Life Events

I’ll be so real with you guys, not much happened these past months! midway through May I dropped an 85lb trap bar on my foot and ended up with a pretty gnarly bone bruise. Biggest shoutout in the world to strength training and running for keeping my bones nice and dense, this could have easily been a full-blown break and it wasn’t! I was in a walking boot for a month and should be fully cleared to start impact activities again mid-July if everything stays on schedule.

did go volunteer at lift for pride to live vicariously through all the lifters and got to see a deadlift bar in action with 500+ lbs on it. absolutely rules. volunteering always helps me feel better given the state of Everything

Training

lifting

I hit two PRs earlier prior to foot-bruise, a 295 deadlift and a 135 bench press. Both of these were during my overwarmup sets without tapering so I suspect there’s a bit more strength there when I get fully back in the game!

While I was in the boot I got to go full Johnny Bravo and focus almost exclusively on bench + upper body work. Ran smolov jr for my bench press with a conservative starting point since, yknow, couldn’t really do much leg drive. Lowkey loved only doing upper body because I got to spend a lot of time lying down and/or sitting.

Ran an experiment where I did 30+ pullups a day in as many sets as it took. I could do 3 pullups prior to The Bar Drop and my best set during the experiment was 8 (!!). now that I’m in regular shoes I admittedly haven’t done a pullup in a minute, but will probably re-institute the get coffee -> do a set of pullups stack again so I don’t completely lose the practice.

Making

I sewed a pair of pajama pants! made some real genuine clothes! Might try to replicate it with some linen to make a light pair of summer-y pants, I’ll need to figure out how to add pockets first.

my main knitting project was finishing up a cape/sweater for my grandma. She did most of the heavy lifting, I just added a collar and made a pair of hats to go along with it. the joy i felt working with needles larger 3.5mm…..unmatched. the project went so quickly! no photos, alas.

The Traveler, Andrea Mowry

lmao stop look how far i got before realizing my gauge was absolutely WRONG! i did a swatch and everything so not 100% sure what happened here. a sweater for ants. but the second iteration is going much quicker since I already know the pattern. goal is to have this done by the fall so no real rush to get it finished now.

pattern itself is easy to follow and requires almost no counting since you can easily count rows in groups of 5 to make sure you’re on track. it does seem like the specs were written for folks with much shorter torsos, I’ve modified it to add length throughout since I want ~4 more inches in length than it calls for.

Moon Set Tee by Ozetta

this is my first time knitting with silk! really really hoping that the end result is a tolerable summer shirt, it’s very sad to need to put all my knitting away once the heat really gets going. unfortunately one of the needles did snap in half (lol) so here’s hoping the manufacturer will replace that for me. until then this’ll just be sitting around.

pattern uses a brand new style of construction for me! you work the top of the back panel first and then down towards the vneck from the shoulders. until you join at the neck it doesn’t have the “try as you go” ability of most top down patterns which is a bummer but fun to see all the different ways a garment can come together.

Cooking

Vietnamese Coffee Cookies, recipe by Haley Nguyen. these are sooo good. the coffee flavor doesn’t smack you too hard in the face, they mostly come across as just more interesting chocolate chip cookies. made a mess with all the chocolate, but worth it

Pickle Biscuits, recipe by Andy Baraghani (NYT). delicious, seeing the layers come to fruition after all the folding was sooo rewarding. I think these freeze decently!

Media

BOOKS

Been on an absolute tear of bangers!! lots of YA and more easy reading books this time around.

Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, Natalie Hodges. 3/5. This is likely a better book than my experience of it, went in expecting something more along the lines of A Brain for Numbers which is very nitty-gritty about what our brains are doing when they’re counting or performing mathematics operations. Uncommon Measure was more of a memoir and love-letter to playing music which, while lovely, wasn’t what I hoped for.

Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting, Clare Pooley. 4/5. A fun little time! Very lighthearted novel about people who become unlikely friends after seeing each other on the train day after day. It doesn’t necessarily do anything groundbreaking, but the characters are lovable and particularly for folks living in a city I think it brings a bit more light to the fact that we’re surrounded by strangers and they’re all people! with their own stories and we can build our own village of those strangers and stories!

A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Becky Chambers. 4.5/5. Very short, ~150 pages. I’ve heard this described as a book for when you need a break and that feels very apt! It’s set in the future after robots achieve sentience and then decide that no thanks, they don’t really want to be around humans and leave. Centuries after this, a robot is tasked with making first-contact and asking “what do people need?” The characters are essentially wrestling with the question of purpose and meaning when all your wants and needs are already met.

Legendborn, Tracy Deonn. 4.5/5. A student at UNC Chapel-Hill discovers a secret society built around the court of King Arthur where descendants of knights fight demons and generally try to prevent the end of humankind. Bree, the main character, joins this society with the goal of finding the truth behind her mother’s death. The author beautifully captures the intersectionality of being a young Black girl and fighting to be taken seriously. Like a lot of fantasy needing to learn a new language took me out at points, but overall I would highly highly recommend.

Raybearer, Jordan Ifueko. 4.5/5. absolutely ate this book up!!! You follow the main character Tarisai as she tries to fight a command bound to her by a spell her mother cast on a local spirit. The author weaves in commentary on imperialism and patriarchy alongside a beautiful world (that I wish we got to spend more time in, maybe the sequel!). Tarisai’s mother is a really well-done study in humanizing people who do objectively bad things and it really does feel like the author doses out information in a way that puts you in the headspace of the main character. Definitely recommend, even if fantasy isn’t your thing.

The Dragon Republic, R.F. Kuang. 4/5. Follow-up to The Poppy War that lived up to the hype, imo. This one felt more academic than the first book since there’s a lot of discussion of strategy and tactics. That can make it a bit difficult to follow at times but the characters and their development more than made-up for shortcomings in that area. Rin continues to be a fantastic main character not because she’s Good or particularly Likeable but because she’s so powerful her perspective and decisions bear that much more weight.

podcasts

The Dollop’s saga on Pete Rose god he really was Not a Good Guy!

Switched on Pop, Is the future of pop...heavy metal?! i wrote a loooong ass paper in high school about the degree to which punk/metal music is “poetic” and this scratched the exact same part of my brain. I don’t often listen to switched on pop but always enjoy when i do!

Triple Click’s episode discussing Claire Obscur: Expedition 33. I’ll talk more about it down below, what a cool game.

Philosophize This, Capitalism is dead. This is Technofeudalism I thought this angle on our economy was fascinating, the argument is roughly that the brokers of digital platforms (ex amazon) fill the same role now that landlords did in a feudal economy.

Movies

Games

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I haven’t played this one myself but watched a playthrough like it was my favorite television show. The soundtrack is Fantastic, the studio found a soundcloud composer and he popped the hell off. I think the best thing about the game is how much the story breaks your expectations at every turn and does the exact opposite of spoon-feeding. apparently the soundtrack can spoil the plot if you speak french well enough which is a major bummer! combat is turn-based with realtime elements to dodge/parry and looks hard as hell. some of the characters reminded me of strategy you may use in slay the spire although these are obviously completely different games otherwise. love seeing new studios create such masterpieces right off the bat, I think they’ll be a group worth keeping an eye on in years to come.

Book of Hours, Weather Factory. I’m not really sure what genre this falls into. an rpg/simulator of sorts? where you serve as the librarian of an occult library and try to help people when they come asking for books. but honestly that aspect is such a small part of the game, it’s much more focused around the exploration and experimentation aspect as you try to learn skills/craft items/unlock rooms.

Is This Seat Taken? demo, Poti Poti Studio. cute little logic puzzles, the demo is free to play and i’ll likely buy the game when it’s out.

Blog

May + June 2025