Kia ora! It's been a minute. How are you doing? You look great today, is that a new haircut?

Forgive my absence for the last month or two, finishing up my first year of university and getting settled into a new job (as a ghostwriter! I'm basically a member of OVO now) has sapped up a lot of my writing time. Now that uni has stopped for the summer and I've roughly settled into my job, I should be back to regularly updating PTW!

A meme depicting a mood chart. Each peak is captioned with variants on 'we're so back'; every valley with 'it's so over'

- the last two months

Some housekeeping:

  1. Thank you so, so much to anyone who supported the billy woods analysis. I really wasn't expecting it to get any sort of attention off the bat, but the amount of Internet Engagement and (more importantly) positive feedback I got for it blew me away -- least of all woods himself, who called it 'well-written'. My girlfriend assumed I was experiencing an actual heart attack when I saw his reply.

    2. A reply to my post on Twitter about my woods article, with a reply from @BackwoodzHipHop reading 'It's well written👍'

    genuinely putting this up on my wall

  2. The next article is a piece about MIKE, specifically his production work as dj blackpower. It will likely be far smaller in scale than the woods analysis, but I'm proud of the argument I've made and I'm excited for folks to read it. I'm also planning on putting together a mix of songs relevant to each of my articles going forward, both as a reference for those unfamiliar with the source material and as a way to recommend related music. Unsure if I should put them together as playlists for streaming services, or just write them out as a text list -- if you have any preferences, let me know!

  3. I do have several ideas in mind for future articles, but I'm still trying to work out exactly what scale I should target with each article. Larger, artist-wide analyses like the woods article are very rewarding to write, but they're a serious undertaking that would be very easy to get burnt out on; smaller pieces (like this MIKE article I'm working on) feel less impactful to me, but they force me to stay focused and lean in regards to my writing.

    I'm interested in putting out a few articles of differing sizes and seeing which y'all prefer. Do watch this space!

  4. This blog is now a part of the Birdsong Webstring (read: a webring with two people) alongside doves.rest! It's hosted by my good friend Wells -- an incredible writer, musician, translator, and visual artist, alongside being a fellow Wellingtonian! It is also directly responsible for all of the wonderful artwork on this blog, including some pieces you haven't seen yet...

    Please go and check its work out, especially if you're interested in book reviews and English translations of Hakushi Hasegawa lyrics! You can find it linked in the footer of the website.

  5. I've started watching movies again! My inability to regularly watch movies has always been a minor insecurity for me (how the fuck have I only seen two movies in the last 12 months. why is one of them Love, Actually), so I'm hoping to keep a consistent schedule of checking new stuff out alongside music and books. pt_watershed on Letterboxd for the curious!

That's all for now. Something more substantial coming sooner rather than later, hopefully. Thanks for reading, and see you soon!