This is Charlie Chaplin’s final speech in his movie “The Great Dictator” from 1940, amazingly timeless, intelligent and beautiful.

straightchain is written and edited by Alex (and hence from here on out this posting is going to be a blatant little self-advertisement). I am an illustrator from Germany, who is currently living in Japan, with a obvious amount of enthusiasm for bikes, games, Japan, drawing and ever increasingly photography.
In Germany I had been working as freelance illustrator for computer games, children’s books, comics and magazines until I returned to Japan as a student in the spring of 2011. I am currently enrolled in the local Kyoto Seika University as a research-student in the Manga Department, where I am researching japanese culture & mythology, as well as working on a comic project. Up to spring of 2012 I had been freelancing in textures and concepts for indie game-developer Black Pants Studios’ title Tiny and Big. The game will be released by publisher Crimson Cow in the second quarter of this year!

You can find my illustration portfolio here, and even though I am posting most of my photography on this blog, there’s a bit more at flickr and 500px.

Thank you.

straightchain was a blog just about bikes, which I started after being hit by the fixed-gear craze in 2007. I quickly learned how to built my first fixed-gear conversion thanks to Sheldon Brown. I didn’t know any local like-minded people, so the blog was a way to vent my newly found enthusiasm.
By chance, I spent 5 months in Kyoto, Japan that year and had a lot to write about, because the local biking-scene was absolutely thriving. Back home, my focus shifted back towards re-blogging about bike-parts and bike-fashion. I found it increasingly boring to re-post content instead of creating new content, e.g. in form of articles, tour-photography and product-reviews. In 2009 I graduated from university, was working in two dayjobs (one LBS) and as a freelance illustrator inbetween. I was so busy, that I finally decided to discontinue straightchain indefinitely.

straightchain will continue again as my personal blog, so I am not tempted to clutter my professional website by bragging about some extraordinarily painful hill-climb in northern italy. Yes, I got to admit, I had been very tempted to do just that last summer!
This version of straightchain will be about bikes (of course), travel, Japan (YES, again), as well as other fields of interest, and lastly non work-related sketches and illustrations, which ought to be shared with fellow colleagues, friends, family or maybe even like-minded cyclists! Oh and, I still got the desire to create content, rather than re-post content. Let’s see how this works out! Enjoy the new straightchain!

It’s been a long time, but straightchain is back.