in between summer nights
november, 2022
Kicked off November with a Coldplay concert and it was a damn good idea! I'm a casual listener, and yet this was by far the best concert I've ever been to. I had a blast dancing under the colorful lightshow and singing my ass off to classics. Chris Martin's charisma and good vibes are incredibly contagious - it was a cathartic experience. Some highlights of the night: A Sky Full of Star's no-phone beat drop, Chris's pause to send love to everyone around the world and the band's cover of De Música Ligera.
Unfortunately this month I didn't jot down as much as I would have wanted to since school made me its bitch these past few weeks, but I'm finally done! Next year I'm graduating high school, which is extremely weird to think about. A lot of changes and new experiences are round the corner, but I think I'm ready to welcome them.
I might be getting a little ahead of myself, but I don't care. In my mind, summer is very much here! I've never been a fan of the heat, but I'm excited about the holidays. Clouded's been neglected for a while, so I hope I can liven up this place a bit. While I may have been rather silent on the digital realm, I've been writing a lot of scattered bits and pieces in the meantime. Hopefully you'll be able to check out some of these in the upcoming weeks.
I'm a longtime fan (an orbit, if you will) of K-pop girlgroup LOONA and I'm absolutely devastated by the news that Chuu's been kicked out from it. The move being announced under extremely suspicious conditions and a lawsuit by most of the remaining members has been very bittersweet for me. While I'm happy that the members will finally be able to get fairer treatment, I'm afraid we soon might have to see the girls part their ways. All good things must come to an end, I suppose.
I finally uninstalled Twitter for good. Funnily enough, what pushed me to hit the button wasn't the whole Elon Musk fiasco, but the utter annoyance of constantly seeing my timeline filled with support for Brazil in the context of the World Cup. I'd been unactive for some months now, but my FOMO had prevented me from fully letting go of the site. In relation to this, this month I've started using Mailbrew and I love it so far. In a nutshell, it's a mailing service that sends you a regular newsletter that you can curate with your favorite RSS feeds, social media accounts and newsletters. For my daily brew, I've picked a list of my favorite Twitter accounts that I genuinely enjoy and that humorously keep me up to date with current affairs, plus some LOONA fan accounts because of course I added LOONA content. On top of that, some newsletters I've been particularly enjoying lately are Reuters and Wired's dailies, plus Animation Obsessive and Austin Kleon's Substacks. What I like so much about Mailbrew is that it's helping me let go of the bad habit of opening Twitter or my phone's browser a million times a day: I get a decently sized portion of enjoyable content that is more than enough to space out throughout the day, and I can't just scroll down to refresh my brew and feed my brain with even more information. I'm waiting some days to get used to not having Twitter around so I can go on to the next step and figure out what to do with my excessive net surfing. There's so much cool stuff to read about on the web, but spending so much time going down Internet rabbit holes is starting to become a problem. Let's see what I'll come up with.
THE WORLD CUP IS HERE!!!!! Let's be honest: Qatar 2022 is anything but a normal World Cup. Apart from quite a bunch of strange and unexpected match results, FIFA's response to the extremely concerning human rights violations in the country was very lackluster, and by the look of things it seems that's all we're going to get. Disappointing. On a brighter note: at home, I never fail to be amazed by the effects of football and how moving this silly little sport can be. Seeing the jerseys on the streets, being spoiled by our neighbours' shouting because of our definitely-super-legal transmission's delay, people lining up at supermarkets and bakeries minutes before the matches... It's an unexplainable feeling. Mística pura.
After toying with web technologies for over two years now, this month I made my first Real And Professional™ web projects and it was so rewarding. I did it myself!!! With my own hands!!! Using Git!!! And the terminal!!! Fun stuff. I hope I finally start learning Javascript this summer and try my hand at more complex projects and all that. Exciting!!
And that's it for November! I haven't planned anything yet to celebrate Christmas and the new year on the site (and I doubt I will) so perhaps this is my farewell until 2023. Very odd to think about, but I'll save that for the next edition of glimpses. Until then, see ya!
- the pilgrim
microplaylist
Coldplay - Adventure of a Lifetime
Serú Girán - Salir de la melancolía
TAICHU - TU SI K TA LOKO
Bad Bunny - Neverita
Coldplay - Yellow
Coldplay - Fix You
Conociendo Rusia - Quiero que me llames
Taylor Swift - Wildest Dreams
Andrés Calamaro - Cuando no estás
Bad Bunny - Tití Me Preguntó
BLACKPINK - Typa Girl
Kevin Johansen, wiranda johansen - Es Como el Día
Coldplay - Humankind
Manuel Turizo - La Bachata
YSY A, Evlay - CÓMO CHILLA ELLA
Soda Stereo - Pic Nic En El 4° B
Pitbull, Jennifer Lopez, Claudia Leitte - We Are One (Ole Ola)
quotes
Look at the stars
Look how they shine for you
And everything you do
Yeah, they were all yellow
I came along
I wrote a song for you
And all the things you do
And it was called Yellow
So, then, I took my turn
Oh, what a thing to have done
And it was all yellow
But life must go on, despite who wins the US midterm elections, who owns Twitter, and how ridiculous the metaverse might be. That’s why every morning, sometimes before breakfast, when I am in despair, I remember the three letters that always bring me comfort: PDF. And then, when I can, I go digging. I read about Gato, a new artificially intelligent agent that can caption images and play games, or the mathematics underlying misinformation, or “digital twins,” which are simulations of real-world things like cities that consulting firms seem able to sell these days. One site, scholar.archive.org, has PDFs going back to the 18th century. It’s empowering to look for this stuff instead of waiting for it to be socially discovered and jammed into my brain.
This was the original function of the web—to transmit learned texts to those seeking them.
Science was supposed to have banished God, but he keeps turning up in our latest technologies. He is the ghost lurking in our data sets, the cockroach hiding beneath the particle accelerator.
Noise is never just about sound; it is inseparable from issues of power and powerlessness. It is a violation we can’t control and to which, because of our anatomy, we cannot close ourselves off. “We have all thought of killing our neighbors at some point,” a soft-spoken scientist researching noise abatement told me.
Nada de lo que tenga que ver con nosotros tiene sentido. No respondemos a ninguna teoría, somos completamente enemigos del sentido común. El sábado podemos ganar 18 a 0. Tengo la ilusión intacta.
FACT: The things that are the most important aren’t shared; they are important only to us.
(...)
You can write it all down, you can put it in your book of facts, but the truth is no one can ever really understand the tangle of experiences and passions that makes you who you are. It’s a secret collection, a private language, a pebble in your pocket that you play with when you’re anxious, hard as geometry, smooth as soap.