Truly beautiful map. What software did you use to make it?

Either way, in times like these, it is deeply important to take the time to understand how we came to be here, and books like Wigan Pier give us that opportunity. Stay safe, and thanks for reading my thoughts.

To me, Orwell is a fascinating but often abrasive person to read about, especially with how he speaks on colonialism and the many groups the British brutalized during their colonial rule. Something he himself took part in.

This book contains some fascinating details about how the poor lived during the period, including family budgets and what the brutal labor within the mines and factories was like.

What Orwell was exploring in this study was which economic and government system would come after the fall of capitalism. This is because during the 1930s, it appeared that capitalism was failing, causing many to believe that societies would have to choose between socialism or fascism.

This is essentially a study of the impoverished industrial class living in the north of England during the 1930s. In it, however, Orwell is effectively tasked by a wealthy leftist circle in the south of England to understand how poor people lived during the period.

If you love the stories that come out of the SCP Foundation or vague yet all-encompassing threats within horror, then definitely read Annihilation. Thank you for reading my thoughts, and please let me know what you think. Also, if you've read the trilogy, lmk if I should ever continue the series.

Annihilation contains an exemplary flow of slow-burning horror, which is buffeted by Vandermeer’s beautiful descriptions of natural phenomena. Contained in eloquent visuals is this creeping feeling that nothing being shown is correct or even real, including the biologist's unreliable narration.

You follow the “biologist” on the twelfth expedition as she searches for any sign of what happened to her husband within Area X. What she does know is that the man who returned to her from the eleventh expedition was not her husband, and the tower she and her squad found was not supposed to exist.

Annihilation is set around “Area X,” an anomalous zone where many have entered, with most not returning. Yet after the eleventh expedition, a group of military personnel sent into the zone suddenly appeared at their families' homes without a clue as to how they got there.

Because of the early iron age technology of the period, portals would remain unknown to most of humanity for thousands of years after their invention. Most of the wider world would not discover the existence of other dimensions through the portals until our version of the late medieval period.

Let me know what you think and thank you for reading my ramblings!

I still remember how I became more estranged from anime/manga because of its fixation on younger people in a way that began to really disturb me the older (and more informed) I became. So this story is really refreshing to read.

Reading Skip and Loafer now is really strange for me since I haven’t seriously consumed romance/slice of life manga/anime since I was in high school, but this story reminds me how much I appreciate what this medium can do.

Something I found highly interesting was the inclusion of Mitsumi’s aunt Nao, a trans woman who is Mitsumi’s guardian in Tokyo. Such normative inclusion of queer characters is something I find deeply encouraging for a genre that, in my experience, treated queer characters very poorly in the past.