Awesome finds - summer 2025

I've been offline for a whole due to a lot of personal and work stuff, but I still, believe it or not, enjoyed some things enough to write about. Sharing is caring as always, so here goes!

Books

[Germany 🇩🇪] Olga, a novel by Bernhard Schlink: a melancholic yet brilliant portrait of a life lost and not lived in tumultuous pre- and post-war Europe. I am a sucker for letters and diaries, and this sort of reflective genre, so this absolute emotional tragedy of a person, who nobody ever knew better than through her letters to a long-lost fiancé, was right up my alley.

[Italy 🇮🇹] My Brilliant Friends by Elena Ferrante: curious, and I'd say truly in the spirit of this challenge: I was extremely surprised by what childhood and teenage years look(ed) like in Italy based on this book. As for the friendship part, yeah, I suppose it's true. A lot of girls I know have experienced something like this, when you look at it from the outside, you can't help but wonder: is the urge to compete the only thing that holds you two together?

[China 🇨🇳] Rickshaw Boy by Lao She: every country must have its own Dostoevsky, or a story about people from the bottom strugglinh to find their way out. This story will make your blood boil and fill you with anger and sadness, because it is so incredibly realistic in its portrayal of the main character's behaviour in the face of obstacles and hurdles along the way. It's not about falling and standing up again, it's about surviving and fighting until you simply... can't anymore, and only then will you discover your true unpolished self.

[Sweden 🇸🇪] The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson: (never seen the film though) the first half of the book was very awesome, but [spoiler alert, -ish?] as a fan of Agatha Christie and true justice and all the good things in the world, I was so angry at how everything ended! Also, not sure if it's because I've read too many detective novels, but I guessed most of what was going to happen, which probably isn't something to be proud of as it sounded so obvious? Aaanyway, aside from that, it covers important topics and has a captivating story, what's not to love?

(fuck that's a lot of books I've read this summer, apparently)

[Colombia 🇨🇴] Of Love And Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: this is the first GGM I've liked, ever. It's still difficult to dissociate from the fact that 13yo girls are perceived as grown women, but perhaps that's (also) the point? There are "demons" everywhere in this book, whether they be disease, curses or actual demons. Why not consider human afflictions to be one of them? In any case, I've never been a fan of magical realism, but this book left me with a cosy feeling despite being quite gory. Not all of the books during this challenge I genuinely liked, but this one I definitely did.

[South Africa 🇿🇦] The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: such a sweet little book! It's very reminiscent of Little Women, but it's at the same time something completely different. It's curious how it's, like, almost three different books at once: it starts feeling weirdly modern, then presents you with comedy and drama, and ends up almost as if it were written by Charlotte Brontë, in terms of style and level of drama.

[Czechia 🇨🇿] The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera: so hard to describe, yet it's also so close to modern reality. I love the feeling of recognition when something written in the past describes the present almost perfectly. I feel like many people who have run from war over the past three years have felt like the characters in this book: when many things are insignificant in the face of something much bigger and more awful, nothing holds you down or accountable.

Something I didn't like: Unless by Carol Shields [Canada 🇨🇦] short but not sweet. ultimately, it turned out to be a poor pick for a Canadian book as well. It tries SO hard to be feminist literature and portray the mental struggles all women have, but it does so in SUCH an INSUFFERABLE way that, as a woman, I wouldn't want to be represented by it. No disrespect for Carol Shields of course.

Music

• onion by hard easy life: I hate the fact that easy life have become a problematic band; I love their music so much. Honestly, it's just heartbreaking. This is a really good album that got no attention because men just can't behave. Oh well.

• Lotus by Little Simz: She has always played in her own league. I don't know of any other rappers like her, and Lotus proves it yet again. Also, what a list of featured artists, man!

• hopefully ! by Loyle Carner: I do struggle a bit with this album - it lacks a centre and some of the uniformity and cheekiness Loyle always had. But this is an album centred on fatherhood, so I suppose it's only natural that he's just not bothered anymore and is turning inwards to reflect on this new and weird and life-changing experience.

• Man I Need by Olivia Dean: I will praise the album some more in the next edition as it is technically a September release but boy I am so happy for her newfound fame! Seriously, if anything, y'all should listen to her even more (and, like, should have started 2 years ago at least but I'll let it slide this time.) She is magnificent and a huge, huge talent.

Cool links

Library Spy by Riley Walz: dunno quite why, but I find this very charming. I love books and people who read. Though not anymore, I spent a hella lot of time in the school library as a child. It's also life-affirming to see that people are interested in wildly different things on the same day at the same time, or in things you've (me?) never been interested in. It's all just lovely, lets read more books. It's _{a tiny bit creepy}, maybe, but who cares? 🕵️

30 minutes with a stranger by Alvin Chang for The Pudding: continuing with wholesome and weirdly optimistic things, this is a virtual essay slash experiment slash proper research project that paired up random people and gave them 30 minutes to talk about whatever they wanted. The pairs were varied, and one could be paired with someone of a different sex, age, political interest, profession, or all of the above. I encourage you to have a scroll around, but I feel a bit warmer inside knowing that, by the end of the conversation, most people said they felt better.

I've got a solution: wolves 🐺: a silly one, but if you're as fed up as I am of reading depressing news on serious websites, I've got a solution: wolves this will certainly cheer you up.

Inside you are two solutions (both are wolves). https://t.co/0nIHHF2PYe

— Richard Morrison (@RichardMorrison) August 12, 2023

Frontend Performance Best Practices and Checklist: this one's huge! It's not exactly a checklist, but it's honestly so useful because, sadly, it often works backwards - first implementation, then improvement of performance. So bookmark it asap to completely forget about it and never ever use.

Games

Very irregular section with games, which are not games exactly, but it is close:

Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test: literally everyone I know is worse at this than me. Curiously, I took this test twice, about four years apart, and got the same result both times (33/36), so I guess it is not a fluke? If you enjoyed the experience of analysing eye expressions, consider spending some time checking your answers against the correct ones, you might learn a thing or two about yourself. Also, if you are autistic, you may have felt very differently throughout the test compared to neurotypical people: you may have found yourself being almost analytical rather than going on a hunch. Brains are awesome and weird.

Alphabet Moon: this is both sweet and fascinating. What a find! Type every word and see how it is written using landmarks (or should I say patterns?) found on the moon that resemble letters. You can also read how it was formed and see where it is located right away. It's so cool to think that we know the moon so well, up to kilometers really. 🌑

AI video that's instant and interactive: I consider it a game because it feels like one - or like a fever dream, perhaps. In this one, you travel through AI-rendered landscapes (like Google Maps street view or a video game), but the catch is that they are rendered as you request them. It's a pretty neat and rather interesting application of AI.

Quick facts

❔ Apparently, this ▯ thing you sometimes see when a letter or special character is not found in a specific font (and there's no fallback) is called tofu!

🔠 Staying on topic with fonts, Google Fonts are NOT GDPR compliant. I think (I hope!!!) it's fairly well known that Google Fonts as a service collects some analytics data, but I personally never realised that it actually violates GDPR.

👞 The word "sabotage" originated from sabot shoes and their protesting French (of course) makers. It is apparently as old as 1808!

🙊 Might be a niche one, but do you know that feeling when you struggle to call someone by their name during a conversation? Like, to say, 'Michael, give me that thing,' or 'Good morning, Vlada!' You are not only not alone, there's also a whole nifty word for it.

To celebrate the books in the first section of this edition, this cosy gem:

See ya soon!