2026-08-26 08:00:00
A few weeks ago, Noisy Deadlines posted a list of 5 albums that shaped her taste in music. I was going to write a post like this too, but it completely slipped my mind. Today she published another post about 5 books that shaped her, which reminded me of the 5 albums. So here's my list, these are 5 albums that had a huge influence on me.
This one I'm pretty sure is the first "heavy" album I bought. Before this I listened to mostly pop music from the 60s, 70s and 80s, or stuff that was on the radio. Then in my late teens I discovered this album and it was my gateway drug into the world of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal, music generes I still love and listen to to this day. I already wrote a review of this album (and all other AC/DC albums), so I'm not going to repeat myself here too much. It's a fantastic album and I love it.
This album, particularly the live video version of it, shows Priest at their absolute peak. Halford had quit drinking and smoking and his voice was at it's absolute best during this era. Tipton and Downing's dual guitar attack is legendary, and just look at the clothes and the hair! It's peak 80s Priest. They're one of my favourite bands ever, and this album was on heavy rotation for a long time after I discovered it.
This one is a masterpiece. Candlemass is a Swedish Doom Metal band which plays music very much inspired by 70s Black Sabbath, with heavy riffs and dark lyrics, but more melodic and operatic vocals than what Sabbath did at the time. This is their debut album, and they were only in their early 20s when they recorded this, which makes it even more impressive that it's so good. If you look up any list of "The X best Heavy Metal Albums of All Time", this album is almost always included, and usually at least in the top 20. And for good reason, because it's just perfect. I listened to it countless times and I know pretty much every lyric, guitar part and drum fill by heart. I even know where all the little mistakes are, of which there are a few because they recorded on a tight budget. And I even have the album cover tattooed on my arm. That's how much I love this album.
Any number of the old Black Sabbath albums could be in this spot, but this one has Paranoid on it, and Paranoid is amazing. Full review is here in my Black Sabbath post. I play electric guitar and Tony Iommi's riffs are a huge influence on my; so much so that I own his signature Epiphone SG guitar which I've had for I guess 15 years or so, and I played it every single time I've played live with my band. And it's still my main guitar that I play almost every day.
Again, I could put any number of the old Uriah Heep albums from the 70s here, but I think the first one I heard was the Best of, the European edition which was released in 1975. Lady in Black is on there, which is incredible and I've loved this song ever since I first heard it as a child. It's just so good. What I love about Uriah Heep is the blend of Hard Rock music and operatic vocals with intricate multi part harmonies. This was later picked up and refined by many other bands, most notably of course Queen. They perfected it, but Uriah Heep came before and their music was hugely influential for me when I was young. I've also seen them live numerous times and they are still a force to be reckoned with.
And there we go. I could add another 10, but these are the first that came to mind; and of course it's not just these particular albums but the bands in general that had a huge influence on me. I've seen all of them live at least once; some have since retired and/or lost key members, others are still out on the road and I hope to catch them again when I have the chance.
2026-08-25 08:00:00
I linked this article by JA Westenberg in my last linkdump, and in it she mentions that she has a "How I AI" section on the about page of her blog. A different post I read this week talks about the authenticity of digital art in an age where everybody can just slop generate everything with a few prompts. And then there's this line I read somewhere, I forgot where: "If you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it". And so I thought I'd put together my thoughts on AI usage on this site.
Plain and simple, this is a blog written by a human for humans. This means that everything you read here has been written by me (with a few exceptions in the past that I'm not going to repeat going forward 1).
I don't use AI to generate ideas, I don't use AI to write posts or generate images or write code.
I use a few tools though, and some might be or are AI powered:
And that's it. So in short, this blog is written by me and what you see and read here comes out of my own brain. When I use AI, I use it the same way I would "use" a person sitting next to me - to ask it a question when I'm stuck and see if it can help me out. I think that's an acceptable way to use it.
I used AI to generate parts of the text in these two posts, and I also experimented with automatically translating my posts from German to English, but abandoned the idea pretty quickly after almost everyone told me that they prefer my imperfect English over the automatic translation.
2026-08-21 08:00:00
We had a solar eclipse here in Europe last week. I didn't see it this time, but I've seen I think two partial eclipses before and they were always fascinating to witness. We had a total solar eclipse that was visible in South Germany where I live back in 1999. I remember watching this from the roof of my school with a couple of friends and teachers. We saw the eclipse begin and the moon move in front of the sun, and everybody was hyped up and excited - but about half an hour before totality clouds started moving in, and by the time it got dark the sky was completely overcast and we couldn't see anything. It was incredibly disappointing. Still fascinating to see it get dark and then light again in the middle of the day, but man… a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity ruined by clouds. Actually, maybe twice in a lifetime, because the next total eclipse will be visible here in 2081, when I will be 99 years old. Make sure you get subscribed so you don't miss my review of it!
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2026-08-18 08:00:00
I recently started thinking about VCRs, as you do. I'll spare you the train of thought that led me to this, but it started with a conversation about worsening eyesight and then it escalated from there.
Anyway, VCRs. I still remember the first VCR my dad bought when I was a kid. And in fact, I remember many times when my dad (and later me, once I had some money of my own) bought a brand new tech device that was state of the art at the time and that we'd never seen or used before.
I remember the first VCR entering our home. And the first microwave oven. The first cordless phone. The first PC (running Windows 95) and a few years later, the Internet. My first CD player. The first time I saw a video being played back from a DVD and how much better it looked than one on VHS. I remember when we had a satellite dish installed on our roof and all of a sudden we had something like 30 TV stations to choose from instead of the five or six we received before that via terrestrial broadcast, and the quality was better, too.
I remember the first widescreen TV my dad bought, and later the first flat screen TV. I remember my first laptop and my first mobile phone. The first mp3 player.
In the first 20 or so years of my life, dozens of new technologies and tech devices entered my life, and I was incredibly excited by all of them, because they all represented progress and they all were an improvement over what we had before.
The cordless phone was better than the one wired into the wall, because now you could go to your room or sit down on the couch and have a phone call there, instead of having to stand in the hallway where the phone was.
DVD was better than VHS. Better quality, no rewinding, the discs didn't wear out and you got tons of extra features on each disc.
CD sounded better than Cassette and Vinyl records. No rewinding, no pops and scratches, no tangled-up tape.
An mp3 player was better than a discman. Smaller, lighter, holds more music. Doesn't require lugging around a bunch of discs.
But in the following 20 years of my life up until today, these instances of discovering some brand new tech that was better than what came before became rarer and rarer. In fact, I only remember two things from the past 10+ years that I started using that were really a brand new product category for me: Smartphones and noise canceling headphones.
Using a smartphone for the first time was pretty amazing, with its touch screen and the responsive and modern user interface. And it had GPS integrated and a lot of memory so you could store music on it and didn't need to carry a separate mp3 player, you could read your emails and chat with people and take pictures and videos... that was pretty revolutionary. Of course nowadays I see the downsides of these devices and we're getting to a point where the cons outweigh the pros, but back when I bought the first smart phone (I guess in 2012 or so, I was relatively late to the party) it felt like a leap into the future compared to what I had before.
Noise canceling headphones still blow me away to this day. You put them on in a noisy environment like on a train, turn them on and all of a sudden it's quiet, despite the fact that there's a 750-horsepower diesel engine working at full power right underneath your seat.
[Edit] Some people on Mastodon pointed out E-readers and 3D printers, and I completely forgot about those. These are great devices too, I have both and I absolutely love them. [\Edit]
But besides that, there isn't a lot of tech in recent years that has fascinated me as much as what became available during the 80s, 90s and 2000s. Everything back then felt like progress, and like moving towards a better future. Nowadays it feels like we're moving towards a worse future and where we were 15 or 20 years ago was perfectly fine and we should have stayed there.
But I wonder if that's just part of me getting older and turning into a grumpy old fart, or if that's a universal feeling. I'm especially curious to know if people who are younger than me, in their 20s today have had the same feelings of wonder and awe when new technology was introduced into their life as I had, or if they feel the same feelings of stagnation and things getting worse that I feel today.
I have a feeling that I know the answer already, because I read a lot of articles about young people rediscovering music cassettes and vinyl records and DVDs and whatnot, and I think if there was new tech to be excited about, they wouldn't get excited about the old stuff. In the 90s, tech from the 60s was dated and boring, while today tech from the 90s seems to see a revival.
But maybe I'm wrong? If you are in your 20s now and feel like writing down your thoughts about this topic, consider yourself challenged! I'd love to read them.
2026-08-15 08:00:00
This week, something happened in the world of rock music that nobody thought was ever going to happen again - Ritchie Blackmore rejoined Deep Purple live on stage for the first time in decades.
Blackmore is one of my favourite guitar players and easily one of the greates guitarists of all time. Along with late keyboard player Jon Lord and drummer Ian Paice he is one of the founding members of Deep Purple. Deep Purple's band history is long and messy; Blackmore left in 1975 to found Rainbow with Ronnie James Dio on vocals which was hugely successful, then he rejoined Purple from 1984 until 1993 when he left for good and went on to briefly reform Rainbow before he founded the medieval folk band Blackmore's Night together with his now wife Candice Night.
I always liked Deep Purple, but I absolutely love Rainbow, especially the Dio era. With Rising they recorded on of the best albums of all time, which also contains one of the best songs ever written, Stargazer. Blackmore's guitar solos on Stargazer and on Deep Purple's Highway Star are among my all time favourites, and I never get tired of listening to them. I'm not too much into the medieval stuff in Blackmore's Night, but in their live shows they always play some old Rainbow and Deep Purple songs, and those are fantastic. Just listen to this rendition of Soldier of Fortune. There's no doubt that Candice is an amazing singer, and Ritchie's guitar work, particularly the intro is out of this world. His fingers just fly across the fretboard and he makes even the fastest and most difficult melody lines look as if they're the easiest thing in the world to play. Incredible.
By all accounts Blackmore is a pretty difficult person to deal with (even his wife calls him "moody and difficult" in the clip above) and the final split with Deep Purple was not the most amicable one, and so they never played together again. Even in 2016 when the band was inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame they couldn't get their act together, with either the band not wanting Blackmore to be there or him not wanting to perform with them, depending on whose version you choose to believe.
So the fact that they managed to put whatever issues they had with each other aside to appear together on stage for what will probably be the final time is almost a miracle, and it's even wilder that it was Blackmore who got in touch with the band and asked to play a song with them. But the stars aligned; the band played in Long Island where he lives and he was well enough to do it (he's been battling a number of health issues in recent years, and he also had to cut short a mini tour with Blackmore's Night last year because he fell ill). So he knows that it's now or never, an opportunity like this might not present itself again.
And so this brings us back to last Wednesday, when Ritchie Blackmore appeared live on stage with Deep Purple, the band he founded in 1968, once again after a 33 year hiatus. And it was great seeing them play together again after this length of time. If we're being pedantic, his playing isn't as fast and technical as it once was, but the man is 81 and is suffering from arthritis and god knows what else, and he still plays better than I ever will, so that's that. It was great seeing him on stage with the band, and they all seemed to have a blast, as did the audience. And that's all anyone can really ask for.
Who knows what the future will hold. I hope he'll be around and well enough to make music for many more years, but he isn't getting any younger and if this turns out to be his final public appearance playing guitar, I can't think of a better way to conclude his incredible career than this.
Being on stage with Deep Purple and playing, of course, Smoke on the Water.
Legendary. Thanks, Ritchie.
2026-08-14 08:00:00
This week Ruben wrote about Feeling blue after the end of Heartstopper, his favourite series. I've never heard of this series before and I'm also not the target audience for it, but he said something in his review that got to me: "It’s the series I wish young me would have been able to watch, at a time when gay people like myself were only portrayed as stereotypes in mainstream media: one-dimensional props for comic relief." I have to admit I felt a twinge of shame reading this, because growing up in the 80s and 90s I know exactly which type of movies and shows he's talking about. And I'm also guilty of laughing at these stereotypical depictions of gay people without ever considering how seeing this must have felt to a young person who was just discovering that their sexual orientation was different from what was considered normal by society at this time. I absolutely believe Ruben when he says that he still carries around memories of pain and fear from his younger days, and it's awful to think about how insensitive we were about this kind of thing back then, without considering the emotional impact this can and does have on people like him. I think we've gotten better in recent times as a society in this regard, but... we should have done better then, too.
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