#Appreciation Wall

The fact that there’s actually a horizontal scrubber at the bottom! T.T

Nothing inspires gratitude and the desire to pay forward like the encounter with the many delightfully-crafted open source software. (What do you mean people poured their heart & soul into it and I’m enjoying it, for free?!)

And it’d be remiss not to give due recognition to the work by way of mentioning it: this is gitui, for viewing diffs in the terminal.

Oh and how can I forget, not an exaggeration to say this is literally the awakening of my literature appreciation:

One moment I was still merely going through the motion of memorizing poems for dictation tests; the next I’m suddenly understanding what language classes have been trying to knock into us for years.

If I have to describe my most overwhelming impression of this poem in one word, it would be lean. The first 3 sentences build up a scene with nouns and nouns only. The entire poem has only two verbs (one of them being a copular even). Continuing on the quality of leanness, the punchline, into which somehow the entirety of the theme managed to be condensed, illuminates it in one swift finishing sentence after a short break of structure on the fourth line. How satisfying is that?

I suppose it also helps that all the nouns in the poem are concrete, with the sole exception being the last word. The contrast gives the poem a spike of dreamy, echoing quality at the very end, such that it reverberates long after its impactful end.

(I admit I’m having a little too much fun glazing it)

One trope of songs I find extremely satisfying is one where the songwriter steps out of their own experiences, toys with a character they have in mind, and writes the exploration in first-person.

They give me a strong sense of the artists having fun with their craft, and I suppose there’s always a certain pleasure to be derived from watching talents play & challenge themselves.

Honorable mention:

This rice bowl takeaway container’s design:

Favorite Singapore-origin Chinese song. Pleasantly surprised by the bite in it and have liked it since

Yes, the song do be giving edgelord, but you gotta acknowledge a sick sass when you see one

Cool word play

Taylor’s good at capturing these quiet chafes.

The kind that tend to make people second-guess themselves the most because there isn’t any visible, intentional wrongdoing, but devastating nonetheless. Really the surest way to kill someone inside is by consistently denying them the consideration they deserve

And because this type of hurt is usually more challenging to articulate, I find her giving words to it empowering and… kind

Tolerate. What a packed word. My heart breaks for the narrator

Oh c’mon

I didn’t expect to like it at first. It’s one of the songs that have slowly grown on me.

I like that there’s fight and anger in the song’s depicted process of getting sadness out of one’s system. And the use of rain as an imagery to invoke tears which somehow doesn’t feel cliche, because of how it manages to make the comparison between the near-choking experience of crying (water coming out) and drowning (water going in) work.

imo it’s the song that does the best at capturing the feeling of a deep, guttural cry that I’ve come across

It’s always the smart people who turn out to be the staunchest humanists

It’d be all lyrics for now until I am motivated enough to load in my screenshots…

Here’s another one I enjoy a lot:

Because how do you write shit like this I’m floored