music

favorite albums

a crow looked at me by mount eerie

raw grief. i listened to this album the year my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which was either the best time or the worst time to listen to phil elverum reflecting on his wife passing away from pancreatic cancer. he forces you to examine within yourself the human desperation to find meaning in death in order to reckon with its sobering apathy. how making art in memoriam of someone can feel utterly crude when you're grasping against an entity that can't be reasoned with.

between bodies by the world is a beautiful place & i am no longer afraid to die

all of TWIABP's music is filled with wounded yearning and a relentlessly hopeful search for a kinder future. this album just happened to have taken ahold of me in a particular way, like my heart is being tugged by some slow gravitational pull. a few of the songs here are a bit different from their usual stuff in the sense that they are spoken and not sung, but they also happen to be my favorites. i'm also just a sucker for narrative devices involving outer space as a metaphor for missed connections.

flora maniia by temachii

bitterness can also be soft and gentle! the mixing in these songs is gorgeous, and temachii's vocals have such an angelic feel. i've yet to grow tired of playing temachii's music over and over again. it's dreamy, resentful, yearning, bleeding, screaming.

give up by the postal service

i was born just in time to still be exposed to 2000s indietronica, so thankfully i'm able to bond with my millennial friends over the postal service and death cab for cutie. i really don't know what to say about this. it's pleasant, a little quirky, but not too much. "such great heights" has been used in so many commercials at this point. ben gibbard does what he does best, which is being a really sad hipster white guy in seattle. it was beautiful to hear them live for the album's 20th anniversary.

I LAY MY LIFE DOWN FOR YOU by JPEGMAFIA

i once saw a video parodying JPEG's music by blasting a shit ton of explosions, gun shots, and discord notification sound effects for 30 seconds straight. the worst part is that JPEG has actually used these samples in at least one of his songs. that being said, i love this album, and i love when artists include electric guitar riffs in rap and hip hop. if you can work with his somewhat chronically online material, you'll be pleasantly rewarded with crazy flow and some pretty sick music production.

transatlanticism by death cab for cutie

i have tried to learn almost all of the songs from this album on my guitar. death cab for cutie is pretty well-known for its wistful and sometimes overpoetic lyrics, but i find that endearing. it's an album about distance, sparseness, and expanses—which makes sense because the concept of this album is long distance relationships. the way the instrumentals swell creates such a lush soundscape that simply makes you feel like you are part of something grand. this is one of the few albums that i genuinely believe is a beautiful listen from start to finish.

favorite tracks

death cab for cutie - a lack of color
JPEGMAFIA - baby i'm bleeding
JPEGMAFIA - i scream this in the mirror before i interact with anyone
los campesinos! - we are beautiful, we are doomed
mount eerie - real death
the postal service - recycled air
TWIABP - if and when i die
underscores - kinko's field trip 2006

physical collection

TBA

film/tv

films

the knives out trilogy

i've largely given up on pursuing filmmaking as a career, but watching these rian johnson films makes me reconsider my stance every once in a while.

scott pilgrim vs. the world

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deer of nine colors

TV

TBA

games

video games

balatro

i once opened balatro at 10pm and didn't stop playing until i looked out the window and realized that the sun was rising. i think it's an understatement to say that i enjoyed this game. you don't even need to know anything about poker. you just need to love a good rouge-like, intentionally designed game art, and the dopamine rush from when numbers go up. i have never gambled and never will, but balatro has gotten me pretty fucking close.

disco elysium

there is nothing that i can say that will add anything new to what has already been praised about disco elysium. it's the best game i've ever read. it's fucking hilarious, it's heartwrenching, it speaks so truthfully about strife and revolutionary hope. it absolutely deserves to be named one of the best games ever made. i do think disco elysium's original concept as a TTRPG shows during its more cumbersome, text-heavy scenes, but consider this an opportunity to retrain your attention span while still playing a video game. it makes all the memes about disco elysium that much more worth it.

sorry we're closed

this game is so, so lustfully queer. the art director and co-developer of sorry we're closed created this game as a reflection on their desperation to be loved during a state of personal transformation. the playstation 2 inspired graphics and painted character art makes the game so god damn beautiful to play, but the combat system was a bit clumsy and frustrating at times! i love magical realism with biblical tropes, but i couldn't take having to play the entire game all over again just to see the other endings. i still highly recommend playing it, if only to experience how fucking sick the boss battle music is.

yakuza 0

i have sunk so many hours of my life into this stupid game. the whole yakuza series is utterly ridiculous. with how many substories and minigames RGG has packed into Y0, you will not be running out of things to play anytime soon. i spent literal YEARS wasting time playing mahjong instead of progressing through the main story—which is far from mediocre, by the way. the crime drama storytelling of pre-kiwami kiryu and majima is so god damn tight, but i feel the real gem of the game is how unapologetically unhinged the gameplay is. i love the fishing minigames, i love the karaoke bar, and i fucking love managing the cabaret club. yakuza ruined my fucking life

coffee talk episode 2: hibiscus and butterfly

pokemon mystery dungeon: explorers of sky

board games

azul

my girlfriend called this "chess but prettier." even as a chess hater, i like this board game quite a lot. the art style for the two-player version is absolutely gorgeous. as a strategic tile-laying game, azul's vibe is meant for more methodical board game sessions, though i've still had plenty of funny moments when playing with friends—especially ones that like to be a little petty and competitive. playing azul puts me in the same meditative flow state that playing mahjong does, and the elegance of the tiles makes for a delightfully tactile experience. the game's really obsessed with portugal though.

harmonies

another tile-laying strategy game, but this time, you're creating habitats for wild animals! the art style for harmonies is so cute, and the game pieces are made out of actual wood! the feeling of completing habitats and maximizing your points through efficient tile-laying is deeply satisfying. it makes for a great casual game to break out for when you have friends over, no matter how experienced.

quacks

a friend of mine introduced us to quacks, and my girlfriend was instantly hooked—which makes sense since she loves push-your-luck games. learning the rules was fairly easy despite quacks' mild complexity, and we've had much success when playing with both new players and board game novices. quacks and its expansions nicely accommodate a variety of experience levels, and the game design creates the perfect balance of skill and RNG chance. i'm part of the crowd that loves its recent claymation-style redesign, and since we got the deluxe version, the board game pieces are nice to hold and temptingly edible.

wingspan asia

so my friends and i are currently locked in some sort of wingspan cold war where everyone's waiting on the other to buy it so they don't have to. my girlfriend and i caved and bought both finspan and wingspan asia under the assumption that our friends would eventually get the base game. it's been months, and still, no one has wingspan. finspan and wingspan asia are both fine games. i'd imagine wingspan asia would make the base game even more fun as an expansion, but we wouldn't know what that's like.

books

captive genders: trans embodiment and the prison industrial complex

sputnik sweetheart

it took me 5 years (i started this in 2019 at my english teacher's recommendation) to work through the narcoleptic perverseness of what is my first murakami novel—but once the action picked up, i was able to blaze through the remaining 50% in the past week. the first half lulls you with its classic murakami-esque melancholy, then snaps to total mystery without warning. the end will leave you with an existential emptiness that you know won't be resolved. the only thing written in this book that's tethered to any sense of reality is the narrator's crude projected fantasies of unrequited sexual desire that probably take up a third of this book if you put them all together. but also you could take this review and stitch this to any one of murakami's books so if you're looking for anything of substance here im sorry

white noise