Things I loved in 2016

Since January, me and my girlfriend have been travelling through New Zealand, Australia, and now Bali. I’ve grown to be quite silent on social media, even our travel blog only has a few posts on it. In the end, writing properly about our experiences takes a lot of energy we’d rather spend enjoying our experiences or working on side projects.

That said, I’d like to share some things that we like recently, that are not directly related to our travels. For the purpose of putting some love for those things out in the world, and sharing it with other people.

Sense8

A TV show created by the Wachowskis (The Matrix, Cloud Atlas, etc…), a Science Fiction drama about 8 individuals around the world linked mentally. This sentence doesn’t sell it too well, maybe, so I’ll try to explain what I love about it: It has a LOST-ish kind of drama + mystery quality to it, which makes it compelling, but with that it also addresses a lot of themes that I haven’t really seen before in shows and movies. Most notably, there’s the portrayal of LGBT+ people and issues. A couple of the main or recurring characters fall into these categories, and the depictions are really positive and realistic. In general, it feels like a really positive and humanistic show. Love is everywhere, and it’s contagious 🙂

As a further highlight, the main concept of linked individuals is executed in a way unlike anything I’ve seen before, it’s really cool and leads to some really well done scenes.

Check it out!

One Punch Man

One Punch Man is an anime about a guy who can take out his enemies with one punch. In the meantime, he’s the most ordinary, boring guy, who doesn’t really have a rational explanation for his mysterious powers. It’s one of the funniest and original things we’ve seen recently. The show pokes fun at a lot of anime and fighting movie cliches. There’s fighting scenes in there, but the real gold is seeing the incapable exploits of the main character and their student in leading their normal lives.

Bee and Puppycat

Created by an Adventure Time alumni, Bee and Puppycat is a lovely animation series on the Cartoon Hangover YouTube Channel. Like Adventure Time, it makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside (if you know what I mean). The characters are funny and lovable, the voice acting is ace, and all the art + colours is really nice. There’s only 5 episodes right now, and we’re anxiously waiting for the next ones.

The episode I linked to above is the Pilot, which is a teeny bit less polished, here’s Bee and Puppycat Episode 1 & 2.

A Moon Shaped Pool (The new Radiohead album)

I was anxiously waiting for a while, knowing that it was about to hit, but To be honest, my expectations were not as high as they would have been. Their previous album (The King Of Limbs) was nice, but never really grabbed me like previous work. I also didn’t really know what to expect from this, besides that my recent live favourite Identikit would probably be on it.

It didn’t take long for me to love the new album, though. A lot of the songs I liked almost instantly (generally Radiohead songs are growers). I don’t know what to say, the whole album makes me feel like I can get lost in it, the production on the songs is amazing and unlike anything I’ve heard before, but even without that, the songs are strong and have such a nice mood.

My sort of top-3: Decks Dark, Identikit, Burn The Witch.

Read Only Memories

A lovely indie game from SF studio Midboss. They call it a “new cyberpunk adventure”. Like Sense8, it is very diverse and inclusive, and features numerous LGBT+ characters. It even asks you for your pronouns, how about that?

Besides all of that, it features a lot of interesting technological topics, like VR, AI, and other tech that might be present in a few decades. It’s a compelling story with interesting and lovable characters.

Cyberpunk and Solarpunk

I’ve gotten quite interested in Cyberpunk as a genre/subculture recently, maybe because I played Deus Ex: Human Revolution before we left, or immersed myself in Read Only Memories a few weeks ago, but anyway, I’m explore the aesthetics and philosophy of some of the topics a lot. A funny byproduct of that is that it informed one of the side projects that I’m working on, but maybe more about that some other time…

Just to highlight a great source of cyberpunk-y stuff for me, the blog Randomghost has an amazing collection of Aesthetics.

Then there’s this thing called Solarpunk. As a genre/subculture it’s way younger and less defined than Cyberpunk, but that makes it interesting. Whereas Cyberpunk is very pessimistic and usually dystopian, Solarpunk is kind of the opposite. In many ways it tries to imagine a future in which society has overcome many of the problems in Cyberpunk: solar and other renewable power sources, green cities and settlements, post-scarcity, and those sorts of things.

There’ s a fairly limited amount of things on the internet about Solarpunk, but I found it profoundly interesting, as it seems to be an utopian ideal inspired by the ideals and struggles of my generation, or at least all the good people on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook that know or follow.

That’s it for now

Well, I hope I’ve shared something you find interesting, and maybe hooked you on one or two things. This is also a bit of a new thing for me, but I figured that I’m not that good at putting parts of my personality online and sharing stuff that I love, so it’s a bit of exercise for me as well.

Let me know if you feel like chatting on one of these things, Cheers!