Week Notes 04

23 Mar, 2025

📝March 17 2025- March 23 2025

🌱 Highlights of the Week

• Celebrated our 3rd year anniversary with a visit to the national zoo! We've been talking about visiting the zoo for at least a year now. It was a nice change of pace as the recent celebrations (birthdays) we've had were mostly meals and chill activities like watching a film etc. The zoo was a nice experience overall, albeit there were many animals that weren't there? I'm not sure if they were transported elsewhere or if they died... Hopefully the former.

  It felt more like a flat hike in the nice forest-y scenery with a side of animals as you walk. Luckily, it only lightly showered for a few minutes and there are many chairs located in the zoo for people who get tired or just want a quick break before resuming.

  My parter was very excited to see the fishes and aquarium section of the zoo, though that ended up pretty disappointing. We agreed that that was one of the least well-kept sections of the entire zoo.

  It was a nice day out, and we ended it with a trip to the mall nearby to grab dinner, and to grab my friend's D's birthday presents. We ended up getting some Pokemon figurine blind boxes! Curious to see his reaction to them.

  Some pictures from the Zoo:

• Celebrated my friend K's birthday with a surprise dinner at her favourite (or 2nd favourite, according to her boyfriend haha) hotpot place. She came all the way from home to join us for an assignment meeting and we guised it as a regular dinner at the mall and didn't suspect a thing! It was one of our best surprise birthday celebrations, as some of the previous ones we've done within our group failed for a random reason. It was fun and tiring, but it's always nice to just hangout with friends outside of academic contexts.

• The local audio store I've bought my old IEMs from started selling the Echo Mini's by Snowsky (a subbrand for a popular Chinese hi-fi company: Fiio) and I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my current audio setup, in hopes to put down Spotify later this year. I've been having some fatigue in terms of Spotify's recommendation system and its overemphasis on playlists, as well as my own habits in the streaming environment.I want to be more mindful about the music I listen to, and to dive deeper into certain artists - and support artists on Bandcamp (in exchange for high quality FLAC files versus the max 320kbps Spotify outputs). I'll probably write a post later this or next month to share more on this, but for now, I'll be having fun with the equipment! I feel 16 again, when I first got my Soundcores when I was 18.

🎬 Watched

• Finished the second season of Severance! Oh my... This was one thrilling AF episode. I love the innie and outie Mark conversing at the cabin. I LOVE what they did with Helly and Milchick and the whole weird marching band thing. It was also really nice to see Dylan coming back, and hearing the whole letter outie Dylan wrote him.

  But wow, the ending was just 10/10. The screams from Gemma as she sees innie Mark running after Helena was just so painful to see, but it's fitting. I don't know how they're going to move from here honestly, but I think this is a good enough place to end, even if I don't get to see the 3rd season see the light of day, for some reason. Sure, there's some loose ends, but it's a final kind of ending, where it doesn't really need anything else.

• Caught up with Fragrance of the First Flower's latest episodes. Ah.... I thought that something would actually start between Ting-Ting and Ning, but seems like they didn't go that route. It's official, Ting-Ting and Yi Ming are back! There's a small plot diversion where we get to see Ting-Ting and her mother interact, and there's a coming out scene in the latest episode where I found to be quite well-done. The portrayal of her mother's silent disapproval and her expression is exactly what I think most Chinese parents would do. Not too sure what they're going to be doing in the next 2 episodes, but I'm hoping they won't leave any cliff-hangers as I think S2 would be a good place to end the show.

🎮 Played

• Played a little of Pokemon Yellow this week! I beat Sabrina after looking up a guide on how to move around the weird building - I gave up trying it myself because I just kept getting back to the front door lol.
• Not exactly played, but I watched my friends play Repo on Discord - I didn't join this time around as I was a little drained that day. It looked fun, and reminds me a lot of Lethal Company, which we also play together! For some reason the game looks more polished than I thought it would be. There was a lot of screaming and clueless questions haha.

📖 Read

Honestly did not read much this week. Hopefully I'll get back to the habit again the next!

🎧 Listened To

• I've been rebuilding my local music library recently after trying out Soma.FM and realizing that I've been relying more and more on Spotify playlists and its algorithm in discovering music. I've rediscovered some of the albums I used to listen to a bunch just a few years ago:
  • Visions of a Life by Wolf Alice
    • Don't Delete the Kisses remains one of my all-time favourite songs!
  • Trouble Will Find Me by The National
  • i,i by Bon Iver
    • Hey, Ma is one of my go-to songs to test out when I'm trying out a new headphone/IEM! I'm not a frequent listener of more electronic-type music, but I always felt that Bon Iver's electronic style worked for me. i,i works much better for me versus the one before it.

🔗 Noteworthy Links

• Losing The Mother I Knew At 14 Years Old
  • Great channel that has been popping up in my recommendation feed - Singaporean channel that covers a lot of local stories that are very well done, imo.
    • The first video I watched was more of an interview style versus a short documentary: I Was Addicted To Porn For 40 Years | Can Ask Meh?, worth a watch!
• While researching the Echo Mini, I came across a review by a Chinese reviewer, and found the guy's narration super soothing.

I haven't read as much blog posts this week as it's been a little busy, and I expect to be taking a brief pause on writing/corresponding in emails as well for the next 1-2 weeks! I have a few assignments due soon, and will have to catch up on some work that piled up since I took a day off the other day.

Hoping to be able to slip in 1-2 posts a week on top of my weeknotes, but we'll have to see!

[36/100] for #100DaysToOffload

#100DaysToOffload #weeknotes