I Was A Guest On Sheena Yap Chan's Podcast
in Personal
This was an um…unusual year. Movie theaters shut down, every single film festival went virtual, all movies were released directly to streaming services, and I ended up watching more new releases since the summer of Moviepass. This year I watched 459 movies.
This year I read mostly non-fiction. Mostly politics too. I learned more about the dangers of American-style democracy and liberalism. I also learned a lot about the CIA and how just much it has harmed the rest of the world. The books that uncovered the truth about the CIA were my favorites of the year because they allowed me to zoom out and truly see the American experiment for what it really is.
The Biden presidency will be full of neoliberal austerity, censorship, technocratic rule, inverted totalitarianism, and the most anti-communist sentiment since the Reagan era. This is no win for democracy.
IT’S SPOOKY SEASON AGAIN! My favorite time of the year (after summer, of course)! Let's change it up a little and have some fun.
A little something different since October is also Filipino American History Month! I LOVE horror movies (especially the ones from the 70s and 80s before CGI came along and ruined everything) and I LOVE reading scary stories, especially ones that are based on real life events. The truth is always stranger and way scarier than fiction, am I right?
I usually do a write up of the events I’ve organized or hosted and my most-read articles at the end of the year. This was an unusual year (obviously, there is no need to go into it here) so I didn’t bother. Instead I want to highlight a project of mine that I am particularly proud of — it’s my new podcast show, Unverified Accounts, that I cohost with my frequent collaborators, Chris Jesu Lee and Filip Guo. If you're a big movie/TV/book buff, have leftist sympathies, but can't stand 'wokeness' dumbing down our culture, then we're the podcast for you. So far in our 25 episodes, we’ve covered a range of contentious topics.