Hobby
I spend my free time variously on:
Travelling
As a German, I have an inborn drive to explore the world. So far I've been to the following European countries: France, Poland, Spain, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, England, Cyprus, and Greece. Outside Europe, the list is far shorter: Egypt, Japan, Mexico and Australia.
My journey to Australia in 2009 is even chronicled in a detailed Photo/GPS-diary (German-only) that can be displayed in Google Earth!
Books
Reading is one of my favourite pastimes, and I read mostly science fiction and fantasy - why constrain yourself to current or historical scenarios when you're in the fictional realm anyway? In my opinion, some of the greates creative potentials and best literary products are found in this field that's so often dismissed unfairly as inferior. Some of my favourite authors are:
- C.J. Cherryh
- Terry Pratchett
- Robert Jordan
- William Gibson
- Douglas Adams
Sports
I like hiking, but don't find the time for it very often.
Anime and Manga
Japanese comics and animated films were my greatest passion for a long time, which shows in my hobby websites (see below). This is how I came to learn Japanese and got the chance to study in Japan for a year. However, this passion has decreased lately.
Anime fansites
A Homepage for Elektra
My first website, which I used to teach myself HTML. It's a "shrine" for the character Elektra in the anime series "Secret of Blue Water". Besides information about the series and the character, there's also an image gallery.
The site was originally made on an Amiga home computer at a time when only tech geeks had internet connections, and the anime (VHS, DVD was yet to come) and
manga available in the west could almost be counted on your fingers.
Brazil's Tenchi Muyo Fanfiction Reviews
For a while, I spent a lot of time reading anime fanfiction and started writing reviews of Tenchi Muyo fanfictions. I even had the goal to review all Tenchi fanfictions in existence. At the time, that was not unrealistic, but soon after, they started becoming very popular.
Later I build the review site into a real community using a database - unfortunately
Tenchi Muyo's popularity was decreasing by that time, so the community became
quiet and then died. So I've been generally unlucky when it comes to timing, but
I did gain a lot of experience concerning literary analysis and dynamic webpages.
My Anime Fanfiction
Of course I also wrote a few fanfictions. Despite being German, I wrote them in English
since the German fanfiction scene was non-existant at that time.
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