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It's been a while since I felt "inspired" to take photos, or another way to out it, manage to notice good light. But today is a fruitful day!

This might be my favourite photo...in at least the past half a year. Favourite photos from travel aside, I always tend to favourite some still life photos taken in lower lighting, there's a...calming quality to them? There's been a few other moments (usually in the morning when I'm eating breakfast) that I notice the light in the kitchen is super good, and with a variety of objects (with its variety of surface characteristics) that make for a good photo.

I'd also totally take a square crop of the middle area and make it an album cover. I guess the whole image works as a book cover too.

...

I also haven't taken a skyline photo in a while, but today had a perfect moment when the heavy clouds were just starting to clear and the CN Tower caught some direct side light.

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Felt more motivated than usual to cook this past week, made a few recipes from The Woks of Life and elsewhere.

Hunan pork and tofu - taste pretty similar Sichuan food, which is unsurprising since the provinces are quite close to each other. Pan fried tofu is kinda a pain to prepare but taste so damn good. Points to me for adding some black wood-ear mushroom, always a tasty thing to stir fry.

Also made stir-fried bok choy with tofu skin as a side to a different meal. A good add-in to a veggie dish.

Probably maple glazed salmon. We made a giant seafood order last week as many wholesale vendors are now selling retail at similar prices. We added a couple of marinades with our order, thinking that it would come smothered on the fish (since you specify the marinade on the same line as other instructions for the fish such as filleting). But it turns out that they come separately -_- and unlabeled so I can only guess this is a maple one. Regardless it tasted delicious, especially with some sweet potato wedges to mop up the extra sauce.

Tofu with black bean sauce, and soy-glazed eggplant. Redux of pan-fried tofu in a different sauce. Since I was frying tofu, I decided to double-down and fry some eggplant too, which is even more annoying. But the results are soooo 下饭.

seam

and now for things I didn't buy but really wanted to from the Nordstrom sale:

Both these items evoke cool to me, the directional sheen of the dress' fabric and the pattern of the sweater (it carries through to the inside!). As for why I didn't buy them, aside from the cost, is that Jeff described the first dress as reminiscent of an oil spill 😅, and I would've preferred the sweater in a jacket or coat form.

breeze

Second addition to my jewelry collection this year: morse code bracelet from Everlijewelry featuring my favourite (and actually only) line of poem.

sizing

A few weeks ago, there was a thread on /r/ffa about free fashion related online courses. I enrolled in the Fashion and Sustainability course created by London College of Fashion and Kering, and have been reading through it. In the course, they linked to a fantastic collection of resources by the CFDA. My favourite of which is the Material Index, which although is a little sparse on the common fabrics, provides quite detailed information (silk is worse than I thought 😭) on what they have and includes a lot of innovative materials.

Based on what I've learned there, and in efforts to even more selective of what new clothing I buy, I've decided to focus on alpaca for knitwear and linen/hemp for woven.

Of course the source of each materials matters tremendously, and the current market seems to be a choose 2 of 3 between: reliable/certified source, price, and design. As an example, Everlane is price and design for alpaca sweaters, and Patagonia is reliable and price for hemp shirts. I'm even willing to relent on price, but it seems that reliable and design is the rarest of combinations. So far I found IOAN alpaca sweater as a good candidate, but I'm holding off until the far future when I can again travel to New York to try it on in person since the sizing is unisex.
(my list of shops to visit in-person in NYC is astoundingly long now...good thing a trip is not in the near future as my wallet needs some fattening up in preparation).

Hemp is even harder to find good designs for. All I can find is catered towards outdoors-use, which is not my preference. Seriously why isn't hemp more widely used? Canada is even a top producer of the plant! I'll have to resort to linen, which isn't too much of a downgrade in terms of sustainability (the only difference is that hemp is more productive per land area), but I haven't found any brand with certified organic linen. For now I'll likely continue buying from the Off/On, the Lithuania-based Etsy shops that I previously bought a dress from, which is at least a plus for supporting small businesses.

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Some of the new things I've made recently:

Polpetto polpette from their cookbook, with some slight modifications due to ingredient availability. Swapped the ratio of ground beef to pork, changed parsley to fennel and oregano, and fresh garlic for garlic powder (fine the last one is due to laziness). Turned out great!

Pesto baked chicken legs with charred bok choy and potato wedges (not pictured). I've not been a huge fan of those sheet pan meals, mostly because its a pain to wash sheet pans, but this one is really great. The potatoes taste insanely good bath in chicken oil & juices.

Other things without photos:

• 红烧style pork shoulder in instant pot: soooo good with some preserved 雪菜. Jeff thinks it taste kinda fusion-y due to the lack of spices. Will add spices back in next time.
• Golden coconut lentil soup: been trying to eat more turmeric and this was an easy way to achieve that. A bowl lentil soup is always good.

Udita

I felt that I needed a tonic for all of the temptation that I'm feeling regarding buying things, and what's better than a documentary about the working conditions of garment workers:


With that said, my interest in clothing is primarily aesthetics, so I can't truthfully say that the sustainability of an item of clothing is my primarily interest. The design will always be most important to me, but sustainability is at least second. As an example, I'll still buy from Aritzia since I haven't an alternative to their designs yet, but for there are many good sustainable alternatives for basics like a neutral coloured cotton long sleeve so I ought to be avoiding Uniqlo or Everlane (their management seems awful to the core, see their fiasco regarding customer support workers unionizing, and surprisingly same for Oak + Fort according to their glass door reviews). I'll be looking into Frank and Oak, which at least is a B Corp. Too bad Kotn doesn't fit me well in terms of sizing, and every other brand doesn't have a physical store near me.

turn

A sign that even I am going crazy during the quarantine is the desire to yet again own non-black pants. This is clearly insanity as I've owned pants in other colours before and have gotten rid of all of them. Yet here I am again compiling some inspiration for a super rich caramel / tobacco coloured pants.

I'm thinking of a straight / slightly wide leg style in a corduroy fabric since the colour is more autumnal. But the pitfalls of buying non-black pants online are chiefly:

• Definite colour inaccuracy
• Probably the item of clothing with the biggest risk of not fitting right

and that my coats and jackets are spread across various colours that do not have an affinity for coloured pants :( Perhaps I should stick to a sweater in this colour instead. 

Irrational Man

This is my forth book review to Rui&Ben.

I requested some recommendations for easier to read books on Existentialism and this is one of Ben's recs. I liked the large amount of context (although context for a very 1950s American perspective) that this book provides, both the historical (the aftermath of world wars) and personal for the four philosophers that it features. The book also focuses on the "core message" of each philosopher rather than giving an overview of their philosophies, which I find also beginner friendly. That said, it's still not the easiest to read since the language used back in the 1950s is different enough from current English. 

Nonetheless I still pulled many quotations:

On the many references to Dostoyevsky :D

Vladimir Solovev belonged to the first generation that felt the impact of Dostoyevsky as both prophets and novelist [... who] will be satisfied with no philosophic answers that fall short of the total and passionate feelings of his own humanity.

Although many aspects of the book is dated, Chapter Two opens with “No age has ever been so self-conscious as ours” and this statement is equally if not more true written in 2020. Continuing: “the task still goes on, as indeed it must, for the last work has not been spoken, and modern man seems even further from understanding himself than when he first began to question his own identity”. More  on our modern times:

This capacity for living easily and familiarly at an extraordinary level of abstraction is the source of modern man’s power. [...] Buy it is also a power which has, like everything human, it’s negative side, in the desolating sense of rootlessness, vacuity, and the lack of concrete feeling that assails modern man in his moments of real anxiety.

In a society that requires of man only that he performs competently his own particular social function, man becomes identified with this function, and the rest of his being is allowed to subsist as best it can - usually to be dropped below the surface of consciousness and be forgotten.

In the end the only authentic art is that which has about it the power of inevitability.  

The subjectivity that is generally present in modern art is a psychological compensation for, sometimes a violent revolt against, the gigantic externalizations of life within modern society. 

The first philosopher the book focuses on is Kierkegaard, which I've attempted to read the original writings of and stopped probably 10 pages in. His focus is being wholly Christian in a way that predates church as an organization.

The social thinking of the present age is determined, [Kierkegaard] says, by what might be called the Law of Large Numbers: it does not matter what quality each individual has, so long as we have enough individuals to add up to a large number - that is, to a crowd or mass. And where the mass is, there is truth - so the modern world believes. 

and similarly, "habits and routines are great veils over our existence".

The next philosopher is Nietzsche, which is famous for his quotation of "God is dead":

The waning of religion is a much more concrete and complex fact than a mere change in conscious outlook; it penetrates the deepest strata of man’s total psychic evolution - as Nietzsche, almost alone amongst nineteenth-century philosophers, was to see. Religion to medieval man was not so much a theological system as a solid psychological matrix surrounding the individual’s life from birth to death, sanctifying and enclosing all its ordinary and extraordinary occasions in sacrament and ritual. The loss of the Church was the loss of a whole system of symbols, images, dogmas, and rites which had the psychological validity of immediate experience, and within which higher to the whole psychic life of Western man has been safely contained. In losing religion, man lost the concrete connection with a transcendent realm of being; he was set free to deal with this world in all its brute objectivity. But he was bound to feel homeless in such a world, which no longer answered the need of his spirit. A home is the accepted framework which habitually contains our life. You lose ones psychic container is to be cast adrift, to become a wanderer upon the gave of the earth. Henceforth, in seeking his own human completeness man would have to do for himself what he once had done for him.

 The third philosopher os Heidegger, whose idea of Being as a field is what I most closely agree with.

The fundamental mood [something we are, not something internal that requires a self to feel], according to Heidegger, is anxiety (Angst); he does not choose this as primary out of any morbidity of temperament, however, but simply because in anxiety this here-and-now of our existence arises before is in all its precarious and porous contingency.
^my interpretation is that anxiety is the primary mood because it has the strongest immediacy and the strongest reminder of the finitude of human existence. 

The last philosopher is Sartre, which the book argues isn't actually an Existentialist as his ideas follow Descartes' divide. His core message is related to freedom:

And the choice that each of made of his life was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death

The essential freedom, the ultimate and final form of freedom that cannot be taken from a man, is to say No. this is the basic premise in Sartre’s view of human freedom: freedom is in its very essence negative, though this negativity is also creative. 

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The best part about working from home is that I can take food photos during lunch when the lighting is not abysmal:

 (during dinner when there is a total lack of good light)

(during lunch when there is an abundance of natural light)

Food wise, the top is a new variant of hot-oil noodles, featuring a spiced spicy powder that Jeff's family sent us. Bottom is my veggie loaded spicy rice cakes following Maangchi's recipe. I realized I'm actually not a huge fan of spicy rice cakes, even though in theory it is totally my dish 😅

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So I did figure eyeshadows out as well! Took many hours but alas its done. Thank you to all the internet people that provide good quality swatches.

Initially I bought the Holika Holika terrazzo palette in #dusty, which covers the cool-toned pink-ish colours. Given that I definitely will not be wearing eyeshadow everyday, I thought the most I can reasonably own is a small neutrals palette.

My first candidate was the Innisfree My Palette...system(?). It's pretty affordable, especially if I have the patience to wait to get it in Asia. It has the added bonus of having blushes and contours, and the palette itself also has a mirror, so overall perfect for travelling. But I was simultaneously considering Mac eyeshadows, which won by its consistent high quality at a slightly higher price-point and the fact that it's a Canadian brand. I will probably still get this Innisfree palette in the future for travel if it proves that I do actually end up wearing eyeshadows.

It was suuuuper challenging deciding the colours for Mac because there's simply too many choices. #omega was the easiest, since a lot of the Chinese you tubers use it for contouring. The rest was significantly more difficult since there seem to be more warm-toned people out there who tend to recommend warm-tone colours, and more Western reviewers of Mac that have different make-up style preferences. The overall cost is actually lower than Innisfree since I bought extra E.L.F. empty palettes from many years ago (in anticipation of exactly this moment). But alas I'm still weary about buying without trying the colours irl but covid19 :(

Which leads to the last option: Romand. This doesn't resolve my uneasiness about blind buying, but at least there's more swatches of this on Asian skin and the official product images show how it looks on the eye. It's also the cheapest option and damn the colours are pretty af.

...

Lastly, this Innisfree single (shimmer #30) is actually the prettiest eyeshadow that I've ever laid my eyes upon:

swatch via Jolse

I would not be surprised at all if an all over wash of this is what I'll wear daily. Despite my earlier skepticism that I'll wear eyeshadow daily, if there is any thing that will change my mind, it is this.

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It seems like most of my friends are playing the new Animal Crossing game. Makes me regret a tinny bit that I didn't pre-order the limited edition switch and join in on the fun. But now that I missed out on that, my desire to play has greatly waned.

Instead I'm playing a lot of Tiny Rails on my phone XD It is pretty great for a casual game. One aspect that I really appreciate is the beautiful and location-relevant backgrounds & different lighting conditions:

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Some of my packages have finally arrived!!

First off a new pearl necklace from Skye. I was pleasantly surprised at how little the pearls are, since I was a little afraid of how flashy the necklace looked on the product photos. Though I suppose I'm getting less value for my money due to small pearls (probably lab-grown?). I do like appreciate how sturdily they are strung together. Bonus little gift of a pearl hair clip. I'm hoping they drop their spring collection soon, especially since they included a gift of some store credit that will expire 😭

I will be unreasonable and not count this towards my yearly perfume quota since I want to get Dzhongka from Etiket later. I got such a good deal on this (somewhat serendipitously too): $50 for the full 100ml size in a gift set with 2 scented body products, compared to the best Canadian grey market price I could find of $65+shipping. I am very proud for scoring this deal and for finally owning a full bottle of something in my favourite style.

The collection now:

(continuing the previous post's rant about terrible indoor lighting, I had to take this at ISO1250 to get an reasonable, non hand-shaky shutter speed with a near wide open aperture 😑. Then I complain about most areas of my photos not being sharp, but thats physically impossible when you're less than a meter away shooting wide open 😑😑 I just want to shoot at like f8!)