october round-up
hey there friends, here's your october wrap-up, expectedly nearly fifteen days late haha. an entire half-month—much apologies! it's been a whirl. hope you're hanging in there—let's take this all the way to the end, shall we? -k
Oh wow, October was a huge month. For me, I think my main highlights were:
- TWICE 7th anniversary. To mark this milestone, TWICE held five fan meets in Japan in early October (lucky J-onces!) and launched an exhibit/popup store in Seoul starting the day of their anniversary, Oct. 20th. What a time to be ONCE :) (Unfortunately, the heartbreaking Itaewon tragedy happened toward the tail-end of October, and all activities across the country were canceled or postponed as the nation went on mourning, including scheduled content and activities in South Korea for TWICE's anniversary. So more of this in the November entry hehe)
- Carly Rae Jepsen's new album, "The Loneliest Time". I think the disco is pretty catchy, and I actually loved how her collab with Rufus Wainwright sounds. Also good cuts: Surrender My Heart, Talking To Yourself, and No Thinking Over the Weekend.
- Taylor Swift's new album, Midnights (which had a special 3 a.m. version that had 7 EXTRA SONGS girlie was wild). Choice cuts: Maroon, Snow on the Beach, Question...?, Labyrinth, Mastermind, The Great War, Bigger than the Whole Sky (!!!), Glitch, Would've, Could've, Should've -- what a good drop.
A word about the Twitter shit-show
Yeah, so that's happening. I've been on that platform 14 years and counting, and it's my most active social network, so it really breaks my heart to see how it's being treated these past few days/weeks/months by its new corporate overlord. I was there when RTs, replies and threads were manual, when "H/T" was a thing, and MOST IMPORTANTLY when news sites weren't there yet.
Yun talaga yun e.
The creation of the Netizen beat, and the investment into social media-focused desks by media organizations brought their attention-anchored monetization goals to the platforms, and the rest is history. Salot, men. I remember being really resentful about the company suddenly dishing out their "social media guidelines" in relation to company-related social media presence. I truly thought that social media was not meant to be anything more than a playground. Oh well. As our mothers are wont to say: Andiyan na iyan.
Look do we have here, ika pa nga. All these years, all we've ever wanted was an Edit button. What we got instead: Algorithms, trending topics, your timeline suddenly being arranged according to most popular tweets instead of reverse chronologically, seeing other people's Likes on your timeline kahit di mo naman gusto, Fleets (remember those??), Spaces, Circles, etc.
In any case--I've always been an advocate of exploring other platforms. I've been tinkering with Mastodon (i'm on mastodon.social/@thegshift) -- it takes a bit of getting used to, but maybe, like we did with Twitter fourteen years ago, together we could make it feel more like home.
ALSO: Let's all go back to our own decentralized hubs, please. Call it a Digital Garden if it pleases you. Go back to blogging and writing things down. Let's go back to taking it slow. To not being a slave to notifs. Sure it's going to be hard--it's going to be harder than quitting cigarettes, probably. But at this point, don't we think we've reached That Point where maybe such a drastic reconsideration is due?
Reads
- Growing old online by Helena Fitzgerald via Wired.
Something that hits home rather hard: "People have been old online before, and young people online get older online every day. But millennials are, arguably, the first generation to have been young on social media and to then get older there. Those of us in our mid- to late thirties may have been extremely online for more than two decades, going through more stages of a life cycle here than anyone else yet has. Other people have been old on here before, but they weren’t here when they were young."
No one is more vicious than young people on the internet clapping back on old people on the internet using the age card. I always see this on stan twitter all the time, because young people seem to have this illusion that Old People Are Not Allowed To Like Things. And by old, they mean anyone over the age of 25, because when you're thirteen and newly allowed a social media account, that's practically double your age already. I can't blame them, really; we're a product of different times. I remember being 17 once and thinking that by age 35 I'm likely done--like done-done. Which is, you know, informed by the fact that my mother passed when she was 38. I'm turning that same age this December, and I'm nowhere near done--and depending on your relationship with life in general, that thought will either have you excited or panicky. I choose to be grateful and curious.
I think space is terrifying. Here's William Shatner on getting his expectations shattered: "I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death."
Oh yeah. I think if I were to join a space trip for tourism, I'd have a panic attack.
Memes
ANYWAY. Some of my favorite memes for October!
- This Jin is always relatable
- I always think about Cheesecake the Cat's diagnosis: 'Just fat. Cheesecake is just fat.'
I hope your APEs were as ordinary as Cheesecake's HAHA. Thank you for reaching this far.
Til the next one!
XO, K