December 15th - December 21st 2025

Music

• Pentiment (Original Soundtrack | Alkemie) - If you are a ren-faire, fantasy girl and you want some aesthetic a capella music to work or walk to, check this out. I particularly like the songs City of Reason and Andreas’ Return. I also cannot express how much I loved Pentiment - the game the soundtrack was made for. Check out my thoughts on it here.

Podcasts

• Zune: The would-be iPod killer | Version History by The Verge - As a card-carrying member of the Zune community back in ‘08 (or thereabouts) it brought me so much joy to listen to this tech retrospective! Also, having someone who wrote reviews back-in-the-day about the Zune was just the cherry on top. I was pretty young in the 2000s, so I wasn’t cognizant of the worldTM or societyTM, but as I age I realize that I was in really pivotal moments for the industries I fixate on today - one of those being tech/gadgets. So, it’s cool to look back and realize you were a part of something!

News/Essays

• A New Anonymous Phone Carrier Lets You Sign Up With Nothing but a Zip Code - Phreeli does exactly what it says it does. You can pay in crypty (Zcash or Monero), give essentially no information and have a piggy-backed T-Mobile signal. Telecomm companies track your every movement and sell them indiscriminately as data cartels. Previously, it was impossible to fully escape this surveillance, but now you can with a comparable fee for I have payed for Xfinity. Just do it, you know it’s the same coverage at a similar cost with all the privacy benefits.

YouTube

• What Happens When Netflix Buys Warner Bros. | The Backdrop | Second Wind - An exceptionally important essay on something I could imagine was bad (re: antitrust), but simply had no respect for the ramifications of this particular buy-out.
• The Internet Used to be a Place | Sarah Davis Baker - Definitely cried through this one. An excellent retelling of late 90’s, early 00’s internet culture through the lens of the video game Hypnospace Outlaw. As someone who started a blog five years ago to cover musings and learnings of going through grad school, it was both for marketing my academic brand and for having an outlet for writing, which is the most core expressive part of me. This year, I finally made the plunge of making this website. I had some media/tech reviews on my academic blog, but because of job market visibility, I decided to make an anonymous blog that would let me talk about whatever I wanted in an aesthetic that I loved. It lets me be cringe and niche in a way you can’t with your name plastered on the webpage and racking up SEO numbers. However, the motivation for blogging in general came from both a nostalgia about the internet of yester-year and the old Diablo II forums I would frequent and make signatures for (iykyk) and a political need to push back and reclaim the internet as a portal to many sites, rather than a web-host for four content aggregators.
• How Def Jam & EA FUMBLED A Game Franchise | Clout Cancún - I can’t remember how many times my brother and I begged my Mom to rent this from Blockbuster, but we rejoiced every time she did. We didn’t play wrestling games at all, and if played real fighting games (like Tekken) it was a ta friends and without any skill. Though, I do distinctly remember my brother grinding a Bruce Lee fighting game story mode. This game was pure fun and aesthetic and I still hold a lot of love for this game, and games like it of the era. Loved hearing about the history, if any of these games were in your life when they released give this a watch!
• How to find new music in the age of algorithms | Notes from the Archive - Exactly what it states, here is the red carpet rolled out for rejecting algorithmic curation (and now increasingly AI-generated music dupes) - do it, it’s good for you and makes you really, really cool.
• The Golden Age of Movie Games | Flandrew - Well, hasn’t this week been painfully nostalgic? I’ve never felt more profo
• Best Chinese Movies of 2025 (and more) | Accented Cinema - Need some movie recs going into 2026? Break out of the recommender algos and check out these bangers!
• Vision of Marathon | Bungie ViDoc - Simply the most exceptional aesthetic I’ve seen in some time. You can ignore the game stuff if that’s not your thing. I think this is a world-class artistic showcase.

Books/Manga

• Hungerstone | Kat Dunn | 2025 - I am about a third of the way through and it’s still good. I have to say the pacing is a bit slow and almost all of the events have taken place in roughly the same area, so it’s really just the catty banter and vampiric charisma that our pushing the plot along so far. I can feel that something is going knock my titties off at any moment, so here’s to hoping.