Monthly Roundup: November 2025
What I Did
Pondered the entire month on what to write for a flash fiction contest and eventually wrote everything on the last day of the month. Compressing a story into less than 200 words is not beans.
Sometimes you need to try a food again to reaffirm why you dislike it in the first place. This month it was honey. Give me processed sugar any day, please, just don't bring honey near me. It's too sweet and I think I once got a stomachache from taking spoonfuls of honey for a sore throat, so, no, thank you. I also don't know what possessed me to pour honey in my garri, but I assure you I'm never doing that again.
Finally moved out of the hostel and back home.
What I Read
I've finally read The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives. It was an interesting read, but people overhype it. It's not a bad book but the way people talk about it you'd think it was The Joys of Motherhood in a more contemporary form. I enjoyed it, but at some parts I felt like I was reading Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger again, with the constant descriptions of filth and how everything was so dirty and everybody was so crass. I'm not sure if I liked the end; it was a whimper instead of a bang, but somehow it fits the story.
Saving Noah, Lucinda Berry. "We forgive murderers, not pedophiles." Not always true, but it is true. It's the story of a mother of a self-confessed teenage child molester and how this confession upends their lives. I still don't know how to feel about it, but it was an interesting read.
What I Played
- Some more Minute Cryptic. Sometimes I get it and sometimes I don't. I'll try to move on to full cryptics (according to MC commenters on YouTube, the Guardian's Quick Cryptic is a good starting point).
- I didn't do much gaming this month. Played some OpenTTD—while it's nice to see my trains and numbers go brrr, it starts to get boring when I finally pay off my loans and start making money.
What I Watched
The Thursday Murder Club: I finally watched this after waiting months to do so and was disappointed. Thankfully, I haven't read the book yet, so I'll just go and do that. Hopefully Knives Out 3 doesn't disappoint me this badly. [5/10]
The Magnificent Seven (2016): I started this earlier in the year but only finished it in November. It was nice, got the Wild West action I came for, and as for the plot? Sorry, I never expect much from action movies, hence, I never bother criticising their stories. It's probably why I'm planning to watch more Jason Statham movies, despite knowing they'll all be in the same vein as The Beekeeper. Now to watch the original movie. [7/10]
Rise of the Planet of the Apes: I have always said that scientists don't consider the effects of their inventions and discoveries, and this only further reaffirms that hypothesis. Look at Jurassic Park, it's the exact same scenario. [7/10]
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl: Rewatching the POTC movies. Still dislike both Will and Elizabeth for being incredibly hypocritical.
What I Listened To
Show Dem Camp's Afrika Magik: Standouts from this album for me are Italawa, Pressure. The whole album (except for the interludes) is great but I've only latched on to these two for now.
Ayra Starr is that girl. Didn't really like her output that much when she first came out but Who's That Girl is changing my mind.
Here We Are, GFRIEND: Slept on this song when it came out and now that we no longer have GFriend with us I've remembered it exists. It's a great fan song, even if it wasn't written for that purpose. A great addition to the Christian horse girl genre of kpop.1
LET'S PRAY (ft. Don Toliver, Travis Scott), DJ Khaled: I think the tear running down his face on this album cover looks silly, but the song is fine, especially with Don Toliver providing the vocals. Another song I discovered from HBCU marching bands.
Waka, MAVINS: it's nice to have Don Jazzy singing, and I really like this new Mavins song.
I've mentioned Adekunle Gold's MANY PEOPLE on a previous roundup, but I would like to let everyone know that there's another version with Adewale Ayuba on it.
Interesting Links
Archivi.ng is a digital archive of Nigerian newspapers. Our own answer to the Internet Archive—I love it!
A spotter's guide to text games is like the name says, a guide to text games. If you played Episodes or Choices or even the ChoiceofGames or Delight Games' offerings, you've probably already played a text game, or interactive fiction. There's more to interactive fiction than CYOA2 or choice-based games, and this post goes further into that.
Indie Web Peeves: I agree with some of these. DNIs, for example, come across as very silly. Autoplaying music is also irritating. Whatever happened to consent?
Political Compass: Discover where you stand on the American political compass, I guess. You have to interpret your results for yourself, which is bad design IMO, and there is a long list of questions to answer. It's something to do if you're bored, though I can't say how accurate this is.
The Website Obesity Crisis is indeed a crisis. Bring back lightweight webpages!
Academic papers yanked after authors found to have used unlicensed software: Be careful when you're using software for research, I guess.
Other Stuff I'd Like to Share
I've been toying with the idea of making my own website, but what would I put on it? As I concluded in this post, everything people have on their personal websites seems to just lead to a blog though. Some websites are beautiful and have more content than just blog posts, like anh's site, but I'm not an artist, and I'm not interested in tracking my shows or books or music on a website when I have the combos of Trakt + Showly, Pano Scrobbler + Last.fm and Never Too Many Books + Open Library to do that for me. I'm not interested in making fansites or shrines like some on Neocities. It would be nice to have my own domain name, but that's not an expense I'm currently thinking about and in the end it would still be a blog. I'll keep pondering though.
The first time I heard Davido's With You, I was flabbergasted. Did Davido sample a kpop song???
- He couldn't have, because two Korean songs I know of had that guitar (is it a guitar?) riff in their songs too, and it's possible that one of them sampled the other, but I doubt it.
- Indeed, he did not sample a kpop song. However, he did sample the song those two songs sampled, although I only have evidence of one.
- The original song is Skinny Fabulous' Watch Thing, also sampled by EXO's Trauma as you can hear and as documented here. The other song I have no evidence for besides my ears is Swervy's January Embers.
- That's all, just felt like sharing.