Weekly Yap: 12/7-12/13

2025-12-14

My subconscious has expected too much effort for each post. While there is a bar for the minimum amount that should be put in, it’s self-imposed. There aren’t any rules here. I still aim to gradually increase the quality of my posts over time, but I need to put aside delusions of cranking out grade-A interesting writing week-in and week-out. It serves more to form a barrier to entry that causes me to push away thoughts of writing than it does to encourage me to do my best.

With that in mind, I’ve decided that my default post is going to be a simple weekly recap. It’ll probably take a few posts to work out a format I really like but I’m just going to dive in.

The Ren Faire

I was worried last weekend’s Ren Faire wouldn’t be as fun as the previous time we (that is, me and my wife, Nug) went because it was cold and overcast and she didn’t really seem like she was in the mood to go. Nevertheless, the excitement started picking up once we were there among the Ren Faire people walking to the entrance. Seeing people adjust their fairy wings and tiaras and wizard hats in the muddy parking lot with full-size mirrors held up by their friends is weirdly heartwarming. Look at us all out here on a mission for some goddamned whimsy.

Inside, we grabbed a couple beers (for me) so we wouldn’t have to wait in line twice¹, ate some meatballs on a stick with bell peppers (why is this so good?), shared a funnel cake, and wandered over to a Shakespeare improv show. The performers had strong theatre kid energy, but the fun kind. Both of them were charming, and the audience member they picked to recreate Romeo and Juliet rolled with it impressively well despite their initial awkward demeanor. By this time, Nug and I were feeling great and the vibes were absolutely immaculate. And, happily, they pretty much stayed that way for the rest of our time there. To my surprise, I had more fun this go around than last time.

Most of our time was spent looking around at all the vendors. At one, we picked up a silver light-switch cover shaped like a castle scene. At another stall, Nug wanted me to get an ocarina. They were reasonably priced, but I was trying to control my spending and didn’t want to get one without checking how in-tune it was. And I couldn’t just get my slobber all on them, ya know? I tried tapping my fingers on the holes to hear the tones like you can with a flute or a recorder, but to no avail. It was a little too noisy where we were. Eventually social anxiety got the better of me so we moved on to another vendor. In hindsight, I should’ve gotten one, whatever the tuning (sorry, Nug, you were right).

We grabbed some drinks (the ginger beer there is weirdly good; It comes in a cheap Coca-Cola paper cup but wow, the ginger is really pronounced and spicy—it’s delicious), watched a show with some performing poodles, and called it a night.

All in all, it was a great experience. Ren Faires are people-with-good-vibes magnets. It was only my third time going², but I know we’ll be back every year for a brief respite from outside reality.

Notable sightings:

• A yellow pikmin girl
• A Shrek and Fiona couple
• Enoch from Over the Garden Wall, complete with streamers and giant pole for accurate height
• Iggy the Gargoyle
• The Mushroom gang, still representing
• a Christmas fairy
• a mysterious shaman figure with some kind of bone mask
• an absence of Beer Wizards (saw them last time though)

Music I Listened to This Week

Floating Points - Cascade [Album]

Rating: [4.25/5]

I’ve had this album in my library for a while but haven’t put it on in its entirety until now. I’ve only listened to it all the way through once, so my mind isn’t entirely made up yet. I’m just going to write about how this initial listen affected me and what I thought about it.

Sam Shepherd has some of the cleanest sounding production of electronic music that I’ve ever heard. Sometimes there are really only two instruments playing but it’s so well mixed that it still sounds so full and even in denser textures it all sounds so controlled. There is never any doubt that you are listening to an absolute master of the craft. All of the sounds are straight ear candy, but his kicks in particular really do it for me (and all of those percussive sounds in “Tilt Shift”—god, I want to inject them into my veins). Also impressive in all of these tracks is the effortlessness of the progressions and emotional arcs. Each track moves seamlessly through its different sections such that none overstays its welcome, even the literal club mix track, “Vocoder (club mix)”. This might be sacrilege, but Floating Points feels to me like an alternate dimension version of Aphex Twin who releases only his most polished, focused tracks. This is no disrespect to AT though; the deluge of variety is a big reason why I love him.

Overall, the album is like a 4.25 for me. No track achieves the sheer heartbreaking beauty of “Falaise” from his 2019 album, Crush (an extremely high bar) or the shimmery wonder of 2020’s Promises (which has the unfair advantage of having a full orchestra and Pharaoh Sanders), though “Ocotillo” gets pretty close to the intensity of emotion, but there aren’t any strong skips and it has a solid, polished album experience.

Highlights:

• That scrungly little riff and the little breathy vocal chops in “Del Oro”.
• That part halfway through “Ocotillo” where you feel like you’re flickering in a great metal chamber with the bass rumbling through you and some kind of bard floating in front of you playing a string instrument.
• How “Afflecks Palace” is straight hacker music.
• The two-minute long fade at the end of “Ablaze” that lets you sit with your feelings as you process the album. I’m a sucker for albums that don’t just kinda end.

Others

I use my personal Plex library for most of my music listening (fuck you Spotify, eat a dick) and I’ve found the “Library Radio” option to be really good at lining up a good playlist of whatever music you’ve got. Countless times I’ve been shocked by smooth transitions between disparate tracks that I would have never thought to listen to in sequence, but that hit so good together. To demonstrate, I just pulled up Plexamp and played the Library Radio and it gave me this:

Weyes Blood: “A Lot’s Gonna Change” -> Claude Debussy: “Valse Romantique” -> Nothing: “Famine Asylum” -> Cindy Lee: “Glitz”

I’ve had better, but this was pretty damn good. “A Lot’s Gonna Change” to “Valse Romantique” was particularly inspired. If you have Plexamp, give this a shot.

Anyways, something Library Radio has brought to my attention lately is that I enjoy some songs from the Arctic Monkeys album Favorite Worst Nightmare when they are removed from the context of the album. I’d written the songs off (except “505” which is excellent) as being boring and same-y. And I mean, they still kinda are, but much less so when they aren’t all played back-to-back. It’s an album in the literal, traditional sense of the word: just a straight up collection of some songs they wrote.

Things I Read This Week

Aldous Huxley - Brave New World (no spoilers)

Rating: [5/5]

Holy shit. I know lots of people probably read this in high school and maybe I’m late to the game but wow. This is one of the books I’ve owned for the longest, having bought it in high school, and it has sat on my shelf for more than a decade across four towns, two states, and six homes. The pages have yellowed since I bought it though I’d never really opened the damn thing. And you know what? I’m glad I didn’t. I think for most of my life up until now I’d have been too stupid to really take it in. Hell, I’m still too stupid to take it all in. But I feel like I’m at a point where I can appreciate most of what this book has to offer, and Jesus, does it have a lot going on.

I’ve had this book pigeon-holed in my head as “the other 1984,” and that’s only partially a fair assessment. Both are dystopian novels written in the first half of the 20th century by white Englishmen that depict massive governments with all-encompassing control over it’s citizens. From a modern perspective, it begs comparison (despite being published 17 years before 1984). But I found it so much more compelling and honestly, plausible.³

(If you don’t want my synopsis, skip this next paragraph. There aren’t any spoilers, though.)

Brave New World proposes a society wherein total control and submission are achieved not through direct fear and paranoia, but through a carefully maintained caste system wherein from birth, each child is conditioned to love the things that they must do and their position in society. Through various scientific processes, the embryos are altered to control the intelligence and innate desires of each child according to their caste. Children of lower casts (Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons) are mass-produced by forcing single embryos to multiply creating dozens of twins at a time from a single specimen.⁴ The children are then “conditioned” (brainwashed) for several years after birth by listening to tapes while they sleep⁵. By the time they enter the workforce, they want to do their job. They want to consume as much as possible. They don’t want to waste their time with trifling things like admiring nature. Strong emotions are eradicated by reducing the interval between desires and their fulfillment. Instant gratification is all but mandatory. There are no romantic relationships and everyone sleeps with everyone else (in fact, it is taboo to be monogamous for too long a period). There are no families; mass-production of children has done away the concept of parents, made the idea of them vulgar, even. When not working (again, a desirable activity for everyone regardless of caste), people take part in overwhelmingly high-sensory activities like going to feelies (a form of movie with heightened realism and smell, touch, etc.) or play elaborately modified sports like Obstacle Golf that require as much equipment as possible to increase consumption. All the rooms are filled with scent-organs that constantly produce an array of vivid smells and synthetic music machines and sexophones do the same, but for sound. No one ever spends time alone, except when they are sleeping. From the moment of conception, everyone is engineered to genuinely desire their lot in life and prefer whatever produces maximum stability for society.

What sticks in your head about Brave New World is not just the PSA about the horrors of government control, but the invitation to grapple with the idea that it’s citizens⁶ are technically happy. They’ve been made to enjoy the functions they carry out and to reject unorthodoxy. And it isn’t just a façade put on to survive—they are truly, authentically happy. It asks you to reconsider happiness as a worthy end goal.

This book gripped me from the very start, and I couldn’t put it down for the three days that it took to read it. I’ve barely touched on my thoughts here, so I’ll be writing a separate post for it in the future. For now, I highly recommend this.

Moments I Had This Week

Morning Walk

In the frigid morning, I walk the stretch of sidewalk that runs from the parking lot up a hill and past a couple of the other warehouses. I’ve only just stepped outside and my hands are already ice. I try to divert my attention elsewhere. Magnolias, birches, and pines are planted along the right of my path and little birds zip between them. I’m not sure what kind. Below me, the cracks in the sidewalk are filled with small ant hills and spotted spurge. After it rained a little while back, the anthills became crumbly and dry, their surfaces reduced from fine granularity to assemblages of little clumps. Do the ants rebuild or just start over with another hill? I don’t know. The spurge thrives, anyway. It’ll be here long after we are.

On the way back down the hill, I walk on the other side of the road. Trucks pass. The sidewalk takes me past the retention pond. Beyond the chain-link fence the land slopes off into the pond. I admire the rushes and weeds that bend towards the water as if in reverence. The water itself is a murky brown and the word “fetid” springs to mind, though I can’t actually smell it. I find myself wondering what it would be like to be on a raft in the middle of it. Just then, a goose lands where I was looking. Now I’m wondering what it would be like to be a goose.

My hands are no longer frozen, but are now tingling with new warmth. I’m invigorated by the wind that moments ago withered me. I’m glad I took this walk.

Conversation Re-starter

A casual conversation with my manager and friend lulls. I break the clip on my Lamy Al-Star while fidgeting with it in my pocket. Shit. My manager says he could probably 3D print a new one. He’s now gushing about his new 3D printer with an almost childlike excitement despite his stolid face. His excitement rubs off on me. I’m happy for him.

While writing about this week it clicked for me the value of personal blogging. Had you asked me about how my week was or what I did, I would have given a non-answer a la “not much.” I wonder how many memories and epiphanies I’ve let slip away by not reflecting on them. But I can’t dwell on that; I was living in the moment. Besides, they’re all still in there somewhere, right? I’ll recover the good ones in time. We all can.

If you read this, genuinely thank you so much. Starting this website has been a very personally rewarding endeavor and it means a lot that someone out there might be connecting with it.

See ya next week!

footnotes