Blogging has never been a particularly taxing task for me, but once in a while I either forget entirely about the existence of my blog or feel an insurmountable dread towards the act of putting my thoughts down to a screen and share them publicly. This is why for a while blogging has remained a…
In the age of digital media, I am among the majority who opt for a phone camera to capture everyday moments for future reminiscence. The strange thing about this is that after a while, all these moments just sort of blend into a blur and occasionally, staring at a photo cannot even conjure the particular…
Everywhere I turn on the Internet, there are floods of messages about all the challenges the world faces today (clearly the algorithm tracks my online behaviors and sends signals my way). It’s dispiriting to experience the bombardment of news about climate change, poverty, inequality, wars and conflicts, and other atrocities that seem to only multiply…
The past fifteen years or so have been marked by the rapid growth of two things: smartphones and social media. While the social media industry now seems to struggle at times to not fall from grace, the toppling of smartphones is nowhere in sight. The presence of smartphones is projected to only rise especially when…
I have been asked by a few friends about how I read so much and I never really managed to give a good response. Typically it would be a shrug, or some (genuinely ashamed) comments about how reading too much in fact negates my ability to do anything else. More than as an encouragement to…
For the past couple of weeks I have been venturing back into a few social media platforms (just because!) and to my surprise I didn’t find the experience all that bad. As per usual, however, I grew tired of it quite quickly and now I’m left with this urge to remove myself from social media…
I recently read the book Under A White Sky (2021) by the science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. Through snippets of her trips to various locations around the world to report on strategies of combating environmental destruction, Kolbert introduces in this book a whole new dimension to what we typically refer to as the Anthropocene. Her previous Pulitzer-winning volume The Sixth…
Earlier this year, Michael E. Mann, who is widely recognized as one of the creators of the famous “hockey stick” graph depicting historical increase in global temperature, published a book titled “The New Climate War”. Despite being written by a renowned climate scientist, the book is fully politicized in its argument against climate “inactivism”, broadly defined as…
At first glance, a climate change documentary titled Disobedience already seems to promise tenacity of a message. Created by a company that goes by the name Disobedient Productions, the relatively short documentary fulfills my initial expectation of its being a stronghold of creative space. What is even more remarkable about this film, however, is its…
Transformations. Makeovers. Glow ups. Instant, yet radical appearance revamps at the flick of a magic wand. Hollywood and the likes brought me up in this world of delusions filled with magical, effortless character transformations that would only take seconds of footages, a lot of momentum buildup, and occasionally some pixie dust. In kids’ movies and…
How can I find the balance between this calling for some save-the-world vigor and grandeur, and the yearning for a more muted, subdued life filled with peace and contentment? In these past few years, I have been harboring no shortage of idealistic visions for a world where all the current ugliness of reality ceases to…
I miss that day when I wanted to go to the old quarter in town, and you purposefully waited to catch me at the door, pretending that you were going there too. That trip ended up being our first date ever. On the same day we visited a clock tower and I only let you…