https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/mary-beard-on-caesar%2C-augustus-%26-zuckerberg

Let’s talk about the episode with Veronika Grimm. It goes entirely as expected. Ronzheimer gives Grimm a bunch of easy passes that allow her to spout the talking points the German government has been pushing about the economy.

Grimm and the government want everybody to work more for less money. The threat is that if we don’t, the economy will become even more uncompetitive than it already is.

We’ve heard them rant against people who are working part-time. Nothing is going to change because of these rants. It would be better to examine why people need to work part-time and try to figure out solutions. The vast productivity and effectiveness gaps present in almost every German company and institution need to be fixed by investment, not papered over by pushing people to work more hours.

Doing any of these of course requires a politics based on changing something. That’s not something this German government can do.

But what takes the cake is Grimm also suggesting to roll back the “telephone sick note” to increase productivity in Germany. Me dragging myself to the doctor’s office on Monday morning and waiting three hours to get a piece of paper is really going to make the country more productive.

With thinking like this we’ll never get a better economy. In the Netherlands sick notes do not exist and working part-time is incredibly common. Last I checked they are doing better than Germany on all fronts.

https://pca.st/episode/08560107-9341-42b6-b177-13cdff827e06

Sports and Health

#

It was a year where I didn’t seriously injure myself and could continuously practice sports. That’s already a huge improvement.

I started going to the gym regularly in the evenings after the kids are sleeping. After some initial hesitance I started doing barbell exercises. The goal is to squat and deadlift at least my bodyweight of 75kg. I’m inching this up very slowly and am currently at 40kg.

Going to the gym is made possible by my Fitbod subscription. Exercising regularly is much easier, if I don’t have to think or plan what I’m going to do. That means either a human or an app should tell me what I need to do. Given that the gym is paid for by my work, I can justify the steep monthly cost of Fitbod (here’s a 14-day guest pass).

I’m doing winter cycling on the trainers at the gym while I debate whether I should get one for at home. That makes me one of those crazy people who wears a chamois to the gym.

It was a great year for cycling. I bought a proper road bike, the Bianchi 2024 Sprint ICR and I managed to join group rides (mostly those of the MAAP LAB Berlin) more or less weekly without having a single mechanical or crash. knocks on wood

But then during a solo ride in the last week of the year I managed to slip and fall over. More than the minor damage to my knee and my carbon frame, it was my ego that was bruised.

Studies

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I read a bunch of papers (one write-up) around LLMs and found the field to be overhyped. I don’t think that single percentage point increases in performance and conversions of BFS algorithms into LLM prompts are worth writing up. Things are moving so quickly that you can’t sit around waiting for breakthroughs to make their way into the literature.

Learning Japanese continues and I’m now at Wanikani level 22. I’m not sure what my next goal is going to be. After my trip to Japan my motivation is somewhat on the rocks.

The main problem is that once you start studying Japanese, you cannot stop. I’m not stopping, but I’m dialing it down to maintenance mode.

Books

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I already posted about how bad of a year 2025 was for reading. Not sure whether I’ll find the time to do better next year.

Movies and TV

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I’ve moved the tracking of everything that I watch over to Trakt saying goodbye to Letterboxd.

Just like with fitness, I need an app that will tell me exactly what I need to do right now. Without it, I’ll very easily lose track of this. Trakt is excellent at this and offers it in the free version. I pay for premium to get some of the more advanced list management versions.

The movies I watched in 2025:

• Wicked
• Moana 2
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Lilo & Stitch
• KPop Demon Hunters
• Encanto
• The Greatest Showman

Trakt tells me that’s 901 minutes spent on movies.

Wicked was lovely on the big screen. Of the kids movies I watched: KPop Demon Hunters is impeccable, Moana 2 was unnecessary, Encanto was strangely forgettable, Lilo & Stitch not as bad as I would expect. The Greatest Showman may be flawed but it is full of bangers.

The tv series I watched in 2025:

• Bluey S3
• The Wheel of Time S2
• The Bear S1+S2+S3+S4
• Neon Genesis Evangelion
• Dennou Coil
• Asura
• Cyberpunk Edge Runners
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes S1
• Heated Rivalry S1
• Kaiju No.8 S1

All of these were spectacular and interesting in their own way. The Bear really meshes with so many things I like and like to do. Asura is effectively just a very long Kore-eda movie. LotGH is peak.

Trakt tells me that this is 4567 minutes spent on episodes. It’s clear who’s the winner here.

Games

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I don’t really track this anymore, but what I can note are the following.

Expedition 33 was a highlight. I saw it on Tiktok and immediately knew I had to experience it. Not having a console I played it via cloud gaming on my Macbook.

Playing a parry/dodge game over a cloud setup is pure masochism, but with difficulty set to easy, it was kind of doable. The gameplay loop is satisfying but after a while the level design formula gets a bit tedious. What stood out were the music¹, the writing and the major set pieces in the boss battles and in the environment.

Critical Role started their campaign 4 and having followed the online RPG scene through Tiktok clips for a while now, I decided to see what the fuss was about. The first episode together with the rest of the ouverture is spectacular. It’s a narrative victory of setup, emotions, reveals and backstabbing. I’m not sure if they’ll stick the landing, but for now I’m very much bought in.

I’ll have to delve into what makes this worthwhile. For now I can point to two things. There is an element of let’s play parasociality that you have with any game stream or impro podcast. Add to that a very meticulously brewed high fantasy setting that’s better than what we get on television: open ended runtime, infinite production values, no cancellation after one or two seasons.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was discounted and became the game we played during the Christmas break. I led exploring the city on Mount Qaf with my kids on a lower difficulty following right on my heels.

It’s a great game where the platform mechanics continue to layer on top of each other together with some very nasty puzzles bordering on the outright sadistic. I’m super proud to see the grit and skill my kids have shown because easy only affects combat, not the platforming.

Persia provides a vast and mostly unknown to us landscape of culture, artifacts and mythology to serve as backdrop for this game. A lot of it is undoubtedly historically not accurate, but that does not make it any less nice to look at.

Podcasts

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The two podcasts I listen to most consistently are Ones and Tooze and Past Present Future. Those are both remnants of my Talking Politics period². Maybe I should add Helen Thompson’s podcast as well and have a full lid?

Other than that I semi-regularly listen to:

• The Adam Friedland show
• The Catskills Podcast
• Cortex
• Developer Voices
• Escape Collective (only during the Tour)
• Feminist Shelf Control
• KALT’ın Podacst’ı
• Oxide and Friends
• Podcast Filosofie
• De Shitshow
• Stavy’s World
• Vergecast

I more or less stopped listening to Trashfuture finding the jokes and the commentary repetitive and boring.

Travel

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It was a much better year for travel than most years before this.

London was a work trip in spring and it was one of my best London trips ever. I stayed in Chelsea, I cycled everywhere, drank lots of great coffee, ate a ton of great food, went to a club, went to a play on the West End. I did so much and there’s so much left to do. I don’t know what took me so long to appreciate London like this.

Iceland was the first trip we took our kids on a plane and then round tripped the island on our way to the family horse farm. Iceland is lovely but empty. Not sure what would make me go back there other than to visit family or if I could do some hard hiking/cycling/riding.

Japan drove me crazy with reports from everybody and their mother visiting so I had to go. After missing the summer window, I booked for November not knowing that that’s one of the best months to visit Japan. I walked the Ise-ji for a large chunk and then I ran around Tokyo for a couple of days. It was even better than all the social media.

Iceland and Japan in the same year is low-key ridiculous but this was also the year at work where I get 20 consecutive extra holidays.

End

#

Lots more things to cover that happened in 2025 but for now this will have to be it. Despite some marked down periods, all in all it was a good year. On to a much better 2026.

(This update has been delayed for a week because I fell quite ill just as the new year came around.)

This particular video was going around on German twitter and all the usual suspects were letting themselves get baited by it including above mentioned Friedemann. I wrote about their podcast previously and I couldn’t resist so I confronted him on it.

So I got blocked.

I mean “obsessive”, sure. Being a major league hypocrite is one of the best ways to bait me.

I did listen to this podcast very regularly but after October 7th it’s become so absurdly pro-Israel that it invalidates their entire previous position. The only situation where I’ve seen people parrot a line so hardcore like that was Dutch men with Russian wives after Putin had just invaded the Crimean Peninsula (“You have to understand Putin has a point.”).

Fragment from around 45:00 clipped below:

“We got quite a lot of shit for doing that actually. Not entirely popular with my German colleagues. ‘Nicht zum Volkskörper zugehörig’ is a phrase that was used. ‘Wie trauen sie sich ein solches Urteil zu.’ Not belonging to the body politic of Germany. How dare you make a judgement like that. We don’t have any reason to regret it. We were clearly right.

https://pca.st/78n4b82o#t=2755.0

He also mentions that Germany is debt unconstrained and could borrow much more than it is doing right now to fix its broken infrastructure but won’t do it because of stupid politics.

https://pca.st/y64j6vk4#t=1108.0

Tooze talking for five minutes about the difference between European and American academic traditions. Excuse the low quality but my Wordpress has a 2MB file limit.

That is what we were training people to do to write essays which had powerful attack, big full body and a conclusive finish and ideally you’d have a student who could make a whole bouquet of different essays across 5-6 exam papers, 3 essays per paper, 15 different essays and what you would want is a student who could really modulate across that range of essay writing types.

And another one:

The formula of British economics, French politics and German philosophy is the tried formula for making Marxists and that’s basically —though that’s not my politics— that’s basically the frame within which I understand comprehensive intellectual engagement with modernity. It requires those three elements:

• You need to have a sophisticated political grip
• You need to have a philosophy of history which in the German sense of course comes from Hegel
• You have to understand capitalism otherwise you’re stuck

https://pca.st/bv0k67fk#t=639.0

https://piratensenderpowerplay.podigee.io/155-neue-episode

I have pretty much had it with podcasts and won’t bother with them unless the content or the speaker are really really good. I’m talking Malcolm Gladwell- or Bruce Sterling-good.

I don’t have the time (who has?) to drudge through hours and hours of keynotes of mindless executives or startup drones going on and on about how their product is going to revolutionize the industry.

Make your argument in a one page writeup and blog it. If it is interesting I’ll pick it up and scan it in due course.

De meeste podcasts hebben wel boeiende onderwerpen maar het blijven mensen die een eindje slap in de ruimte lullen. Temminste als de Daily Shoulder Complaint van Adam Curry een indicatie is.

De podcast van de stadsdichters is een voorbeeld van een schaars goed (dichters die voordragen) met een beperkte doelgroep (ik bijvoorbeeld) dat nu met behulp van dit nieuwe medium ontsloten en gepubliceerd wordt voor een groot publiek. Daarnaast is het blog dat erbij hoort handig als community en agenda.

De auteursrechten liggen natuurlijk nog steeds bij de dichters maar iets zegt me dat ze het helemaal niet erg vinden als zoveel mogelijk mensen hun gedichten horen.