Now

A Tangent

I wanted to have the first entry of the new year… well, be closer to the actual start of the year I guess?

I just caught up with a good friend of mine last week, a few months or so since our last catch-up, and I became keenly aware of how little has changed on my end in terms of grand life events. I’m wary of pinning this on some notion of having grown older and, therefore, finding myself in a little pool of stability.

But, I’m 26… and even if I was a lot older, I wouldn’t want the above excuse line of reasoning to preclude these grand life events I speak of. Or maybe it’s just a matter of perspective. What even is a ‘Grand Life Event’?

Suffice to say, that catch-up left me dwelling a little too much on the current state of my life. Which brings us to:

Life

Honestly, there’s a lot of stability here, so I’m just figuring out how to spend my time in a way that feels right.

A few things that I’m proud of:

1. I’ve been working on a little server application, Webhooked, which was a good excuse to learn Python~
2. I got myself a VPS to play with! I’m already self-hosting Webhooked on it, and I’ve got plans to host some other OSS projects in the new future.
3. I got myself a PS5!

The last one might seem trivial, but it’s pretty important to me.

The PS5 is my first console since a PS2 my brothers and I shared nearly a decade and a half ago. There’s a pretty important footnote to all of this haha.¹ I also blame this purchasing decision on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 which looks, absolutely phenomenal.²

Health

I got myself some running shoes at the start of the month.I picked the worst possible time to convince myself to start running again, given that, it was smack-dab at the start of Ramadan.

I’ve taken a break from jump rope (still trying to figure out where that one fits) and filled that time with semiregular calisthenics workouts. The Recommended Routine.

Between the calisthenics, running, jumping rope, and badminton I find myself a little stretched this. While I really have no idea how they all fit together, my goal is simple. Get fit enough to be able to work out as many times a week as to fit in all of these activities, and not hate my body all the while.

I’m at the point where doing some activity 4~5 times a week isn’t too taxing, although I might have to reassess my progress after Eid.

Entertainment

Well, I did / I am doing, a metric ton of ‘being entertained’ (and not in some glaringly hedonistic, ‘SEEKING PLEASURE ONLY’ kind of way. I’m more… disciplined about that). So let’s break this down!

Video Games

FINAL FANTASY XVI AAAAAAAAAH!

I did not hesitate to purchase the game. It’s not even because the game is particularly amazing (reviews are pretty mixed), but man have I always had a soft spot for the series, and it feels a fitting way for this to be the first game I get myself.

I’m about 80% of the way through the main story, (all I do are the main quests and some ‘important’ side-quests), and I find myself enjoying the moment to moment gameplay, it’s alright.

Where the game shines is with these boss fights, particularly the Eikon ones. I wouldn’t really call any of them so far ‘challenging’, but they are quite amazing cinematic experiences. Peak, is a pretty fitting description.

I’m having a blast! Aside from Expedition 33 which I’m likely to buy soon after it releases, the other games I’m looking forward to are single player experiences as well. I’m not in a rush to get into any of them, so I’m just waiting for Sony to shower me with good fortune and discount the games on my wishlist.

Oh - I’ve already got FFXV so that’s likely going to be next ha.

Books

In a sense, it is unfortunate that my reading spree has been dominated by a single series. A mere two (I’m midway through the third)books in fact, and with that, I’ve more or less shelved everything else.

Starting the Stormlight Archive was not something I thought I would do, given that, I have a disinclination³ towards series that are yet to be completed. In the end I convinced myself that it was fine, with the following reasoning:

1. Sanderson, as an author, is stupidly meticulous in planning and executing on his authorship. If Sanderson and I make it through our natural lives, I’m confident I’ll see the series through.
2. Wind and Truth (Book 5 of the Stormlight Archive, and end of the ‘first part’), apparently (I don’t know, I haven’t read it) concludes many of the promises laid out in The Way of Kings (book one), enough to present a natural stopping point.
3. I. Just. Could. Not. Hold. Myself. Back. Any. Longer.

Pretty rational choice on my part.

I did tell myself that I’d take ‘breaks’ in between the books to read something else but given I’ve made it through 3000 pages of this series barely having spared a glance to my TBR list.

I don’t think I’m doing so well on that front. Just before I started the Stormlight Archive though, I did go back to reading light novels for a bit. Something new this time, the Your Forma series. I’ve also convinced myself to go finish Mushoku Tensei once I’m done with the Stormlight Archive. I’ve got around 4 volumes left on Mushoku.

Movies & Shows

The Winter 2025 season of Anime didn’t really have many shows that got me excited. I’ve been following Orb (Rafal FTW!), Ishura S2 and Apothecary Diaries S2 weekly, and they’ve all been fantastic. To be completely honest, I’ve taken a break from Orb so I can binge the last arc! Given that the final episode just aired, I’ll have to find the time for that!

The only other anime I started was Zenshu but, it didn’t really appeal to me (aside from the fantastic animation). I’m willing to give it a few more episodes at some point though.

No TV shows, although I have the second season of Severance lined up for ' sometime soon’.

I’ve been getting back into watching movies more regularly, both in the cinema and at home, but there’s likely only one I’d want to talk about here, and that’s Conclave. Which, by the way, only showed up in Cinemas recently here in Indonesia.

It wasn’t even all that great as a movie. I’d rate it as a 3/5 which makes it a solid flick, but nothing amazing, and not something I’d watch again. There was just a couple of things surrounding my viewing of the film that, stood out, and added to the experience:

1. The condition of the current Pope, which was covered by mainstream media, and well, how I came to discover the movie in the first place. That’s some uncanny timing… given that it released in Indonesia around the same time haha.
2. Dialogue in the movie was multilingual, which under home-viewing circumstances wouldn’t be an issue, but given that I was watching this in an Indonesian cinema, it took me a solid 1/3rd of the movie to realize that there was actually a ton of dialogue that I was missing out on because all I got were Indonesian subtitles xd?
3. I definitely overthought how the movie would end up going.

Fine, not a well thought out conspiracy but one my mind just couldn’t shake off.

Work

Not really a lot going on here. I suppose my upcoming reviews in April would tell me a lot about my trajectory given the changes I talked about in my previous ‘Now’ post.

That’s All Folks!

A much longer post than I usually write, and definitely one that isn’t all that typical from what you’d expect from a ' Now’ page. Hopefully, I get my act together for the next one!

History

See previous versions of this page here.