Welcome to another short post(hopefully). I'd go over some of the things that I like and are easy ways to make me feel something close to happy. Decided to take this route since I've spent the past couple of weeks bashing onions (rightfully so!). Anyways, lets get into it.

Yoghurts

To start with, I don't like ice creams. I find them way too sweet for my tongue. As a result, I probably only take them once or twice a year when on dates. I buy ice cream for other people though. Yoghurts, on the other hand, are simply divine. They're one of the best inventions ever created by mankind. Somewhere near the top of the list.

I love yoghurts only as long as they're plain. Parfaits are a serious no no. The first time that I tried one was in Accra in 2023. I don't think I could finish up to half of the cup before I dumped it. I find anything put inside yoghurts to be detestable, punishable by law even.

Vanilla yoghurts are the best. Followed by strawberry, then banana and finally, others. I don't experiment as much in terms of flavour. I should try mangoes next though.

Fries

I've always loved fried yam, fried sweet potatoes, and fried Irish potatoes. I generally love yam in any form - fried, boiled, porridge, roasted. The other two, I largely like fried. I don't really like boiled potatoes(either of the two). Porridge sweet potatoes, I don't mind. Yam and sweet potatoes are some of my comfort foods and I can generally eat them for extended periods of time, until I get tired of them.

I should mention that I also like them plain. Eating fries with sauces is something I consider an affront to my own existence. They ruin the delightful taste of them. Ughh. I don't know how other people can eat them with sauces. Plain fries will always be a delight. People need to switch over to the good side.

Plantain Chips

There was a particular year where I bought a lot of plantain chips that the jars filled an empty 50kg sack of rice and there were still a lot of jars left to spare. Back then, I was probably going through 2 jars of plantain chips a week. I'm not sure I've liked a snack as much as I like it. I don't like fried plantain as much, and I absolutely abhor boiled plantains. Roasted plantains, meh. Plantain chips is where it's at.

To avoid turning into a human sized plantain, I did have to curb the amount of chips I was eating sometime in 2022. Now, I get them as weekend treats whenever I can, instead of buying them in bulk. My other weekend treats are yoghurts. Together, they make weekends something to look forward to.

Gum

I generally love to chew gum. It's a stim for me and helps keep me focused especially when at work. I switch out gum after really short periods, once the rich flavour has worn off. Its bad enough that one of my partners has said that she'd never get them for me lol. Favourite brand is Mentos, and then maybe Trident. The rest are meh. Used to love Orbit but I no longer do.

Sour Udara/Agbalumo

I've always loved udara that's sour but not too sour, performing a delicate balancing act. When it's too sweet, it turns me off. But that perfect level of sourness is to die for. It's similar to how I feel about mangoes. While I don't like sour mangoes, I prefer them when they are hard and crunchy. When they are soft and juicy, they taste awful to me. You should have picked up on a pattern by now => I love to chew.

Blood Sausages

I discovered these on a work trip to Barcelona sometime in 2024 and my life hasn't been the same ever since. They rewired my brain on how good sausages should taste. I don't think I've had any sausage that I've liked since then. They were so good that I didn't know that they were made from blood until a few days after. I can't wait to have them again.

Sushi

This I started trying in 2023 courtesy of PJ and I liked them almost instantly. Liked them more than the rest of the dishes I had that day. With sushi, it gets a bit tricky as I don't like every variant. I prefer the ones with fish. I don't think I've liked any that I've tried that was made with chicken or something similar. Not had them in a while and I should soon.

That's about all when it comes to some of my favourite drinks, snacks and food. Can't wait to get people into blood sausages too. But yeah, this should also help people know what to get me if they ever consider getting me food.

This is probably going to be a short post but its going to revolve around something I was thinking about during the week, which is how I go about picking the kind of media that I consume. We'd go over books, shows, music and games.

Books

One of the things that tends to draw me to books is the author's writing style. This isn't fixed and tends to vary across the books that they write. I don't think I have a specific style that I gravitate too, but I do find it hard to get into certain books and I end up dropping them halfway. In the past year, I've picked up two books that I couldn't continue because the dialogue and style felt off to me. In one case, the dialogue felt forced and didn't flow well, so couldn't immerse myself in it. In the second, I just wasn't as engaged with it no matter how much I tried that I had to go read science books for a bit.

Style also determines how likely I am to go into a focused state with books that I read. We'd take Cradle for example. It's a series that a friend got me into last year and I read all 12 books in it in less than a month. The dialogue in it was fun for me to read. The worldbuilding was great, and it was easy to love the characters, Suriel especially. I could also empathize with the antagonists while still hating them; the exception being Regan Shen.

I love reading series too, especially when they're over five books long. I've read the books in the Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus series (10 books) say three times. I've read the Expanse (9 books) twice. Most of my favourite authors write series. I find them easier to read because I struggle with transitions a lot(thank you AuDHD). So long running series tend to be comforting as I don't have to think of what my next read would be until I'm done. Some of my other favourite series are The Legendborn Cycle(not completed yet so I can't reread) and The Six of Crows Duology(read twice).

Games

I've been playing games since 2000. We got a PS2 back then that came with a French version of Spiderman. You'd have thought that this would have encouraged me to learn French so I could navigate the game. It did not. I did manage to play the game with French enabled. We played a number of demo games too growing up, and a whole bunch of chipped games which stopped working after a while.

For the longest of times, I used to play different iterations of FIFA. Used to be a good comfort game, until EA decided to sell themselves to the PSF(why they did so, I have no idea). I loved FIFA because I could play it to relax, but still feel pretty challenged. I've tried to find new comfort games ever since but I've not been able to.

Currently I enjoy playing action and adventure style RPGs. Some of my favourites include the Horizon series: Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West. You play as Aloy, a young woman in a post apocalyptic war in which humans lost to a horde of machines, as she tries to find out more about the past and also why machines are currently being corrupted in her timeline. It has one of the best stories of any game that I've played recently and the gameplay is pretty fun too.

I also love the new God of War games, and Spiderman too. I have tried to play some pure RPGs' like Final Fantasy but never fully got into them.

The category of games that I absolutely avoid are souls like games. They're too much stress for me. I bought Nioh/Nioh 2 thinking that they'd be fun games for me to play. But noooo, they just had to be souls like. When it comes to games, I don't believe in stressing myself too much. I drop games if they're too hard. I want to play games to relax.

Series

For series, I tend to prefer long-running shows. You know, the thing I mentioned with transitions. It comes into play a lot here. But generally, I gravitate towards police procedural shows, thrillers, some adventure, and action. Also sci-fi, though I think I prefer to read sci-fi than watch it most of the time. With the exception of shows that aren't book adaptations like Star Trek.

I also love rewatching shows. I don't care how many times I rewatch certain shows. Twice, thrice, up to infinity. I learn something new each time. I do this a lot with Castlevania. The style speaks to me, and I love hearing the monologues in it. On the other hand, I love rewatching police procedural shows because knowing what comes next in them is calming and I can also multi-task in the background. I sometimes read in the background while certain shows are playing as it weirdly helps me focus on whatever I'm reading. Music rarely does it for me.

Music

My music taste is something I've actively been developing since 2015. A lot of people who know me know that Lorde is my favourite artist. Coincidentally, 2015 was the year in which I discovered her. Spreading out from Lorde, I typically look for artists who sound similar to her and experiment with them to see if I'd like their sounds too. This was how I sort of discovered another gem, in Rachel Chinouriri(I'd known of her because I have an old tweet of hers saved but didn't listen to her songs until I started experimenting).

One other way I used to build up my library was looking up artists from songs I heard on shows or movies. The Blacklist used to be really good at this. Whoever curated soundtracks for them was the bomb. Some of the artists that I've discovered this way include Ruelle (Mortal Instruments), Santigold, Tanerelle(Now a fave. Had a crush on her for a long while), Of Monsters and Men (Jessica Jones).

I used to also discover songs from FIFA as they also put in a lot of effort into curating soundtracks from each of their iterations. Some of the artists I discovered from doing this are Sampa The Great and Moonchild Sanelly.

I also just rely on Spotify's Release Radar to find new stuff to listen to. Made it into a routine that I follow every weekend. Some of the artists that I've found out this way are Rainbow Kitten Surprise, BENEE, and The Beaches.

I should mention that I also like k-pop, but I can not for the life of me remember how I got into it. I know it was in 2021, but I don't remember what pushed me in that direction. YouTube recommendations maybe. I honestly don't know. Anyways, I've tried out a number of groups since then. I started out with Twice, BlackPink, and Stray Kids. But my favourite group is currently IVE. CLC and STAYC next, and then others. I-dle used to be up there but they've fallen down the pecking order. I still like Soyeon though, especially in K/DA.

Anyways, this was largely me rambling about how I pick some of the things that I like. Thought it would help to give people a little insight into what goes on in my head since I might not always share. Byeee, until next time.

Hola one of my facourite people in the multiverse, the less funny of the both of us (you know it's the truth). It's been a while since I wrote to you and I'd want to share some of the things that have gone down lately.

I'd start with the grandiose one first. I've found a motivation for getting into politics actively. It all started with a single thought: the eradication of onions. I figured that if I was to become president, it would be simple enough to sign an executive order banning onions in the entire country. It would be my first act after entering office. We both hate onions with the passion of a billion burning stars and eradicating them would benefit everyone. To make the change easier on people, I would create a competition to get people to find better alternatives to it. Reward money would be 500 million naira (I know, I'm benevolent). If I'm successful in banning it from Nigeria, I'd move on to step two which is to ban it from earth-prime completely. If I had the right powers, I would create a black hole whose sole purpose is sucking in and destroying onions.

And now, on to less grandiose things. I've been reading a book on how the universe could possibly end. I'm guessing that the same laws would also apply to your universe. In that case, I have both good news and very very bad news. I'd start with the bad news first. The universe likely ends in some violent ways. Very violent too. The good news is that we'd be dead long before then, so yayyy. The first likely cause is the universe's expansion stopping and then reversing course. That likely doesn't start for another 10 billion years, so we're pretty good. Next was called heat death and at least it didn't mean that we all burn to death. Just means that entropy keeps decreasing to a point where it's unlikely to pick up again and nothing can get created. Though I did learn that in that state, there's a slight possibility of the universe being recreated again, so yay I guess. And then, the big rip. This was the scarier of the three as it involves dark energy which has been forcing to universe to keep accelerating, and after maybe 188 billion years, it becomes more catastrophic. Galaxies get pushed away from each other. The moon leaves us. The earth explodes. Any surviving human being gets blown up by the spaces pushing their atoms away from each other. I still have two more causes to go, but we're safe for the time being.

On the other hand, I think I've forgotten how to flirt with women. I did get good at it at some point. But now, I just end up discussing the universe ending with people, or whatever manga that I'm reading at the point. Though new manga more often than not ends being something I discuss with our Ojou-sama (how's she doing in your universe?) than with new people. I'm inching ever slowly back to the days when I had to google how to flirt with people. Who knows, maybe that happens. Or maybe I become like prime Aphrodite and sway up everyone with my absolute charm. But it's looking like googling flirting skills again will win.

Oh, I started playing The Sims 4 tonight. I'd been looking for games to play since I'd been in a slump for over a month. I started downloading Where Winds Meet since Eevee recommended it. Since it's over a 100gb large, I picked up The Sims instead. I created a non-binary character who's into both men and women, can get pregnant. I also added traits to make them be also polyamorous, like us. So far, I've flirted with almost every Sim that I've met and come close to my character getting their first kiss. I also got them as a job as a thief and I'm curious to see how that plays out. Stay tuned to find out! I'm going to keep exploring and see how many wives and husbands I can get with this character. In hindsight, I should not have set the option to allow them get pregnant.

I tried ramen tonight and hated it. I got it almost a month ago and decided to have it tonight. I knew I wasn't going to like it from the moment I opened it up. It reeked of onions! Onions! I don't believe in wasting food but I hated every bite of it. Why did they have to ruin what would have otherwise been a great meal. Onions ruin everything. I know you can relate. Don't worry. When I'm done wiping it out from my universe, I'm coming over to yours to save you and all the inhabitants of earth-beta from the plague that is onions.

I started watching more relaxing anime recently. Decided to branch out of Shonen for a bit. I started with Apothecary Diaries, and it was pretty chill. It's fun watching Maomao trying to experiment with as many poisons as she can. I loved the friendships that she forms with the different consorts in the emperor's palace. I then went from it to Delicious in Dungeon. This follows a party trying to save one of their member's sister from the belly of a dragon before she gets digested and well, dead. Each episode follows hem finding new monsters in the dungeon and different ways to prepare and eat them. It's basically a less horny version of Food Wars. You should get into them. We both know One Piece is supreme, but it's fun to try new things too.

I've also been having weird dreams lately. Started out with being made a manager at work. It's been tricky explaining to people why I consider this a nightmare. Its the most anxious that a dream has made me feel recently. Woke up with my heart racing. And then another weird dream where I finally found a apartment but the steps were broken and there was a gap where one of the landings should have been. Worst part was only finding out about the issues after I'd moved in. I remember watching Dr Strange and The Multiverse of Madness recently and one thing they discussed was the the main Strange's dreams were his multiversal counterparts' realities. If my dreams have been your realities, then that must really suck for you. I can't imagine how drained you've been while working as a manager. I'm hoping that it's not the case. Sending you a lot of hugs if it is.

Oh, in more women related news, I should gist you about some of my weirder encounters from the past year. I met one women who wanted to come to my house roughly two hours after she matched with me on Bumble. It was pretty weird to me. What if I was a serial killer? I know that I'm not, but just imagine. Also had one person who only ever reached out to me to ask if I wanted her over. She never tried to sustain a conversation that didn't involve knowing where I lived. And the weirdest was the person who only tried to talk to me in the leadup to trying to ask for money. Culminated in her asking for 450k to clear her goods at customs which i just ignored.

I should probably end here so I don't nerd out too much about universe ending stuff. Plus I need to focus on my plans to wipe out onions from the multiverse. Can't wait for you to write me back. You've not done so in ages and I'm starting to feel lonely. I love you. I mean I love me. We both love each other. Until next time.

Background

The year is 2018. I'd quit one job to get a few months off before starting out at a new job. While working on a project, I took time out to binge on a few series - Altered Carbon, The Breaker, and finally The Expanse. It had a couple of seasons up on Netflix, and I decided to try it out. I can't remember what about the cover art got my attention but I was captivated from the start. It had one of the most attention grabbing scenes that I've seen start any show; Two people having sex in zero gravity.

I kept watching past that point and it turned into one of the most interesting series that I've seen. The first season started out with a missing person's mystery coupled with the show exploring a lot of class inequality, and it kept improving from there. By the time that I got to the second season, I was completely hooked. I knew the show was based off a book series and I'd had people that I followed on Twitter talk about it. But it took me a while to get into the books. Netflix had refused to renew it passed the second season and I think I was sad for a while. But Amazon eventually picked it up. Back then, I was no longer following the long standing art of pirating shows. I also couldn't watch the show on Amazon Prime because they weren't in Nigeria at that time.

And so, I decided to start buying the books. It remains one of the best decisions that I've ever taken. I started reading it around late 2019/early 2020. And the first book was beyond captivating. I loved it so much that I got the second book about a month later. I remember that my job had given out gift vouchers as a Christmas gift to employees, and I sold mine so I could continue buying the books. For a while, I stuck to buying a book a month and taking a couple of weeks to read each one.

And by May or so, during COVID, I'd finished book 5. But it ended on one of the best cliffhangers that I've come across, that I broke my rule and then bought book 6, and then book 7, and then book 8. And within a short period of time, I'd finished all of them. It did involve a lot of days where I didn't eat until 11pm or 12am, because I was caught up in the books. And I needed a month to recover from all the starvation but it was worth it.

I did have to wait a couple of years for the final book in the series to come out, and I got it around the weekend that it did. I loved it a lot too.

What I love

I've tried a lot to get people to read this series lol. I even bought all nine books for one of my close friends in 2023 thinking she'd like it. While it's a sci-fi series, sci-fi just serves as a backdrop for the writers to explore a lot of social issues.

The first book was part missing person's mystery and focused on a detective looking for a billionaire's daughter, and part a dive into class inequality. The book sets up the world perfectly. It's set in a future where humans have mastered inter-planetary travel and have populations on Earth, in Mars, some of the moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, and in The Belt

You'd think that in a future where space travel is possible and there's Universal Basic Income for people who want it, that xenophobia would not exist. But psych, xenophobia is alive and well in this world. And it forms a large basis for the rest of the series going forward.

Book two takes things a step further and focuses on the extreme end of capitalism. It also introduces us to the political system of the universe that the books are set in, and to one of my favourite characters in fiction, Avasarala. It's also the book in the series that starts exploring different kinds of relationships in-depth and also has one of my favourite pieces of dialogue

"If life transcends death, then I will seek for you there. If not, then there too."

Book three is more philosophical and poses the question, if you've grown up with belief systems that were pretty much set in stone, what would you do when something shows up that usurps everything that you've been taught? Do you abandon your beliefs or do they evolve alongside it?

Book four is one of my favourite books. Which is weird because I've seen other people say that they don't like it because a lot doesn't happen in it. But to me, a lot did. There's a lot of exploration in the book and it's the book that I probably think about the most. This is one of the more sci-fi heavy entries in the series, alongsides books eight and nine. But it's focuses on an aspect of sci-fi that I enjoy. I found myself enjoying rain on a new planet being depicted and the aftermath that followed it(poisonous rainbow colored slugs that turned your vision green).

Book five is where things kick up a notch and the tone for the rest of the series shifts. It's also the only book that deviates from the narrative structure that the remaining eight books follow. The other books have a setup or build up half and a more explosive half. Book five starts out explosively and maintains the pace all through. The class inequality that I mentioned earlier comes to a head here and it follows into book six. It explores a traumatic family unit and how one character navigates their way around it with the aim of getting out of it.

Book six continues from where book five ends, but it also explores conflict from the point of view of the aggressors who feel like they've been wronged for decades. And it looks at all the avenues in which the conflict could be resolved. One of the reasons that I'm also fond of this book is that it focuses on a polyamorous unit, and how they navigate communication, how they support each other, give constructive feedback and show love towards one another.

Books seven and eight focus on authoritanism and how people rebel against such regimes. They are some of the most emotional books in the series. Book eight leans more into the sci-fi aspect of the series and explores some of the concepts we started getting introduced to from book one. It also features one of the best set pieces in all fiction that I've ever consumed, centering one of my favourite characters in all of fiction, Naomi "The Genius" Nagata

Book nine brings the series full circle and has one of the best endings to a series that I've read. It centers another favourite character of mine, Elvi Okoye, as she tries to find the cause of unexplained deaths that have been happening for about five books at this point. The book shows how the core group of characters we'd focused on from book one have grown and how their ideologies have evolved up until this point, how trauma also affects what their current viewpoints are. I didn't see the ending coming, and it took me a while to accept it but I understood that it was the best conclusion to the series

One of the other things I like about the series are the space battles. It's different from what I grew up with in Star Wars and Star Trek, where entire battles take place with ships in close proximity to each other. The Expanse takes the vastness of the universe into accounts and ships rarely see each other. You would have scenarios where missiles are chasing after you for 24 hours, and you have that much time to prepare countermeasures. Even what's considered close quarters combat(CQB) in the series still has ships spaced pretty far apart.

Conclusion

I love how the books explored human connections and different kinds of relationships - straight, queer, polyamorous, and found families. It explores sci-fi in a way that doesn't get overwhelming. The characters are written so well that you are drawn to them from the time the series starts and you stick with them until their arcs end. You understand their fears, their motivations, what they love, what they stand for. I think about some of the characters from time to time. Usually Naomi or Michio Pai. It's one of my best rated series of all time. I was finally able to get someone to binge the series in 2024 and I was happy that she loved it. Maybe I'd convert more people in the future 🥲🥲.

Hey Kachi,

How's life on earth 2? Last time we talked, you lot had figured out the secrets to creating never ending yoghurts, without ever running out of resources. I wish we had something like that over here. I'd have all the yoghurt that I could eat without needing to spend a single naira. Here, we're stuck having the never ending debates about which is better, ice cream or yoghurt. I'd ride for yoghurts any time, any day but there are heathens here who think ice cream is better and here I thought i was the weird one.

I've had a bunch of girl drama lately that I thought I should update you on. Soooo, there was this girl I met with on a dating  platform at 1:53AM on Monday, who was asking to come over to my place on Monday night. In less than 24 hours, and we'd barely talked all day. One of my friends said that she probably wanted to kidnap me lol. Also ran into someone who was telling me that I had no reason not to go to church when armed robbers and native doctors went there, as if that's good advertisement for them.

I got new glasses recently, and it was the first time I remember a mistake being made with my prescription. I kept thinking that something was wrong and went in for a checkup. Turns out that my prescription hadn't really changed, but the lab tech that worked on them misaligned one of the lenses by a whole 85⁰. 85⁰. I used to get nauseated when I put them on. Maybe I'd have clocked it faster if I got headaches, but noooo, the headaches decided that they wanted to go on vacation. My optometrist, sweet little lady, said they'd fix them at no extra cost to me.

I had friends over on Thursday, one old and one potentially new. We spent time playing monopoly and the competitive part of me showed up midway through the game. I tend to take games seriously. I once played tabletop soccer with a kid who wasn't probably up to 7 years old and played him like I would play a pro. My ideology is that when you play people, even babies, seriously,  they feel more joyful when they have an upper hand. So, I play to crush babies, I mean to win. It builds character, lots of it. I did come put on top by acting like a capitalist and my friends conceded, when they had to be paying me £890 for rent.

I haven't really flirted with people lately. I mean, I did with one for a bit in our February (your March). It didn't end up well in the end. But I've missed casually flirting and not having it lead anywhere. It used to be pretty fun. I've not also written a sensual poem since 2020 I think. I should have sent it to you but I didn't want women fawning over you, thinking that you wrote it (I mean, you're me and you also write, but I'm better). Yes, I'm petty.

Oh, I tried out a blood sausage in January. It's one of the best dishes that I've had in a long while. It made the other sausages that I had together with it taste inferior. Like they were impostors trying to stand up to the true king. Finding out that it was made from actual blood did not deter me, and I look forward to eating it again. Someone called me a vampire, and considering that I have Delayed Phase Sleeping Disorder, it probably tracks.

It's been fun sharing all of these with you, and I do wish you'd send a letter sometimes. It's not like your universe got wiped out by a singularity, like Universe-432. I still believe that they got wiped out because they didn't have a Kachi like us in them. I digress. But I do want you to send a letter, preferable one with the blueprints for the infinite yoghurt machine.

Sincerely,

Kachi Prime (the best in the multiverse)