Dune is a colossal book, not just by its influence on science fiction as a genre, but also its rich detail and underlying themes of survival, evolution, ecology, religion, politics, and power. For this it deserves credit, but as a story itself it failed to grip me. A minor obstacle was its pacing, often slow yet sometimes so fast across plot twist that I wondered if I accidentally skipped a page. But the biggest hurdle is that Dune feels highly cliche, which is ungrateful to say because I do realise this is the spaceship that launched all these science fiction typicalities, influencing the likes of Ender’s Game and Star Wars.
In our new house, many appliances still get their power through a travel adapter. Eight years in China was long enough to not only put down roots and settle in, but also for everything we owned to end in a Chinese plug: my MacBook, the coffee machine, the rice cooker, the baby monitor. The appliances […]
In June we moved back to the Netherlands, six suitcases across 8000 kilometres, and after a brief spell at my parents’ place, we moved into our own home. This second move also involved putting down carpet, curtains, buying appliances and furniture — so that our new garage quickly filled with cardboard boxes and other packaging […]
Our new home in the Netherlands sits in a mundane residential area full of young families like ours. The street name comes from made (‘meadow’), still referring to a field that once lay here and now survives only in the name (just how the name Shanghai refers to a river that no longer exists). And […]
There are a ton of application sites out there, but I think they’re all horrible. I searched for jobs three times: 2014 (before graduation), 2016 (desire to change jobs in the Netherlands), and 2018 (desire to move to China) — and from those three runs I do not doubt that I’ve sent well over 100 […]
