New Favorite Thing #001: Coffee at Night, Flameless Candles, & Other Delightful Absurdities
Welcome to New Favorite Thing, a series of posts in which I prattle on about stuff for which I have recently developed a great fondness. Let's have a look at this month's highlights!
Music: Painted Shut & Leaves Turn Inside You
Full disclosure: I have been struggling to write this blog post for some time because I keep getting distracted listening to Hop Along. What's most embarrassing though is that I'd barely listened to their discography until the past month or so. I had even heard the song Tibetan Pop Stars before and had barely internalized the fact that it is basically the best song you could hope to have in your ears at any given time. In retrospect, the band's greatness was probably so self-evident that nobody figured they needed to remind me of Frances Quinlan's arresting vocals and songwriting or even the contributions of Joe Reinhart of Algernon Cadwallader (a band which really got through to me in a live setting and whose work I now also hold in high esteem).
Well, anyway, there's no time like the present, and so I finally set to meeting that first song's neighbors in the tracklist of Get Disowned, whose 2012 release showcased Frances accompanied for the first time by what has since then been the band's full lineup. These songs showed me a great deal more to love about Hop Along's sound but still saw Tibetan Pop Stars towering over them in my evaluation. I was delighted to discover that the 2015 follow-up Painted Shut seemed to do the impossible by producing a whole LP's worth of arrangements and performances just as gratifying as the previous album's best. Every track on Painted Shut has been my personal obsession for at least a few days. The first time I listened to it, I acidentally had it on shuffle and needed to spend a couple hours fully occupied with my hands. As I worked and listened, I had no complaints. I greedily abosrbed each track again and again at unpredictable intervals like I was tearing into a bag of Doritos with helpless fervor. I tried to learn all the words by heart immediately. I wish I had the vocal range to sing along. Frances and the band appear to have plenty more great recordings for me to savor next, but I'm eating aaaaalll the crumbs and dust outta the bottom of this one first. If you were living in the dark like I was, do yourself a favor.
A little later in this post, I'll describe the way I undertook an unusally long bout of laundry folding. The soundtrack to my chores was Unwound's acclaimed final record Leaves Turn Inside You. In the past, I was instead drawn to the more direct and more straightforwardly post-hardcore sound of records like Repetition. Now I have come to appreciate the fact that, much like Fugazi with The Argument, Unwound put their best foot forward with their genre-blending turn-of-the-millenium swan song. It has this unmistakably chilly and spooky sound and really plays to what I see as the band's biggest strengths (which in this case means letting the lyrics and vocals recede into the background a little). Every time I put this thing on, I can't help but to listen to it all the way through. It looks like vinyl copies of the reissue from Numero are sold out online (some CDs left at time of writing!), but this definitely seems like a great album to pick up on physical media if you come across a copy. Maybe you've already got it. As before, I was conspiciously late to the party with this one...
The Hario Switch Glass Coffee Brewer + Adventures in Decent Decaf
Last year, I made a lot of filtered immersion coffee with the Clever Brewer and was really loving it. The brewer eventually took a tumble and broke though. Rather than replacing it one-for-one, I gave prolonged consideration to an alternative which looked somehow more pleasing to use. When I finally pounced on a glass Hario Switch (which I use in more or less the same what I did my Clever), I felt a surge of joy rush back into my mornings. In fact, that joy came to me in the evenings too! Huh?!
That's right: after becoming convinced of the fact that good decaf coffee beans exist out there somewhere (with James Hoffman having been responsible for the bulk of the convincing) I finally scored a bag over the holidays that produced a shockingly enjoyable brew. Coffee after dark would normally wreck my sleep in the worst way, so being able to sip to my heart's content in the evening without worry was an enormous boon. I even have it in the morning sometimes! It's a pleasant drinking experience at the start of the day even absent the stimulant component. Besides, the placebo effect is a powerful thing! (Blogger's note: this last bit was actually because I ran out of regular coffee beans for a while, and, having restocked, I'm not sure I could so easily give up my full-caff morning cuppa again. But the other points stand, and I've still been regularly enjoying decaf in the evening!)
Flameless Candles That Are Actually Mostly Good
Much like decaf, you'd be forgiven for believing that flameless candles are terrible across the board. When I've spotted them in restaurants or wedding venues, they have always struck me as a bit tacky compared to the serene joy of a real miniature fire dancing atop a waxy pedestal. But I get it. I suppose not every restaurant has the sort of insurance policy that lets you feel comfortable setting out an array of open flames in your place of business.
I too am a bit skittish about fire hazards, combustion products, and messy wax. But I also have pretty extreme views where indoor lighting is concerned. Natural daylight from windows during the day, candlelight (or its equivalent, intensity- and color temperature-wise) at night. No more, no less (excepting a few tasks that require slightly greater visibility).
I was very pleased, then, to discover that there is a line of remote-controlled LED candles made from real wax (!) and whose "flames" are cleverly recessed a couple of inches down into the body of each candle to help preserve the illusion. The flickering effect is pretty convincing too, though I think maybe it's a little fast. The candles also tend to sync up if you start them with the remote at the same time, but this can be pretty easily circumvented for better realism. It's great to have candle-like illumination that I can easily carry around at night and put wherever I want, even in a place that wouldn't be safe for a real flame. My favorite experience so far has been taking an evening shower by the light of a single candle!
The ones I got are branded "YIWER," but I think the same product is sold under an assortment of names. At time of writing, they're pretty easy to find online with a keyword search and are offered at reasonable prices, like $10 to $30 USD depending on how many you buy at once. The only downside is that each one takes two AA batteries. I've been using them as actual light sources, so I can imagine a situation where they die annoyingly fast, though it's not happened so far. The timer feature can help prevent wasted battery power from accidentally leaving them on overnight.
Folding Clothes Like Marie Kondo Does
I don't know a great deal about Ms. Kondo or her books and TV shows. All I know is that she doesn't seem to like having a lot of stuff (relatable) and that she is particular about folding (a woman after my own heart). As I mentioned earlier, I recently embarked on a massive cleaning and reorganization effort in my bedroom, which involved evicting a lot of junk from my closet to make room for an orderly arrangement of clothes. I wanted to accomplish this without buying any sort of physical closet organization system (I find all of them kind of garish and not all that practical-looking) or a dresser (which is admittedly a great choice — if you don't plan on moving any time soon, that is). I saw someone on Reddit reference the KonMari folding method, and I was sold on it pretty much right away. It is easy to learn and produces semi-free-standing rectangles that can be neatly arranged on a shelf or even the floor in such a way as to make each garment visible and accessible. This became the basis for my new closet setup. I love that the arrangement of my clothes is mostly undisturbed when I retrieve an item, preventing the whole system from falling into disarray. Plus, as with many things in my life, a mindful and ritual approach to folding helps keep me motivated. This was key since — and I'm not sure whether I mentioned this before — I charged myself with re-folding every piece of clothing in my wardrobe.
Returning to Hobonichi Techo A6 As My Daily Planner
OK, this one is more of an Old Favorite Thing, but I'll still give a shout-out to the Hobonichi Techo A6 page-a-day planner, which has served me dutifully since 2021. Except, in 2025, I strayed from the light: I tried to use a different setup consisting of a Midori Graduation weekly vertical planner plus a tall and skinny pocket grid rule notebook. Long story short, this was a mistake. I am having great fun being "home" with my Techo, including exploring some new strategies for task tracking, intention setting, idea scribbling, and record keeping. I also think it's kind of cool that it's basically the exact same size as my Kindle!
Kindle Jailbreaks & The Library
Oh, yeah. I recently got a 2024 Kindle, and I pretty much immediately jailbroke it using Winterbreak (after an interval of being confused about the firmware version I was on and trying at great length to do the somewhat more elaborate Adbreak). I haven't done much of anything with my device's post-jailbreak capabilities besides installing KOreader, but it's still nice to know I have more complete control over my device, especially considering Amazon's whole, uh, everything.
On kind of an unrelated note (since library books are natively supported on Kindles and similar devices without any tinkering necessary), I've gotten all set up to get some ebooks on loan from my local library. I'm working through a bit of backlog represented by phyiscal books (with 3 currently in progress), but I hope that leveraging the great free resources will help to accelerate me towards meeting my unspecified and largely vibes-based reading goals for the year!
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That's all for this edition of New Favorite Thing! But I have already developed some new new faves in the frankly absurd amount of time it took me to slap together this unedited mess, so expect to see more of these real soon! I was also going to give a shout-out to Cemantle, "fun" word game, but it's actually really hard and has been consistently pissing me off. So, shout-out retracted! It's my blog, and therefor it's my prerogative to be petty. Sorry, I kinda got sidetracked there. Anyway, thanks as always for reading! I love you!!