a list of things i've been obsessed with lately

I've always enjoyed snooping into other people's taste through lists that compiled favourites (temporary or in general). Cue, my most recent obsessions all in one place – this post!

PSY'S THAT THAT

My descent into Kpop and by extension Korean music was caused by my girlfriend two years-ish ago. For some reason I only got into BTS very recently. And that was the culprit of me finding this video and being completely obsessed with it. If you're not familiar with Kmusic, you might still remember PSY as the guy who wreaked havoc with Gangnam Style back in 2011. He's fairly well-known in Korea (I'm told) and for good reason! That That is an earworm. I have it on loop (I even play it in my mind when I'm not listening to it, lol). You can listen to it here.

JIN'S SUPER TUNA

Of course. Of course. This song has not made it out of my mind since I forced my girlfriend to click on the video thumbnail and she sighed in defeat. If you are a diehard Army, please look away while I type this. I was under the very wrong impression (covering my back here) that the BTS guys were still forced to play the perfect (boring) boyfriend role that is thrusted upon all boyband members in the industry. I was promptly informed that, and I quote, "they're so famous now they can do whatever they want". This video is proof of that. There's more where this screenshot came from, and the song itself is so fun I can't stop listening to it.

ANTHROPODENIAL

Exploring Jin's affection towards a tuna fish can lead to a lot of different, interesting concepts – such as, what is the way we regard non-human animals in relation to ourselves? From what I can gather (I haven't yet read the entire paper), De Waal (a Dutch researcher) wanted to respond to the numerous critiques that said he was making animals "too human" when he talked about them in his research. He posed that the opposite might be true – are we rejecting any trace of "humanity" in animals because we don't think of them as similar to us? Apparently (expectably) he's the author behind a book I had added to my reading list sometime ago, called Are we smart enough to understand how smart animals are? In this paper, he talks about the concept of anthropodenial, which I think is very interesting. Use yer JSTOR institutional license while it lasts.

RSTUDIO THEMES

I famously turned too many laptops unusable because, at 11 years old, I trusted strangers on the internet to provide beautiful Windows 7 themes, free of charge, nicely wrapped in a not suspicious .exe file. I know have a Macbook and not enough knowledge to jailbreak it and customize it to my heart's desire (and also a more acute feeling of how much money is worth), so I've resorted to customizing what little I can. This applies to my beautiful RStudio. I recently found this page by a guy named Garrick who apparently worked in the company that created RStudio itself! He does provide, free of charge, some beautiful RStudio themes so that you can stare at them while it runs your script. My personal favourites are the Rosé Pine themes (for both light and dark modes) and the Flat White theme (for light mode, my beloved).

PUMPKIN JAM

Wow. I swear, if you haven't tried it, you should. Back in January I had one of those express viruses that last no more than a day, but it rendered me effectively useless for a day and a half at least. I didn't eat anything for 24 hours. And then – at 5 in the morning – I woke up famished and made myself two toasts with abundant pumpkin jam on top in the dark. Nothing has ever tasted as delicious. There's simply something to it. Since a picture of the one I have would potentially doxx me, have this generic one I found online instead.

my 2026 reading list (so far)

As always, life came back after Christmas, and with going back home and starting work again, I could not bring myself to find time to spend on this blog, even though I enjoy it a lot. Part of it was the fact my girlfriend gave me Breath of the Wild as a Christmas gift and I haven't stopped playing since... and part of it was going back into an almost automatic routine that barely leaves any space for hobbies.

Since the year started, though, I have been participating in a Storygraph challenge that consists on reading at least one page every day. Back when I was in high school, this wouldn't even have been challenging. I used to read for fun. I used to pick up a book, get in bed, and spend at least half an hour reading every night.

But then university came, and between having more of a social life than I had ever had and the fact I now had to read literature works for my courses, I found very little time to dedicate to reading as a hobby (and not as "homework"). So whenever I picked a book, it would either be a studying session or a guilty pleasure. And since I spent my day reading (either actual books or academic papers), when I got to bed at night, the last thing I wanted to do was read more.

If my 8-year-old self could've heard this, he would've looked at me in horror. But it happened, and for some good 6 years of my life, if not more, I've been relegating reading to a very brief time before bed, and some days, to nothing at all.

So I decided to join the challenge, because Christmas, and in general any holidays, always mean I go back to my child self – not worried about schedules or clocks, focused only on what I want to do next, and a bookworm at heart.

Of course, coming back to real life has made it harder to maintain the habit, because I'm just so used to not reading here. But I've managed to cut out some time for reading during breakfast (instead of watching vlogs on YouTube) and to journal again before bed at night.

My 2026 Hobonichi

I wanted to share here my reading list for the year. In part because I haven't thought about what I really want to read yet, and in part because I'd like to come back at the end of the year and see how much I've actually read, and what was left on the shelf. This, as everything in life, is subject to change – but I wanted to put pen to paper (or finger to key) and plan my reading year to get excited about books again. Book shopping what I already have, so to speak.

So, what am I planning on reading this year? In no particular order...

hello world!

Hello! It feels weird posting here, almost like coming back home.

I'm Jocha. I'm a twenty-something guy who misses the internet he grew up in, a lot. Thus, this blog was born!

I used to host a several blogs on Blogger many years ago, when I was just a kid and fiddling with the family computer was my idea of a fun time. A lot has happened since then, and I've gone through many, many different phases and interests, but the idea of writing a blog has always called to me like a siren song. In the year of 2026 (!!), the blog is no longer a place in the Personal Internet (™) but a weird thing that most of us have forgotten still exists.

As a teenager, I had an Instagram account, a Twitter account, a Tumblr account, you name it. The blogs I had died with my old Gmail account, which I deleted because it was weighing me down with past ghosts (and thousands of unread spam emails from free trials, newsletters I forgot to unsubscribe from, and the like). I was everywhere all at once. Now, you don't know this about me yet, but I've always struggled with the idea of being scattered. Though as I grow, I become less anxious about being wider, I'm still enamored with the idea of having a single thread to follow.

By opening this blog I'm doing the opposite of that – last year I created my own Neocities website, which is still (and will forever be) in development, I have several Tumblr blogs (among these my personal blog, my old fandom and editing blog that has been running for over a decade at this point – if you take into account the archive –, and my new gaming blog), I'm slowly getting into the habit of journaling and making spreads for things I like, such as movies or books, and I'm also building my own Obsidian vault, where I keep everything from recipes, to notes on academic papers, to beers I've tried, to gaming 'spreadsheets'. I still very much struggle with the idea that not everything needs to be contained in a single place. But I'm managing. I want to create about the very same thing from different perspectives, and abandon the thought I need to make The Perfect [Something] about it, the One And Only Thing About This Interest Of Mine.

I hope my blog is yet another place to explore myself. In 2026, I want to become aware of things I'd never noticed about myself, and most of all, slow down and actually pay attention to my days, to what I love, to what i think, to what grows within me when I interact with the world.

Part of the reason I disliked 'traditional' social media was the lack of customization. I felt constrained by the soulless profiles you can create, with only a profile picture (sometimes a banner) to express yourself. I think many people feel like this (that's, in my opinion, the very reason Carrds are so popular among teens nowadays, and why Tumblr is stubbornly holding on to life despite everybody from The Outside™ thinking it's dead). I've always been in love with my computer, and spending afternoons and holiday mornings crafting a new look for my Tumblr blog feels like such an intimate connection with the Internet, whatever it is now. This is why Substack never worked for me either (that, and the fact people seemed too interested in their engagement there. I really want the feeling of screaming into the void and only sometimes having the void scream back).

Lilly Ashton, who does not know this blog exists, is the reason I decided to open it today. On her Tumblr blog, she urged people to join the Blogspot resurgence of 2026, and just reading those words made me think back to all the times I spent my days writing entries nobody read, and how happy I was doing so. When I remember those days, now, they all have the same light to them, a soft light from the end of the afternoon, when the world is tender. I'm sure many days were darker than I recall, and many of them cold and unpleasant. But in my computer lived that light.

I hope to see this blog grow thick with entries about the silliest little things. Things that I love, that live in many, many places, in many, many different ways, because I'm very, very happy when I talk about them.

If you're reading this, did I succeed? How many years into the future does this blog still exist? How many love letters to the world have I written so far?

With love,

Jocha