Afterglow: August 2025

The winter bugs descended this month and picked my family members off one by one. Last week was my turn to get sick so I’ve been out of action. It’s been a struggle to get the routine going agin this week as I still feel quite unwell. One of the downsides of adulting is that you don’t really get to stop and rest properly so sickness can drag on a lot longer.

This meant a slight delay in releasing RNDM into the wild but it’s now live! You can read more about it here. One tip I will share is that you can make it generate images more rapidly by refreshing your browser rather than waiting 20 seconds for it to regenerate.

I was inspired by an article from Cache and Burn called it's time to ditch streaming for an ipod – so that’s what I did. I was surprised to find there is a whole scene around modding iPods with better batteries and storage, even changing the firmware. I had 2 broken iPods (a gen 5 and a 5.5) that I stripped for parts to build one functional iPod, a process that is surprisingly easy given that this is an apple product. The most difficult part is getting the case open.

The generation 5 is the more sought after model as the case is slightly easier to open and they use the Wolfson DAC, which according to audiophiles offers a warmer sound. I downloaded all the music I’ve purchase over the years from Apple music and Bandcamp and loaded them on the device. It’s nice to have music that you actually own rather than music you just rent month to month, I’m also enjoying the fact the device is completely offline so you get to enjoy distraction free listening. The next step will be purchasing a CD writer so that I can get my old CD collection into the digital realm.

I’ve been focussing a lot on trying to cut down the time I spend online. I fell back into Instagram pretty heavily, it was just a few quick hits at first but before I knew it I was doom scrolling my evenings away again. It was probably a lot worse because I was unwell and it was a quick distraction. On the positive side I became more and more bored with the content, it feels so fake, and a lot of it literally is fake now. Social media is at a point where it has become blatantly obvious that the algorithms goal is just to force feed you advertising disguised as entertainment. It just feels… gross.

Here are some of the sounds and words that resonated with me during August. The album why by vvhy was actually released a couple of days ago but it’s so good that I had to sneak it on the list!