Welcome to the premiere inaugural edition of weekly links 🎉

This is a link and thought dump hopefully in a weekly manner, of interesting stuff I found throughout the week. Hopefully more improved editions are to be expected in the future since this is still in beta phase, or should I say still an experiment. Enjoy.

Noteworthy News 📰

1. The Jakarta High Court overturns a lower court’s order to delay Indonesia’s national elections for two years. Indonesia’s next presidential election is slated to be held on 14 February 2024.
2. President Emmanuel Macron signs the pension reform bill into law as protests intensify in the country
3. Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) to search for life in the Jovian system, with an expected arrival date of 2031.

What I’ve Been Consoooming 📺

1. I recently watched a documentary titled “Status Anxiety” made by the English philosopher Alain de Botton. You can watch it here. It is definitely a 10/10 watch if you’ve got two hours to spare! It talks about our current obsession with status seen from a philosophical point of view. I’ve been following his work through his famous YouTube channel The School of Life for a couple of years now, I have also read some of the books published by him and his company. But this one is very refreshing, seeing Alain in a long form documentary. This documentary accompanied his book of the same title of which I might read in the future. Alain is so good with synthesizing views from different prominent philosophers in the past within his works, and it went smoothly in this documentary.
2. During the last couple of weeks I like to watch food related videos for obvious reasons, one of the channels that I discovered is Goldthread. They are focused on finding street food in China. I like this episode where they covered dim sums. The vibe that their video creates reminds me of Worth It series by Buzzfeed that I used to watch years ago. How time flies, man.
3. I listened to NIKI’s backburner more times than ever this week. The lyric is so fucking good.
4. I read this article from The Free Press about surrogate mothers and it is so interesting. What are the implications when you can just rent someone’s body for giving birth to your child?
5. Kementrian PUPR (Ministry of Public Works and Public Housing) released a video animation regarding the planned new capital of Indonesia, Nusantara. By the way, if you’re Indonesian, you can vote for the planned capital city logo here. You might win an electric motorcycle lmao.
6. I watched the entire three seasons of Love Death & Robots in one sitting. It was so good. If you want a refreshing bite sized short stories in beautiful animation, you have to watch it.

Book Corner 📚

After half assing it for four months or so, I finally finished the book 인형의 정원. It is a bad book 6/10 would not recommend.

Because that was a very niche hobby of mine, here are the books I’m currently reading:

• Epictetus The Complete Works by Epictetus, trans. Robin Waterfield
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and
• Blindsight by Peter Watts

I have been meaning to get deeper into stoicism ever since reading Meditations late last year. I have read it three times by now because it is so good. Epictetus is one of the other prominent stoicism thinker (other two of course, being Seneca and Marcus Aurelius) and the edition that I’m using is a recent translation by Robin Waterfield published by University of Chicago. It is a very modern contemporary english translation which I really liked because when I first read Meditations I used the Gregory Hays translation which is the best out there because it is so clear for a non native speaker of english like me. I’m planning to read Waterfield’s translation of Meditations which just came out.

I have always wanted to read Crime and Punishment because I used to watch a lot of videos from Dr. Jordan Peterson and he kept mentioning it and other works from Russian authors. I had to find the right translation and the one I’m reading is from Oliver Ready, it is much better than the others cause it’s so easy to understand. I’m at the beginning of Part Two as I’m writing this.

I might not finish Blindsight but the reviews are overwhelmingly positive. The book is actually free online so you can read it on the link above. I really like scifi ever since reading Three Body Problem trilogy so can’t say a lot about this book for now. Here’s the synopsis per Wikipedia:

The story follows a crew of astronauts sent out as the third wave, following two series of probes, to investigate a trans-Neptunian Kuiper belt comet dubbed “Burns-Caulfield” that has been found to be transmitting an unidentified radio signal to an as-yet unknown destination elsewhere in the Solar System, followed by their subsequent first contact. The novel explores themes of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, and game theory as well as evolution and biology.

That is it for now, have a good day. Here’s a picture of me stuck in a traffic jam.