field notes: the manosphere; fun tech and eid 🤷🏽♂️👩🏽💻🌙
also celebrating my first paid subscriber!!!
I would like to announce that I have gotten my FIRST paid subscriber! And I am excited (and slightly concerned)! I have half the mind to start writing personal essays in for my paid subscribers and keep it as a secret diary that only some people have access to!!! I have one idea about the piece I will write there, and it starts with my aunt calling me aged at my younger brothers wedding! Sorry, you will have to pay to read it.
1. WATCH
On Nowness, Full Month is a film about a woman coming back to Singapore explores the dynamic that many Asian people when they come back to house full of expectations.
I watched the disturbing Manosphere documentary and found relief in some funny reactions here, and here. I also found more relief in Louis TheROUX’s hilarious post-podcast with Romesh Ranganathan. I don’t even like podcasts and I listened to the whole thing.
The funniest reaction to the Dinosaur documentary wasn’t the bloopers (although I love bloopers). It was the comments on this post and also this one:
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Sue me, I’m a sucker for a Malaysian anything. This is Malaysian Airlines’ ad for Eid.
2. BOOKS
I’ve fallen into the trap of finding new creators who are big readers aka Shamspirals and Seigfried. And have made myself feel like I’m not reading enough (TRAPPED!) It is hard because I feel I didn’t have a good reading start of the year, but also I need to remind myself that reading is for pleasure and no one cares but me.
Radical Intimacy. The book is what you’d expect from the title. But with a lot of modern context and references peppered into it. It challenges the way we view intimacy, and forces us to remember the collective in our highly individualised world.
The Safekeep. Veeeery good. A queer historic fiction that surprises and also grips you! The writing makes you rethink what you pick up from your family, all the bad unhealthy obsessing and reflect on who you are as a person in the world. What does it mean to be good, and what happens when you realise that you might be the villain in someone else’s story?
Secrets of Divine Love is a book I read through Ramadan, as it outlines different parts of Islam. Having never finished the book, I felt closer in some ways to things I hadn’t understood before, which is a gentle reminder that you can always learn something new about how to love something you have known your whole life. (always be curious)
3. ARTICLES
Dancing is a powerful antidepressant. Yes to this and I don’t think I need to say much else. Read the thing. “A place where I could be surrounded by people, away from the isolation of my room, with no expectation of socializing and only one rule: dance.”
Your reference is making you irrelevant. Are we curating or hoarding references?
A poignant piece by Noreen Moustafa on why she chose to fast this year. Idk if it was the lack of sleep, but this made me cry.
How memes ruined everything. An article that challenges the need for brands to be culturally reactive all the time, when we all know what it means: “Are memes generating loyalty? Probably not. Are they selling stuff? Maybe… sometimes. Are they building cultural relevance? Yes and no.”
Wired’s new editor is anti-tech bro.
An interview with Aminatou Sow. One of the authors of Big Friendship. Obviously a book about how we make, break and keep friends. “And that’s why friendship sits at the center of my life. Because it’s the relationship that consistently saves me from myself. Romantic love is beautiful, but friendship? It’s durable. It’s abundant. You’re only allowed to have one romantic partner at a time, legally. But no one’s limiting your number of best friends.”
4. RANDOM
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Analog is definitly a trend this year, and we can all agree that nostalgia remains. But the crossover between these two is the emergent trend of people building their own cyberdecks and other similar tech projects (tamagotchi for your plants; e-ink your album art), in an effort to bring back fun tech. Fun aka: multicolored, transparent, not always working, bulky and noisy technologies. People want whimsy in tech! Frictionmaxxing coded. More on why they are having a moment here.
Telfar bag EID SALE: 100% profits go to relief for people in GAZA, SUDAN, CONGO, CUBA, HAITI
You can now collect Wikipedia articles like pokemon cards.
I did not know this, but people are churning butter, and making ice cream while running.
Real life below deck is this account right here!
SORRY DID ANYONE ELSE KNOW THAT SARAH JESSICA PARKER WAS ON THE JURY FOR BOOKER PRIZE AWARD?
My favourite take of the week was watching Aamir decode the orientalism that came out of Diya, the cool girl from India.
This man, Jack, is travelling around China and speaking the language and eating food and basically making me want to be able to do the same. Immerse yourself in a country and learn the language and feel part of something.
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