June 2024

What I've been up to ...

This month, I went on several Hinge dates. They were all pleasant but unromantic.  

For that reason, I wrote a Substack essay about relationships and their discontents. The essay candidly discusses sensitive subjects like hookup culture, prostitution, and sex robots.

Output

For what it’s worth, this has been my most successful month ever on YouTube. I had been having a slow year creatively, but I was able to finish a new song, titled ‘Let’s Be You and Me’, which satirises sexual freedom and sex positivity:

On the same YouTube channel, my Chinese song about work culture got well over 3000 hits:

On another YouTube channel, this classical guitar piece got over 4000 hits. It is an arresting, slow tempo piece called ‘Reminiscence’, whose authorship is not quite known:

Activities

As well as my campus work, and a new job in a law firm that I am not at liberty to talk much about, I have been tutoring beginner Mandarin. On my Monday Mandarin YouTube channel, this video got over 4,000 hits:

Wider World

This month saw the eightieth anniversary of D-Day, one of the most impressive and courageous military operations in history. Also this month, historian Richard Overy published his new book ‘Why War’?

In it, he explores how, as in 1914, superpowers came into direct conflict, despite neither side being an outright aggressor. The more these things pass beyond living memory, the more we are in danger of forgetting their lessons.  

At Home cinema, I watched a screening of the 1945 masterpiece ‘Rome, Open City’. And one of my main takeaways was how easy it was for a private citizen to become a Nazi collaborator, even without any nefarious intent. It just goes to show that people in the 1940s weren’t necessarily tougher than us, they were fallible humans with better hairstyles.