonderful Reeder app by Silvio Rizzi. After a lot of procrastination and also a few bits of unexpected setup struggle I finally have a feed reader system again. This is a problem now. I loved a lot of blogs back in the day. Most of those died. I’m excited to find out what new things I will discover and what old magic I will fall in love with all over again.

Other than that, June was uneventful. Apparently, we’re having the wettest year since the beginning of regular weather recordings something like 150 years ago. It saddens me that most of this rainfall does not have a chance to really soak into the earth since the landscapes around Berlin have been so deprived over the decades. It’s no one’s fault in particular, everything happened for a reason, but we as a people need to act now. Not everything is broken. Just technology.