Some things I´ve been up to during the Winter time

I´m watching the incredible Stop Making Sense in 4k as I write this. Life is worth living. To start with, I thought I ought to update my top 5 bands as of today.

1. ROXY MUSIC 2. NEW ORDER 3. TALKING HEADS 4. SLOWDIVE 5. LIMP BIZKIT

Ok, now that that´s out of the way, in my now late 20´s I find that the most difficult aspect of life is keeping a balance between I wanna have fun and I deserve it! and I should be stoic and grow as a person! It´s hard and life is shit most of the time. But there is a light. For example, back in October I got a beautiful bike and named it D´Angelo. I´ve travelled hundreds of kilometers on it by now, discovered some beautiful countryside sights, and gotten honked at about twenty times for taking fucked up turns. Truly, having a bike is a beautiful privilege.

One good day, after getting a job that I didn´t expect, I decided I wanted to make one of my all time dreams come true. I wanted a Nintendo DS in the year of our lord 2025. I´d never had one, but remembered longing for that rectangular hunk of silver with a digital puppy inside. So I went (on my bike, of course, traversing towns and getting honked at again) and got one. The lady at the shop complimented the Pokémon stickers on my pink helmet.

Today I came back to my Animal Crossing town after a few weeks without playing. My villagers greeted me with concern and restrained themselves from asking too many questions about my disappearance. I can´t possibly convey to them the pressure that I´d been feeling about work, the mental gymnastics I´d had to go through day in and day out to make myself more adaptable, and all the anxiety that I seemingly couldn´t let go of. They wouldn´t get it, because they don´t have jobs. They fish and ask me for fruit and give me furniture. They are not aware of these horrors.

Besides work, I´d also been busy elsewhere. I was busy spending 60 hours playing Baldur´s Gate 3 for the third time. What possessed me to do this, I wonder? There was no need for another thing sucking the life out of me. And yet, oh how I´ve enjoyed myself being evil and progressing through my long hours of playtime in this game. I love the world of D&D, and after revisiting the Legend of Drizzt books, I couldn´t help the temptation of trying a new class. I can´t remember another game sucking me this much into it. I´ve also been enjoying Persona 5, but after 5 fucking hours of playtime, it seems like I´m still in the tutorial, so I´ll be expanding more on that in the future.

It also happened to snow in Madrid during the first week of January, which was both beautiful and tragic, considering the bombing of Caracas and global warming and whatnot. The world is going to shit and everything was foggy and pristine on this particular early morning.

My partner gave me a purple binder to put my small card collection in, and it looks so pretty it kind of made me understand the appeal that card collectors see in it.

I´ve also neglected books in favor of manga. I hope that is not derogatory. In reality, I´ve come to really appreciate the art of manga. There´s a lot of shit, but there are so many wonderful works to make up for the big boob anime girls. My current reads that I always ago back to are Chainsaw Man (whose author´s Look Back was also beyond amazing) and Berserk. I have talked about the latter on here, but I have to say the story hurt me emotionally so bad that I´ve put it on hold for the time being. Jesus fuck. Horrible things go on there all the time. Chainsaw Man, on the other hand, has an artstyle that distinguishes it from every other manga, a kind of hacky, unpolished and fluid drawing style. Like when you see someone who can draw a car on command and it just comes natural to them, because they are just that talented.

I feel very nostalgic, but if I have one purpose for this year, it´s to be grateful. I tend to take most things for granted, going through the motions, feeling bothered by most things. I don´t have the "I get to --" mindset, but I want it. So bad! All in all, last year was good for me, I believe I became a better person, if not a more mature person. Now, I mostly seek to be happy and at ease. A kind of Mono Aware, which is a japanese motto I found because of weebs, but it has a great meaning, something like: having empathy and sensibility towards things. The ability to be moved by the mundane. That kind of stuff. Here´s an hallaca and me. Toodles.

Vampire Hunter D, Berserk and the end of Summer.

I truly love animation. This is one of the best animated movies I've ever seen: an incredible English dub, a beautiful story and stunning character design. You can see the work Yoshitaka Amano put in.

The truth is, I needed something to pick me up; summer is coming to an end, things are changing, nothing stops. As I steer away from social media and interacting too much online, it gets really lonely (and really boring). Lately, I've started reading tons of manga, most notably Yona of the Dawn and Berserk. The latter has sucked me in with its incredible story and unparalleled art. Truthfully, I acknowledge manga as a complicated and relatively underappreciated artform, and there's no need to pit two queens against each other, but Berserk goes above and beyond any other manga I've put my eyes on.

I'm currently on volume 8 or 9 (lost count), still a long way to go, many hundreds of chapters away from the current decade, so I'm just starting to discover these characters. I'm sure I'll come back to this and change my mind in some way, but for now, Griffith is a superb character. He's a little cunt, a little glam, a little goof. Guts' backstory makes all the sense in the world and manages to not fall into the usual anime/manga toxic tropes, and I find that this story isn't very comfortable to read, but it's fascinating and deeply philosophical. Berserk is the Dark Souls of reading manga. Looking forward to suffering for the next 300+ chapters.

ガンダム

A month ago, J gave me a gunpla model kit. I'd never dabbled in anything like this, and was rather slow at building Legos. All the layers of plastic seemed entirely foreign to me, and then I also had the pliers, a cutter and nippers. This was the first one I built:

The process was slow, my thumbs hurt from pushing in all the plastic, and I stayed up until 2 am. It was therapeutic. I could insert myself into this thing, not think about anything else at all, and lose myself in the hours spent while these bits and pieces took shape. I think I'm very old now, but I'm ecstatic to have found a new hobby, and to know that I can still surprise myself. In short, I'd say putting together Gunplas is on par with Legos and painting in terms of passing time and relaxation; it requires a little more attention, organization (of which I have very little) and nitpicking, but the resulting feeling is the same. Yesterday, my legs were sore as fuck, and I've been constantly fatigued for a week, so I stayed home and built two more Gundams: the Transient and the Aegis. We picked up the Aegis from Otaku Center, a nerd store in a nerd alley in center Madrid, a little way from Gran Vía. What kind of nerd am I becoming?

How To Be Alone

I've been using my time rather languidly? Some entity possessed me and I rewatched the whole of Attack On Titan, I started reading Berserk, listening to a lot of house music, I went swimming on the 40 degree days, and read a total of 1 book: How to Be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen. Frankly, I was lured in by the title, but it turned out to be a nice experience. I felt like I got to know Jonathan, who I didn't really like at first (I abandoned the book at 50% and moved on to cheerier people with cheerier books), but ended up feeling really familiar with. His book is about the rapid overtaking of technology over books, and the deep changing in society through the coming of the 21st century, which makes this book really funny to read in 2025, when I can ask chat GPT to nickname himself after a vampire (I did this 2 months ago and "he" still remembers) and write a novel about whatever I can think of. A shitty novel, of course, crunched out by a virtual machine that needs constant cooling somewhere in the world. I think this is part of what he feared. He says, in one of my bookmarks: 

I wonder if our current cultural susceptibility to the charms of materialism--our increasing willingness to see psychology as chemical, identity as genetic, and behavior as the product of bygone exigencies of human evolution--isn't intimately related to the post-modern resurgence of the oral and the eclipse of the written: our incessant telephoning , our ephemeral e-mailing, our steadfast devotion to the flickering tube.

He comes from the past like a horseman, warning about terrible cyber-enemies to come, terrified of TV and e-mailing. I can't remember the last time I wrote and e-mail that wasn't somehow bureaucratic. But I too am overwhelmed by the world changing, by the pressing obsolescence of so much. He also confesses I want to be alone, but not too alone. I want to be the same, but different. Isn't that why this place exists, why I try to write instead of post, why I try to increasingly separate myself from the vacuum of social media? And isn't that okay, and healthy, and beneficial for my mental health? More and more, I am unable to properly communicate online, to feel comfortable and welcome anywhere. I've deleted most social apps from my phone, and don't really text anymore, except to my mom, who I love. I try not to be too into this lifestyle change, but without the constant flow of notifications or generally things to look at on my phone, there is one difference in my day to day: I'm looking more at people, particularly, on the subway. And though I'm not any exception, and I'm not cured of my post-modern post-TV anxieties, I do believe I owe it to myself: to give myself space, to be nice to myself, to do as I feel. In any case, I'm sure Jonathan has an iPhone and at least texts now.   

given

i really liked these sad gays who play music

this almond cake from ikea

was fire

05.08.2025

who knows where this leads?