June started with preparations for vacation and then vacation itself. 3-day Rock im Park in Nürnberg, a quick trip to Dortmund (not the best time here as they were preparing for the Euro Cup), and finished trip in Helsinki.

Week at home, and here we go again: a new trip, this time to Arsenal Fest in Kragujevac.

Besides this: meetings with friends, cinema, stand-up in English, etc…

Trips

• Nürnberg — love this city. New details and places each time! Highlight: geek shop, where consumerism took over my mind completely.
• Dortmund — I once rooted for Borussia Dortmund, so it was a pleasure to visit their hometown. But honestly, it’s not the best town I’ve seen. Highlight: a walk around a city center with beer stops.
• Helsinki — a nice city, though too crowded and loud for me, but with great atmosphere and amazing places. Highlight: seagulls, scavenging leftover french fries.

Festivals

• Rock im Park — a great experience as always (except for the beer). Royal Republic, Green Day, While She Sleeps, Corey Taylor, Parkway Drive and many others. Highlight: Corey Taylor performing SpongeBob SquarePants.
• Arsenal Fest — second time here, and it was good. Asian Dub Foundation, Circa Waves, Nik West and local bands. Highlight: frontman of Circa Waves does not expect the flame machine but likes it a lot.

Games

Surprisingly, despite the vacations, I played a lot of games this month.

• Cocoon — easy puzzles and a strange world. A nice filler, but nothing more.
• Haiku, the Robot — a solid classic Metroidvania.
• Alan Wake 2 DLC Night Springs — short, but good enough (except for the second episode). I love humour in this dark world.
• Talos Principle 2 DLC — currently playing, glad to be back for more puzzles.
• Elden Ring — no, not DLC, because of screwed up region-lock DLC/save system. I need to finish this game a second time just to play the expansion, thanks to Sony. And I’ve only beaten Rennala, there’s so much to do…

Movies/shows

• Inside Out 2 - good, but the first part was more exciting.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024) — good casting most of the time and better character expansion, especially Iroh, but overall, it’s not as good as the original animation.

Books

• Persepolis Rising (Expanse #7) by James Corey — finally, a great book, it’s on par with the second one for me in terms of intrigue and excitement. So much hopes for the next one.
• What men want — a book in Russian about male psychology. Good, but nothing special.

Site

• Change the default blog language to English, wrote more about it here.
• Also moved my wishlist to the blog. I used a new Hugo feature for this, called content adapters.
• I plan to translate some posts to English, add now and other slash pages, and support dark/light theme for the wishlist.

Other

For the first time in my life, I attended a stand-up show in English, and Dragoș was amazing. His stories, jokes and crowd work were all great. “Kurwa-Malakas”!

P.S. Almost no photos because I prefer to shoot short videos for a year movie rather than take photos.