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several of the older men i know (my boss' boss, my dad, my grandfather) were supremely impressed with me for reading erik larsen's the devil in the white city, which simultaneously tells the story of the chief architect behind the chicago world's fair and hh holmes, the serial killer operating in chicago at that time. this is a Book For Dads tm. i was not all that into it. the tone is a little weird because larsen is, at points, reconstructing dialogue and conjecturing about events in a tone that... kind of implies that the book is a fictional thriller? like there was a massive cognitive dissonance for me between knowing that these were real events and also knowing that larsen was just making some of this shit up. it was weird and i didn't like it. not that i had anything against the style really -- like, i love love LOVE procedural television so i can appreciate a thriller even if it's not what i usually read. but something about this one just didn't jive with me. (even if i did feel Smart and Intellectual reading it on the subway.)

speaking of things bedeviling the city can we talk about how i woke up this morning and found out the aqi had been in the 200s overnight because of a fire the next state over?? after i stayed out late in the park with friends and walked... brb checking google maps... 2.5 miles (holy shit? was it really that far?) home for funsies and then slept with my FUCKING WINDOW OPEN because i still haven't put in my window unit because itll go from 89f one day to 70 the next. i really need to suck it up and buy an air purifier for my bedroom or something because god damn. i hate living through historical events

so, in late march/early april i started seeing this guy.

i've alluded to him before, i think, sometimes vaguely and once giving a whole rundown of the situation as it was in, like, january. it's been going really well! the more i talk to him, the more i like him and the more i think we work well together, and i know he's been enjoying spending time with me. but without going too much into it, we're stopping, at least for now, with the option of picking it back up in a few months if that's what we feel is the right thing.

one of the things that came out of that conversation was that i basically asked him to give me homework. "what are tv shows or movies that you like," i said. "it'll be like microdosing getting to know you," i said. i am now going to be embarking on the grand adventure of Watching Anime. (i have watched anime before but it was yuri on ice and fma brotherhood. i am not an Anime Watcher, habitually.) expect some posts about one piece.

all of this to say, the book i just finished - the starless sea by erin morgenstern of night circus fame - is one that i wonder if he'd enjoy. as far as i know, he leans very sci-fi fantasy, which this book is not NOT, it is solidly fantasy--okay, let me just explain the book and why i liked it. it's this nested mobius loop of a fairy tale about time falling in love with fate and the generations-long journey they have to take to reunite and a mysterious extradimensional library. i love stories about stories and metafiction and this certainly is that! it for sure has the same dreamlike quality that i loved about night circus too, and it's very gay and the character design is cool and the worldbuilding is like... not a lot actually gets Explained. there's a lot of Just Rolling With It. but i'm down for that. the reason why i think my guy would like it is because he's a gamer and there's this thread that gets dropped near the beginning of the book and picked up near the end about the storytelling potential of video games, and structured choices, and so on. and also just i liked it.

i didn't particularly give him any recommendations to microdose ME, mostly because he didn't ask and the point of the break is really more for him than it is for me - like, it is for me but also it's not and i think i have licence to go on dates with other people and get really into his favourite television shows but that is not really what i suspect he is going to be doing with his time. again i don't want to air the personal business of a guy who is not my boyfriend and who doesn't know i'm blogging about him and also nobody reads this but if you are reading this: just trust me, i'm not actually going to give him a reading list. i am gonna write one here, though.

because internet, by gretchen mcculloch
the starless sea by erin morgenstern, see above, lol
friends at the table's COUNTER/weight and Twilight Mirage seasons
Leverage
Infinity Train (which i rewatched recently at work because i found a working link and fuck, i forgot how good that show is)

i was gonna put some songs here but i feel like everything i listen to that's his taste he's already heard and a lot of the ones i'd want to put are songs that have lyrics that i have made About Him slightly and frankly he doesn't need to know what's on the spotify playlist because there Is One.

so, FOREVER ago, i took some uquiz on tumblr that was like "i'll tell you what book to read!" and the result i got was rita indiana's tentacle, a work in translation about yoruba religion, post-climate apocalypse dominican republic, gender transition, and time travel. i added it to my tbr, finally read it, and yeah. uquiz was right, i liked it.

the worldbuilding here is fascinating. people get stung by sea anemones and gain the ability to astral project back in time, with newly-created avatar bodies that they have to spend conscious thought controlling while also being in their home time. in 2027, the dominican republic accepts nuclear weapons from venezuela, which then accidentally detonate and completely ruin the caribbean. a secret cult of barely-santeria worshippers concoct a plan to send someone back in time to dissuade the to-be-president of the DR from accepting said weapons. and spoiler alert: uh, it doesn't work?? the time travelers involved are both kind of shitty people.

no seriously. argenis luna? fuck that guy. seriously fuck that guy. i hated reading his chapters because like, just, seriously what the fuck.

acilde, on the other hand, is more interesting. introduced as selfishly motivated, kills her employer and steals the anemone and runs away, uses the anemone as leverage to futuristically gender transition, hides out in jail for ten years controlling his past-avatar, and then at the end of it all he GIVES UP ON saving the ocean because doing so would set off a chain of events meaning he wouldn't get to live his life as a man. and he has, like, a wife now, and a life in the past-that's-actually-2010-or-something, that he doesn't want to give up, so he just... leaves it. and weirdly, it's satisfying, because i wasn't sure how indiana was going to execute the timeline fuckery that would have happened had acilde succeeded, so instead he gets to live out the rest of his life as menicucci. i enjoyed the subversion there or whatever.

and it was nice and short and held my attention the entire time. would recommend to anyone i deem weird enough to actually engage with what's going on and not just be put out.

recent read: time of contempt, book two-ish in the witcher series. enjoyed it. it's a book about the horrors of war. yknow. i like it because of how the camera bounces around--the focus isn't necessarily only on geralt, yen, and ciri, but rather we get to see the different sorcerers and low level army guys (i had to google a lot of old-fashioned military terms that i promptly forgot) and so on and so forth. the whole situation with the sorcerers murdering each other out of political [gestures confusedly] was very compelling and i'm also really interested in what ciri is gonna get up to with her rat friends.

like, and another thing--i mentioned this to my.... to my, uhhh... my [redacted]? my not really anything so i'm going to talk around it and hope that the one (1) person who reads this picks up on the specific social situation i'm in? one of the dudes i impressed by having read the previous witcher book? one thing i mentioned to him is that i was kind of pleasantly surprised by how funny these books are. like obviously they are about the horrors of war. assassins, teenager girls almost dying in the desert and eating all sorts of unpleasant things to survive, soldiers talking about how they're going to rape and pillage, so on. but ciri is constantly ribbing yennefer about her relationship with geralt, and that condringher guy (he was interesting, rip) saying that being a bastard is a cornerstone of his profession, and that bit in the last book where triss lays into the witchers for not knowing what to do when ciri gets her period. like. listen, i don't know what the tone of the games is like (and [redacted], who has actually played the games, did not answer my thinly veiled inquiry about this because it is like pulling teeth trying to extract text messages out of him), but the show is very grimdark with the exception of when jaskier is onscreen. so the comedy that comes up in the books, the one-liners of it all, i wasn't expecting it. yknow.

also what the fuck is up with this falka shit. i'm soooo curious about that.

most recent read is catherynne valente's the refrigerator monologues, which is, like... it's a short feminist take on superheroes and superhero girlfriends and, as the title suggests, fridged women. one of the characters is LITERALLY stuffed into a refrigerator when she dies. i adore the concept of this ragtag group of exes, not all of whom actually like each other, meeting up for coffee regularly and bitching about how they were doomed by the narrative. it's very self-aware, which i love, and funny, and i could sort of picture how this would be staged as a play, weirdly enough. the title is a deliberate callback to the vagina monologues, which i have not seen performed in any way shape or form, but like, i get the gist. i'm really curious about what would happen if somebody staged this one, you know?

i'm originally familiar with valente from her book space opera, which is a very silly book about alien eurovision. wow look at me with my segue - it's eurovision week! my faves have all qualified from their semifinals and the stage is not atrocious and even the automatic qualifiers this year are good. i'm excited to watch live on saturday; i didn't last year due to a combination of the... well, you know, the politics, and also i had to work. (The Politics, by which i mean the inclusion of israel despite their blatant use of it as a propaganda disseminator and their, you know, ongoing atrocities against the palestinians, are still Politicking this year -- but the overton window is definitely shifting. there have been a lot of protests and subsequent statements by the people who run the contest and i do think their days in the contest are limited.) but obviously you all know i've been perfectly comfortable (well, not exactly, it still does FEEL weird) engaging with the contest this year because i've been blogging about it. who do i think is going to win? no idea, but in my own personal opinion, the netherlands, lithuania, and austria are all very good.

btw i'm writing this on the work computer because Someone Who's Not Even My Boss double-booked himself and now i have to have a meeting during an employee social event and i'm bothered about it so i'm posting on company time, wifi, and resources <3

okay, one thing about me? i fucking love a timeloop. i'd never write it, or even actively seek it out, but when i come across it it's one of my favourite fanfic tropes. it's about the emotional intimacy and coming to terms with your demons of it all. it's about you can't avoid the inevitable and the Truth Will Out. and so awhile ago, i forget exactly how i heard about this, but the book Neverworld Wake by Marisha Pessl was recommended to me as a good timeloop YA book. the basic premise is that five teenagers meet a year after their high school graduation, die in a car crash, and then relive the day of the car crash over and over again because ultimately only one of them can survive and they need to decide which. sounds interesting enough, right? unfortunately pessl absolutely failed at the execution.

i've got two main criticisms with this book: it's overly complicated and it's totally bogged down by metaphor. to the second point, literally i could open up to any page in the book and provide you with wordy, convoluted examples of figurative language. let's see... page 120, "[i remember him] like I remember a hot summer with a water shortage, backed-up sewage, and zero air-conditionin'." (side note: the completely flat, stereotypical, manic pixie YA characterizations are a third but ultimately less important criticism. i could have overlooked them on their own, but...) the whole book is like this, and it starts early on, and that's when i knew i was in for an unhappy ride.

to the first thing: there's just so much plot going on? it's a time loop story where all the characters have to choose who lives and who dies, but this is being enforced by a mysterious wizard dude because the time loop works on magic rules that are informed by the basest parts of all five characters' psyches, so there's a whole spatial travel mini arc where based off the rules of an esoteric lost media book a side character loves they all need to attempt suicide and think really hard about the time and place they want to go, but then there's ALSO a murder mystery situation where the sixth member of their friend group and the MC's boyfriend died a year prior under mysterious circumstances and the entire time loop revolves around them figuring out what happened to him, but then the resolution to that is that one of the guys ran him over with his car while on a drug drop because one of the GIRLS in the group was a drug dealer, but then ALSO the main character accidentally let him fall and gravely injure himself because she was mad at him and thought he was cheating on her, but this information is kept from the other characters by another character in a sort of "lesbian ex machina" situation, and on and on and on. and it distracts from the thing i really actually love about time loops, which is the character study.

which brings us back to the character issue, i guess: all five characters are one-dimensional. there's the gay trailer trash, there's the drug-dealing pharmaceutical heiress, there's the lesbian genius with no feelings, there's the computer prodigy who's been trying to cover up the murder he committed, and there's bee, the main character, who is convinced she's a good person but is completely uninteresting, and even the final reveal that she may or may not have caused her boyfriend's death does nothing to help that. she doesn't learn anything about herself in the loop. she is no less stuck. what i love about time loops is that they force the characters to confront things, whether that's grief or sexuality/feelings or self-confidence issues or some kind of life change. (they also take place in the same place every time and feel like they go on forever, whereas the characters in Neverworld Wake are constantly driving off on missions/teleporting via suicide (?????) and "wakes"/loops are glossed over pretty frequently.) bee spends an absurd about of time tailing her four friends, trying to figure out what they're up to, and those activities--one of them goes hitchhiking, one of them visits a professor and tries to learn social engineering, and the other two party it up on a cruise ship--never really resolve themselves. bee tries to convince whitley and cannon (yes, those are actually their names) to stop ruining the cruise ship and eventually they do but that doesn't reveal anything about whitley and cannon, it doesn't push their characters in any certain direction, they just eventually get bored of it. it's not compelling. overall? i do not recommend and i could give you several works of fanfiction that do it better.

i want to write my own time loop stuff so bad... i've got a 3x09 colin&isaac timeloop fic for ted lasso loosely outlined in my notes app and i'd also love to write an original fiction story where a genre-savvy character gets stuck in a timeloop and thinks they need to fall in love with the other person (and are big mad about it) but the secret the entire time is that they need to gain some self-esteem. but if i'm gonna write it i like stuff like that enough that i want to do it RIGHT, you know?

book post time! hello! its Been A Minute because the book ive been reading lately has been LONG. that book, i hotel by karen tei yamashita, is about... it's mostly about communism and other resistance in 1960s-70s san francisco, mostly focusing on and around a real hotel called the i hotel that serves as a site for some of those resistance movements/community building activities. it's a really interesting book for a lot of reasons - firstly, each section of the book focuses on a different theme or themes, style of storytelling, and set of characters. those characters and events appear as background in the other chapters sometimes, but most people get their very own chance to shine and you get to know everyone which is cool. (i will admit that some of the sections i liked more than others - nothing really beats out the first section except the one about ben and olivia and MAYBE the orpheus and eurydice bit). the author experiments with a variety of different styles, using film scripting format, outlines, visual art/comics, different narrative perspectives, and one bit that's laid out like a political manifesto. there was one part that was really hard to follow that was, like, choreography sheet meets house of leaves. so the experimenting of it all was cool.

it was interesting to learn about the history of asian american organizing in that way. like genuinely a very educational book! there were some things i knew about, like martial law in the philippines (thanks, hi nay podcast) or the section 504 sit-in, but other things i hadn't really heard of, so that was cool and i learned a lot. i also really liked yamashita's perspective on the whole thing, where it's like... there's no one ideological splinter that is Just And Correct. everyone has problems and the infighting only ever fucks them up because the main purpose isn't ideology, it SHOULD be community.

took me a long fucking time though lol. and because of the variety of voices and formats, there were lots of parts of the book that didn't click with me! but overall i enjoyed the experience of reading it. i read a lot of this while commuting, or in the park, but i also read a decent amount on the couch in my own house. i don't really read At Home anymore which is weird.

Come and Get It, by Kiley Reid, is another one of those books that was highly recommended by, like, local news and the ~author scene~. It follows the ill-fated professional and sexual relationship between Agatha, a lifestyle journalist and visiting professor, and Millie, a super-senior RA, at a state college in the American South.

Like Housemates, another locally hyped-up book, that I deeply hated (i'm not going to bother linking the dw post where i systematically explain how not worth my time it was, because it's not worth my time), Come and Get It is DEEPLY literary and DEEPLY pessimistic and DEEPLY concerned with positioning the author as a Good Person. I Get It, You're Smarter Than Me! That is not, uh, the relationship I want to have as a reader with an author. It's so, like... EVERYONE in this story is a deeply bad person in ways that are often parodies of themselves. And sure, that's part of the point: money makes people do stupid shit. Millie wants to buy a house so bad she accepts a bribe from a resident; those residents are themselves so spoiled that they're incapable of being kind people (which, you know, I did go to a college with a substantial amount of Rich Girls, Reid isn't necessarily wrong about girls like Jenna and Tyler existing in the world); Agatha is literally just hanging out and performing deeply unethical and unsupervised research (and she's like, deeply vengeful, actually, too). But there's a total lack of affection for the characters, I feel, besides MAYBE Millie, that I really struggle with a little.

Specifically, I'm bothered by the book's treatment of Kennedy, one of the college students. Kennedy's relationship with money takes the most backseat out of all the characters, and the novel focuses a lot more on her desperate struggle to feel liked/wanted/happy. She has a bad relationship with her roommates through no REAL fault of her own (excessive consumerism, maybe, but aside from the inciting incident where this is brought up it never really comes back). Despite being a POV character she mostly serves as a catalyst for her roommates' and RA's bad decisions. Which kind of sucks. And, spoiler, she self-harms in a very dramatic and public way towards the end of the book, and listen. It gets kind of written off as a thoughtless action and, like, juvenile or immature? And, again, it's a catalyst for the other characters sort of but not really facing consequences for their actions? But throughout the book, despite her treatment by the narrative, she's the character I feel the most for. As someone who has been ostracized, who's struggled to make friends, who thinks everyone hates me sometimes (I'm going to therapy and working on my intrusive low self esteem thoughts I promise), like... I really want things to turn out okay for her, and they just don't. I get her impulse! I get the almost unconscious, incoherent, accidental way she hurts herself, I've Done That! And the narrative doesn't really care. It just gives up on her and makes her pitiable and a source of Millie and Agatha's guilt. Fucking stupid.

One thing I will say for it, though, specifically in relation to Housemates, is that the prose is enticing to read. It was a really quick read actually--where Housemates got bogged down in leftist jargon and overy-specific temporal positioning, Come And Get It actually moves, and despite my dislike of the story I nevertheless found myself wanting to FINISH IT and would reach for it on the train or while sitting around waiting for something.

I guess the central thesis, of Money Makes You An Asshole Sometimes, is sound, but I just... I don't like the path that Reid took to get there. That make sense?

and finally: wtf is her problem with uptalk. it is annoying I Guess but it is not a cardinal sin?

hahaha. what a world we live in.

recently read a book called the most dazzling girl in berlin by kip wilson. this is about a young queer woman in, you guessed it, 1930s berlin--like, early 1930s--who gets pulled into the lesbian club scene there at that time and falls for a jewish woman and runs away to paris at the end. it's free-verse poetry and therefore an extremely quick read. didn't realize it was poetry when i picked it up but weirdly it works? (although, sidenote, i've been experimenting with writing poetry lately and part of that has been learning the rules of sonnets and villanelles and things like that which has been genuinely sort of interesting).

and so tangentially related to that, world politics,

honestly? part of me really wanted to write this introspective rant about what it means to be very much from a place that is also objectively very bad. or talk about how a couple of international students i know have been REALLY worried about getting deported recently. or about how if it weren't for money or passport nonsense or my entire community being here in my city there is a big part of me that wants to just run away for somewhere less... bullying. but i don't have the words for it right now. the world is just tiring and i want things to stop being on fire.

not kidding. well. mostly one. so the book in question is Blood of Elves, the first book in the Witcher series that is actually A Book and not a short story collection. Gamer Boy #1 saw I was reading this and went !!! oh shit cool!!! whereas I got the distinct pleasure of informing Gamer Boy #2 that yes, they really were books first (he was nice about it, we weren't um actuallying each other). they're both nice guys. i guess it's incentive to keep reading the series lmao

i found myself really easily drawn into the plot of this book -- ciri training at kaer morhen, geralt and triss' weird thing, jaskier's spy misadventures, and finally ciri training with yennefer and the two of them having this enemies to besties sort of deal. both the petty personal drama and the politicking are very fun for me. things i like, i guess.

i started a new job last week monday and my commute is, uh, WAY longer than it used to be by about 30 or 40 minutes depending on if we're counting the time it takes to walk places. so i've been reading on the subway. i've discovered that i can get carsick on the subway which is really fucked up but it's also useful for getting some reading done.

awhile ago one of my choirs sang two settings of sara teasdale poems: "stars" and "there will be rest", with one bleeding directly into the next. i really liked both the music and the text itself so i finally decided, hmm, if i want to be well-rounded or whatever and read poetry, i might as well start with hers.

i still don't really "get" poetry in some ways. some of them i read and they just totally slide out of my brain. but others just whack me in the face. take this passage from "the sea":

I am so weak a thing, praise me for this, 
That in some strange way I was strong enough 
To keep my love unuttered and to stand 
Altho' I longed to kneel to you that night 
You looked at me with ever-calling eyes. 
Was I not calm? And if you guessed my love 
You thought it something delicate and free, 
Soft as the sound of fir-trees in the wind, 
Fleeting as phosphorescent stars in foam. 
Yet in my heart there was a beating storm 
Bending my thoughts before it, and I strove 
To say too little lest I say too much, 
And from my eyes to drive love's happy shame.

she writes a lot about love, both requited and not, and about mental health. so those are themes that are big with me and part of why i vibe with her so much. it was neat.

one of those titles that kind of has two meanings

EXTREMELY belated recap of "hell followed with us" here. i finished this book kind of ages ago but thankfully had written most of my thoughts on the back of the library receipt prior to returning it, so here goes. the book is about a trans exvangelical who was engineered into a bioweapon to kill the nonbelievers at some point in the next 20 years.

the nick ex-angel reveal? genuine shocker.
theo's betrayal however i saw coming from a mile away in a way that was narratively very satisfying. (i'm not really a vengeance guy though. we'll address that in a second)
wish there was a little more dramatic in that, like. okay, i don't actually remember what i meant by this but i think maybe i wanted certain reveals to have been metered out a bit more. like we drop the bioweapon bombshell in chapter two and there's a part of me that wanted a bit more buildup to the body horror?
this book has a bad bad case of diversity bingo but it's not as distracting as it could otherwise be. mostly it's just a reminder that the author was like 22 when he wrote it.
overall a really compelling and interesting story that i didn't want to put down! quick read and the bigger themes (ecofascism, struggling with one's relationship to god/heaven in a way that seems written by someone who still feels a lot of complex feelings about that issue) were handled in interesting ways that parallel to modern times a bit but not too much as to psych me out lol
also the conflict of morality. this question of what does "be good" mean, right? is it be kind and not hurt others, or hurt others in service of being kind? again, i'm not a vengeance guy. but again, this author was 22 and sometimes what you need is trans rage. sometimes that's what's cathartic or useful or even necessary. /i/ might not be a queer rage guy personally in terms of my own actions but i can't deny that it's a good thing right now.
really fascinated by the decision to reveal benji's deadname. i think there's a big taboo in a lot of trans fiction about that but the decision added to the story here because it was so jarring. like, youre not supposed to do that! thats not his name! and it just added to the wrongness of benji's time in the compound/with his mother/etc.

yeah overall good book do recommend.

theres also been some, uh, emotional apocalypse stuff going on over here. i don't want to talk TOO much about some of it yet because it hasn't solidified and i don't want to gush about something exciting that might suck or get taken away from me. there's some work things and some personal life things that have the POTENTIAL to be really good but also might not pan out in the way i'd like them to and that's stressful and hard. it's been impacting my sleep lol. also i went to singing contest last weekend and my voice is sooooooooooooooo so dead. i got back sunday afternoon, it's thursday, i'm still really hoarse hahaha

I've been threatening this post on here for like, several months now. So now that the Eurovision preselection season is officially over (we've got one song to go and it's an internal selection so that doesn't count): What Was Good, 2025. Presented in absolutely random order and without a readmore because I'm scared to experiment with those on a post that's gonna take me so long to write. I promise I'll be brief.

Norway
Last Song - Tone Damli: The first song of the season that actually had me jamming and dancing on first listen. Perfectly nice nu-disco.
Sulale - Nora Jabri: Not entirely obvious on the lyrics alone, this song is about her dad/her Iraqi heritage. I think it's clever in its simplicity.

Luxembourg
Gambler's Song - One Last Time: Admittedly kind of a guilty pleasure song for me. Ultimately a silly cheesy rock song written by a band whose musical inspirations unfortunately include Nickelback.

Latvia
Zelts - KoBra: Stripped-back slow duet in Latvian.
Lovable - Marta: In January I described a song as "knockoff Latvian Carly Rae Jepsen". That's this one.
Līgo - The Ludvig: Eurovision has had a tendency towards folk-inspired dance bangers lately and this is a very good example.
The Water - Bel Tempo ft. LEGZDINA: You can probably tell this was written by three people working in the British music industry because it's the most polished, radio-friendly song in this subsection (affectionate).
Stronger - Luka: Delicate uplifting songwritergirl music, ft. both electric and acoustic guitar.

Spain
La casa - Celine Van Heel: Dutch girl goes salsa, actually pulls it off.
No lo ves - Henry Semler: TikTok sadboy music that I don't think actually did that well with the youths tm. But I liked it.
Me gustas tú - K!NGDOM: Good going-out-dancing music. Very slightly '00s-'10s. I've had a really good time checking out K!NGDOM's other songs.
Te escribo en el cielo - Lucas Bun: Extremely emotive ballad about missing someone (?), maybe his mom (?). Live performance was good, watch it here.

Finland
Hitaammin hautaan - Nelli Matula: Kind of ethereal polished Nordic pop? I love Nelli's airy high range. Live was good, watch it here.
Aina - Viivi: Soundtrack-y slow love song that is probably going to be played at Finnish weddings for the rest of time.
Sekaisin - Costee: This singer is I think primarily a rapper but he's singing here. Somewhat rock/alt adjacent?

Malta
Heaven Sent - Kristy Spiteri: Popera track written by a songwriter I really love. I'm still mad this didn't win. Live was good, watch it here.
Juno - Victoria Sciberras: Female empowerment Europop song about calling down the heavens on the ones that have done you wrong. Live was good (here) but, uh, mind the outfit lol
Yo Listen - Martina Borg: It's sort of... funk? I don't know enough about funk music to say this confidently but it's a chill jam.
Unheard - Krista Šujak: Malta goes Olivia Rodrigo. The live performance (here) kind of took it up a level, I wasn't so crazy about it before but playlisted it immediately after the live.

Poland
Pray - Kuba Szmajkowski: Kind of a meh pop song but I really vibed with the lyrics at first listen. I will say that if you like your music totally unspoiled by controversy maybe don't google this guy? He kind of... did something bad on television.
Lusterka - SW@DA x Niczos: Minority language, uhhh... techno-ish?
Hold the Light - Dominik Dudek: The songwriter from Heaven Sent is also on here. Slow love song, kinda rhythmic-piano driven in a basic way? About how his partner has supported him which I think is sweet.

Estonia
Last to Know - Elysa: Some of the most nonsense lyrics out of all the songs I'm recommending but she has a nice voice. Extremely theatrical song about being on the wrong side of an affair.
Armageddon - Minimal Wind: For the sad girl indie enjoyers in your life. My roommate is like, a soft wlw stereotype and this is one I feel comfortable putting on at her parties.

Denmark
Proud - Tim Schou: Singer-songwritery. Ostensibly about his experience in the music industry but it reads as a coming-out song. Live here.
Unluckiest Boy Alive - Adel the Second: Tongue-in-cheek song about feeling like you're the Worst Most Put Upon Saddest Wet Cat and Nobody's Problems Could Possibly Be Worse. I think it's very fun and good perspective.

Portugal
Lisboa - Capital da Bulgária: More sad girl indie, this time in Portuguese! If you hate landlords/gentrification you should look up the lyrics to this song because you will like them.
Adamastor - Peculiar: Belongs in a sci-fi thriller, a little bit. I had to look this up, but Adamastor was historically the personification of the Cape of Good Hope for Portuguese sailors? Its whole vibe is "you can't tame the sea" and it's appropriately epic.
Tristeza - Josh: Epic instrumental at the proportions of (but not SIMILAR to) the above and VERY showy vocals, in a good way.

Sweden
Revolution - Måns Zelmerlöw: Generically uplifting "the world doesn't spin without the everyman" pop song. Very... Swedish? Remember in 2012 when Avicii was popular, but also it's not like that? I don't really know how else to describe this lol it's mostly a redux of his 2015 winning entry. The live is the best way to experience this because his positivity really sells this.
Life Again - Annika Wickihalder: I just think it's fun! It's so cute, such a sweet song. Another one really elevated by a good-vibes live. Good for Ryn Weaver listeners.
24k Gold - Malou Prytz: "Hot girl at the bar" music. Repetitive but good for when you're feeling yourself.
Show Me What Love Is - Erik Segerstedt: Mid-aughts to early-tens dad radio music.

Lithuania
Tavo akys - Katarsis: Dark, uh, Wikipedia says they're post-punk? This won and is going to Eurovision.

Croatia
Extra - Fenksta: 90s-style rap in Croatian about being offbeat quirky (or maybe having ADHD?).

Bonus round: Song was eh, live performance is worth watching (lives, not Spotify, linked)
Tule (Estonia): Country-folk-something. Please understand, I HATED this before watching it live but the performance kind of takes it to a new level.
Frozen (Estonia): It has this futuristic-y beat underneath smooth 80s vocals/lyrics about a breakup. Somehow it works.
Still I Rise (Malta): Self-empowerment song, radio-friendly in a more modern and less totally generic way than ones in, say, Sweden. Mostly impressed at her vocal ability live but the other stage elements were cool too I guess
Į saldumą (Lithuania): Kind of dark/creepy/witchy but the onstage vibe isn't necessarily like that. She's alone onstage and manages to make it entirely hers.
Ai senhor! (Portugal): Also slightly creepy and witchy but in a totally different way? Lots and lots of drums. This is about climate change.
Kind (Slovenia): I'll be honest this isn't that cute it belongs in a kids musical or perhaps movie soundtrack but this kid is so earnest.
Bara Bada Bastu (Sweden): If you've heard anything about NF season that wasn't from me, it was about this. Massive fan favourite, beat Revolution which was the "safe bet", extremely silly good vibes song about just taking a sauna!
Trendseter (Serbia): Rock drums and brass instruments. Kind of traditional Balkan sound but also not. Worth a watch for the sheep on the background LED.

Anyway have fun with these and if you listened to any of these and liked them, tell me :>

when i reserved a hold on samantha harvey's orbital there were 110 holds on it. by the time i picked it up there were 88. crazy town. the book was... not for me. it was very experimental and i thought it would focus more on the relationships between the astronauts (and cosmonauts) and perhaps have literally any plot in it. idk, the bit about the national toilets was sort of interesting. but the stream of consciousness style and the lack of dialogue punctuation made it a difficult read for me, sort of boring. it was all vibes and imagery and definitely a book for people who have a deep and abiding interest in the logistic minutiae of space travel. i, uh, don't. at least not in this context.

sorry, i should explain. the book follows one day, 16 orbits, in the life of a multinational ISS sort of crew. there's side stuff about a typhoon and someone's mother dying (one of the more compelling almost-but-not-actually plots) and some other different astronauts going on a moon mission. it's like fine. wouldn't recommend really and i suspect that the absurd number of holds on it is all hype.

in other news national final season for eurovision is officially over so at some point in the next idk week expect a big long post where i tell you what was good.

wow im back so soon... yeah. couple of things.

in book news, i received i'm waiting for you and other stories, a work of translations of kim bo-young sci-fi, for christmas (along with girl at war (see last post)). finally got around to it. this book advertises itself as four stories; it's two stories, one of which sits in the middle of the other one. but they aren't really the same universe. i mean, i guess you could make an argument for it.

the main story, "i'm waiting for you", tells the story of a man who is engaged to a woman, and the two of them keep getting temporally displaced as they journey to their wedding day and end up surviving the downfall of humanity alone, separated from each other, but writing to each other all the while. i read this one alone at a regional rail station in 40-degree weather at like 10:30 at night waiting for the last train back into the city, and reader, when the main character walks into the church he was supposed to get married in eons ago, miraculously intact, only to find the letters his fiancee has written him over the same duration of time? yeah. i cried. i cried and then when i finished it i COULD NOT immediately go back to my horror podcast (any other hi nay listeners out here?) so had to put on the voces8 recordings of there will be rest and stars (in my most recent choir concert, we performed both these pieces immediately together with no break in the middle; this works thematically as the composition is similar, they're both sara teasdale poems and "there will be rest" ends with a line about "stars i shall find" so then if you segue right into "stars"... also if you read up on sara teasdale and/or consider the themes for .2 seconds there is a very plausible reading of the narrator dying at the end of the first work and arriving in heaven for the second, and my point is, i'm not accepting any other way of programming either of these from now on kthxbai) and just stare up at the (mostly empty. city living sux sometimes) night sky for a while before i could THEN go back to my horror podcast. incredibly impactful piece of work.

"on my way to you" closes the book and tells the same story from the bride's perspective. it has a much more hopeful ending and imo they definitely do reunite (and in kim bo-young's extended universe, they do and then they have a daughter together, which makes me happy. they deserve it). her outlook and experiences are so different from his but i really like it as a sequel nonetheless. apparently the first story was written for a friend of the author's so he could use it to propose to his girlfriend and the sequel was written as a later gift to the married couple. i think that's fucking cute.

"prophet of corruption" (which is listed as a separate work from "that one life", but "that one life" reads as a chapter from "prophet of corruption"... anyways) explores what it means to be an individual. it has this interesting take on reincarnation--basically, that souls are recycled life after life and you go up to the afterlife and decide what to do next--that actually is very aligned with my own personal beliefs so that was sort of interesting but also my GOD the philosophy in here lol. this piece's main thesis is that a) we are all interconnected. harming another living being is harming ourselves. which. in this day and age. but also b) individuality as a contrast to that is not necessarily a bad thing, it's just different. and c) defining another as corrupt and "other" thereby corrupts and others oneself.

in mental health news i have not been doing so well lmao there's been a lot of little chaoses in my life lately and i'm not coping so well. nf season is kicking everyone at the eurovision blog's ass and i'm, like. not handling the discord server's transition from "we're coworkers" to "we're friends" because sometimes i feel like the friendship is contingent on me getting a good grade in blog responsibilities and with my SPECIFIC anxieties... well let's just say that on saturday i had a really shitty busy day at work that burnt me tf out, promptly left the aforementioned discord server because i believed that nobody there liked me enough to notice/care (...they truly did not notice lmao but whatever if i wanted to fish/put on a show about it i kinda picked the wrong day to do it because there was Much Business occurring) (business = croatia) and that they considered me a nuisance and what have you. i made it approx. 20 hours before realizing that Hey, This Sucks. the flight instinct has been a thing with me for years and years and years and its literally always detrimental to me and to my friendships so i need to, uh, not do that and embrace fear and learn that love comes with it and what the fuck ever. so i lied and said i had tech issues and rejoined the server and now i have to beg the least-online-out-of-all-of-us mods for my roles back and rejoin all the threads and its like a little awkward but its fine i did the grownup thing and came back its FINE.

so in book news i read girl at war by sara novic recently. novic wrote true biz which i enjoyed so much last summer that i've straight up started learning sign language. i'm taking this online course and i've got nobody to sign to so i don't have any ideas about how well i can actually communicate but i'm having fun. that's beside the point. anyway, girl at war is just as good, albeit for different reasons. it doesn't touch much on disability, instead focusing on the main character's experiences during and after the balkan civil wars. she grows up in zagreb, croatia, and for the first 25% or so of the book we've got this plucky middle-grade character--i mean it READS like a middle grade book for a minute. and then she watches her parents get executed by serbian nationalists and all of a sudden she's 20 years old and living in new york, having been adopted by a family in a metro area i'm actually very familiar with so it was funny to read about her on public transit and stuff. through a series of events she goes back to croatia, reconnects with her childhood best friend, and revisits her activities as a child soldier in the months immediately following her parents' deaths. it speaks, i think, to how you think your life could never be upended and then in a split second it IS. something worth pondering at this point in american politics, haha, hahahahaha, haha, i'm doing great everything's fine why are you asking.

my boss sent my team an email today being like here are several volunteer opportunities in the area and if you get arrested at a protest your job is safe just find a way to let us know you aren't coming in for your shift. it's very possible i'll be leaving this job soon and i had this moment of being like, shit. this new job would NEVER send us something like this and i'll really miss that and have to take a moment to sit with my values around employment. i haven't actually been offered the job yet. anyway.

the other reason this post is titled "a very balkan february" is because national finals, i guess. serbia and croatia are happening this weekend. serbia's was today actually and the results are very funny because the televote winner got like 50% of the televote or something stupid and it lost because the juries totally tanked it so there's probably going to be some drama. on top of the drama about the national public broadcaster's biased coverage of the corruption protests taking place in novi sad that had a good third of the competing artists wearing protest pins/including messaging in their performances. so yknow. meanwhile in croatia we thought they were gonna have good songs this year maybe and they, uh. don't. so we'll see on sunday what happens with that.

so awhile ago i was like "i should read house of leaves"

i have now since read house of leaves

what a fucking weird book (affectionate)

first of all, i've been explaining this book to everybody i know for weeks, with the exception of two coworkers and one online friend who'd heard of it. "oh, you know how in the princess bride..." "so it's about a haunted house, but then the film is lost media, and so..." "and if i open it to this page the text looks like this..." etc etc etc. i explained it in a JOB INTERVIEW. i did not realize that this book is not actually super popular among the masses and it's just the literate nerds i follow on tumblr who really know about it.

i enjoyed the experience of reading it, though. the weird text placement was actually not so hard to understand how to parse once i got to it. johnny truant's descent into paranoia not so much. i struggled with the long rambly text, i must say. no, but i liked it. i was most interested in what was going on with the main story of the navidson record and really less interested in the misadventures of johnny truant. the whalestoe letters being the exception.

wikipedia says that people describe this book as a horror story or a story about love (presumably romantic: karen and navy, and johnny and his many conquests, i guess?). i'm more in the love camp, but not romantic love. i think this is a book about FAMILY, and how family can fuck you up, and how love can fuck you up. navidson holds onto the house because he wants it to fix his family like it was supposed to, and while it tears his brother from him it reconciles him with karen in the end, in one way. johnny's mother loves him, but she loves him DEEPLY imperfectly. emphasis on deeply. honestly, her cycling in and out of lucidity hit me harder than any of the main story. and then there's whatever's going on with the minotaur. there's definitely a way to interpret that where zampano has some kind of lost son he's likening to the minotaur but is afraid to actually connect to the myth in writing. this abandoned child searching for a home and taking his grief out on everybody else. also applicable to johnny and to navidson. so yknow. and then there's the whole guilt thing. minos: minotaur as pelafina: johnny as navy: delial. there's a thread here about parents and children but then again you get out of stories what your brain is most inclined to get out of them and i've been thinking a lot about parenthood lately so maybe that's just a me thing.

it's also a story about stories? all the academia shit, the dissection of navidson's choices and how people have taken inspiration from him. it's about what gets preserved, and what gets lost when media is lost, and how one's legacy survives by what people say about it rather than your work itself surviving. that appeals to me too. meta shit and academia shit. things i like. whatever.

tl;dr would read again but probably not for a LONG time.

Time is weird because this week, January of 2025, in the middle of this whole corporate neo-nazi situation taking hold in the US, I read this book from 2013 that accidentally invented Ring cameras as a cautionary tale.

Dave Eggers' The Circle is downright creepy, satisfyingly unsatisfying, and most of all cautionary. When I started reading, I assumed quickly that Mae would eventually realize the perils of her obsessive, demanding, omniscient employer and work to take it down, but the further you get in the book, the more you realize she's not going to. She's totally drunk the Kool-Aid. There's no hope in The Circle. Mae is excited, Mae is hopeful, but we the readers have seen her betray her family, her friends, all sorts of people in service to digital connection.

One of the most unsettling parts for me was this sequence where Mae is told to up her rating/engagement on social media and then stays up all night doing it. I finished it and then... immediately picked up my phone and checked Bluesky, and I was like, wait, do I want to be doing this? And I feel so nervous about checking Facebook or Insta now as well. The other thing that really rattled me is how effective the propaganda is! When Eamon Bailey has conversations with Mae, and I try to take a second to consider his viewpoint, there are parts of it that make sense. I can feel myself sliding down the slope unless I catch myself, and that's... scary.

Are there parts of this book that I wish were better written? Yeah. I certainly could have done without the sex scenes, although admittedly giving Mae the chance to totally reject Francis after the whole sex tape situation was a good idea because it had me going crazy about, like, how could she not see that this was a bad thing??? The kayaking, also, plot relevant yes but also sort of shoehorned in in places.

Ultimately it's got me thinking a lot about privacy. I was a lonely kid in the 2010s, I spent a lot of time on the internet. In some ways this has been great! I've had good friends in Scotland and the Netherlands and Serbia and Brazil. I've met internet friends and it's been great. I've discovered cool new music, books, learned languages, all sorts of cool things. But I wonder, particularly as a queer person in this day and age, how much of my face and my identity do I want on, say, YouTube? Do I want my choir friends and my Eurovision fandom friends to know each other? What secrets do I want to keep? I'm not usually very good at keeping them, but over the past year I've found myself lying about certain things, keeping things from my parents, my roommate, past coworkers, things like that. So in that way, it's kind of nice that I mostly use this space just to talk about books. Like, I COULD ramble here all about the, say, Ted Lasso fic I've been reading or my job search or things like that, but mostly here I chat about books and music. And that's almost all that you guys (of which there are, like, not even five people subbed to me here and idk who's even active) get to know about me. It's weirdly freeing.

sorry if this one is sort of less than structured/doesn't "flow" i wrote it in my email drafts on the work computer and am posting it several days later and tbh i cba to reread it

I'm feeling conflicted about this choice, but I'm choosing to not finish Nisi Shawl's Kinning, the sequel to Everfair. It's just frustrating to me and I found myself choosing fanfiction or a short story or GeoGuessr over it every time. And now I have to return it to the library and just, I don't care anymore. I don't care about the Europeans' shady plot to dam the Mediterranean and bring back Atlantis (it's just so unimportant compared to what else is going on). The ethics involved in the Spirit Medicine are so whack--I'm happy for mad scientist Bee-Lung, but the idea of "I'm going to dose you with this polycule mushroom and I'm not going to tell you I'm doing it because you'll be mad but it's for your own good so it's fine" is... it doesn't sit right with me. I don't know why. And then it's like, it's suppose to induce empathy in those who receive it but there's no textual evidence of that. Characters who've been inoculated are just as judgmental--if not more--as the other characters. It just... makes them good at smelling lies, or something. None of the characters are likable. Lily has so obviously been fridged in book one to give Tink something to angst about, and his sidequest about "why does my girlfriend not want to marry me" is annoying because Kwangmi is impossible to please and there's no way to satisfyingly resolve that storyline. She's going to keep refusing him for philosophy reasons that she isn't going to explain and no one is going to learn anything. And the philosophy! This book is so ideological, bordering on preachy, which is part of why the plot is so hard to care about--it's because we're getting Shawl's politics mainlined into us without a hint of subtlety. Also, the May December relationships/no one has any kids thing continues--none of the plot threads from the last book that I was curious about have been remotely wrapped up, by the way--and the way they write Rima Bailey feels off. Shawl is Black but if a white writer had written Rima's dialogue like that they would have been accused of racism so fast. She sounds annoying and unintelligent and you can TELL that it's on purpose. Because she's American? Because she represents European interests? Just for fun? I don't know. Anyway I didn't like it and I'm going to move on now.

one of my best friends from college is repeatedly calling me out on my flight instinct, aka "something isnt going the way i want it therefore everything sucks time to run away to colorado" or whatever. another one of my good friends has recently stared me in the eye and said "well, why COULDN'T this thing you want happen to you?". so we're gonna dissect that a little bit.

item the first: choir angsting
so. me, as a person. as a hobby, and as my primary social outlet, i do SO much singing. on a regular week this is four rehearsals: quartet, ttbb bbs, normal choir, satb bbs. i am. currently having A Moment about literally all of these and i'm like, well, what if i simply stopped doing all of it.
quartet situation: we just, like, aren't getting better. we get scored at our performances, right? i want us to score better, thereby proving that we're growing as musicians or whatever. i don't know if that's gonna happen. admittedly this week we did kind of make a breakthrough and have been sounding better even by my extremely pessimistic metric (i am the lead weight to my guys' helium balloons). but also. like. bbs, generally, is SO expensive. i have to pay my yearly dues soon, for contest we have to pay for transportation and stay in a hotel (more on this later), we buy music, it's all input and no reward. and i'm tired. i love my guys for the most part but i don't want this to make me hate them and i worry im starting to reach that point.
ttbb bbs situation: see item two, but also, i initially joined that group saying very loudly and aggressively that i was a transgender man and now i'm kind of not that so i'm now playing 4d gender chess where i'm boiling the frog with the old men of the group about how fem i'm being but also trying to be fem enough to be attractive to... well... see item two.
normal choir situation: the music is just too damn hard. it's a really cool program but it's just so HARD. last week i had a panic attack in the bathroom the likes of which i don't know if i've had before? like, i could feel my face going numb from the hyperventilating or whatever. yes i joined this group to challenge myself yes im running away from the prospect of being challenged shhhhh.
satb bbs situation: mostly it's carpooling. so i don't drive, right? rehearsal for this one is in the next city over and it isn't super commutable so me and a friend have had to rely on increasingly elaborate carpooling schemes to get there. this friend is moving in with his girlfriend across town soon and like, the only reason the carpool thing is even remotely sustainable is because he and i live walking distance from each other so whoever we're imposing on that night only has to go out of their way one time. also, this is the group going to international in july and again, EXPENSIVE. and and, i feel like chorus leadership doesn't think i have a lot to offer and specifically, they somewhat obviously like and value my carpool bestie more than me and that's fucking annoying. but also, maybe they like me just fine and i'm projecting. who hecking knows.
all this to say, what if i ran away from everything! one of the local postcollegiate a cappella groups is holding online auditions through the end of the month, they rehearse on thursdays, and they're specifically looking for upper voices. so. that might be a thing i do. screams and cries and dies and

item the second: boy angsting
there is a CUTE BOY at ttbb bbs. this is a problem for several reasons.
firstly, we knew each other VERY BRIEFLY AND NOT WELL in high school. he knows me as my old name, and like whatever, he seems chill, he also seems straight. i feel like i have this image of him in my head from when we were teenagers--a good image, i remember him as being overall a really nice guy and this is def contributing to my feelings now. it's all sort of complicated and i'm not sure how well i'm explaining it because i'm trying to be a little vague.
when i like somebody, i tend to get a little........obsessive. we're friends on facebook from high school, i went on it after we re-met and promptly scrolled far enough to find a video of him soloing in college a cappella (and the original song there wound up being my top song on streaming this year. go figure. it is just a good song on its own... in my defense...) and also discovered some sensitive stuff about his family/medical life and my brain, the part of my brain that i don't have a ton of control over, has just seized on this stuff and is daydreaming wildly so any minute of free thought i get these days is spent playing whackamole with "DON'T THINK THAT, THAT'S WEIRD, STOPPIT".
see also: the gender stuff from above. carpool bestie (who's in all four of my singing groups, we're very normal friends that way) says that he seems "spicy straight" and that my only option is NOT just to ride this out and there's a possibility that i could get this to work out for me.
the thing is, i don't have a lot of experience with dating? i've been in a relationship before, but it was with another genderqueer person, and it was also just unconventional for several reasons: long distance for most of it, we were friends who hooked up and dtr'ed later, i was getting cheated on via badly handled polyamory for most of it, i don't think she ever liked me for me and just liked that i liked her. i don't know how to play the game that normal people play where they nonthreateningly and normally get to know each other and go for coffee and then whoops we've kissed. i want to try, but i'm scared. i don't want to make things awkward, i don't want to scare him away from ttbb bbs because they need him more than they need me, and just. just. i COULD make this work. but i don't know how. i don't even really see myself as someone attractive (in a personality sense, i think i'm pretty enough but also i'm off-putting to be around). what do i do what do i do what do i DO. i want to try, but how the hell do i do it? how do i do it tactfully?

so it's been a weird week here.

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i don't storm, i sunshower

he/she, eng/de/한.

Recent Entries

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