We're living in a crazy world, and it seems like it is getting crazier by the day. There's not just the climate crisis, there's not just a pandemic, still ongoing, on top of that - no, now we also have war in Europe. Friends, Romans, Countrypeople - I cannot believe it. It wasn't so long ago that I thought the one Big Historical Thing in my lifetime would be the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Iron Curtain, but no, apparently I am to live in interesting times, as are you.

I still cannot believe this is happening, and it makes me a little sad and a little despaired. It also makes me feel that the life I lead is sort of unreal in some way - that I am sitting here in comfort and safety, as much as there can be, and suddenly that safety feels really fragile. There's food on the table every day. There's friends and there's a working phone. There's running water and electricity, and all the comforts of home that we tend to take for granted. Not so far away from here, all those things were normal until a few days ago, and now they are not.

If someone decides to go to war, what can the other party do? Once things get aggressive and escalate, there will be fighting. You do not stop someone intent on hitting you with friendly words. Or words in general, including unfriendly ones, as it seems.

It's not only the war that makes me sad, though. It's also the fact that suddenly, Germany has a lot of money to spend for the army. It's a shitload of money, folks. A metric f**kton of money. Or, to give you the actual number: One hundred billion Euro. Or, in numbers: 1.000.000.000 Euro.

That's a number so large that my brain has a hard time processing it. That is so many zeros that my maths division is zeroing out.

Now... don't get me wrong - I can see that there has to be some investment into military, because humans will be humans, and there will always be some party that gets the bright idea it would be a fine thing to bash somebody else's face in. It would be a much nicer world if that were not so, but that's like wishing that yellow would be pink. I can also understand that Putin's starting a war put the fear into politicians everywhere, including here in Germany, and a sudden spike of fear will make people do things. Fear is a really strong motivator, as we probably all know from our own personal experience. But I'm still really sad that there's been discussions about better pay for service workers and care workers for more than one year, and a paltry bonus was finally agreed upon; there's been nothing done to stop the climate change because there's no money for it... and now we have a metric f**ton to spend on the army.

I sincerely hope that the war will be over soon, with as low a number of deaths as can be. I also hope that our world will get its shit together afterwards and emerge a better place. I won't hold my breath, though.

(I was debating with myself, by the way, on whether to use the nice little asterisks or not... and decided in their favour. Germans use the f-word and though it is considered pretty strong, it's not horrifyingly bad, at least not to my knowledge.)

You're probably also getting them: Loads and loads of advertisements and promises of deep discounts and insane deals, coming up on Friday, or the weekend, or all this week, even.

I think I posted a similar rant last year, and I'm kinda tired of doing it again, but... but. I will still write about this.

Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving (the US food coma holiday), and it's been made a retail and shopping madness day at some point years back. It has since spread over about all the world, and now people are getting loads and loads of ads and discounts and whatnots to tempt them into buying stuff and more stuff.

Now... I totally get the desire to have nice things, and new things. I'm not adverse to having something pretty, and having stuff is, for most of us humans, a quite basic desire. Stuff like food is a necessity, as is clothing appropriate to the time of year and climate. Then there's the social component, stuff that shows one's taste and preferences and social status. There's stuff that we need for work, stuff that we want for comfort, stuff we buy to make others happy. Stuff we get to repair other stuff. Stuff we get for future use (stash acquisition, anyone?) and stuff we get for future use though we strongly suspect while getting it that we will never actually use it.

I am, overall, fine with that. For myself, I try to stop and think before buying something new whether I will really use it, and do so in time. Do I really need this? Will it be useful? Am I sure about this? Then there's some secondary considerations, like how is it packaged? How much energy does it use? How long will it last? Can it be repaired? Does it have a fair price, and where does the money land that I pay for it - where the work has been done, or somewhere else?

Altogether, these things lead to shopping decisions that I'm usually happy with, not just after buying, but years and sometimes decades later. My thermos cup felt really expensive back when I bought it, back in 2012. I'm still very happy about the decision to get it anyways every time I pull it out of my bag to have a coffee on the road. It looks quite battered by now, but it's still working very well. Deals limited to a short amount of time, intending to put pressure on people to buy right now this instance or the opportunity will be gone make me deeply suspicious, though. As do deep discounts - because, well, if the sticker price can be discounted that far, either the seller loses money with the deep discount (which is not a smart business move), or the sticker price is way higher than it would need to be for the seller to make a decent profit. But if there's still money made with the deeply discounted price... how cheap is the item, actually, when they buy it? I'd really love to know the calculations behind these deals...

For now, though, I'll stick with not buying stuff this Friday. Just like most Fridays. Like most days, actually. And that's something I'm totally fine with.

It's been quite a while since I wrote anything about the Covid situation - partly because, during the summer, numbers were low-ish enough to ignore things, and partly because there was other stuff to write about, but mostly because I'm tired of it. Like probably everybody else is as well.

Vaccination rate in Germany is still pretty low, as opposed to new infections and incidence numbers - they are sky-high, and still skyrocketing, thanks to the politicians doing, well, exactly nothing for way, way too long. Now we have 7 day incidences of over 1000 in some areas, overfull hospitals that cannot accommodate any more patients, overfull ICUs which is a danger to anyone suffering a stroke, heart attack, or having been involved in a life-threatening accident.

And why all that? Because, obviously, not a single one of the effing people supposed to steer this country has learned just a penny's worth from the pandemic occurrences in the past two years. I'd love to say now that if anybody would act as stupidly and irresponsibly in a company, they'd be fired at a moments' notice, but unfortunately that is not true either.

The thing that I find most disquieting about all this, though - it's actually that I am so tired of the stupidity of the politicians, and so tired of all the pandemic shithappenings, and so tired of all the misinformation, that the most I can do is go "meh" and move on. Like so many others, I've become so jaded - and it frightens me. We've been living with high incidence numbers, high death numbers, high numbers of people in ICUs for so long, with the politicians always saying "ah, it's not so bad, everything is under control, everything is fine, let's loosen restrictions some more" that slowly but surely they have been losing their importance, and they just seem so normal now that it's hard to remember how scared everyone was back in the first wave, and how outraged by the passivity of the politicians in the second and third wave. And now we've come to expect them, actually, to do nothing until things are far worse than before, and then act half-heartedly and go say "but look it's even worse somewhere else" and "oh who could have known" and "somebody else is to  blame".

In July, scientists predicted an incidence number of 350 for mid-November if vaccination rate would stay at 65%. Guess what rate we had? Guess when we hit the incidence of 350? And now politicians say "well, who could have guessed that!" I just feel so taken down the garden path. I also get the impression that no matter what most of the Germans would like to see done, or changed, in the politics of the country, the guys at the rudder just blatantly ignore it. Most of us would like a general speed limit on the Autobahn... right during the pre-talks for the new coalition after the elections, the group declared that there would be no general speed limit. WHAT?

All this makes me so mad, and so tired and hopeless at the same time, that I don't know what to do anymore. So I've been ignoring things for a while, which does not make it better either - and now I'm writing about it here, because, well, not talking about it is also not an option.

So. I'm jaded now, so jaded that it frightens me, while it feels at the same time that being frightened about my own jadedness is also getting less and less each day. That probably is a very useful psychological mechanism to help survive inevitably dire situations without going insane... but unfortunately, this situation would not have been inevitable if some people would just have listened to scientists and actually did what people who know their shit recommend. I also wonder if politicians are at all able to learn from the past, or not, and if the latter, why. Why can they not do sensible things, and make sensible decisions, instead of going "oh look there's a wall straight ahead, let's hit the accelerator!"?

Sigh.

Maybe it's a little better in your bit of the world - how are you feeling?

Sorry for the blog silence yesterday - I completely forgot to post! That happens only rarely, but this year, I had the very interesting idea of scheduling workshops fairly soon after the summer break, and together with the catching up on things that is still going on... well, it totally slipped my attention. Even though "blog" is on the list of daily things to do. But just like calendars, lists are of limited use if you don't look at them...

There's quite a bit going on here at the moment, behind the scenes. There's a newsletter to write for September, I'm preparing the items for the next online sewing workshop (on October 10, and there's still spaces free if you'd like to learn about medieval stitches and seams, in German), and both of these meant taking some photos yesterday. There's also a new thing for the shop, hooray! (Which obviously needs to go in as a listing before the newsletter goes out.) Oh, and I figured out how to solve the broken image problem on the blog - they should all be back now. (For some reason, there was a 1 added to a lot of picture file names, and deleting that meant the pics, which were on the server, could be found again.)

I'm also doing some spinning tests for the next reconstruction project - a museum would like to have Bronze Age fabrics for visitors to touch, and try on garments made from them. This is a lovely project, and a wonderful task, and it means a lot of spinning, which also means a bit of test spinning. Once I have the tests finished, they will go to the weaver to see if they are suitable, and give me some feedback, and then spinning for real will start. I'm very, very excited!

Other news? The vote in Germany is over (that was last Sunday), and now we're waiting to see who is going to run (or ruin) the country for the next 4 years. Mathematically, a lot of party constellations are possible - not, unfortunately, those that I personally would have favoured most. We might still end up with the "traffic lights" - that is SPD, FDP and the Green Party, which is the one I'd prefer out of the options left. It's definitely living in interesting times...

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I a) do own a car (or, to be really correct, I own my own company, and said company owns a car, and that b) I am very fond of cycling, and will try to use the bike or public transport instead of driving whenever possible.

Car vs. Bike is, to my constant consternation, a very emotionally heated debate here in Germany. I really don't understand this - and I guess quite a lot of it is due to some anti-green propaganda. But let me explain this a bit better.

It's quite typical that, if somebody says "people could take the bike to do that" or "bikes are more sustainable than cars", someone else cries out "but you cannot forbid people to use the car, not everyone can be car-free" or "but bikes are not suitable to transport heavy goods or multiple people". Basically, what happens is the implication that everyone who is pro-bicycle, or mentions benefits from bikes wants everyone to instantly ditch their car and go by bike everywhere and for everything, no matter what.

This is definitely not true, but it happens all the time, and it's not making the situation better.

I grew up in a small town at the end of nowhere, and everybody there used the car for about everything. Children rode bikes, but as soon as you turned 17, you'd register for driving school, and you'd typically get your license on your 18th birthday (the earliest point possible back then), and then you had mobility, and freedom, and many of my peers also had their first own car then, or got use of the family car. My home town is not very bike-friendly regarding the streets, and it's a bit hilly, but both things are also not very bad, so it would be perfectly possible to cycle more than is usual there. On the other hand, there used to be next to no public transport (which has not changed much) - so for any visits to neighbouring villages or towns, you'd need a car.

Today, I live in a bike-friendly city, and we're doing all of our everyday stuff by bike. There's also decent public transport, which allows to take bikes along in the metro trains so you can use your own transport for the last mile. However, there's still the car - and I need that for going to fairs and markets, because there's just no way that I could transport all the things necessary to set up a booth in public transport. Exceptions apply, such as when I went to Dublin for WorldCon - though I had most of the booth logistics supplied by the con there. If you have to bring your own tables and seats like for most fairs, that's just straight out not possible.

So. I am fully aware of the benefits of a car - but I'm also aware of their drawbacks. Personally, I think that bikes are the best thing for mobility in many cases, and many circumstances. They are resource-friendly (and even an e-bike uses much less material and energy than a car), they keep you healthy, they are quiet and don't take up much space, it's easy to find a parking space for them just where you want to go, and for short to medium distances in daily life, especially in towns, they are faster than a car. Even for the 10-something kilometers to our regular bouldering place, it takes us just as long to go by car as it does by bike! Yes, they have limited transport capacity (though it's amazing what you can pack on if you have a bit of practise), and they do not protect you from the weather (unless you have a velomobile), but these are things where there's still the option to take a car. (Or lend a cargo bike.)

Nobody of the sane people promoting the bike as a very good option for personal transport wants everyone to stop using cars right now. All that we want is for more people to consider cycling (or walking) instead of hopping into the car more often, because every little bit helps. So it makes me very sad when the response to "more cycling" is an automatic "bikes cannot solve everything!!!!11!!". No, they cannot, but neither can cars.

And then there's e-bike bashing, too. Yes, they take more resources to make than a non-electrified bike. There's also the people looking down their noses at e-bikers, because apparently, in their minds, if you need the motor, you are a lesser person. WTF? If an e-bike means there will be more cycling instead of car driving, I'm all, all for it. I don't care for the reason that someone adds a motor to a bike, whether it's laziness or unfitness or some other physical condition or the fact that it's just more fun to go supported or the need to get somewhere reliably quickly without breaking a sweat or the desire to ride on the latest fad wave or the fact that the friends in the cycling group all have an e-bike and there's no way to keep up without one - any reason is valid. And any kilometer done by bike, whether e or not, whether it's to replace a car trip or it's a fun ride just for cycling's sake, is a good thing.

I'm done with my rant for now... but I'm curious: Have you encountered that "you want to forbid everything! go away"-phenomenon, too? Regarding cycles, or something that a green party said or promoted, where you are? And what's your opinion on the bike-vs-car thing? Let me know in the comments...