Dear friends,
I just got vaccinated against the flu and COVID, so if this newsletter sounds a little delirious, or as if Bill Gates’s nanobots are currently racing through my bloodstream, please excuse me.
Speaking of nanobots, I finished the current season of Silo on Apple TV this week and really enjoyed it. I just had to stop comparing it to the books, which I LOVE, and embrace it as the same story told with a different tone and focus.
My heart was racing through pretty much the entirety of S03E09 even though I knew exactly what was about to happen. That part completely blew my mind in the books, and apparently knowing it was coming did absolutely nothing to prepare me for seeing it on screen.
Anyway! I hope you’re prepared for a week of daily comics. This is a good one, if I dare say so myself.
Monday
In case you’re as clueless as we were when we suddenly found ourselves standing in front of this enormous thing, wondering what on earth it was: a graduation tower is basically a huge wooden structure filled with bundles of branches. Salt water trickles down through them, evaporating in the wind and making the air around it slightly salty, a bit like being by the sea.
I’d never heard of or seen anything like it before, and it really was a sight to behold. Definitely one of the highlights of our day trip to Lüneburg.
Tuesday
I’ll never get tired of mentioning how much I enjoy the fact that a really good day doesn’t have to offer all that much to be one. A calm morning in a café, a delicious dinner, and some time with loved ones in between is really all I need to consider my time well spent.
On an unrelated note: the second panel might be one of my favorites I’ve ever drawn. I love everything about it, especially how perfectly it captures my excitement for the XO noodles at Batu. They’re genuinely some of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten.
Wednesday
This was only the second time in my life that I brought something to the cleaners, and it always makes me feel like a character in Friends or Seinfeld. Those shows really made me think dry cleaning would be a much bigger part of adult life. Turns out: they lied to us.
I switched to a fountain pen for the previous comic and this one, and I think you can tell. There’s something different about the line quality and, in my opinion, something better. Everything feels so crisp now!
Thursday
Not only did I get surprise pastries, they also came with a surprise visit from Anna. I can’t imagine anything better happening to a day that, until then, hadn’t offered much in the way of interesting or joyful experiences.
Earlier that day, I had unboxed some new, very(!) expensive ink: Platinum Chou Kuro, which promised to be the blackest waterproof ink you can get. Except it wasn’t waterproof. When I tried to paint over the face in the first panel with watercolor, the ink started smudging and messed the whole thing up. I had to switch to colored pencils to finish it, and even those managed to smudge the ink a little.
So this comic is officially messed up, but at least we learned an important lesson: never trust an ink review that tells you an ink is waterproof.
Friday
Before I had the Year of Art, I had the Year of Friendship. It was actually two years, but who’s counting.
These yearly themes aren’t really supposed to end when the year does. Something always sticks. One of the things that stuck from the Year of Friendship is that I now tend to say yes when someone asks me to do something. Relationships are the most important thing in life, and I don’t want to look back one day and think I should have done more, tried more, or spent more time with the people I care about.
That being said, I don’t think this philosophy will extend to eating at fancy restaurants much more often. The food is delicious, sure, but I’m mostly there for the company, and by the next day I’ll probably have forgotten almost everything I ate. I have friends who can still tell me about that incredible mushroom steak they had in Copenhagen ten years ago or whatever. That’s just not me.
Food is very much an in-the-moment kind of thing for me. I enjoy it while it’s there, but it doesn’t have a huge impact on how I remember an experience overall, as long as it’s good and healthy enough.
Saturday
To be fair, that woman doesn’t seem to be having the best time in Hamburg at the moment and wishes she were back in Sweden, where her family has a house and apparently spends most of the year. So her tears might not have been entirely caused by the quality of the product.
I’m considering suing her anyway, just in case.
Sunday
This was a lot of fun! I wouldn’t say I’m particularly happy with the perfume I ended up with, but I understand the process much better now and already have a hunch about what I should have done differently.
The instructor was incredibly helpful and clearly knew what she was doing. She had worked for the EU on making perfume ingredients safer and could sniff out even the slightest changes in our mixtures.
The nice thing is that we can come back with our recipe, tweak it, and see whether we like the new version better. Apparently, making the perfect perfume is less of a one-time thing and more of an ongoing process of iteration.
Fun!
See! I told you this was a good one, didn’t I? Did you expect to learn what a graduation tower is? Me neither!
Thanks for reading. I really appreciate your ongoing interest in my little comics.
Cheers,
Marcel
🧂