Misc

The Death of the American Dream I recall watching the movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby back in 2013. Baz Luhrmann created a visual spectacle, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as the titular character who has become part of multiple memes. And who can forget Lana Del Rey’s haunting vocals for the theme “Young and Beautiful”? I read the original novel soon after, and was pretty struck by how deep the underlying themes run. Fast forward to 2025, and it has been exactly a century since F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby. One hundred years later, its themes feel eerily familiar. The excessive wealth, the disillusionment, the relentless pursuit of a dream—all of it maps almost perfectly onto today’s tech-fueled, crypto-charged, influencer-driven landscape. This struck me on a commute home last week and as I thought about it, the main characters do reflect segments of modern day society. ...

Yep, just one week into the new year of 2025 I fractured my right last finger during football, during the seemingly innocuous act of catching a ball. Having been told for years the stereotype of “you’ll know if it is a fracture by the intense pain”, I thought it was just a bad sprain, because the pain was aching rather than sharp. There was no swelling, no bruising, so I just went for dinner as usual, and then back home, and that was when the swelling really started. ...

Since the new house is relatively settled now, we were inspired by woonie’s post to try a different route. We lost by less than 5 minutes, maybe we would have beaten his team if not for the toilet break at Bukit Panjang which resulted in us missing a LRT.