Favorite Things Winter 2025

Published: 2025-05-08

My Favorite things from the last 3 months (January2025 - April 2025)

Little reviews of things I checked out or did but don’t really mention anywhere else.

Ginger Root + Japanese Breakfast at Massey Hall

I saw Ginger Root!!! It was a phenomenal show, he had a dude with an over the shoulder camera on stage recording the performance onto a projector, moving and adding visual effects in time to the music he also was speaking into a landline phone on stage to emulate his vocal compression in a live context. Ginger Root is super commited to a specific aesthetic and sound and the effort put into maintaining that live is recognized and appreciated. Also him playing like 3 synths at the same time was cool.

He was opening for Japanese Breakfast, an artist I didn’t know anything about, Her performance was great and bombastic with smoke machines and strobe lights and someone on a violin? She was all over the place when it came to her indie rock sound, kind of like Beabadoobee????? I think Ginger Root was more interesting though.

Someone coffee chatted me?

Like, someone reached out because they wanted to meet and talk to me because they saw my website and thought I was cool. It was nice to know that other people resonate with what I have to share.

Severance Season 1 + 2

I don’t watch television, Severance is an exception to that though, My brother had recommended it to me, likely because he uses social media and noticed it’s popularity increasing with the end of the second season. It’s really good TV, expects you to pay attention and think, it uses an interesting premise with really good execution, it’s got off kilter vibes that I think people like about Twin Peaks? My mom also started watching it with us and I had to do a lot of explaining to her about what had happened at the end of each episode.

Unbeatable Demo

I backed this game on kickstarter a very long time ago, but it seems like they’re finally getting to it and delivering on their promise. It’s a fun stylized rhythm game, it has early Studio Trigger vibes in it’s art-style, if that made you go “heck yeah brother” then maybe check it out.

Taiko no Tatsujin/Yume Arcade

There’s a Japanese Rhythm Game import arcade in Toronto. I played Taiko no Tatsujin there, They have a viewlix with some other games there too but you’re probably there for a the imported stuff. Hitting the drums in time with the music is fun! Rhythm games lack of thinking or nuanced design is always a little interesting, they can be built using the loophole that humans find doing things in time with music to be inherently fun.

Attack on Titan Tribute game 2

Tribute game is BACK. And Thunderspear PVP is goated. It’s got the addictive open ended ODM movement I always remembered from tribute game, but now there are rocket launchers that you shoot at each other. Frag your friends for an evening, it’s a good time.

Peach Momoko’s Demon Days + Demon Wars

Peach Momoko makes incredibly beautiful watercolor and ink comics. I was familiar with her work on the 2024 Ultimate X-Men, but went back to read her previous series’ Demon Days, and it’s follow up, Demon Wars. It’s the Marvel Universe but for Weebs, with all our favorite characters being re-imaged as their Japanese folklore equivalents. The actual story is quite simple, it’s the art and imagination of the world that makes it such a great read. Get it in print if you can so you can view the art at a high resolution, it’s very nice stuff.

February push-up challenge

GDYU participated in the Canadian push up challenge for the Canadian Mental Health Association mental health throughout February. Each one of us did 2000 push-ups over the span of 18 days. If an average of 110 push-ups a day sounds like a lot it’s because it is. It was nice to prove to myself that I can be consistent with exercise related habits.

Power Tower

I can do pull ups and dips in my basement now!

1440p monitor

1080p displays are too small for text editing, especially after getting used to the extra screen size on my Framework 13 and My massive 4k monitor at Google. 1440p lets me have more text on screen and comfortably fit two windows next to each other in i3. I forgot the specific model I got but it’s a 144hrz Dell one. It was on sale.

Action Button La Noire

He’s back.

The production quality has increased a substantial amount from season 1 to season 2, but so has the time in between episodes. I was expecting the review on Final Fantasy 4 but I am NOT disappointed in the review we got first. Tim Rogers has an ability to take any game and make me care about it. The fiction this review is wrapped within is a super interesting but also super fitting for Action Button and it’s reputation for meticulous detail. It’s broken up into episodes which makes it easier to watch, I haven’t finished it myself yet either.