Published Saturday, January 31, 2026

Every year I try to spend some quality time with cool art, listen to a new album, watch a movie I had never watched, or read a book by a new author that I never heard of. It’s a way of learning about different perspectives in life, or living a sensorial experience and feel something new inside you. I cherish many of these moments. I’d like to share some of my favourite media from last year in this post.

Music

An Excellent Spiritual Serviceman by Contemporary Noise Ensemble has to be one of my favorite records in quite some time. My first contact with the group was with the also excellent Pig Inside the Gentleman, a modern jazz album. This new one, however, is very electronic with lots of synthesizer, quite different from their older stuff, which I enjoyed a lot. You can get a good taste of this in the track The Queen is About to Spin, quite a mesmerizing song, actually. There’s also The Caprice, which has been my favorite lately. It’s crazy how this album has grown on me—each time I listen I discover a new gem that instantly becomes my new favorite track. What an album.

Can’t forget to mention Things We Have in Common by Efterklang, one of my favorite bands growing up. I loved them on their more experimental side in albums like Tripper or Parades. This new one is quite different—more on the pop side and much less experimental. I’m not usually a big fan of pop music, but their version of pop is some of the best there is, so I liked it a lot nonetheless. Some of the tracks stick like glue. I’ve been listening to Shelf Break a lot recently, and before that it was Animated Heart, and before that it was Plant. Great album overall.

TV

My absolute favorite has to be The White Lotus from HBO. The idea of groups of wealthy people going to a resort for a week is super captivating to me for some reason. As a viewer, we know there will be an escalation of events leading to the end, so as the guests’ storylines intertwine, we’re on the edge of our seats. The show gets darker and weirder as the stories deepen, and I love watching it all unfold.

I also loved The Pitt, to my absolute surprise. I’m not a big fan of medical shows—only really liked House back in the day—and I tend to avoid medical dramas because I dread the imagery. When I heard the praise the show was getting I knew I couldn’t resist, so I gave it a try and got so enthralled by the characters and storylines. Now I’m watching the second season and I can’t wait for the next episode. Great show!

Cinema

Last year I watched exactly 100 movies! That’s my record for a year, I think, at least since I started keeping track on Letterboxd. I watched a lot of great movies, but very few moved me quite like Perfect Days by director Wim Wenders. We follow Hirayama in his daily life, cleaning toilets as his livelihood, and in his time off reading books and listening to cassette tapes. He finds beauty in the world by living a simple life and appreciating art. A really inspiring movie for me—we can aspire to live a simpler life too, but we can’t give up art. It will make us miserable. We need art to make us whole. As I said earlier, I watched a lot of movies this year and some really good ones, but not one comes even close to Perfect Days, so I will refrain from mentioning any other. Just go watch it already!

Books

I’ve been struggling with books all year long. I get really tired after work and it’s getting harder to find time for reading, only really having a decent time on the weekends. But I reached my goal of at least 12 books, so there’s that. This book was on my reading list for quite a while and I finally decided to read it: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. It’s a medieval book about a mason’s dream of building a cathedral. I’m not a religious guy, but I really sympathize with the idea of building something that will last. The book is quite long (1092 pages!), took me almost a month to finish, but was totally worth it! I’m planning to gift this book to someone this year.

Games

I haven’t played many games this year, but I did get some time off and I mostly used it to play Death Stranding 2, which I enjoyed very much. I must confess, the first game didn’t grab my attention, I thought the world was really cool and I liked the characters, but the gameplay was kind of a chore. Can’t say the same for this game, however. They improved the gameplay with a lot of ideas from MGSV and I had a blast with it. Having a deeper stealth system and better tools at your disposal made all the difference. While the first game I barely clocked 30 hours, in Death Stranding 2 I played more than 100 hours. This game has a system in which you can capture the monsters and later use them against the enemies, just like pokemon. I spent a lot of time building roads and infrastructure to make traversal easier to complete missions. This game was so much fun, Kojima is a really creative guy with an amazing team. Looking forward to Psyint.

I’m really glad to still have time for this stuff, I dread the day that I won’t. Makes you think and appreciate more the time you still have for this. Do you have any memorable media you would like to share?