December 2023

This December started two weeks into my sabbatical and was about spending quality time with friends. We went to Belgrade and Vienna and returned to Berlin for the holidays.

One of the reasons to come to Serbia was to give a warm welcome to Kenny and Matty who recently moved there and opened a tiny tattoo studio in the heart of the capital. We visited Dim, did some bar hopping, cooked together, and enjoyed the multiplayer bloodbath of a game that is Towerfall.

Francesco Fonassi at Dim with a reel-to-reel, a trusty CDJ-400, and an Arturia Microfreak

Yasna joined me after a couple of days. She arrived with a pretty bad cold but it took her one night of good sleep to be rolling again. We went to Olya’s place for a pelmeni party, introducing a few of our friends to an improvised vegan recipe. It was a success.

Cooking with friends turned into a tradition that I’d like to keep. We did it a couple more times which taught me a good lesson: some ingredients are tough to find far from home. Overcoming perfectionism and being more flexible with planning is the key.

Before going to the airport I marked all my favorite places on a map and took Yasna on a poor man’s guided tour. I’d love to do more of this kind of prep for other cities, especially for Berlin. We explored as much as we could before the city got covered in snow, quite a spectacle.

In Vienna we stayed at A.’s place, sharing the space with two cats. The animals were good company during the day but relentless noisemakers in the night.

Planty Pizza in Spektakel, a space nearby packed with colorful drunk people, treated us to the best pizza ever. Landia, a more traditional restaurant a bit further away, was another hidden gem. Both places were either veggie or vegan.

One of the quieter rooms of Spektakel shortly before the place closed for the night

Back home it was my turn to catch a cold. I’ve used this time to learn a bunch of new stuff. I started blender and narrative design courses for an upcoming game, studied the basics of chess and glimpsed over the Playdate guidelines. I shopped online for new music and recorded my first DJ mix. I failed at reviving a 10€ iPod Classic from an online ad, what a surprise!

I also binge-watched Psycho-Pass, an anime series about an agency enforcing the social credit system in a future Tokyo. The world it paints is grim, and also indistinguishable from our present.

All of this was a lot of fun but also made me feel guilty and afraid that I’m spreading myself too thin and I’d waste the rest of the sabbatical similarly: on the couch, doing everything at once, and nothing in particular.

Our dear friends Tyoma and Asya came from Amsterdam to spend the holidays with us, and they were the perfect company to ease into 2024. We cozied up and forced through the greyness of the Berlin winter together.

My jaw dropped when they revealed a Playdate game they’d made together featuring me as the main character. In this game, I fight hordes of babushkas from my couch refusing their demand to go back to work. It was a good laugh and a perfect metaphor for what I described a couple of paragraphs above, equally touching and motivating.

Conveniently, my Playdate has also arrived this month, and now I’m focused on making a game for it as never before.

Playdate running Kolya vs Babushkas

I started reading “Унеси ты моё горе”, a collection of interviews with survivors of the war in Ukraine. The title translates as ”Take away my grief”, and it is not an easy book. A reminder to snap out of the numbness we developed over the last two years of this ugly, shameful war. Published by Meduza, an anti-Kremlin news outlet, I hope it finds a broader audience.

I tried something new to conduct the year’s retrospective: 40 questions to ask yourself every year. It helped processing the year’s events, as well as building a narrative around it. Sharing it with close people was also a great way to get to know each other better. Let me know if you’d like to do the same.