Week Notes 07
๐April 21 2025- April 27 2025
It has been a few weeks since I last posted anything here, and I miss it a lot. Frankly, I haven't been doing much writing outside of work or university. Assignments were peaking, and there were a lot more new clients and renewals happening in the past few weeks, so I did not have much energy left to spare to write.
It's finals week next week (and the first part of the week after the next), and so I have been home during my study break. It's mainly just a mix of work and revision (panic-cramming honestly). Still, I want to share some things that I got to here, even if it's not a full-fledged blog post but more of a recap.
๐ฑ Highlights of the Week
- I just made my first physical book purchase of the year! The book is called Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World by Anne-Laure Le Cunff and I decided to finally get it after seeing great reviews and interviews with the author. It was pretty pricey, but the company I work for introduced a new self-improvement program that basically covers any sort of non-fiction-self-help-type book purchases every 1 month (limited to 1 book). It's so new and pricey that I don't think I would've taken the plunge if not for it. Excited to get to it during my break.
- I had a movie night with my sister, watching the Hotel Reverie episode from Black Mirror. It was really good. Despite some criticisms of the plot not making sense at some points, I think that it was such a great mix of modern and old-timey movie magic. It didn't make my sister and I cry like San Junipero did (another amazing Black Mirror episode), but, we left feeling as though we had lost something in ourselves too. Fascinating to see Awkwafina play such a serious and normal character too, haha!
- I had some nice accountability study + work sessions with my partner! As both of us are taking most of the same exams, and we're long-distance for the week, we decided to do some silent video calls every other day while we did our own Pomodoro study sessions. It's been a pretty nice setup and it does help with motivation a bit, as I don't slack off too much and vice versa when you know your partner is working super hard. Also fun when we end the day with a sitcom episode (we recently finished Modern Family, so we've moved on to Brooklyn 99!).
๐ฌ Watched
Apart from the episodes of Black Mirror and Brooklyn Nine-Nine mentioned, I did watch the first two episodes of the second season of The Derry Girls! I've been rewatching the first season (as I watched it a fair bit of time ago and mostly forgotten the plot) and I've been having a fun time. Some of the Irish humour goes over my head, but when it hits, it hits! The actresses do a good job of acting their age, and even when their characters are annoying, I can still find humour in the plot.
๐ฎ Played
Didn't play much except for a few Discord activities when I was on those accountability calls with my partner as a way of destressing! I'm looking forward to getting back into Persona 5 and hopefully defeating the last gym leader in my playthrough of Pokemon Yellow.
๐ Read
I've also been in a hard reading slump these few weeks. The only 'reading' I've been doing is listening to the Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist audiobook by Liz Pelly. The book was discovered from a video interview by Fantano (a pretty popular music critic on YouTube) with the author herself, which I found super intriguing. I'm about under 2 hours left, and the things unveiled by the author are scary. It's amazing how much Spotify is getting away with the "implanting fake artists into their editorial playlists" so actual artists don't get as much stream time (which, in turn, means Spotify don't have to pay them as much) is crazy.
Not to mention the cultural costs of the playlist culture that Spotify is parading around. There are a lot of things that have made me question how I interact with music, especially with the usage of Spotify. I imagine it would be similar to other streaming services, but, it seems like Spotify one-upped the others with how much they're doing to dominate the market with its low-cost allures.
Apart from this non-fiction listen, I've also been rereading a romance novel so I can hopefully get away from the slump: When You Least Expect It by Haley Cass. I've read it twice now, and this would be my third read. It's a very chill stakes romance, and it's fairly short too (at about 250 or so pages on my Kindle) and it's a breeze to go through. Sometimes reading something familiar is super comforting to me, and this is really doing the trick.
๐ง Listened To
I've been listening to a lot of video game music this week during my study sessions, but when I wasn't, these were some of the things that caught my ear!
- Tiny Desk with Doechii
- Oh my! Doechii is an up-and-coming female rapper who sings so good live. She has such an amazing presence here, and if you only know her through her hit, 'Anxiety', please please please take a listen to this Tiny Desk performance or try her new mixtape out.
- ่ชๆฌ by ๆน้
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- I'm always intrigued by modern Hokkien pop music, and this is a nice chill pop record that's the kind I love. Reminds me of a tamer Enno Cheng.
๐ Noteworthy Links
- Stereogum Review for Bon Iver's new record!
Thank you so much for reading this! To the few that have sent emails, I have not forgotten about them - I will be getting back to those after my finals pass over :)
[38/100] for #100DaysToOffload