Favourite media of 2022

We did summarize our 2022 blogging, now it’s time for books, shows and movies… we’ll see how long it gets, but we’ll try to cover it all in one post. It’s been a busy year, but a lot was consumed nonetheless, just maybe a bit different stuff than usual 🙂

Piotrek: Lets start with books, the crown achievement of human culture and our blog’s main topic. According to GoodReads I read 107 titles in 2022 and that added up to 39,400 pages. One of my better years on record. Average book length was 368 pages and that is the record, I believe. I did some re-reads, I read some books that were waiting a long time on my shelf, and I read a lot on the most important topic of the year – Ukraine and its struggle against Russian colonialism and imperialism, and not only on the battlefields, but in the minds of people all around the world.

I’ll start with re-reads. There’s been more of that than usual, and I want to mention two. Shōgun disappointed Bookstooge during his recent re-read, but he made me wanna revisit the book myself. And it was just as good! I don’t mind profanity, or even blasphemy, and it’s such an epic adventure it makes me want to also replay the excellent Total War: Shogun 2 computer strategy. But I also had my disappointment and it sadly was The Legend of Drizzt. I like R.A. Salvatore, whenever I listen to an interview on some fantasy podcast he comes out as a nice human being. But reading his books just isn’t as fun as it used to be. This one wasn’t, and neither were short stories I loved in the 90-ties… there’s always a risk in revisiting childhood favourites, sometimes it pays out sometimes it doesn’t.

Now my favourite genre fiction. This year it constituted (fantasy and sf combined) about 1/3 of my reading, probably the lowest since… early elementary school? But these were mostly solid works. And I’ve chosen three that I liked the most (in no particular order).

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PSA: Temporary radio silence

Hello everyone!

This is a short announcement that I’ll be sadly much less present on WP for the next ten weeks or so – approximately till mid-December. It’s not blogging fatigue, on the contrary, blogging gives me as much fun as ever. It’s a crazy year for me, though. After much soul-searching I decided early this spring to make a career change. I love social anthropology and sociology, but unfortunately my love is not widely shared by the job market 😉 

I have made the decision to switch paths completely, and a few months back I enrolled in a programming bootcamp. It is very much a proper bootcamp, cramming years of study into a bit less than five months of very intensive training. For the last six weeks I’ve been studying for ~50-60 hours a week, and now as I’m entering the final phase of the course, I’m looking at ~60-70 hours a week. I tried very hard to find time for blogging and reading, but there really isn’t much time for anything, except learning javascript and a bunch of other programming languages ;). 

So, wish me luck and forgive me if I don’t comment or write much over the next two months. After that, hopefully…

Also, feel free to pester Piotrek for some more posts! Re-enchantment is still very much alive and kicking 😀

WordPress without WordPress.com?

A question, really, more than a post. Is anyone here hosting their blog somewhere else? Somewhere cheaper than $180 that WordPress.com seems to be introducing soon as their cheapest add-free version?

Ideally, somewhere with no block editors?

WordPress.org suggests some hosting options, I wonder, how easy they are for amateurs, and do their migrations tools work…

There are some guides online, but perhaps someone can suggest a tried and trusted one 🙂

I assume WordPress.com users would still be able to comment and get notifications about a WordPress-not-com blog? That’s really the crucial thing, as it’s all about the community.

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The Best of 2021 in Books and Comics

Oh, 2021… it was, in many ways, quite similar to 2020, actually. We did a general summary of the year here, and now the time comes to sum up our reading/watching experiences. This year, we decided to combine our best and worst title is one place, one reason being it’s already mid-January…

Piotrek: and another, at least in my case, that I mostly made really good choices and there’s really not that much bad stuff to write about.

Ola: Oh, for me this reading year was more of a mixed bag, with some truly flabbergasting titles from NetGalley – and some truly amazing, too. It was generally a pretty good year, reading-wise. Lots of solid titles, not too many re-reads… I will also remember this year as my introduction to the marvellous metaverse of manga – and that journey will continue!

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Birthdays, spicy reveals and even a tag, oh my!

As today, in the last day of Middle Earth’s Old Year, we both celebrate our Birthday, we decided to celebrate it with a post that will reveal some hard truths and clear some popular misconceptions about the two individuals running Re-E since 2015, OlaG and piotrek!

OlaG’s name is Aleksandra (like the Cohen’s song), so she’s female and Polish, not a male Russian lumberjack named Oleg as I believe someone used to think 😉 Below – a proof 😉

Piotrek is a local version of Peter, he answers to both (and Pio, too) 😉 A very popular name, there were four of us in my high school class.

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