2026-02-08 08:00:00
I mentioned a few times in the last few months that I'm dealing with some health issues, and I thought long about whether or not I should write about them... but I always feel inspired when people talk about the challenges they're facing, because it shows that everybody has something they have to deal with. So I thought I'd share my story, because for the past eight years I've been suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS).
I'm not a medical expert, so I'll keep this section brief, but I think I should at least briefly explain what the illness is about. It's often called ME/CFS, which stands for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Don't worry if you can't pronounce it, I can't either, which is why I just say CFS. Here's a quick overview, taken from Wikipedia:
Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a disabling chronic illness. People with ME/CFS experience profound fatigue that does not go away with rest, as well as sleep issues and problems with memory or concentration. The hallmark symptom is post-exertional malaise (PEM), a worsening of the illness that can start immediately or hours to days after even minor physical or mental activity. This "crash" can last from hours or days to several months. Further common symptoms include dizziness or faintness when upright and pain.
I think this sums it up very well. Patients are suffering from a strong fatigue which is different in every person and can also vary in intensity during different times of the day/month/year, along with a host of other symptoms. The severity of the fatigue and the other symptoms can range from mild, where patients are still able to do most daily activities with some limitations, all the way to very severe, which will leave patients bedridden and unable to do virtually anything. Very severely affected patients often can't even tolerate light and sound, and so they have to lie in a darkened room all day, unable to watch TV, listen to music, read, have a conversation or sometimes even move, lest they make their symptoms worse.
The worst thing about the illness is the post-exertional malaise which will worsen the symptoms after some amount of activity, and it's often unclear how much activity can be tolerated before it's too much and a crash will follow. Since a worsening often comes with a delay of hours if not days, it's easy for patients to accidentally overexert themselves and unintentionally trigger a crash. This is dangerous because every worsening of the condition can be permanent and there is no guarantee that a recovery to the previously tolerated level of activity is possible.
You might have heard about this type of illness in connection with the symptoms of a prolonged COVID infection, which is called long COVID or post COVID. And in fact these two illnesses are closely related or maybe even the same. Research into the causes of the illness is ongoing, but as of yet it isn't fully understood and because of this there is also no cure or therapy available at this point in time.
2017 was a pretty eventful year for me. The year before I'd lost my job, and in a state of mild panic from this I accepted the first new job that came my way, which turned out to be a huge mistake as I was miserable there pretty much from day one. So in February of 2017 I decided to quit this job and take a few months off from work to recharge and find a better one. I spent the spring and early summer making music, exercising, hanging out with friends and generally enjoying life before I started a new and much better job in the summer as an R&D engineer in a company that developed medical devices. The commute was about an hour which was a bit long, but I enjoyed the work there and because I decided to scale down to a four day week, I was much less stressed and had more free time than I'd had before, which was nice and a big increase in quality of life.
I had also started martial arts classes the year before and towards the end of 2017 was getting ready to train for the yellow belt, the first step up from being a total beginner, which I was pretty excited about. I enjoyed going to the gym and I sometimes did the 15 km commute to work by bike. Things were looking pretty good that year.
Until one day in September without warning I woke up feeling absolutely terrible. I felt as if I had the flu - weak, fatigued, feverish and just generally very sick. Curiously I had no symptoms that are commonly associated with a flu or any type of infection, no fever, no sore throat, runny nose, cough, nothing. Just the feeling of being really, really sick.
So I called in sick at work, got a sick note from the doctor and waited. A week turned into two, then three, four... and I only very slowly got better. After six weeks or so I felt well enough to go back to work, and after eight weeks I thought I could try doing some mild exercise, only to immediately get sick again.
So I spent another couple of weeks at home, feeling sick, not being able to do much of anything, until I got better. Then I thought okay, surely now I'm recovered! I tried some light exercise and immediately crashed again. I went through four or five of these cycles of getting better, increasing my level of activity, crashing and being back to square one until I understood that this was not going away so easily.
During this time I also started an odyssey through pretty much all available medical disciplines. I saw a neurologist, internist, cardiologist, radiologist, immunologist and several other doctors, and they all did their tests and told me the same thing - that there was nothing wrong with me and that I was perfectly healthy.
This was incredibly frustrating because I knew something was wrong, my energy levels were way down, I was easily fatigued and often felt downright sick and I seemed to have gotten allergic to exercise or any kind of strenuous physical activity, and yet according to all medical tests I seemed to be completely healthy. Some doctors were also less then empathetic, with one doctor telling me that he he had good mirror neurons and they told him that there was nothing wrong with me. What do you even say to that? Dr House and his mirror neurons have cracked the case. I never went there again.
Eventually I got the message and stopped doing all types of exercise. No more martial arts, no more jogging, no more going to the gym, no more long bike tours. I went from a person who was fit and healthy and in good shape to a person who couldn't even tolerate 10 minutes of light exercise without crashing into a state of feeling sick and being unable to work for weeks. I had to adopt a much slower, less active and more sedentary lifestyle than I was used to or was willing to have, but I had no other choice.
After having stopped pretty much all types of exercise the condition improved somewhat and the severity and longevity of the crashes reduced, at least to a degree. Since then, the illness has settled into a familiar and at least somewhat manageable rhythm.
I have long stretches of time (weeks or months) during which I feel essentially healthy as long as I stay away from too strenuous exercise. During these periods I can do all normal everyday activites like going to work, household chores, meeting friends, going to concerts etc. and I can still go on walks or ride my bike as long as I don't do it for more than an hour or so at a time. Anything more taxing than that like jogging, lifting weights, martial arts etc. is permanently off the table, I simply can't do it anymore and it will reliably send me into a crash.
Then there are also periods of time which aren't good at all and where I crash back into the same state I was in when all of this started - feeling sick, with a terrible fatigue which doesn't go away no matter how much I rest, trouble with concentration (a symptom referred to as brain fog) and an intolerance towards even mild activity like going grocery shopping or walking around the block, which will (usually with a delay of half a day or so) considerably worsen the symptoms and prolong the crash. This is the dreaded post-exertional malaise and is one of the worst symptoms to have, because I can never be sure which level of activity is fine and which is too much. I only know afterwards, when it's too late.
During these times, my life is essentially on hold. I often have to call in sick at work, cancel all obligations like meeting friends, going to birthday parties etc. and stay home, rest and wait for my body to recover, which can sometimes only take a few days, but sometimes it takes weeks or even two or three months.
It's also the most frustrating thing to try and explain to a doctor, because doctors who aren't familiar with the condition (which unfortunately is most of them) will often flatout refuse to believe you when you say "I walked for five minutes and 8 hours later I felt like I've been hit by a truck". One doctor told me once "That's impossible. I never heard of anything like this!", as if anything he'd never heard of simply didn't and couldn't exist. Thankfully my current doctor is also treating a few other CFS and long COVID patients, so he's somewhat familiar with the condition and even though there isn't much he can do, he at least knows that I'm not faking anything and am not just trying to get a "get out of work for a week"-card from him.
And this is pretty much how the last eight years have been for me. I would estimate that in any given year I have on average around 8 good months and 4 bad ones. The bad times are often, but not always in the winter, so there seems to be a seasonal component to all of this too, maybe related to light or vitamin D or temperature or whatever. Maybe it's a coincidence. Crashes can last from a few days to a few weeks or even two or three months, and it isn't always clear to me what brought on a crash, and I also have no idea how to get out of one. All I can realistically do is stay at home and rest, avoid anything that would make the condition worse and wait until my body recovers and is able to pull itself out of it, which so far it's thankfully always been able to do.
In late August last year I started slowly getting worse, with short crashes happening more frequently after less and less activity. I gradually went from being able to go for a 45 minute walk without any problems to crashing for a day or two after walking for no more than five minutes. Then in late October I completely crashed and spent weeks unable to even leave my apartment in the dreaded "feeling as if I have the flu" state, which lasted through most of November.
Since December this has been very slowly improving with frequent setbacks, but the trend is pointing upwards. For the last couple of weeks as I'm writing this I felt mostly fine, though I still need to rest a lot during the day. I can get out of the house again, even though I still have to drive everywhere (my Vespa is parked right outside, and I usually park right in front of wherever I want to go). But I'm not housebound anymore, at least not all the time. I can go visit friends or have a coffee, which is amazing and such a gain in quality of life compared to the previous two months that it's almost unbelievable. I still can't go for even a short walk and I have not even seen my bike in months, but I hope to be able to do these things again soon. Or at least eventually.
This has been by far the longest crash that has happened, and even though I'm getting better I would say I'm still only 50% recovered at this point, three months after it started. The level of activity I can tolerate without getting worse is still tiny. I can't do focused work for more than an hour or two a day, and last week I went outside twice in one day (I live on the second floor, so I have to walk up and down two storeys) and that was too much, in the evening my legs felt as if I'd run a marathon and it took me three days to recover from that.
I'm currently not working because I quit my job last fall due to being stressed and unhappy there, so there's no immediate pressure to go back to work and I can take it easy for now, though I will have to start looking for a new job soon. I kind of dread it because I had originally planned to take the time after leaving work to figure out what to do next, but instead I spent it at home being sick and not really being able to focus on the job situation at all. And now with my health being better but still not great, I'm not sure what kind of job I'm even able to do, which adds quite a bit of uncertainty. But sometimes things don't go to plan, and that's part of life. I can't control the waves, so I have to learn how to surf.
The most important thing, and the biggest challenge at the same time is to take care of my mental health. It's easy when faced with a condition like this to slide into depression and despair, or to adopt a state of denial and toxic positivity; but while very understandable, none of this is helpful. Despairing and giving up is obviously not good, but neither is fighting against the condition or pretending that it isn't so bad, or going to bed with the expectation that the next day will be better. It might be, but it might not, and having unrealistic expectations creates stress and uses up energy, of which I have very little to begin with.
So I practice mindfulness, acceptance, meditation and a bit of yoga if I can tolerate it, and I go with the flow. When I have a good day and I manage to meet friends or go to a cafe I cherish that, and I don't beat myself up when I have a bad day. This might sound easy, but trust me it isn't, and I would be lying if I said there aren't days where I'm angry, or anxious, or sad, or depressed, or all of these things at once. The trick is to be okay with that, too. When a days is shit it's shit, and it's allowed to be shit.
How is this going to continue in the future? Unfortunately I have no idea, and no-one can tell me, either. Since the illness is currently still not well understood and there is no cure and not even a treatment available, all I can do is take care of myself, accept that it is what it is, listen to my body and avoid anything that I know will make me worse. So far I've always been able to recover from a crash, and I trust that I will recover this time, too. I already am much better than I was a month or two ago, and I feel that I'm getting better with each passing week, despite the setbacks and the slow progress.
The job situation is a bit worrying, because the condition is so unpredictable. A corporate job would provide security, but I would have to work part time and no employer is happy with an employee who constantly has to take sick leave, sometimes for longer periods of time. Ideally I'd have a job where I can work at my own pace, work when I'm well enough to do so and take time off when needed without feeling bad about letting anyone down. The current economy is weird though and the legal situation for freelancers here in Germany is also complicated, so I don't know if that's feasible. Maybe I'll have to build a career out of making AI slop for Instagram and YouTube. Joking aside, I think this is my big task for this year - figure out how to move forward professionally.
So what's happening in the medical community?
This particular illness has long been ignored or not taken very seriously and there was little research (and little funding for research), but since COVID hit and more and more people became affected by a similar condition, governments and research labs are starting to wake up. Lately, it feels like there's a lot of progress being made at figuring out the causes of the illness and the mechanisms behind it, and more and more findings point towards a complex and multisystemic issue that affects various parts of the body like the central nervous system, the energy producing mechanisms inside the muscles and maybe even the brain, which is why some people can experience physical fatigue from mental exertion alone.
Most research is still in the "figuring out the causes" stage and there is limited work being done towards actually finding a cure or at least a treatment for the worst of the symptoms. Medical research progresses slowly because studies take time and findings need to be cross checked and verified, which can be difficult and expensive. Progress is being made though and I'm tentatively hopeful that some kind of treatment will be available within the next five to ten years. Even a treatment that improves the condition by 10 or 20 percent will be more than welcome, especially by those who are most severely affected, because they are suffering tremendously.
There's so much more I could say, but I think this post is long enough as it is. I deliberated back and forth for months whether or not I should write about this here, but ultimately I think it's the right decision to do it. This condition is still widely unknown and misunderstood, and so I feel it's important to talk about it and spread a bit more knowledge and awareness. Many people with this illness simply disappear from life and from society, because they cannot leave their house or even their bed anymore. They become invisible to anyone but the people who care for them, and so the illness is also largely invisible and unknown.
All in all, I don't like that I have this condition and I wish I didn't, but I'm still grateful that it isn't worse than it is, because it could be. I know how bad I feel when I'm in a crash, and there are millions of people who are in this state continually without a minute of relief, ever. There is a girl in Austria who can often not even tolerate the mere presence of another person in her room, and so she's forced to lie in her bed all day every day, not being able to move or talk or even think too much, alone with her symptoms and her despair. It's terrifying to think about, and it's people like her who need a cure the most. I can wait, but they can't.
Lastly, please don't take away from this that my life is terrible and it's nothing but pain and suffering, because it isn't. I spent a lot of time describing what it feels like being ill, but there are also many good days in my life, more good ones than bad ones in fact. Life is up and down, and we all have our challenges. These are mine, they are not great, but I'm dealing with them to the best of my abilities. If you're suffering from this condition, please know that you're not alone. Feel free to get in touch if you feel like it. I can't offer much in terms of advice, but sometimes it helps to talk to someone who shares the same experience.
I'm going to leave some resources here in case you want to have more information. I know this is a very different post from what I normally write about, but I wanted to get it out. If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading!
2026-02-06 08:00:00
Did you know you can 3D print a guitar? There are some amazing models online, like this one for example, or this. Printing a neck is probably not feasible (though I've seen it done), but a guitar body is really not that complicated (the body of an electric guitar is literally just a block of wood) and can easily be made on a 3D printer. What many of these designs have in common is that the bodies don't necessarily have to be soild and can be made with all kinds of interesting hole patterns, something which is really difficult to achieve if you're building a body out of wood. I've been staring at pictures of 3D printed guitars for days now and I'm really tempted to give it a try. I have an unused guitar lying around which I could use for parts, so I wouldn't even have to buy anything except for the filament. Remember the ads from 20 years ago which said "you wouldn't download a guitar" or whatever? Well screw that, I absolutely would!
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2026-02-01 08:00:00
Nowadays when you turn on the radio in Germany, you'll hear mostly songs which are currently in the charts or hits from past decades, which are almost all in English. Occasionally you'll get a song in German like "99 Luftballons", but most pop music these days is sung in English and that's what's on the radio (there are of course stations which only play German music, or classical music, or things that make you spiral into depression, aka the news). But it wasn't always like this; in the 50s and 60s German music was still really popular. So popular in fact that many artists at that time re-recorded their hits in German, even if they didn't speak the language. I recently fell into a hole of music by English-speaking artists who sang in German, and I thought I'd share some of it with you. Maybe it'll make you smile for a minute.
I'm going to link the songs on YouTube which is the easiest way; I'd love to be able to just put some MP3s up, but I would be sued into oblivion before the end of the day. If you know a better way of linking to music online, let me know!
With this song Abba won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974 and became world famous, so it made sense for them to record it in other languages, too. The song is timeless, the lyrics make no sense but the costumes are fantastic and the Swedish accents are kinda cute. And if you watch their lips, you can see that they forget the words a couple of times :)
This one is kind of weird - an Australian singer singing an American folk song in German. Why? No idea. Her mother was German which explains the language, but why this particular song I don't know. I really like it though, and her pronunciation is great.
As a GI, Elvis was stationed in Germany, where he got in touch with German culture. Wooden Heart is a cover of the traditional folk song Muss i denn which is sung in the dialect I grew up with. Most of the song is in English, but he sings one verse in the original language and it's absolutely surreal hearing Elvis singing in Swabian.
Apparently the Beatles were less than enthusiastic about singing in German, but they did it anyway and so now we know what it would have sounded like if the Beatles had been German. I think this works very well! They also recorded a German version of She loves you, but I like this one a little better.
Kind a cool to hear the Man in Black singing in German. He doesn't sound like he speaks the language, more like somebody wrote the lyrics out for him phonetically and then he did his best, but Cash in heavily American-accented German is still Cash, and Cash is great.
Why did David Bowie sing in German? I have no idea. He lived in Berlin for a while, maybe that's why. He sings with his usual passion, but his pronunciation is... challenging, and for most of the song I have no idea what he's saying. Still sounds great though.
This one doesn't exactly fit in here because it isn't sung by the original artist, but it is so bizarre that I just have to share it. Cindy und Bert are usually known for making the cheesiest of cheesy German pop music called Schlager, like this song, but for whatever reason here they recorded a Cover of Black Sabbath's Paranoid, and it actually works. They kept the dark sound of the song intact and added a Hammond organ which gives it a bit of a Deep Purple/Uriah Heep vibe, and the singing is strange, but kind of hypnotic. They also look like they're stoned off their asses. This might actually be my favourite Sabbath cover!
While writing this I noticed that three of the artists in this post (Abba, Olivia Newton-John and Cindy und Bert) participated in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest. Just thought I'd mention it.
2026-01-31 08:00:00
My friend Dom wrote a long post yesterday about his feelings around coding with AI over on his blog titled "Vibe coding a Gemini Capsule and learning a life lesson in the process", which I highly recommend reading. As it happens, I needed to solve a problem a few days ago and decided to give vibe coding a try, and I have some thoughts about it, too.
Here's just a very quick description of my problem, in case you'd like to play along at home. I have a number of text files which look like this:
Section A:
- content
- content
- content
Section B:
- content
- content
- content
...
Each file has different sections with different content underneath. What I want to do is grab each Section A from every file and write the contents to a new file titled SectionA.txt, then do the same for Section B and so on. The files are also timestamped and I want to put everything in chronological order in the resulting textfile.
It's not the most difficult problem out there, but it's not something that you can just solve with one quick line of bash code. Ok, I'm sure there's someone out there who could whip up one line of code which does this, but it's definitely not me. So I thought I'd see how ChatGPT deals with a task like this.
So I punched my problem and the solution I expected as a prompt into ChatGPT (selecting the model GPT-5 mini from DuckDuckGo) and let it do it's thing. After a few seconds it produced a bash script which looked fine, so I copied it into a file, ran it and it worked flawlessly on the first try and did exactly what I wanted. It took less than a minute from starting to write the prompt to running the script and verifying the output, which I have to say is impressive and is way faster than if I had done it myself.
Roaring success, right? AI is amazing and it made my life easier. What's not to love?
Well, after I'd run the script, I sat with this thought for a while and realised that I didn't like at all how it made me feel. Yes, I got the result I wanted, but I didn't do anything for it, I didn't learn anything from it, I didn't understand how and why the script I got back worked. I just told a machine what I wanted, and the machine did it without any effort from my side at all. I felt like an impostor, like a hack, like someone who had just cheated on a test. I felt like one of those people in the movie WALL·E who are just sitting in their automated chairs with screens in front of their faces, too fat and lazy and stupid to do anything useful. And I hated that feeling.
So I deleted the script, closed the browser tab and decided to write the script myself.
I switched to Python because I'm more familiar with it than bash. This is not a complex problem to solve, but I still had to start thinking about what I wanted to achieve and how to best approach it. Then I had to work in small increments, first reading out one section from one file, then all sections from one file, then all sections from all files, then make sure everything was processed in the right order, make sure the output was formatted correctly, and so on.
I made mistakes which I had to fix, and I had to look up a bunch of things that I had forgotten or wasn't sure how to do anymore. It was't hard, but it was still way harder than just typing a prompt into an AI, and it took a lot longer, too. I didn't look at the clock, but I guess I spent 20 to 30 minutes with it until I was happy with my script.
But afterwards I felt good! I had accomplished something. I came up with a solution to my problem, and then I implemented the solution and learned a few things and improved my coding skills in the process. I got frustrated when I ran into an issue but then got a small dopamine hit when I resolved it, and when I was done I walked away from the computer feeling good about myself because I had actually done and produced something and not just whipped a slave into doing the thing for me while I sat around lazily on my butt. Metaphorically speaking of course.
So here's the very predictable conclusion: Using AI can lead to impressive results in no time at all, but it leaves me feeling hollow and discontent. Satisfaction and happiness comes from doing something myself, even if it may be difficult and uncomfortable in the moment. But if I avoid doing everything that's hard and outsource all the thinking to AI, then I will pretty soon turn into a lazy and stupid blob who isn't capable of thinking for himself anymore, and that's a fate I want to avoid at all cost.
Dom summarises the feeling of using AI very well:
Yes, I published a project. But I didn’t become a better person doing it.
And that's a damn shame.
2026-01-30 08:00:00
The web is getting worse, search engines are becoming more and more useless and AI crawlers are so greedy that by now they're almost indistinguishable from a DDoS attack. I had a few interesting discussions about this on Mastodon this week, and everybody is exhausted, frustrated and angry. What do we do about it? I have no idea... Michal advocates for switching to a different protocol like Gemini, and maybe that's not a bad idea if more people did it. I might look into this at some point. I'd love to have a space free of ads, tracking, slop, privacy invasions and corporate garbage. You know, a place which is still human.
In some other threads we talked about the importance of sharing links now that Google etc. are practically useless and have deteriorated to being little more than advertising frontends and slop dispensers. Since my linkdumps seem to be quite popular, I decided to create a dedicated RSS feed only for those, which you can find here. The regular feed which you're probably reading right now will stay as it is and contain all blog posts and linkdumps, so there is no need to subscribe to both. This is purely for the people who are mainly interested in the links and not so much in my other ramblings. You'll still have to deal with my random nonsense in the intro though, I'm not letting you off that easily :)
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2026-01-28 08:00:00
I remember when I was a kid my dad told me that he watched the first moon landing in 1969 live on TV, which blew my mind because the moon landing did (and does) seem like ancient history to me, like something that happened in the distant past. I mean, TV was still (mostly) in black and white! But of course it was only 13 years before I was born, so naturally my dad was around back then and he could watch it live on TV, along with about a billion other people.
The first mission to land on the moon was Apollo 11, and its crew consisted of three astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin (the first and second man, respectively, to walk on the moon) and Michael Collins who stayed behind in the command module which orbited the moon, while the other two took the lunar module down to the moon's surface. Carrying the Fire is Michael Collins' autobiography in which he chronicles his time as a military test pilot in the US Air Force and as a NASA astronaut during the 1960s where he flew in space twice, once on Gemini 10 and once on Apollo 11, which became the mission that made history as the first successful landing of humans on another celestial body.
In addition to being a test pilot and an astronaut, Michael Collins is also a great writer and narrator and as such he wrote the book without a ghostwriter, unlike many of his peers. With around 500 pages the book is quite long and detailed (his first space flight on Gemini 10 lasted around 70 hours, and it seems like he takes the reader through every single one of these hours) and he doesn't get to the Apollo flight until about 300 pages in, but thanks to his talent as a writer it never gets boring and is quite an entertaining read throughout.
Because he wrote the book himself, we get a good idea of who he is as a person and he gives a pretty honest and unfiltered look into the space program from his point of view. Some parts are quite hilarious to read, like his bone-dry recitation of the entire 20-step checklist for urinating in space ("2. Place penis against receiver inlet check valve and roll latex receiver onto penis. 3. Rotate selector valve knob (clockwise) to the “Urinate” position. 4. Urinate. 5....") or him calling the Gemini capsule a flying men's room because, well, the "toilet" was a plastic bag and there was no privacy at all, your crewmate was sitting right next to you the whole time. And you can't just open a window in space...
[Edit]: Interestingly, I just watched a video by Scott Manley published the day before I posted this, where he discusses the whole "pooping in space" situation, both back then and today. [/Edit]
The highlight of the book is of course the flight of Apollo 11, and his unique perspective as the man who didn't land on the moon but stayed behind in the command module (called Columbia) orbiting the moon while the other two astronauts flew the lunar module down to the moon's surface (the lunar module was called Eagle, which is why Neil Armstrong announced over the radio "the eagle has landed" after their successful landing). Had anything gone wrong during the landing or had they failed to take off again from the moon, there would have been nothing he could have done to save his crewmates and he would have had to return to earth alone, knowing that he left two men, friends, behind to die on the moon. The sense of relief he felt when Armstrong and Aldrin successfully returned after about a day on the moon and climbed back into the command module really comes through.
The book was written in 1974, five years after the moon landing and as such it pretty much ends with their successful return to earth and a three week quarantine to make sure they didn't bring any harmful microorganisms back from the moon. There is one last chapter which feels like an epilogue, a sort of "where are they now" where he describes his life after he left NASA shortly after the mission had ended. In this chapter he also shares how the flight to the moon has shaped his thinking and his philosophy of life - that seeing the earth from the outside and as a whole makes you aware of how fragile it is, how beautiful it is and how insignificant our quarrels down here really are, which is a sentiment that I've read from many other astronauts as well.
Overall I really enjoyed this book. It's quite a long read, but it's never boring thanks to Collins' engaging writing style. The only bits that made me roll my eyes a little were some of his comments on women; the man was born in the 1930s and grew up in the 40s and 50s, and it shows. At one point he refers to an airline stewardess as "honey"; he's glad there weren't any women in the space program because that would have just complicated things and he muses what it would be like to fly in space with one thousand women (and their two thousand weightless breasts, "bobbing beautifully and quivering delightfully in response to their every weightless movement …"). I suspect if he had written the book later in life, he might have left some of this out. These comments are few and far in between though, and for better or worse they also serve as a time capsule, offering a view into the mentality of the time.
If you're interested in the NASA space program of the 1960s, I highly recommend having a look at this book because it gives a quite detailed and unique perspective into it. And despite a few cringy bits here and there it is really well written and worth a read.