2021 favs

i tried, i really tried. i tried bringing all this together into one coherent writing with a unified theme, but i just couldn’t figure out what it should be. at one point i considered separating the entries to “this has ghosts!” and “this doesn’t have ghosts!”. the ghosts were metaphorical of course, except for two entries where it was actually ghosts. but anyway.

i also tried to tie everything with a personal story of my real-life experiences in 2021, but also that turned out to be difficult. unfortunately, i would just have to accept that the first post of my blog would have to be messy. i had planned to publish this at january at the absolute latest, but it's february already lmao.

so here you go. a list of the various things i really liked in 2021 and why i liked them, in no particular order.

1. 🎥 inland empire

2007, dir. David Lynch

i’m not the sort of person to watch horror movies much this year, but this was one that i’ve watched and oooh boy was it terrifying. this might actually be more terrifying to the people my age than the original audience back in 2007.

imagine—if not remember—being up late as a kid, at an hour where you've usually already slept, and you decided to see what's on tv. maybe it was some late-night true crime investigation, or a horror-themed reality tv show that you had thought was real, or maybe it was just two adults talking about something you weren't quite sure about. it felt that you ought to understand them, but you couldn't. you wondered whether you should just get back to bed.

there’s just something about the early 2000s digital tv aesthetic in this movie that’s just bone-chilling. and to add to that, this whole film is disorienting. characters play multiple roles, whole scenarios appear and disappear at ease, and to say that this film follows dream-logic would be disingenuous to dream-logic. for someone who’s easily scared by late-night tv of the 2000s, this is literally the stuff of my nightmares.

2. 📺 arcane

2021, prod. Fortiche

it's difficult for me to just start watching a new tv series these days, but when your friend told you that a new animated series is the best since avatar: the last airbender, well i was sold.

i mean just look at it. these aren't concept arts, or once/twice per episode stills. every. single. frame. looks like these if not better! and note that i'm only putting the spoiler-free shots here. every frame was a painting.

3. 🎥 fiksi

2008, dir. Mouly Surya

so it’s like alice in wonderland set in jakarta, right? well.... kinda. but also, not really?

but what's just so amazing about this film is that it. has. so. many. layers. fiction as memories. fiction of other people's lives, other people’s lives as fiction. fiction as hopes and dreams. fiction as parallel lives. fiction as a coping mechanism. fiction as something you put and receive with all your heart, or a cold dispassionate way to pass the time.

i'm really trying to not just label every film i love the atmosphere of as "dream-like", but this film certainly counts.

4. 🎥 it's such a beautiful day & world of tomorrow

2012 & 2015-2020, dir. Don Hertzfeldt

the concept of don hertzfeldt's short films is usually "your entire life in one short 20 minute long film". but it couldn't be your life. your life has so much detail in it, so much specificity. in that sense, not one movie could ever be your life. and yet, we get moved by art anyway. we relate, fawn, and obsess over them and the people living inside them. this person is just like me, this person is just like me for real.

perhaps that's because behind every art, there was someone real. someone who put their life into words and then dared ask other people to play them, paint them, or (in this case) animate them as stick figures moving through canvases of colors. and so paradoxically, you learn about this person's life, so unique and special compared to yours, that you have to conclude that everyone's lives must be, too. and so does yours.

5. 🎮 outer wilds: echoes of the eye

2021, dev. mobius digital

there are ghosts here! they're metaphorical, but still spooky!

it's hard to describe anything about this game without spoiling, but i'll try.

if outer wilds is akin to exploring the great outdoors and its mysteries as a kid, echoes of the eye is like exploring a house that is not your own. locked doors, alternate paths, forgotten possessions. you see a guitar case hidden behind the dusty old jackets, and you wonder what song had this house last heard. you see an old book about gardening, and contrast it with the green yet uninteresting front porch that you saw. you find a key inside a drawer, and you wonder which of the hundreds of locks is it for. but you have no need to worry, you have all the time in the universe.

6. 🎮 before your eyes

2021, dev. GoodbyeWorld Games

this is a game where you relive a person's memories, and time passes when you blink. like, actually blink. it uses your webcam to detect when you blink. and it uses this very neat tech to make you cry.

honestly this video explains it better than i ever could.

7. 📚 cultish

2021, by Amanda Montell

"hold up... tupperware?? you're a multi-level marketing scheme, too??? originally named 'tupper's wares' after the founder, earl tupper???? woah."

cultish is a book about the language of cults. this book is both an excellent overview and a great overarching story of the way language was used by cults for their self-interests.

but my absolute favorite part was that it also talked about what we consider as typical cults, but modern secular forms as well. everything from multi-level marketings to crossfit, a few of them seemed far-fetched at first but by the end i was like "oh wow, their language does sound like a cult!".

8. 📚 good economics for hard times & 📚 winners take all

2019, by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo; 2018 by Anand Giridharadas; respectively

woah i didn't realize that i've only finished reading these two books last year. i've written reviews for each of them.

9. 📚 exhalation

2019, by Ted Chiang

as the author himself said elsewhere: “science fiction is about using speculative scenarios as a lens to examine the human condition." there are so many good stories in this, but i particularly like "the alchemist's gate" (a lo-fi time travel story), the titular "exhalation" (one of the two bittersweet stories about entropy in this blog post), and "anxiety is the dizziness of freedom" (a story where you can peek into parallel universes and see how the parallel you is doing).

10. 📺 loki

2021, writen by Michael Waldron, dir. Kate Herron

parallel universe hopping! retro stuff! like most of the big recent disney+ releases, they're just a blast to watch together and follow episodically.

and as concerning as the grip this corporation has on the media right now, man are they doing it right with their weekly releases (same with HBO, etc.). it's not just because there's an overwhelming amount of content, but there's just something so nice about the communal experience of watching something together at the same time then discussing it. both together in the living room, and as in the world.

11. 📚 together

2020, by Vivek H. Murthy

i've heard a lot about headlines like "millenials and gen-z are the loneliest generations" and that's one thing, but to hear the former US surgeon general take the loneliness epidemic with the same seriousness as he did with the US' opioid crisis, that's something else. the opening of this book was a bummer for sure.

it’s a book where if one would read the title and synopsis right now in the year 2022, their answer would probably a “well, duh we all need human connections, i've been feeling miserable in the past two years not being able to see my friends!”. but as it was written with a scientific lens, this book gives much more than just acknowledging with what we've all been feeling right now.

i kept thinking about a simile in the book, "loneliness is akin to hunger. it's a signal from your brain that you urgently need social interactions, just as hunger is a signal for you to find food". that is to say, it was never a failing of yours if you feel that loneliness, just as you wouldn't blame yourself for being hungry if you just can't find food.

this book was the reason why i began asking people for catchup calls, or even just cold-messaging old friends to ask what they're up to. as someone who used to be absolutely terrified of doing something like this, i had expected a lot of my requests would just be rejected. like, they'll probably be busy, or they don't consider we were that close as friends, or that they already have their own support system. but i'm surprised that that almost never happened! and thanks to that, i'm now more comfortable with the idea of joining more communities. maybe even starting one myself, someday.

i think this stuff is hard, because it's always hard to admit to others (and to yourself) that you probably need more emotional support than what you have right now. it's a time where you know that a lot of people are struggling so hard, it almost feels that your struggles are unworthy of care. but they are. you can always try to find someone who can help you, and who you can help in turn, in going through this dark times together.

12. 📺 neon genesis evangelion

1995-2021, dir. Hideaki Anno

speaking of dark times, have you heard of the apocalyptic anime "neon genesis evangelion"?

there's a funny/sad tweet pointing out that the world in the anime was literally in the middle of an apocalypse, and our protagonist still had to go to school and people still had to go to work their office jobs. seems familiar lmao.

the series is much more than that, though. i'll probably need to write more about it in a separate post. (note that you should watch the original anime series first, then the ending film, and then the 4 rebuild films.)

13. 📺 revolutionary girl utena

1999, dir. Kunihiko Ikuhara

this is honestly just evangelion but they actually did it in one season! and they still made a follow up movie about it, cause why not i guess?

revolutionary girl utena is a surrealist story, and oh does it have a ton of bewildering symbolism. had to discuss this with my friend for hours and watch a ton of video essays.

it also starts a bit slow? episodes in the first arc felt rather repetitive at first, and that's after i learned it's supposed to be repetitive. but sticking through those first few episodes was so worth it. the evil elevator therapy sequences are one of my favorite (terrifying) sequences in anything ever, and no, i will not elaborate on what that meant.

i figure it's just not as popular because it's not in any major streaming services, but really, this was so ahead of its time. and still is.

that's all folks!

and that's it! scrolling through git log i found that i first initialized this blog repository on August 30th 2020. and that was after i decided to start the blog all over from scratch.

i procrastinated a lot as you can tell. i know that at the end of the day it's really the writing that matters, and not how sophisticated your design or frontend code is. but i did really enjoy making this! it's just really satisfying to make something that you started from scratch.

but as you can see, i really did mostly procrastinate hehe. the initial design on the top left sucked, but the next ones were already pretty good. i could've done with a simpler website first, and just start putting up things to write. alas.

well, now that i've finally setup everything i guess there's no more excuse for me to procrastinate further? i already have some ideas of what to write next, so you can expect those in the coming months. 🙇