Yet another Expat

E98 - Europe Is Boiling, EasyJet's Second-Class Passengers & Oversea Rants ft. DOGE's Worm Comeback

It's the hottest day I've ever lived through in Berlin, the asphalt is melting, my phone is peeling, and yes, I'm recording this with no clothes on. Why does EasyJet make you choose your level of suffering to board a plane? How do you cut a $15M worm program and end up paying a billion? And how exactly do you paint a national monument's pool, drive your car through it, and turn the whole thing green? Vaccines, mosquitoes that now love your repellent, and the unluckiest plane full of parachute instructors. Stay hydrated.

E97 - Vacation Is Dead, AI Is Scared & Facts Are Optional Now

Who does an ultramarathon in the desert and calls it a vacation? Who's building a new free public swimming pool at the center of Berlin? What's the latest in Trump's agenda vs anything that ever made sense in the world, and why Anthropic is calling for a pause in AI development? These and more. Come we can laugh and cry together. Follow me on my socials if you can find them. Leave a comment if you're not AI Cheers.

E96 - Rants, Lakes, AI and Pollen Attacks

I propose modern public holidays, starting with a yearly “check your backups” day (USB sticks, external drives, photo chaos) and I campaign for using exclamation marks again. Then I rant about workplaces adopting Claude so heavily that company chat starts reading like AI-on-AI communication: people use AI to generate overly long polite messages and recipients use AI to compress them back into one sentence, creating extra cognitive load and raising the question of how harsh we’re training ourselves (and AIs) to be. I share personal updates on brutal Berlin pollen, the threatened shutdown of multicultural RBB Cosmo (where I also make a Greek show), my coding side projects (a 2D anti-AI platformer, a Google reviews “fair ratings” extension, and an encrypted no-notifications messaging app), surreal Trump/IRS corruption news, and a lake trip where my kid ignores nature for inflatable plastic toys. Follow my stuff on: https://ennui92.github.io/ermis-dev/ 00:00 Welcome From Berlin00:40 Modern Public Holidays01:07 Backup Day Proposal03:28 Exclamation Mark Revival04:20 AI Written Workplace Talk05:53 Full Circle Communication09:05 Being Nice To AI11:13 Proper Episode Intro11:35 Berlin Allergy Season14:39 Cosmo Radio Shutdown19:02 Coding Side Projects21:53 No Rush Messaging App24:46 Trump And IRS Corruption27:28 Lake Day In Berlin30:15 Plastic Toys In Nature31:26 Wrap Up And Goodbye

E95 - Parenting Adventures & Game Development with Claude

Links at the bottom. Greece won. Three years in a row. The title of the most complex country in the world to do business in. I open by complaining about it, then quietly admit I still keep an accountant there even though I left, because the complexity is also why I cannot leave. (Before you read further... You know who writes these descriptions... right? Right. Ermis out)Then a small thing about the €230 question I once paid a lawyer to answer, that I'd now ask ChatGPT for free. Which is great. Except for the part where the same machine is firing people I know.Some parenting at 1.5 years. He sleeps through the night now. He wants to wear one red boot. Just the one. We are walking, slowly, into the part of toddlerhood where he figures out he can lie down in the middle of the pavement and there is nothing I can do about it.And then the long stretch. I am building a 2D platformer called Pull the Plug. I cannot code. I am making it anyway, with Claude. I'll tell you about the shortcuts I built this week that finally made the thing move faster. Fly cam. God mode. A one-button checkpoint. A screenshot batcher. Petty victories. They felt enormous.The game is ugly. Shipping anyway.We can pull the plug together, kill the AI, then go grow tomatoes. That was always the plan.— * Play the ugly in-progress version: https://pull-the-plug.feepok.workers.dev [https://pull-the-plug.feepok.workers.dev/] * Game landing + waitlist: https://ennui92.github.io/pull-the-plug-site/ [https://ennui92.github.io/pull-the-plug-site/] * Daily devlog: https://ermis.dev [https://ermis.dev/] * Newsletter: https://ermis1.substack.com [https://ermis1.substack.com/]

E94 - Alligators, UFOs, and Rebrain Greece

Zoo Animals as Influencers, a Shoe-Hoarding Alligator, and Greece’s “Rebrain” PR Yo I'm too tired so got an LLM to summarise this episode below, sorry. No need to read ittttt Ermis records episode 94 from Berlin, reflecting on modern zoos and their conservation narrative, comparing captive animals to “trapped influencers” funding protection of wildlife, and noting the northern white rhino is functionally extinct with only two females left, relying on IVF. He shares a news story about an alligator lifted by helicopter after a flood, found to have eaten a missing businessman and to contain six pairs of shoes, suggesting it may have preyed on others near a frequently flooding bridge. He comments on the Trump administration releasing UFO files in curated batches while dumping Epstein files as unorganized raw data. He critiques Greece’s “Rebrain Greece” campaign amid brain drain statistics and misleading “reversal” language, praises Korea’s mixed-ripeness “one a day” banana packs, covers Berlin’s e-scooter hub parking plan extending to 2035, and updates that he’s building a six-level 2D platformer game playable in a browser: here https://pull-the-plug.feepok.workers.dev/ more projects at: https://ennui92.github.io/ermis-dev/.00:00 Welcome to Episode 9400:46 Zoos and Conservation Guilt04:41 Rhino Extinction Reality06:09 Alligator Eats Businessman10:01 UFO Files vs Epstein Files13:14 Rebrain Greece PR Spin19:31 Bananas One a Day Pack21:26 Berlin E Scooter Parking Ban24:05 Building a 2D Platformer Game25:34 Final Wrap and Callbacks