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"Spring is upon us!"

GIF: Butterfly Well, almost. Officially, spring begins on March 20th; and at the time of setting this website up, it is not yet that time. And remember that all of this is only true if you are in the Northern Hemisphere! We are still in winter as of now; but that is the perfect time to grab a hot chocolate and prepare a little celebratory subpage to get really excited for the blossoming season! In fact, here is a little countdown to the official dawn of spring on March 20th, 2023: GIF: Butterfly

Sorry, your browser does not support JavaScript enough to display the countdown timer. ... That's kinda cool though!

Springtime Badges

I have created some spring-themed 88x31 badges for anyone to use if they want to!

I'd also thank the community over at the 32-bit Café for the idea for this page; this subpage is an official entry to their little springtime 2023 website contest:

Springtime Mini Recipes

With fresh vegetables coming back in style during Spring, I have written down some super easy spring-themed mini recipes! ... I don't really know which ingredients are in season in spring, but I tried my best to at least make them fit the aesthetic. Pah!

Tomato-Feta Molten Pasta

Photograph: Pasta with tomato-cheese melt over it

You will need:

~500g really small tomatoes/"cherry tomatoes"
A ~200g package of feta cheese
A copious amount of garlic
250gs pasta
Salt, pepper, basil, olive oil; other herbs if you want, like oregano.
Some small container for the oven

Start off by washing the tomatoes and draining the feta cheese of its water. Yeet all of the tomatoes into the container; if you got the right size, they should loosely cover the entire floor like this without stacking (much). Season with olive oil, pepper and salt; other herbs and spices are welcome, like oregano and basil. Chop up some garlic and spread it all over. Put the entire block of feta cheese on top in the middle. Season lightly again so the feta also gets some! Now, pre-heat the oven to about 230°C before putting the prepared container in if you're that kind of person, or just put it in the oven directly at that temperature if you don't care for pre-heating.

Now wait. When the little oven guys have been baking for about half their allotted time (it will take around 25 minutes total, it's ready when the feta has gained nice and golden brown rims), put up some saltwater for the noodles and cook them until they're nice and soft. Finally, they should finish at around the same time; drain the pasta, take out the container from the oven (caution: hot!), and mix the ingredients in the container together. Don't be afraid to smash the cheese and tomatoes and grind them all a bit together; it's gonna be like sauce!

Serve the tasty molten mix over the pasta and garnish with fresh basil leaves if you feel fancy. Voilà!

Goodbye Winter: Photo Gallery

When planning this site, I originally conceptualized a little photo gallery showcasing the advent of spring in my neighborhood: blossoming plants, trees regaining their leaves, frolicking birds, love and romance all around us. But as nature and climate change both willed it, it had just started to snow for the first time this winter, and it was decidedly not spring yet: the trees are still barren and brown, the skies grey and nature has not begun to regenerate in any way. The birds are back, surely, but they struggle adapting to the cold temperatures. Plants idle under layers of frost and ice, and cloudy skies give way to drab rainclouds and sharp winds. GIF: Butterflies

Of course I could have gone and taken some macro photographies cherry-picked from the places around me to find a little spring blossom regardless, something to conceal the depressive looks around me: If I had wanted to, I surely would have found something pleasant and whimsical. But is that not dishonest? Perhaps we should start appreciating nature as it really is, not relying on archetypes and aesthetics that do not take shape in real life very often.

So, what I decided to do instead was to take photographies of nature around me as it was - drab, interrupted by human structures and trash, faded, wilting, gray. I found it to be a fairly interesting case study in how much a winter landscape mirrors a particularly rundown urban landscape: joyless, unappreciated, fever dream-ish. These pictures express this fairly decently. Of course, to accentuate the effect, I decided to also take pictures not with a fancy digital camera but with the inbuilt camera of my Nokia E90 Communicator flipphone from 2007, which gives all of them a familiar color grading, and added various minor visual effects like dithering and color correction to express the mood better.

Enjoy:

Photograph: Branches of cotton in front of a purple cloudy sky

Photograph: Sad looking white flowers on a leaf-filled ground

Photograph: Windy stone path through a natural area with a bridge in the distance

Photograph: Unnaturally saturated reddish trees in front of a blue sky

Photograph: A badly cropped tree with wilted leaves standing in front of a wooden sign with grey living quarters in the background

Photograph: Dry brown leaves stuck in branches

Photograph: Berries growing on a wilted bush with discarded leaves stuck all over it; green rundown structure in the background

Photograph: Spherical black spiky plants growing in the foreground in front of a grey cement wall with a strip of sad lawn in front of it

Photograph: Very low resolution photo of an industrial chimney in the background, framed by an old hedge, a dead tree and some housing

Photograph: Looking out of a window whose frame also frames the image; with metal gating in front of it, looking at a graffitied house while snowflakes grace the air