Hello hello! We’re well into the last half and the last quarter of the year. Can you believe the time flies so quickly? Christmas and holidays are starting to loom over ahead but before that, here’s a recap of what happened in the third quarter for me.

Life lately

This was the quarter where all my major trips of the year happened. On early July, I had a trip with a big group of friends. It was probably one of the largest group trips I’ve had and I learned a lot about myself that time haha! I only had a couple weeks or so of rest before I headed back to Manila again for Faye Webster’s concert — this time staying mostly around the southern part of Metro Manila. It was also peak rainy season in July so I was worried I would be stranded in Manila after the concert because there was a typhoon at the time!

August was reeelatively chill in terms of stuff happening. I went thrift shopping with one of my best friends at a popular Japanese surplus warehouse in the city. I got my household mismatched porcelain soup bowls, which was great because I am definitely becoming that person who’s always craving for soup. My mother would joke that I truly am getting old because I’m always asking for soups and broths, and she’s not wrong! And let’s be real, in this cultural and economical climate, loving soups is the least problematic thing to be. Sometime in June, the first Din Tai Fung in the city finally opened. My sister and I brought the rest of our family in August to try out their xiao long bao and noodles soup (yes soup! haha) and they all loved it!

I also attended this year’s Patron of the Arts Cebu (POTA, iykyk) with a college friend. My main goal this year was to buy stickers that I can put in my travel luggage. One thing that I learned from my trips last July was that my pastel pink luggage is NOT unique and that can make claiming check-in baggage hard… and embarrassing at times, especially when you mistakenly take one that isn’t yours.

I didn’t do much in the first three weeks in September but that’s largely because I spent that time preparing for the Singapore trip with my other best friend!!! To be honest, when it comes to leisurely travel, Singapore isn’t exactly the kind of place I personally want to return to. It just so happens that I was attending the Symphony of Seasons concert for Stardew Valley and it was my best friend’s first trip out of country. It was the person I was with that made the trip all the more fun. <3

Media lately

This quarter was filled with me exploring all kinds of iterations of high stakes fantasy. It’s great because I’ve stepped back from consuming a lot of high fantasy stories the past couple years, mostly enjoying cozy fantasies and stories with lower stakes. Quite the contrast of me seeking the comfort and warmth of soups, I’m craving for excitement and adventures on my fantasy stories this year.

Books

I’m happy to report that I have finished FOUR books this quarter — some of those as both audiobook and digital book — which means I have officially reached my 2025 reading goal of reading more books than I did last year, yey!!!

• I picked up T. Kingfisher’s A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking and fell in love with her writing! Mona was such a lovely main character and all the characters in the story felt beautifully quirky and endearing. I still ache a bit when I think of Knackering Molly. ಥ‿ಥ
• I immediately started the first three books of her Saint of Steel series which were exactly the type of romantasy stories that I’m looking for. I’ve always enjoyed the series format of standalone novels in the same universe that I usually encounter more on contemporary romances. Reading this series feels fresh in that the characters aren’t corporate rivals or neighbors in the suburbia. Instead, we have berserker paladins whose god has died and a delightfully practical religious order full of diplomats and lawyers opening up soup kitchens and tending to the downtrodden. And they’re trying to rebuild from their lost sense of purpose and finding love while also trying to figure out why the headless corpses they’re finding around the city smell bad. It’s the best.

TV series

Not a lot of TV shows I watched this quarter. I’m still following Dimension 20’s current season Cloudward Ho! which is their steampunk season! It’s so beautiful to watch these seven improvs and comedians weave this intricate and beautiful story together every week. Continuing my agenda of watching all kinds of Austen, I also watched Miss Austen which I finished at the first day of my Singapore trip. I LOVED their version of Jane Austen so so much!

Movies

I think this quarter’s selection of movies I watched is probably the most elite of all the quarters so far.

• Tokyo Godfathers. It was available on Tubi (shoutout to Tubi once again. The absolute best!) and I’m so glad I decided to watch it! It’s beautiful and rowdy and so much fun while still so full of heart!! Surprisingly, this is also my first Satoshi Kon film I ever finished watching.
• Sound of Music. Finally watched this from start to finish and it makes so much sense why it’s a movie musical classic — the production is amazing and all the songs are catchy and delightful. I didn’t realize Ariana Grande’s “7 rings” was a direct sample of “Favourite Things” until I watched the film, haha!
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I loved Céline Sciamma’s choice of not using any original soundtracks for the majority of the film except for that pivotal scene and the end. The cinematography is amazing and the harsh landscape of the island felt like a character on its own.
• Polite Society. Seeing how We Are Lady Parts is one of my all-time favorite series ever, I had so much faith in Nida Manzoor and she and the rest of the cast and crew abso-fucking-lutely delivers. The cast dynamics are on point and I just love how much care is put in a young female protagonist’s worries and insecurities and ensuring she is vindicated and that yeah, Ria is right; sometimes violence is the solution. (I really should watch WALP season 2 already.)
• The Green Knight. This was me pre-gaming my deep dive into Arthurian legends and I know I will be spoiling myself with this. It is epic fantasy at its best. The cinematography is gorgeous, and I love how the sprawling meadows and the crags and looming trees make it all seem like Gawain (and me, the viewer) is so small amidst it all. The OST is beautiful, too!

Anime

I binged through the second season of The Apothecary Diaries this quarter — which was great! I love the direction they’re going with the anime and I’m excited for season three.

After hearing about Seven Seas’ license of the novel The Twelve Kingdoms (I mean have you seen the cover art?? The art style is so gorgeous!), it made me curious about its 2002 anime adaptation and decided to check it out. Luckily, it’s available to watch on Bilibili Premium and my god, was that a SHOW. 45 episodes of painful and awkward characters growing into better people!! 45 episodes of beautiful worldbuilding and political intrigues and compelling themes!! By far, my favorite fantasy media I watched this year.

Continuing my search for all kinds of fantasy stories, I also started a lot of romantasy anime and webtoons… that I barely finished the first few episodes of before ultimately dropping them. I did finish one and honestly, deciding to finish the last few episodes was more of a “might as well get this over with” vibe than me actually enjoying it. IDK… Perhaps with Kingfisher’s worldbuilding, and the epic landscape of The Twelve Kingdoms, and the grand adventures of the Wind Riders in Cloudward Ho!, transmigration and time loop fantasy romances’ heavy reliant on their tropes and not much else just cannot hold up well in comparison. Perhaps my one-year break from anime and webtoons has made me rusty when it comes to scouring through the various platforms’ huuuge catalog to find gems I’d enjoy. I’m not giving up on these media and these specific subgenres, though. Some of my favorite fantasy stories of all time are romantasy anime and webtoons.

Creating lately

Bad news: I still haven’t finished the Bad Kids six fanarts project. In fact, I’ve paused a lot of the projects I started this year. I’ve been thinking about my self-expression through art recently and how much output-based my relationship to my art has been.

Good news: I started doing daily doodles for memory keeping in the last few days of August. I was and still am taking it one day at a time and so far I had been able to do it for the entirety of September, yey! I wanted to have a relationship with my art and integrate it with my life beyond projects and results.