Konstantin Atanasov

Ricoh

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I had been looking at point-and-shoot cameras for a while, and I might have hinted to Joseph a few times that I wanted the Ricoh GRIIIx HDF. He was sweet enough to get it for me for Christmas. ♡

Before the Ricoh, I hadn’t touched my film camera (a Nikon FM2) in a while. I really love shooting with it, but developing the film is a hassle. I either have to go to the photo shop or develop it myself, both of which are too expensive and time consuming nowadays. Also, when it came to my iPhone, I started to feel like shooting photos with it is a dirty business. My Photos app currently has 40,598 items, and I suspect 80% of them are just photographs.

And this brings me to the pitiful state the phone has reduced me to. Technically and creatively, I’ve become lazy. To start with, it took me a few days to get familiar again with the sensation of a camera around my neck, and it being a specialized tool that can’t do twenty different things. It expects dedicated attention. It is not so much that a point-and-shoot can’t be used on auto, but to get a deliberate image, I have to be prepared to work with at least the aperture, shutter speed, and—shoutout Ricoh!—focus distance. I am not even considering the peculiarities of the GRIII, which I still don’t fully understand.

On the creativity and pleasure side, I’ve taken so many shots with my phone that the act itself started to feel mundane. Which is disappointing, because I used to be excited to go out and ‘look’ for something to photograph. On my iPhone, even with 'manual' and 'no process' apps like Moment and Project Indigo, I still have less control and focus than with a camera. I’ve been the designated photo-taker of the friend group, and at this point, I can feel that I just don’t like doing it. My friends probably think I’ve become lazy or don’t care that much. But vanity often gets in the way of the photo, and I find that disheartening. Instagram and TikTok are always where the photos end up, like ends in themselves, and considering I don’t even use those apps anymore, trying to check all the requirements for a good IG story gives me the ick.

But I have started to regain that focus. For the first time in years, I can feel the ominous presence of the iPhone fading. There were times when I didn’t see a reason to take photographs. Now I feel comfortable shooting my dog/partner/friends/trips in all the aesthetically displeasing ways I want. The photos may not see the internet, but they will definitely see a photobook.

Anyway, I am using the camera every other day, if not daily when I go out during the week. It fits in my pocket easily, does amazing in low light, and has film simulations, which makes it a pleasure to experiment with. Similar options to my second contender, the Fujifilm X100VI, but less chunky. These past three months have been turbulent, and I haven’t had the chance to enjoy it to its full potential yet, but I am looking forward to warmer days and more free time. I'll be back in a couple of months with some more images.

Music for spring

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pairing an album to a season is mostly subjective. It usually requires (at least for me) the reminiscences of past seasons. I don’t see it entirely like that, though. The music must actually be bright, vivid, or airy to feel spring-y. An apocalypse-sounding, mutant cyborg avant-pop whatever album will not make it. Here are 8 that I really like.

Mother Earth's Plantasia by Mort Garson

This is the spring album. To quote the top comment on YouTube: ‘[It] puts the synthesize in photosynthesize’. The music is composed specifically for plants to listen to and help them grow. The answer on how it would achieve this is more New Age than scientific. Here’s an excerpt of the Pitchfork review, and I recommend reading it to learn more of the weird background of the record:

The idea came from a 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants, written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird and containing some hilariously specious claims: Plants can communicate telepathically, they can identify pain in others, they carry ancient wisdom in their little green cells, and they love music.

It is a conceptual album, but it does sound joyful. It reminds me of some lost soundtrack to a Ghibli film, or a sci-fi nature film animated to the album (as Interstella 5555 is to Daft Punk's Discovery).

→ Listen here

The Reminder by Feist

The Reminder is the reason I decided to write this post. March came and I thought—time to listen to Feist. Can’t really pinpoint why it sounds so spring-y to me. I was 13 when it was released in 2007 and I remember watching the wonderful video for ‘1234’. Years later I got really into Broken Social Scene, and by proxy to Feist, who is part of the group. My old last.fm account shows that between 2012-2014, each year from March to June, I scrobbled a lot of The Reminder. Maybe it is nostalgia; I was younger, the days had a different flow. But nonetheless the album is a great one to put you in a good mood. Feist has an effortless voice. There is a lot of sparkles—xylophones and whatnot. A lot of claps, finger snaps, dips and bursts. And I think it helps the spring-yness that the first demos for the album were recorded in early March and released in April the next year. Either way, not being able to pinpoint why I love this album probably means there’s more than just my mind playing a part.

CHAI by CHAI

CHAI would be the ones to organise the first picnic of the season. It would be the hottest and sunniest day of spring, and an absolute blast. They had an amazing run of 4 albums between 2017 and 2024. I found out about them just before the release of CHAI, which was their last before breaking up. If I must be conservative, I will describe them as a pop act. But in their music there’s rock, R&B, funk and, as they sing on their debut, Pink, some “hi hi hip-hop rap time”.

Here’s a song about having their tour trailer stolen in the US and still playing all their shows—thanks to “the support and generosity of other people”. →'Surprise': Not exactly part of the album, but it is, in my opinion, the first child of it. I have listened to it hundreds of times. I think it was my top song in Apple Music Replay in 2022. Still not tired of it.

Ys by Joanna Newsom

On a day in mid-to-late March, you go on a walk to do something mundane. And you look around—nothing is the same! A few days ago it was all bare, and now you can’t get used to how much there is of everything. A spring of baroque beauty. That is this album.

→ Listen here

0 by Ichiko Aoba

Airy, breezy and soft. A gush of warm wind in April. Literally. Field recordings are incorporated throughout the whole album. It “feels” like being outside. '0' is the blueprint for much of the ambient acoustic music we hear these days—in sound, mostly. You can hear many snippets of it on TikTok. Though, it doesn’t do justice to hear just a minute of her songs. Ichiko Aoba is a wonderful landscaper, and I recommend listening to the album from start to finish.

→ Listen here

Bloom by Beach House

No reason to meander and describe the monumental beauty of this album.

→ Listen here

songs by Adrianne Lenker

If I have to say where in spring this album fits, it would be in the early, chilly days. It is a raw sound, sprinkled with bird songs, sound dips, soft vocals. ‘come’ begins with light rainfall on leaves, and leads you into a tender scene of a dying woman. She has a talent for entwining the mundane and ethereal. On ‘ingydar’ she sings: ‘Early evening, the pink ring swallows / The spherical marigold terrain / Sleepily, Venus sinks and hollows / The stationed headlight of a plane’. There is heartbreak, or longing, in every song. But the chords are lush, and the scenery vivid. And even though it is an album that gets heavier with every listen, the warmth is there.

→ Listen here

Father of the Bride by Vampire Weekend

‘Father of the Bride’ is a late spring, warmer weather album. It’s witty and lighthearted, a good warmup before the summer. It puts a huge emphasis on nature, and Earth, being an obvious centre on the cover. The video for ‘Harmony Hall’ is all bugs and flowers. ‘This Life’ is cells and microorganisms diving and dancing around. ‘Big Blue’ is all fishes, one of them taking the bite. Most of all, it sounds cool. (And they’re amazing live.) Like every Vampire Weekend album though, it is the perspective of an urban guy—a spring in the city.

Thank your lucky stars

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last year I read Confessions by St. Augustine of Hippo. I highly recommend the book. Even though it was written 1600 years ago, It is surprisingly relatable and modern. And after all this time, daily life seems unchanged, and people continue to be just as sinful.

There was a reflection in the book about Astrology that stuck with me. I am not religious, and not really into the occult. But my friends throughout the years have gone to astrologers, tarot readers, gotten their birth charts drawn and paid for astrology portraits. And I have teased them relentlessly about all of it! Here’s a confession of my own—I have been provokingly annoying at times. I stopped, for the most part, when I realised for myself that searching for a guide in life is a necessity.

In recent years, as we have grown older, they have doubled down on the whole thing. Their obsession is growing stronger. The newest thing is to use GenAI to create Human Design maps. We get more anxious and troubled, but if the stars guide us, everything will get better. And you know what? Augustine thought the same!

In the fourth book of Confessions, he reflects on his youth. Prior to his conversion to Christianity, he was a devout follower of Manichaeism—a religion that believed there is a cosmic battle between the forces of light and darkness. It heavily focused on the celestial bodies—the Sun and the Moon as divine beings, dictating everything that happens on Earth. Astrology was a logical extension to his faith, and it made him obsessed with it. He studied math to understand the mechanics of the stars, and constantly consulted astrologers for advice. It promises that the universe and life are ordered and predictable. For a young guy who was confused and anxious about life, being able to calculate and predict everything felt amazing. It promised him control and understanding.

The issue was, he was deeply unhappy. He speaks of having a “voracious appetite for worldly pleasures”, struggling with his “ambitions and lusts”, and had a child out of marriage /a big no-no/. Still, it wasn’t his fault. It was the stars! If they were guiding his actions, then it was just bad planetary alignment. Later in the chapter he confesses how easy it was to blame “Venus, Saturn and Mars”, instead of taking responsibility for his guilt.

For they [astrologers] say, 'The cause of your sin is inevitably determined in heaven'; and, 'Venus or Saturn or Mars did this'—in order that man, forsooth, who is only flesh and blood, and proud corruption, might be blameless, while the Creator and Ordainer of heaven and the stars is to bear the blame.

Surprisingly, the reason he abandoned Astrology wasn’t Christianity. Manichaeism had massive volumes explaining the structure and movement of the universe. And as he learned more about “the science of the stars” and the precise physical movement of the planets, he realised they did not match what the astrologers were teaching. He calculated the eclipses and solstices, and when they actually happened as he had estimated, it blew his mind.

They foretold what year, what month of the year, what day of the month, what hour of the day, and what part of its light, either moon or sun was to be eclipsed, and it came to pass as they foretold... But Mani wrote about these things as if he knew them all, and yet he was completely ignorant of them.

If his Manichaean faith was fundamentally mathematically wrong, how could he trust it on spiritual matters? He held his beliefs for 9 more years after this realisation. But he wanted to speak to Faustus of Mileve, the greatest Manichaean bishop of the age. The local priests told him: just wait, when he comes here he will explain everything! When Faustus finally visited, St. Augustine arranged a private meeting between them, and laid out his mathematical and astrological problems. And Faustus’ response was simply: I don’t know.

He told Augustine he hadn't studied the secular sciences and couldn't answer the mathematical objections. Although Augustine describes him as pleasant and very well-spoken, he was inadequate to the task of defending Manichaean theology. His true talents lay in eloquently evading difficult questions.

I discovered at once that he knew nothing of the liberal arts except grammar, and that only in an ordinary way. He had, however, read some of Tully’s orations, a very few books of Seneca, and some of the poets, and such few books of his own sect as were written in good Latin. With this meager learning and his daily practice in speaking, he had acquired a sort of eloquence which proved the more delightful and enticing because it was under the direction of a ready wit and a sort of native grace.

After astronomy proved to him that the universe was ordered in a rational and testable way, he studied Neoplatonic philosophy, arguing for a single, infinite source of all creation. And that led him to Christianity, where he concluded that God was a supreme creator and architect of a beautiful, ordered universe. There was no preordained fate you can read in the sky. God gave us free will because love requires it. A machine guided and pushed by the cosmos’ whim cannot freely choose it. It cannot love its maker.

During the pandemic lockdown, I used to take out my Tarot cards and do online readings for my friends and colleagues. And it was so much fun. I had a repertoire—cloaked myself in a black scarf, lit candles, and took out a pendulum I bought in a Vegas secondhand shop... It was exciting in what it got right and absurd in some of the predictions. But also anxiety-inducing, especially in those 4 lockdown months of 2020. Five of Pentacles and Seven of Swords: I should be careful with my finances, as if I’m not already? Death for the 4th time: Maybe I won’t actually die, but how many spiritual rebirths can I have locked in a 45m² apartment?

During that time I also made an Instagram page titled Guided Imagery. My conviction was that Tarot and Astrology could be great tools for self-reflection. I made an Instagram filter to do a daily card draw and curated 3 posts on the topic. In one of the posts, I referenced the brilliantly absurd Ocean-Chart map from Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark /which I renamed to Life-Chart/.

In the poem, the Bellman—the eccentric captain of the expedition—brings the empty Ocean-Map to guide his crew. He dismisses all actual navigational tools as "merely conventional signs”. A joke on how complex systems feel arbitrary and often overwhelming to the layperson. The empty map gives the crew a sense of security, because they can “understand” it. Ignoring the fact it gives absolutely zero information.

The Bellman’s crew loved the blank map, it gave them the feeling of having a map without the hard work of actual navigation. Astrology and Tarot offer a similar comfort through the illusion of scientific rigor. The sheer volume of charts, degrees, ephemerides, and mathematical aspects makes it look like a science. You have your sun, moon and rising sign. Different house systems (Placidus, Whole Sign, Campanus). You add in aspects (trines, squares, sextiles), planetary transits, progressions and decans. They’ve even added newly discovered celestial bodies! It makes you feel comfort by the idea that the universe has a strict, measurable order. Even if that order is so tangled that the astrologers most of the time end up relying on their “intuition”.

You can ask the cards, and the stars, as long as you don’t see too much of yourself in them. And what bad can come from knowing you’re “generous, warm and fiercely loyal” as a Leo? As long as you don’t start embodying and excusing being “dramatic, stubborn, and attention-seeking”. Rather than giving your money to astrologers, buy Confessions by St. Augustine. It is a beautiful introspection of a troubled life that finds faith and order in an uncertain world. Uncertainty will still come and surprise us all, but the least we can do is learn to live with it.

PS: The title of this post is from the amazing album Thank Your Lucky Stars by Beach House.

PPS: The day after I wrote this, a friend called stating that Mercury Retrograde had started, and we should be vigilant! She followed this up by telling me some mutual friends of ours are stranded in Doha because of the war in the Middle East—somehow connecting the two. Surreal.

Swing Girls (2004)

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It is a rare occasion to stumble onto something interesting by chance. Even though the internet can make it feel like that, it is never truly so.

I took Josi for a walk to check the pee-mail and do his business. While he was busy, I saw this sticker on an electrical post on the grimy street beside our building. What a contrast!

I looked it up a month after I took that photo. Turns out it’s from a Japanese teen comedy called Swing Girls (2004).

A tale of delinquent and lazy school girls. In their efforts to cut remedial summer math class, they end up poisoning and replacing the school’s brass band.

I decided to give it a watch a few days ago, and I loved it. Haven’t seen something so amusing and bright in a while.

Even though I haven’t been to Japan, it inspired a kind of nostalgia in me, as all old—but not older than me—movies do. Does a glimpse of this world still exist? Probably not, but I’ll know when I do visit Japan. Either way, whatever your expectation is for Swing Girls, you'll be surprised.

Back to the street—that sticker is a good change of scenery. To understand the aesthetic of it, think of a Medieval comedy. Muddy pothole-riddled streets and BMWs, a gypsy on a horse-drawn carriage and a DHL truck, wild dogs and poodles in sweaters, a sushi restaurant next to a cigarette shop, Chappel Roan and chalga blasting from the cars... The sticker, though out of place, is not surprising by its out-of-placeness. But rather how innocent it is amidst whatever that mess is around it.

I’ve found some shots from the archives. This exact spot with the electrical post (next to a playground which doubles as a toy dump) has seen a discarded wig and a dildo.

Most recently, on another walk with Josi, I found a row of bread buns placed on the curb. Seems deliberate.

PS: If your attention span is fried, put the phone down. Joseph couldn’t stand 15 minutes of the movie!

What I enjoyed lately

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Instead of stalling on the fact I don’t have anything to write about, I’m starting with something simple. In the last two weeks I enjoyed a few things. Good music and good media show up all the time, but it’s still worth noting.

The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck

New England, 1919. Lionel and David spend a summer collecting songs. They fall in love. What they touch ripples through time into twelve linked stories. What stuck with me is how meaning moves through the decades. Song to song, person to person, object to object.
I started this thinking it would be close to North Woods by Daniel Mason (which I also enjoyed), but this book I found to be more tender.

And by that time, all of Mark’s and Julia’s and Ian’s problems would be so far in the past, so irrelevant, it would be as if they’d never even touched the earth.

But you should have a little pain in your life—humans are meant to have a little pain. Endings, I suppose, like seasons, like winters. That’s where all the good stuff is. Ripped apart, so you can feel the mending. There’s nothing like it. I wouldn’t wish an uneventful life on my worst enemy.

Crash Landing on You, 2019

The show isn’t new, it aired in 2019, but I love a good K-drama. In short:

After a paragliding accident, South Korean heiress Yoon Se-ri lands in North Korea. Captain Ri Jeong-hyeok finds her, hides her, and looks for a way to send her home. While they dodge the authorities, village life and the small kindnesses between Se-ri and Jeong-hyeok pull them closer and closer.

If you grew up with long Turkish soaps like I did, this feels like their antithesis. The plot is lighter and kinder. Even during the tense moments, the episodes usually settle into a comforting end. It’s that comfort that kept me watching. I cried at the end. Easy recommend. 10/10

Friend by James K

Thirteen tracks composed of hushed vocals over glassy electronics. And lots of layers. By the end, it made me feel lighter. Wonderful.

Also, James K is signed to AD 93. A label worth following if you like off-kilter techno. And the album is produced by Patrick Holland and Priori, they're the duo behind Jump Source. Listen to their banger EP JS06.