LostFocus

Hi, I'm Dominik Schwind, friend of the internet. And this is my blog.

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2025-W15: Ch-Ch-Changes

Deep into April, here we go.

I went to the office in Köln for meeting some people in person that I’m suddenly working with. The small-ish agency I work at is in the final staged of total assimilation into the bigger company that bought it a couple of years ago and we really start to feel that in the last few months. And it’s quite a culture shock, for sure. Both for us and for those people, suddenly having to work with people who are used to much less regulated and anonymous work environments.

The city was in the grips of a big trade fair, so the only hotel that was within the company budget that we could find was quite outside the city center in an industrial area. And because it just changed owners, the whole lobby area was a construction site. Lovely.

I managed to meet a whole bunch of current and former coworkers, though, and stayed for an extra day with Teymur, so that was good.

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The White Lotus: Season 3

Okay, I have seen the finale.

Ever since the first teaser I was really looking forward to this season of The White Lotus and frankly: I wasn’t disappointed.

But something felt a bit off.
Not the series itself but everything around it. What started as a small mini-series (which I wasn’t too eager to watch) in the beginning and then liked a lot, once I did give it a try, is now a big lifestyle event series. There were huge premiere events, with the one in Bangkok being livestreamed. It was everywhere on social media and suddenly it was a big thing. There were ads for tie-in goods at different luxury (or at least luxury-adjacent) brands. The takes everywhere were too much.

This is all very I liked this band before they were cool but I’d lie if I weren’t slightly amused and maybe a bit weirded out by this additional layer of real-life satire.

Hey, we all have our Achilles heel, man, ya know?

2025-W14: Sun

Oh my, it’s Sunday again.
I posted a bunch of photos from last week’s trips: Les Grottes de Vallorbe, a cave system in the Swiss Jura mountains and the small Alsatian town of Riquewihr. Have a look if you want to.
I’m using MastoFeed to post these photos to my Mastodon account but I’m not so sure how happy I am with this solution. Sure, they show up and people can see them and interact with them, but the order is all jumbled up. (Please don’t tell me I need to write my own software to solve this problem.)

Meanwhile it is really nice and sunny outside but I struggle to enjoy the spring weather because certain trees enjoy it a little bit too much. But when I look at the pollen calendar, the worst should be over soon and I can join the party of people who frolick in the sun. (I can’t remember the last time I frolicked, to be honest. (That sounded a lot sadder than I meant it. I can be very happy without frolicking.))

This week I had a bit of a scary moment with my MacBook – out of the blue it started to log me out and wouldn’t let me use TouchID to get back in. Given that this thing is long out of warranty I was quite worried it would be a hardware issue. I’m not really in the market for buying a new laptop right now. But turns out – that’s what it does when the disc is too full. I don’t want to know how and why these things are connected, something something swap space, probably? Anyway, I managed to delete a couple of big files and move a lot of stuff to my NAS and now that the SSD is half empty, everything works smoothly again.

Hahaha, I didn’t do a single thing off my list from two years ago. (Two years? Jesus.)

2025-W13: Bienvenue en Alsace

After a pretty uneventful last week, this one was filled with activities. Friends of mine from Vietnam were here and we did a big sweep of little adventures all over the place, including a few days in the Alsace region. A lot of walking around, a lot of looking at things, a lot of food and coffee and talking about this and that. A rather excellent way of spending a week.

And as a bonus I now have a whole mountain of different great Vietnamese coffee to try.

2025-W12: Mop

Not much to report about this week – I’ve done a bit of spring cleaning and finally managed to get a replacement for my old Roomba. (🪦) So far so fun.

The weather has been exhausting – warm, yet cold, sunshine, yet rainy. Typical late March/early April weather, still annoying every year.

Just a little test.

Test.

There’s a private project with a strict deadline on Sunday. Not a silly arbitrary one like at work but something that has to be done be then, no alternative possible. It will take me a couple of days to finish and I do have the time right now.

Alas, my ADHD panic hasn’t set in yet, so all I do all day is dilly-dally.

Ugh.

That latest episode of The White Lotus is quite something.

Irgendwann möchte ich auch diesen Level an Erleuchtung erreichen.

2025-W11: Knowledge!

Another week that was mostly dominated by work stuff – enough so that I’m seriously thinking about the future which is a terrifying and unfamiliar concept, given that my brain puts everything further away than a week into the realm of “weird science fiction.”

The weather is still dark and grey, so I sleep a lot. Or at least I’m in bed or on the couch a lot, drifting in and out of sleep. I am sure that is extremely productive. The antihistamines might have something to do with it, but with hazel being particularly strong around this time of the year, there’s not much to be done.

On a more positive note: I have gotten into podcasts again. Mostly catching up on Omnibus though. Having almost a year of light entertainment in the backburner is pretty neat.

2025-W10: 🐒

Well, another week. Time marches on. Because it’s March already. Haha. Oh no.

Anyway – I’m not really progressing in any of the tasks that I set myself and mostly that’s because I don’t want to do them. I just want (frankly: need) the result of them, but try to tell to the chattering monkeys in my brain that the work will lead to the result. It seems like an impossible task.

Spirituality in a Nutshell

But what has brought me an extraordinary amount of peace in my life is when I finally fell in love with myself. Genuinely, I think that is the path of all spirituality. You can say it’s about finding god, but when you find your god you’re still going to have to face yourself. And either you’re going to cross that Rubicon or you’re not, but that in and of itself is a theology. The moment where I finally loved myself in a way that I could actually forgive myself and forgive the people in my life that may have caused me trauma and have that currency going forward to forgive and have compassion and empathy for other people—that is, I think, spirituality in a nutshell.

Walton Goggins

2025-W09: Nostalgia

Instead of writing weeknotes I spent the last 20 minutes watching this video about the rivers in Red Dead Redemption 2.

In general I’m hiding myself in media consumption lately. The Traitors US are still on, Survivor US and Australia have new seasons, there’s a new season of Reacher, The White Lotus is amazing and then there’s so much old things to watch as well. Very convenient if one wants to avoid everything.

EA just open-sourced a whole bunch of C&C games, which gave me the great idea to get C&C Generals on Steam. For such an old game, it is quite fun but it’s also quite amazing how small everything is. I remember the maps feeling big, but even with the slowest unit it doesn’t take long to get from one side to the other. Very different from modern games.

2025-W08: No Shadows

Went to vote, went for a walk. It’s warm, but doesn’t look like it – the constant cloud cover creates a weird grey light without many shadows. First signs of the allergies are here as well.

The first episode of The White Lotus is here and I spent a lot of time reading fan theories. I’m now very much looking forward to the next episode.