Awesome finds - February/March 2025

Lotta books, some curiosities and web dev related things, which I think was lacking lately.

Books

Quick disclaimer: this year I'm trying the 25 for 25 challenge: the aim is to read 25 books by 25 authors from 25 different countries. So this list now includes countries!

[Norway 🇳🇴] A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen : a real feminist literature! I seriously liked it. I listened to a theatrical performance of the play with a pleasure and was really captivated by the dynamics between characters, there's nothing but dialogs but it's more than enough. It is surprisingly modern, I was surprised that it was written at the end of the XIX century.

[Hungary 🇭🇺] Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz: yeeeears ago, after All the Light We Cannot See, I promised myself I would never touch another WWII book again (there have been soo many, my heart aches, and I'm so tired, man), but here we are, I guess???? The indifference of the main character and the view from the outside is quite unique in describing the horrors of concentration camps, but it still hits you hard, the cruelty, the evil and the senselessness of it all.

[Mexico 🇲🇽] Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli: mixed feelings about this one: the premise is good, but the way it is told is a bit... too much? First it is a diary, but not really though, then it is like a play, but not really, again... It tries, hard, to get you more involved in the fate of refugee children lost somewhere between the USA and Mexico, by some careful manipulations (don't want to spoil it), but the real life is much scarier, somehow.

[Japan 🇯🇵] Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami: I read it in February and I'm still thinking about it! Womanhood, motherhood, sisterhood, friendship, love and fear, societal gender roles - it is all at once, but all very feminine in the best way. I realised I haven't read many books like this. There aren't many, to be fair.

Something I didn't like: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee [South Korea 🇰🇷] (everyone recommended it, but it is SO artificial it hurts, no one acts naturally or does things according to their character, was very relieved to finally finish it).

Music

Lotta love in this selection:

• Death & Love, Pt. 1 by Circa Waves: still need to catch up on it and spend some quality time listening to it, but on the first couple of listens the vibes are very good on this one and Like You Did Before is an instant love and goosebumps generator.

• Everything Is Peacefull Love by Bon Iver: this album is already in the list of the best albums of the year, i don't care that it hasn't been released yet, leave me alone (i will listen to it, peacefully)

• Stephanie's Place by Joesef: my perfect Scottish boy, ultimate vibe. Whatever he does, I follow.

• Handlebars by JENNIE & Dua Lipa: not pretentious and a bit generic girl song, but soooo catchy I couldn't stop listening to it. The harmony is quite nice though.

• Rearrange My World by Daniel Caesar & Rex Orange County: the duo I didn't know I needed. They feel like two parts of different worlds, at least to me, but this track is very touching and imperfectly beautiful, tender and so sweet.

• Greyhound by Palace: such a beautiful ballad, a rhythm that makes you want to float. I wish more people would listen to Palace, it is like, objectively beautiful? Hard to explain, but some of their songs are just breathtaking.

Movies and series

• In the Mood for Love: very slow, very beautiful, very tender and touching.

• The Iron Claw: someone tweeted that it was Little Women for men, and that was my ONLY reason for watching it, just to learn that it is SO. MUCH. NOT. A good film though. It just pains me to look at Zach Efron's square face, but apart from that little detail, a lot of pain, so 8/10. But seriously though, it is very intense and even if you know the story, it keeps you on the edge of your seat until the last minute.

• Clarkson's Farm: I've said it before and I will say it again - this show has absolutely no right to be this good. Somehow it just gets better with every season. Don't be put off by Clarkson or farming or just the idea of Clarkson farming - I promise you it's hours of the best entertainment TV there is. The ups and downs of farming and managing the piece of land in today's economic climate, an amazing cast who aren't really a cast, animals as we don't know them (unless you grew up on a farm?) and very down to earth problems. One of the best things to come along in years, genuinely.

Something I didn't like: Death on the Nile (absolutely incredible how awful this cast was - Russell Brand, Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer, like, what?), The Bear season 3 (surprisingly bland compared to the amazing previous two).

Life, health, and world

🧬 Are you on a diet? Well, tough life. It might help you live a little longer, but GUESS WHAT - genetics wins again: "Lifespan was heritable and genetics had a larger influence on lifespan than dietary restriction" - Nature. That's selective reading, suuuure, diet and calorie restriction had a "proportional influence", so don't drop all sorts of self-imposed restrictions just yet.

😷 Somehow very cool and kinda funny (for a person who has lived in Poland for the last seven years) that the Black Death, a major bubonic plague pandemic. almost completely missed Poland (which is disputed but we won't talk about that).

♻️ I can't remember what prompted me to remember about this, but it's my favourite environmental story of all time: An environmentalist gets lunch - The Works on Progress. It's an absolutely incredible read, your mind will be blown and your stereotypes about 'green' everything will be shattered. AND! you will probably feel a little better about yourself, for a change.

🤖 Another unexpected side of AI has just dropped: it turns out that quite a few people use AI-generated images as inspo/references for their hair, construction and interior design, cakes and clothes, genuinely annoying craftspeople, because AI 'ideas' defy gravity and common sense. That's just awesome. We're definitely NOT doomed.

🍃 This is more of the the curiosities department, I admit, but it felt right to include it in this world-themed section: Small seasons: a guide to understanding. We're more dependent on the agricultural seasons than we realise, that's for sure, but there's something precious about living through the time when the first rainbows of the year appear. You feel ✨ blessed ✨

Dev thingies

• Some things about keyframes by Ryan Mulligan - this one made me realise that I don't know sh8t about animations, apart from a few tiny additions here and there (taken from other websites and guides, I admit). Fortunately, I don't have to write it often, although I feel I should. I just... don't like animated web much? Hard to sell myself on the idea of working on something I'd hate.

• Did you know you can use place-self (or justify-self and align-self separately) to position absolutely placed items? 🤯 it doesn't work in Safari (obviously!) and was just recently added to Firefox but still, damn, no more translate(-50%, -50%)

See the Pen Box alignment for absolutely positioned boxes by Vadim Makeev (@pepelsbey) on CodePen.

• A great checklist to make sure you take your website's accessibility seriously: Accessibility Not-Checklist. This is very well done and could be useful not only for developers, but also for designers, QAs, PMs and users (if you're into suing companies for bad UX).

• Old but gold: Lesser-Known and Underused CSS features in 2022. Found this in my bookmarks, can honestly say I've used all of those things, but it was still nice to skim through the article and remember some of those things. Like currentColor, which is a very useful one for design systems, or font rendering options, which I seem to forget about every time I work with numbers, or scroll-padding, which I remember conceptually but have to google every time to remember the wording. Don't be like me, I guess...

Random curiosities

🔣 As a person who genuinely struggles at times remembering what the heck symbols are called in English, this feels nice and useful. Would I remember to use it next time? Probably not. Did I draw a random shape in the mould and get this handsome beast: ߘ? Hell yes.

🏀 NBA ratings/watch has been on a steady decline for a while now. I've heard a lot of noise about it, mainly things like "it's become incredibly boring and nothing ever happens". It turns out that when a 3-pointer is worth more than a 2-pointer, duh, and you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, the game turns out to be all about shooting from long range and hoping it works. Missed 3s Are Taking Over the NBA by Kirk Goldsberry.

🪄 Puzzlebox by Blackle Mori. This is very cute and a good use of the 30 minutes of your time. Where's the catch, you ask? It is all done with HTML+CSS without any JS involved! Bonkers.

🌯 Personally not a fan of kebabs OR railway stations OR kebabs at railway stations. HUGE FAN of using programming to solve REAL PROBLEMS like this one: The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab - A study by James Pae.

🧀 Duolingo link, sorry about that, but a surprisingly funny one: on the one hand, why the hell are pie charts called camembert charts in France, on the other, oh of course they are! Delicious names for "pie charts" in other languages. Confirmed (ish?) on Reddit so consider legit.

👨‍✈️ I first heard a story about Thomas Salme on an unrelated Polish podcast, and I'm not gonna lie, was fucking annoyed and terrified and impressed all at the same time. Very conflicting feelings but such a story, man. Please don't read if you afraid of flying...

And, to finish this edition, me IRL (or not really but I feel this way, often):

Wishing you very, very flowery April! 🌺