Hey,

It’s been a while.

Much has happened these last few months. And yet, nothing has really changed.

I’m still the same person with the same interests, fighting the same demons!

My focus these last few months has been entirely on overkill. It’s a company now, which makes me a business owner? Writing this still feels weird; I feel like a guy trying to figure this out. Then again, I guess that’s what we all do.

overkill grew quicker than I expected, I guess anyone expected. I believe the success to be a mix of luck, timing, and work. Hard work. Hard, taxing, mental work that occupies my mind 80% of the time I’m awake. I like it, though. I believe I need this. It keeps me going. It keeps me sane amidst the insanity that is living. Hard, creative work, I think, hope, is the reason I’m here. So I’ll keep it going.

But I still felt like something was lacking. I have many interests. Gaming and tech are but one (well, two). Ask Chris, my cofounder, and he’ll tell you my mind is all over the place all the time. My brain is broken this way.

Which is why I revived The Letters of Clio. It’ll be a monthly newsletter (for now, I might experiment with the rhythm), filled with things, words, pictures, and thoughts that occupied me the weeks between the emails.

By sharing what I care about, I hope someone somewhere will benefit from it.

So thank you for subscribing!

Let’s get to it.

I rediscovered books

I started reading again after not having touched a book in, what, close to a year?

I would have loved to say it came easy, but that would have been a lie. I had to make „sacrifices“ to become a reader again.

I needed to make time. The thing about reading is that no one has time to read. If it isn‘t something you want to do, you‘ll find enough excuses why you can‘t read right now. And even if you want to read, it has to be a conscious effort. So I had to make time. Find something somewhere that had to go, to make space for reading.

While I haven‘t read a book in a year, I have been reading a lot — timelines, mostly. And while reading a book and reading a timeline are not even close to comparable, both things use up the same space and energy in the mind. They occupy the same mind space, only that one of these two things is just filled with trash upon trash upon trash. You can guess which one is which. So timelines had to go. I removed every social media app from my phone (except for Discord, but that is a communications tool, it‘s how I stay in touch with my friends). I still use social media, but when I‘m on my Mac, I use them less as a consumer and more as a creator for overkill. And I guess, now, this thing.

Anyway. I finished reading Ryan Holiday‘s Discipline is Destiny. It‘s the second of four books in his Virtue series after Courage is Calling.

I preferred this book to the first one. It felt closer to home. I sometimes lack discipline when I try to rely on motivation alone. A fleeting muse, much more fickle than just putting my ass down and doing the thing.

I like Ryan‘s writing: he tells a story about a historical figure, distils the lesson based on this person‘s life, and then shares how it applies to the reader. It is a style he adopted from his mentor, Robert Greene, whose book, Seduction, I‘ve started reading but couldn‘t finish.

I plan to get into YouTube (the first video is here), and I figured I might be able to use some meta-skills taught in this book to grow on the platform. But the book is all about sexual seduction, all the time. So I gave up.

I‘m currently reading Rick Rubin‘s The Creative Act. I‘ve only started, so I don‘t have any opinion yet but know that after reading two chapters, I started writing this.

On my mind

Two things (besides overkill) occupied me the most in the last few weeks.

I‘ve finally been taking my exercise routine and diet seriously. I lost a few kilograms, mostly in body fat, since the beginning of the year. For the first time in my life, I have something resembling abs.

I‘m on a high protein, low(er) carb, slightly caloric deficit diet and have been tracking everything I eat. I use this app, by the way, but any other app is good enough.

It‘s been fun for me (like some math game: what do I need to eat to fill my macros), but probably very annoying for anyone else. I‘m no longer interested in going to restaurants, as I can‘t correctly track my diet. And when I go to restaurants — I still try to be kinda social — I spend a good chunk of time guessing what macros I have to log. I still love my occasional pizza, though.

I‘ve also been looking much more into the science of exercise. I‘m a nerd when it comes to these things. While I hated school, I sometimes wish I had studied human psychology and physiology.

I have been watching this podcast series on exercise and nutrition by Dr Andrew Huberman and Dr Andy Galpin. It features 6 over three hours long episodes covering everything from how to gain muscle, lose fat, how to drink water best, what supplements to take, how to create an exercise routine, and more.

I added all these videos to Reader by Readwise. A fantastic app, by the way. If a YouTube video has captions, it saves them and then synchronizes the captions with the playtime. Highlights are then automatically sent to my Obsidian vault.

Something else that occupied my mind was the interior design of our apartment. We moved furniture around and put the couch in the middle of our long living room to divide the room into two. We now have a dedicated living room area and a work area with three(!) desks: my girlfriend‘s desk, my desk, and a third one that I call the "focus desk".

Unlike the other two, it has no monitors, keyboards, mice or anything else. It‘s just a grey surface with a few items that I love seeing: a succulent, my two typewriters (an Olympia SM3 and an Olivetti lettera 32), an Edison lamp, a coffee mug in the morning, a glass of water in the evening, and from time to time either my iPad (like right now), or pen and paper.

It is where I write my journal in the morning and where I write stuff like this newsletter. There is something romantic about sitting at this desk compared to my other one. Sitting in the middle of a large room, my mind has more space to wander and think. No screens mean no notifications that can pop up and scream for my attention.

Here is a picture of what it looks like right now:

I like it!

Some recommendations

I recently discovered Ren, a musician from Brighton. I can‘t tell you what genre Ren belongs to because he‘s home… in all of them?

He is a fantastic storyteller and has a way with words akin to a poet. I think he‘s the closest we might have to a modern-day bard.

Do yourself a favour and listen to "The Tale of Jenny & Screech":

And to „Hi Ren“.

Ok, I‘m running out of steam. A lot of words for a single newsletter. But I liked it, though. Writing this was fun; I may have missed this more than I expected.

I might have to do more of this writing. But it‘s a struggle. The world tells you to focus, specialize, and do the main thing. Which, in my case, is overkill (and maybe, you know, my full-time job?). Every minute I write something else is a minute I don‘t spend on overkill.

But I think that’s a mistake. Because every minute I spend writing whatever, is a minute I spend emptying my head, making space for other things. Including overkill. Here I can experiment. Here I can throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks. And whatever sticks, I‘ll refine and turn into a gem for overkill. Be it prose, audio, or even video (I have some video ideas I want to try out on a personal channel).

Playing just for the sake of playing and creating just for the sake of creating is so damn important. I need to do more of it where the path, the act of doing something, is the goal and not some metric, like ratio or clickthrough rate.

So what I want to say is: expect more from me on kvn.li.

It’s good to be back!

P.S.: I created that cover image up there in Midjourney. My prompt was: office of creative writer, typewriter and edison light bulb on desk, flying books, starry, sublime, cinematic lighting, watercolor, dark souls, bloodborne, matte painting --aspect 3:2 --c 50

I have moved servers. I announced it two days ago on the blog — the post has been since deleted – believing I would end up frying my website, but nope. Everything went smoothly. It was super easy, barely an inconvenience (this link might have spoilers for some movies you haven't watched yet).

I am astonished by the simplicity of the whole endeavour and am now wondering why I haven't done so before. I moved away from the much more expensive Ghost(Pro) solution (31 eurodollars per month!!) to a self-hosted Digitalocean server ($6 a month; also, that link gives you $100 credit when signing up). I don't know what to do with this newfound richness.

Not everything worked flawlessly, however. I can't seem to change the email address the newsletter is sent from. And when importing all my subscribers to the backend, I lost a bunch. Everyone who signed up for the Tsundoku-newsletter or the "get all blogpost" newsletter has been lost. Nothing I can do.

But if you want to sign up again, click the button below and toggle whatever you wish to. You can use this too to unsubscribe if you don't care about this anymore.

Also, I am working on something new.

Yes, I can't stop. I must constantly move forward and try new things, or I will die of boredom. Probably. I don't want to find out.

I am relaunching overkill.wtf as a gaming website, written by yours truly with my usual sass and idiosyncrasy. I will primarily focus on the Steam Deck, with a hint of Switch, PC gaming and whatever else I find interesting at that moment. But mostly Steam Deck.

I firmly believe the Steam Deck will be the future of gaming. Or at least that type of platform: a small handheld PC capable of playing most games at a decent quality paired with off-site streaming solutions a la Game Pass Cloud or GeForce Now.

Some interesting contenders, be it the Ayaneo Air or the Ayn Odin, are on the market, and the tech keeps moving forward. Also, I can't shake off the feeling that we might see an Xbox Portable soon.

I want to be onboard this ship. And share the fascination and the love I have for this market. So overkill.wtf will go live soon. I have some behind-the-scenes changes I need to adapt before formally launching it, but for now, you can subscribe via RSS or newsletter.

Also, if anyone wants to be part of the journey, hit me up. I am looking for co-bloggers.

I've been wondering if I should get a new camera. Not to replace my beloved Leica Q2 (who the hell would do that?) but to complement it, to have something whenever I feel too limited by the Q2's 28mm focal length.

I want to get something with changeable lenses. (You can't change the lens of the Q2 if you didn't know. This is part of its charm.) I mainly want lenses for product/still photography and portraits. So I guess around 50mm and 85mm — or whatever their equivalent is on a non-full-frame sensor.

But what camera I should get is the tricky part. I used to have a Sony a7 II with a bunch of lenses but hated using that camera. It took great shots, but the experience was... boring. It was tedious, it wasn't fun.

The Leica is fun. Using it makes me happy. But it's also expensive as hell. No way I can afford a Leica SL2 or M11.

My current choice is to get a Fuji X-T4. Or rather an X-T5, whenever that one gets released. After all, I have to budget this first, and it'll take a while until I have the money.

Though that X-Pro3 looks intriguing, too.

I signed up for an account over at Glass, and this is where I will post my pictures in the future.

Kevin Wammer on Glass

A guy with too many interests. From Luxembourg. Half-Italian. Trying to figure out how to take pictures using a Leica Q2.

I explained in the last email for my pop-up newsletter project why:

I dislike having to do something daily. TTLG confirmed this for me. I need novelty to function at my best (which is why most jobs bore me, but that’s another topic). I much rather only take shots a few times per week, or maybe per month, whenever I go out to do something. July was a slow month, but for my stay in France.

But not all was lost with this project. I liked editing and curating the shots, and I think I learned a few things and could hone my style a little more.

But no more daily photo newsletters for me. Instead, I decided to sign up for an account at Glass. In the future, I will keep posting my photography there whenever I am happy with a shot. Or two. You get the deal.

You can sign up for Glass (use the offer code PIVOT2VIDEO or use this link to save some money) or follow my photographic endeavours through RSS.