Awesome finds - January 2025

Surprisingly, I've managed to accumulate a LOT of stuff this month. Honestly, this issue was a pleasure to write, so much cool stuff!

Books

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway: when I read Hemingway as part of a school curriculum I felt that Hemingway was like "everyone drinking heavily and nothing ever happens". Well, I am happy to report that literally nothing has changed during those 15 years, BUT now I feel I understand that lost generation a little better. I actually kinda liked it: with all the empty conversations and everyone's emotional bankruptcy, it felt like a real slice of life rather than literature (read: imaginative people/situations).

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins: or the past year or so, I've had an idea in my head for a book (which I'll obviously never write) where something really weird (like a unique superpower, a weird dystopian world order, or a new force of nature, literally anything if it's weird enough) is presented to the reader as a matter of fact, without explanation, to create that "wait what? did I miss something earlier?" feeling. This book came dangerously close to that. But the rules are somehow explained at the end, so... no?

Look at Me by Jennifer Egan: a few days have passed since I finished it, and now I think that this novel really is shit (excuse my language). It is gripping and very intriguing, but then huge nope, not a single plot line came to something intelligible. Like, what was THIS* (*replace with anything/any character) for? For god knows how many pages? Like...???

Music

Boy, it has been a nice month for me:

• 5 Dollar Pony Rides / Funny Papers by Mac Miller: what can I say, nothing breaks like a heart, no one is quite like him. Malcolm forever ❤️‍🩹 RIP.

• Keep Me Satisfied by Jungle: vibezzz, sparkling shiny happiness, summer nights and best vocal ever.

• ЛИНЕ by 5'nizza: turned it on for the first time and was quite literally transported to my childhood room in Syberia, to the moment I first heard Луна, успокой меня, the same feeling of overwhelming love. It's just an absolutely perfect 5'nizza track, literally nothing to add to it. Wish there wasn't a goddamn war.

• A Stone Only Rolls Downhill by OK Go: did I smile for the whole 3:22 of the long-awaited new music video? yes. Have I IMMEDIATELY rewatched my favourite OK Go music video afterwards? hell yeah. Is this a good song on its own without the video? don't know, don't care. It is pretty catchy though!

Podcasts

🇻🇳 Ho Chí Minh, one of the founders of "modern Vietnam" and its first president, apparently washed dishes in Paris, worked as a baker in Boston and a pastry chef in London 🥐, attended Lenin's funeral in Moscow and recovered from tuberculosis in the Crimea - but, including those facts, we know almost nothing of his youth for sure - The Vietnam War by Short History Of.. and Wikipedia. What a Mister Worldwide.

🧪 I had no idea that Maria Skłodowska-Curie's daughter – Irene Joliot Curie - has received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry as well - Marie Curie by Short History Of... Anyway, it also turned out that Maria Skłodowska-Curie had such a hard life that I actually felt like crying several times while listening, she really DID do this for women everywhere.

🏰 (Not now, obviously, but) Some researchers are apparently allowed to work IN Kremlin. Like, to have a work room in the building and what not. Had no idea that was possible! - The Kremlin by The Short History Of.... As a Russian, can confirm that this is not a bad episode at all as a very quick Russian history rundown.

🔠 Karol/Charles/Karl/Carl is pretty much the same name, popularised by Charlemagne, King of the Franks. Charlemagne = Charles-le-magne. Karolus, which is the same name in medieval Latin, came into the Russian language as 'korol' - a word meaning 'king'. But surprisingly, the Russian word 'knjazʹ, which means prince (or something similar), actually has the same root as Middle English 'king'. Like what? 🤯 43 - Koronacje 25 grudnia by Historia Polski dla dzieci [PL] + Wikipedia + Wiktionary

Facts with links

🍫 It's well known that chocolate is different in Europe and the US, but the fact that the European "version" might contain twice as much cocoa blows my mind - Battle of the chocolate bars by Surbhi Bhatia

🙈 I'm not telling you what it is. Just check it out, it's brilliant (promise no scary monsters and no rickrolling) - My Stupid Friend

🖼️ After 12 years of existence, React finally gets its first animations API Revealed: React's experimental animations API. As a developer, delighted it exists. As a user, ALREADY very annoyed because I mostly hate animations, and this insanity is going to be everywhere. My eyes are not ready.

💃 We have no idea how or when flamenco was created. Why pee smells bad after asparagus (and why for some people it really does not!). What is the species of origin of snakes. What exactly is déjà vu. Plenty of stuff we don't know, but if you want to try your hand at some of these unknowns, there's a whole encyclopedia for you: Wikenigma.

📝 There're calques and there're loanwords.. "Pizza" is a loanword - pronounced/sounding the same, meaning the same as the Italian original. "Skyscrapper" is a calque in many languages: same meaning, different words. Like in Russian, it is небоскрёб aka sky(небо)scraper(скрёб). It is "drapacz chmur" aka scraper(drapacz) chmur(cloud) in Polish.

📅 Work on new data handling in JS has started in 2017, and only now Temporal is coming to JS 🥹 So happy!

🪦 The "modern" internet, with apps and social media and whatnot, is relatively new - so in a sense we're yet to discover how our data, apps, algorithms and flows affect us and look like to us, while we grow, age and die. So here's a tiny piece of reflection on Strava and a sense of mortality.

🚀 An early abandonment of the space race might have been a turning point towards a better life on Earth, and a socialist revolution in the USA sometime after Black Thursday 1929 might have led to a strange communist USA-USSR union. It is kind of fun to imagine A Better World, especially in these dark times.

And, to finish this edition, a sweet Christmas-y reminder:

Wishing you productive and snowy February! ❄️