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Hope in a Crisis

I felt certain that this virus would spread around the globe when I first heard of its rather long incubation period and the fact that it could feel just like a cold. That must have been in late December or early to mid January. I remember thinking: Why don’t they halt air travel from Asia, especially from China?

Of course, I can’t prove any of the above, but does it matter? The overwhelming majority of western nations are in total crisis mode. People are dying, left and right. German scientists boast that Germany is doing so great with testing, but still you coudn’t really get a test two weeks ago, if you just had symptoms but weren’t a likely case because you weren’t in a dangerous area or have been in close contact with someone infected. There must be quite the Dunkelziffer. ((Number of unreported cases.))

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Resource Exhaustion

It was the end of the year, and my resources were pretty much depleted. After what seems to me like it was the most demanding year in my life, on early December 27th I headed of to Leipzig to attend the 36th Chaos Communication Congress. My father had brought me there, thankfully, especially as his resources are likely more depleted than mine.

Beforehand I hadn’t been sure whether I would attend «Congress» for a fifth consecutive year, as I really felt kind of burned out. But I went, mainly to record an episode of a podcast that ironically then never aired due to a noisy recording environment negatively affective audio quality.

Having learned from all these years, I had carefully checked the official program for interesting talks, focusing on the topic of climate crisis and related environmentalist themes, being fully aware that I would not attend most of them. The use of Congress is to meet people in sessions, that are not being recorded and generally enjoy the atmosphere and survive all the input while sourcing great food is surprisingly difficult (or not so surprisingly if you are familiar with the food at german trade fairs).

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