Week Notes 09

11 May, 2025

📝May 5 2025- May 11 2025

Exams are officially over! I've been back home for a week now, and I'm trying to get my groove back in blogging and responding to emails. I've been putting off anything related to Bear and blogging in general. It's just been a little overwhelming, and frankly, I wasn't too motivated to get into it during the latter parts of my semester.

I'm now back for the next few weeks, and apart from working as many hours as possible, I would love to get back into a few things during my break.

🌱 Highlights of the Week

• Celebrated the end of the finals by having NakNak.
  • Our friends and I have been talking about having something to eat as a celebration, and I suggested some Korean Fried Chicken from this restaurant. It's a fast food chain that's new here, and they serve good boneless fried chicken and burgers. It is so filling that I ended up just sharing a set of chicken and fries with my partner. We went to a Matcha place after that, and chatted about some of our plans during break and what we're most looking forward to. At one point, everyone got exhausted, so we went home.
• Went out for dinner with some college friends!

  • During the same day, YH and I were invited to dinner with some friends from college. It's been more than a year since we saw some of them (as they had went to the US for some sort of exchange program) and our friend M was returning to East Malaysia, so we couldn't miss it or we wouldn't get to say goodbye properly. We were both pretty drained when we got there (the traffic jam was crazy, a 30-minute drive became 2 whole hours), but it was nice to see everyone.

    We reminisced about how quickly everyone is graduating and how diverse everyone seemed to be from the friend group. We have a few people getting their nutrition degrees, biomedicine, analytics, mathematics, traditional Chinese medicine, and psychology. It's always nice to speak with them, even though I wouldn't say they're all my close friends. I've had some great memories with some of them, but I don't speak 1-1 to all of them.

• Played Repo with some of the friends from my previous internship!

  • It was a lot more scary than I thought. I've watched some of my friends play the game before, but haven't fully paid attention to how the game works. There's a lot of coordination, and frankly, my vertical mouse was not helping haha, but it was still fun. The mechanics are very similar to Lethal Company, where you have to collect items that have some sort of monetary value to get to the next level. The caveat this time in Repo is that dropping these objects or hitting them on something else would cause the value of these items to drop, making it harder for you to win the round. In addition to that, there will be some monsters/ghosts to make your life harder.

    I would say it is more forgiving than Lethal Company, as you can 'shrink' yourself in the game and hide. As long as you're not in direct contact with the monsters, you won't die. As you can imagine, there was a lot of screaming happening when we played this.

• Had Dim Sum with my family for Mother's Day!
  • We haven't been eating out as much as a family recently, but it was nice to head out together. As always, the food was great.

🎬 Watched

• Finished the second season of Hacks.
  • It was good! I didn't see Deborah firing Ava (in that way) coming at all. This show has been fairly fun to catch up with. It never ends in an "oh my god, I need to watch this" way, but I find myself gravitating towards it when I want a funny show that's not sitcom material (like Modern Family or Brooklyn 99).

🎮 Played

Other than Repo, nothing, honestly! Not in a super gaming mood lately, but maybe I'll find some time to catch up on Persona 5?

📖 Read

• Started Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff!

  • The book arrived and I've read the first few chapters. So far, it's been pretty good. I like self-help books that don't assume you want to achieve Everything Everywhere All At Once. This one isn't exactly telling you to leave it up to fate, but rather to take tiny risks and experiment with different things, all through the author's framework and research.

    Though I would note that I wasn't a fan in one of the first chapters where the author claimed that she "isolated a set of practices that are an antidote to burnout and boredom alike". In general, I do not like it when any author that claims to use research as their evidence to make any confirmatory statements like that, as promises like these just act as a marketing tool and may end with disappointment.

    However, I am giving it the benefit of the doubt as the chapters after that have been good, and I like the way she writes. Her framework seems to be pretty sound so far, too.

• Started Jujutsu Kaisen!
  • I haven't been reading much Manga except for Fullmetal Alchemist, but I've lost the drive to keep up with it, unfortunately. It might be the long pauses I have gone from each chapter, but I decided to move to the anime (haven't started it yet) instead. JJK has been recommended to me by my housemate, and I had another close friend tell me it was good as well, so I decided to just go for it!
  • So far, I'm in the first volume, but I would say the pacing is quick. I think I've been attuned to the slower pacing from Western novels, and fantasy at that, that this feels like I'm watching Arcane Season 2 in Manga format haha! I do enjoy it still, and I like the art style so far, and I'm intrigued to see where it goes. I have 0 idea how it'll play out so far, but I'll share my thoughts as I go in these week's notes.

🎧 Listened To

• The new Men I Trust record, Equus Caballus!
  • If you liked Oncle Jazz, this is just like that, imo. Men I Trust is perfect chill music for me, honestly. I have mostly no idea what the frontwoman is singing for the most part, but her voice works so well with the instrumentation. Those bass lines in some of these songs are just perfect. Warm, sounding and feels like a nice hug.
• 鹹汫 (微電影《夜酌》主題曲) by 曹雅雯

🔗 Noteworthy Links

I had the chance to catch up with a lot more posts this week, so I have more to share!

• gratitude for education
• I'm begging you to love something again
  • "People forget what it's like to love something, forget what it's like to fail, forget what it means to work for something. Do you know what it was like being a 2009 k-pop fan, do you know how many alt burners you needed to get to vote for your favorite artists at 3 am, do you know about translating and hardcoding translations into youtube videos without any real translation services online? and you did it for the community?"
• Labeling the mind
• Bullying is never okay
  • I had no idea Brandon left, and I'm pretty sad to hear that he might've been bullied out of blogging :/ He was kind to me when I first started posting, and I hope he is doing okay. I loved how diverse of a blogger he was, and he genuinely seemed like a nice person.
• Do we always need to be busy?

[43/100] for #100DaysToOffload

#100DaysToOffload #weeknotes