Pori

~ a blog ~

Following the same format as last years post (and somewhat more timely!)…

2025 top tracks

My top 5 listened to tracks in 2025 according to last.fm:

  1. pinponpanpon – SO COOL

  2. HANA – ROSE

  3. Ava Max – Wet, Hot American Dream

  4. Ava Max – World’s Smallest Violin

  5. Ava Max – Lovin Myself

(unashamed cringe pop enjoyer 😂)

…tbh I think this sums up the year well enough.

Best Song 2025

Not in my top 5 most played (my 35th apparently), but I think song of the year really has to go to:

HUNTR/X – Golden

I mean it was everywhere, and pretty catchy. I also wanted to dislike KPop Demon Hunters, but after actually watching it… honestly surprisingly enjoyable.

No honorable mentions this year since they’re all in their own categories below.

JPop 2025

Absolutely no question on this, it has to be HANA – ROSE. Massive debut year for them, glad Momoka from PD101JP got her debut in a group that suits her style (and is already doing better than the actual group from the show… not to mention healthier management company by all accounts). A well deserved best new artist award too for them at the end of the year. They could easily have had 2 or even 3 songs at the top of this list in 2025 (Blue Jeans being the close 2nd of their songs).

pinponpanpon

My personal favourite song of the year I’ve got to go with pinponpanpon – SO COOL.❄️ Like a lot of their songs lean heavily into the “bad/cringe but funny” category, but I think SO COOL transcends that into a legitimately decent track that can be enjoyed in total isolation (same with Midnight Ravers on last years list). I’m also thoroughly enjoying their youtube antics.

They even completed a European tour in 2025, including London. Not going to post a whole report on that or anything, the venue was awful, 4am is too late for me these days, but fantastic to see them and their energy in person. Obligatory cheki (as far as cheki locations go, this is pretty awesome tbh!)…

Honorable mentions

Too many others to choose from, could have gone on, but let’s go with these:

KPop 2025

I don’t think I actually listened to much other than ILLIT or KPop Demon Hunters. So I’ll go with the only one I listened to on repeat for a while:

  1. ILLIT – jellyous

Best Album

Two clear contenders, and both very different!

  • .BPM – The .BPM Wonder This entire album is like a greatest hits, all their best songs, plus some new songs. It really is a masterpiece from start to finish. Based on what their producer has been saying online, it really seems like it’s been a labour of love to produce the whole thing over the years (and impressive from a single producer!). I can’t praise it enough. I hope they get the recognition they deserve. Definitely want to see them live some day! 🙏

  • Ava Max – Don’t Click Play Pure pop. The amount of mess that preceded this album, cancelled how many times, quitting management agency, cancelling an entire world tour, omg, felt like it was never going to happen. Clearly not as iconic as previous Ava Max albums, but this really has some good fun songs, and her lyrical writing is as poetic pop as ever. Was looking forward to the tour before it got cancelled, hopefully it gets re-announced for sometime this year. ❤️

Other Stuff

I think the main other interesting thing that happened last year was seeing the Japanese cast for the SIX musical performing in London (including Suzuki Airi!). I’m not really a musical person, but this felt more like a concert (plot thin at best, lol), super awesome to see Airi still performing on stage and enjoying herself. Far too many people at the stage exit to get any decent photos though, though she took photos of everyone else…

Finally… 😭😭

Can’t end the post without mentioning Perfume going into cryosleep. Still producing amazing albums until the end. Seems like there will be a documentary movie released sometime next summer, then who knows when we’ll hear from them again, though they’re not ending, just sleeping! From my last post in 2023 😭😭😭😭…

“I couldn’t help but wonder, would this be the last time I see Perfume live?”

Music is everything

遥かなユニバース

It truly is.

#music #jpop #concerts #perfume

Discuss...

New Momoi music for the first time in forever. 🎉🎉

  1. NewGame+

  2. Nanika

  3. 転売ヤーをぶっとばせ！

  4. LOVE.EXE -TENSEI Ver.-

Since this blog is kinda not really in-use, I wasn’t originally going to write about this, but after crying through FUWAMOCO’s Momoi karaoke stream, I couldn’t not (they feature on Nanika along with many other people). It’s been so long, the songs are all good. ❤️ ❤️

So this is really written with a heart filled with nostalgia. All of the old communities are gone, paranda’s blog, the English Momoi fansite and forums. I imagine everyone is still around somewhere, but a combination of life, and the changing face of the internet has really broken apart a lot of old communities.

First of all FUWAMOCO’s love for Momoi really shines through in that stream. I don’t think I ever met them when Momoi was performing at various overseas conventions, but definitely remember them from the Momoi forum. Their journey since then has been impressive in both their effort and what they’ve achieved. Truly brings a tear to the eye, both figuratively, and then literally while going through waves of nostalgia on their stream. OS No Yes in the next setlist? 🙏😅

Momoi really means a lot to me too, if not for UNDER17 (and same origin story, specifically the DearS OP: Love Slave), I would not have my love for JPop today, I would not have attended various events, met essentially most of my friends today. That initial curiosity of “what is this song style, it sounds so… intriguing”, into finding an UNDER17 concert online, seeing the passion of the fans, hearing all of the awesome and unique songs, and well everything is history. How could one not fall in love? It’s amazing how a single song can impact the entire trajectory of one’s life.

I really lament the loss of the old community (and the entire earlier internet tbh). If anyone finds this, can we have some kind of momoist reunion? Resurrect the forum? Create a discord or something? Group visit to a Momoi concert in Japan?

#music #momoi #桃井はるこ #jpop

Discuss...

(obviously I meant to do this some months back, alas time is relentless…^^)

2024

So according to my last.fm, my top 5 listened tracks last year were:

  1. ME:I – Our Story

  2. ME:I – Hi-Five

  3. ME:I – Click

  4. Chappell Roan – Good Luck, Babe!

  5. .BPM – Boom Boom Bee

Now with hindsight, that might not be the way I would order the best songs of last year, so I’ll ramble here for a little bit…

Best song 2024

I don’t think there is any question on this, it is easily Chappell Roan – Good Luck, Babe! I can’t realistically say any of the other songs this year are better, or even came close. Everything, from the lyrics/message, the singing ability, and the composition itself (lyric relevant tempo change ftw!), all top class.

Honorable Mentions

…both super catchy!

JPop 2024

So ME:I obviously took up a lot of my listen time. I’ve never really watched audition shows before (unless you count Popstars with Hear’Say back in the day), however Produce 101 Japan The Girls was actually quite entertaining! I think the group really got the right people in it, variety of personalities, and the best singers (Tzuzumi & Ayane) from the show both got in. However, I don’t think they’ve had the best songs since their debut, they feel a bit over-produced, with some at times terrible lyrics (“太陽と my sweat” 🤢). They’re not bad songs, quite catchy in-fact, but certainly not the best songs of the year. Of their songs, I liked Our Story the most because it sounded like it suited their vocal range the most, not as high-pitched as their other songs, more “real”.

My favourite JPop song of 2024 though was actually .BPM – Boom Boom Bee! It has a nostalgic 2000’s Hello-Project JPop sound even though it’s not Hello-Project. The producer Okamura Yosuke is a genius! I hope they continue making more music. Check out: their .. other .. songs.

Honorable Mentions

KPop 2024

I don’t really listen to much KPop, but ILLIT – Magnetic is far too catchy! As was Tick-Tack (including the collab version with Ava Max).

Honorable Mentions

  • Katseye – Touch …not really KPop, but putting it here anyway, again very catchy. Shame their recent single is total garbage.

…and an early view of 2025…

(in-case I don’t do another one of these)

Early contender for song of the year is HANA – ROSE, seems rare these days to see strong vocals! Others worth a listen:

  • pinponpanpon – SO COOL …more crazyness! 😃
  • cosmosy – Lucky=One …I have no idea what is going on in the video, battle royal style meets magical girls, and then the song sounds like it should be a Eurovision song (Finnish producer it seems). Absolutely bizarre mixture, but the song is actually really good.
  • ME:I – Million Stars …this might be their best song. Continuing the trend of the other tracks being better than the single.
  • IRyS – DIAMOND GIRLFRIEND feat.MOTSU …I find most vtuber songs a bit forced, but wow this song. Not only is the song a better Initial D song than some actual Initial D songs, it also features the real motsu from m.o.v.e, and holy shit the video production quality, absolutely top notch.

#music #jpop

Discuss...

After having spent quite some time reflecting on the previous post, and playing through both The Talos Principle and its sequel (which touches similar themes), there may be two potential solutions.

  1. We could go down the route of free will being an illusion, in which case everything is easy to view as simply a passenger experiencing reality as it passes us by. Why get upset or worried by the future when this is exactly how it was meant to happen, there was simply no other outcome that the universe could ever accommodate. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the rest of the ride before eternal darkness.

  2. The other solution (as argued by the aforementioned Talos Principle) is that we have a moral duty to fight back, even when it all seems totally futile, even when a single person has no chance against the entire system.

The reason we have this moral duty goes somewhat like this:

  • Premise 1: There is a possibility that we are the only conscious beings in the entirety of the universe (I think that is highly unlikely, but it is a possibility). Or at the least, we are unique in our own consciousness even if there are others out there.
  • Premise 2: There is a beauty in parts of the universe being conscious, being able to experience itself.
  • Conclusion 1: Therefore, it is valuable for consciousness to continue to exist.
  • Premise 3: We are the only creatures capable of affecting the continued existence of our consciousness.

  • Conclusion 2: Therefore, since it is valuable for consciousness to continue to exist, and we are the only creatures capable of affecting its continued existence, we have a moral duty to ensure that it continues. All of us, every conscious being.

    We must therefore fight until the end, regardless of how hopeless it might seem, because the alternative is a universe without consciousness (or at least our unique consciousness).

As for how sound either of those arguments is, is certainly up for debate, and neither really help with the day to day woes. Maybe somewhere in that though is enough to get us through our remaining years!

(as an aside, I totally disagree with The Talos Principle’s derision of people choosing to disconnect from the world and live an off-grid simple life. While endless pursuit of progress can be a noble goal in terms of consciousness experiencing new things and having a greater understanding of existence itself… those that choose to be happy experiencing simple, safer, things ought to be able to co-exist without being looked down upon)

#philosophy #future

Discuss...

I feel like the biggest difference between growing up in the 90’s/early 2000’s compared to now is the sense of optimism about the future. Everybody felt hopeful that the future would be better than the past, that technological advancement would elevate the quality of life for everybody, that science would achieve great things beyond our imagination. What is there to be hopeful about the future of humanity today?

We are facing, on multiple fronts, at best a question-mark about our future, and at worst, a near total collapse of civilization (omnishambles is a word that should really make a comeback).

Climate catastrophe

  • Temperature extremes
    • Climate change will drive some places to become too hot to live, while others become too cold. Or, in the case of Western Europe, some sort of superposition of the two depending on the effects of the weakening AMOC.
  • Natural disasters – fire/water/wind
    • Storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, mudslides; extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and intensity, causing death, destruction, and mass migration events. This will continue to get worse.
  • Rising sea level
    • As polar ice, glacial melt, and other factors cause global sea-level rise, coastal populations will suffer. Currently habited areas will become uninhabitable, entire island nations will cease to exist, causing again, mass migration events.
  • Depletion of fresh/drinking water
    • Global freshwater levels continue to decline, either as a result of climate change, or over-extraction. Without investment in alternate sources such as desalination technology, there will not be enough available to sustain the current water usage of the world.
  • Depletion of topsoil
    • While claims on the timespan for total degradation of topsoil might be overblown, it is clear that intensive farming practices, combined with other factors, are degrading topsoil worldwide. This will reduce food yields, food security, and again could lead to famines, death, and mass migration events.
  • Collapse of biodiversity – particularly pollinators
  • Pollution – air, water, plastics, forever chemicals
    • Despite the feel-good effort of individuals sorting their waste into different coloured bins for collection in developed nations, recycling is not meeting global waste production; pollution is ever increasing. Plastic and other waste is increasingly shipped to poorer nations for disposal (out of sight, out of mind I guess!) and often ends up in the sea. Forever chemicals (PFAS) and microplastic are now ubiquitous in our drinking water, food, and other life. Air pollution continues to be a problem, and is getting worse. All of these cause illness, reduce lifespans, and are likely contributing to collapse in biodiversity.

Economic collapse

  • Wealth inequality
  • The façade of eternal growth
    • Companies are driven by eternal growth, economies rely on growth. What is the end state when there are diminishing returns in a world with finite resources?
  • Subscriptions everywhere, the cost of living worsening
    • Perhaps as a result of the problem with eternal growth, companies are turning to ever more desperate ways to squeeze more money out of people. Either the price goes up, the size goes down, or subscriptions are added to products or services that didn’t have one before. Everything is increasing in cost everywhere, from food, to utilities, to rent, and wages are not keeping up. Again, what is the end state here? What happens when people simply can’t afford the cost of living? Food banks will not supply us all.
  • Reduction in workers rights
  • Aging populations testing the economic limits of social security
    • Western countries face long-term population decline due to falling birth rates. While this alone may not necessarily be bad, the impact of a disproportionately aged population is negative. There is growing pressure on public health services, growing pressure on social security such as national pension funds. If there are not enough working people to fund (via tax) the increase in aged people using these services, then they will simply not function at all. Is the future of social security a world where retirement age is pushed ever further back, or simply no longer exists until you’re physically incapable of working anymore?
  • Key jobs (teachers, nurses, care workers) not paid well relative to other industries
    • Across western nations in both Europe and America, key worker salaries such as those of nurses/care workers and teachers have neither kept up with inflation, nor with jobs outside of those sectors. For such key jobs (especially taking into account the aforementioned aging population, and the yet to be discussed decline in education) there is no incentive for anybody today to choose those professions over for example, a career in a safe office job that often pays double, triple, or more, and has less of the stressful downsides. If we don’t incentivise or value these jobs, what will happen to society when nobody (not even migrant workers) wants to do them?

Social degradation

  • Algorithm induced polarisation and fractal social bubbles
    • Social media is causing a massive detrimental impact on society through its polarisation effects. It is a mutually reinforcing feedback loop of algorithms recommending content driving people into bubbles or echo-chambers that only consist of that content, which subsequently leads people to seek out such content driving further algorithmic polarisation. The effects of this are being felt everywhere socially. The obvious example in political elections and the inability for one side to even be able to have a productive conversation with the other, let alone reach bi-partisan agreement or compromise. The other obvious example is radicalisation into terror groups (either domestically or otherwise).
    • However, it also has more insidious consequences: as people are driven into ever more niche social bubbles, the very social cohesion of physical societies fall apart. The social norms in one group may not be social norms in another. The social topics or hobbies in one group may not be in another. If everybody has their own unique social bubble that predominantly socialises online and likely is not geographically located together, how can people that are geographically located together be expected to interact in a socially cohesive way if they share no overlap? The social makeup and shared culture of people is shifting to shared online spaces rather than in-person, yet we physically are not. It is, therefore, inevitable, that there will be gaps in offline social cohesion (or the social cohesion of “countries”) as a result.
    • As an aside (and this is probably a topic for an entire essay), I use “fractal social bubbles” here to refer to the ever reducing size, or increasing niche-ness of such bubbles. For example, if we compare social overlap with regard to tv shows over time. In the era of terrestrial TV where only a handful of stations existed, a particular show could be expected to enter the national social awareness, allowing for shared conversations (whether positive or negative). Then, with satellite/cable TV and the early days of online streaming, we could still see this on occasion with shows like Game of Thrones entering widespread global social awareness. However, fast-forward to today, and the proliferation of channels, platforms, and quantity of content is vast, and the fandoms smaller, such that even having conversations about something watched on a streaming platform is increasingly likely to be met with “I’ve not seen/heard of that” from those outside of your own social bubble. This may be one cause of increasing feelings of social isolation (that end up mutually reinforcing online social bubbles).
  • The post-truth era
    • It is clear we are entering into an era of post-truth, whereby the truth or actual facts spoken by our media, politicians, and even everyday people have become unimportant. Some are deceptive and outright lie or say things they know are false, but they don’t care, and the people that listen to them also don’t think truth is important. Where does this lead? What becomes of a society that shuns facts, science, and truth, and instead listens to only those that say what people want to hear, or say it in a way that makes people feel good?
  • Decreasing attention spans in a world trying to capture an ever slimmer chunk of your time
    • Everything wants your attention. Notifications, short-form content, endlessly scrolling feeds, recommended content, gamification, adverts everywhere, and all the other predatory tactics being used to keep you engaged. All of this is resulting in attention being divided into smaller chunks across more things, and ultimately a measurable decline in attention spans. How many books do you, personally, fully read (not listen to in audiobook form) today compared to 10 or more years ago? Who even knows what the long-term consequences of this will be, but it can’t be good to have an entire population of people struggle to digest long or deep content. How can people solve world problems if they can’t spend the time to deeply read, comprehend, and synthesise the underlying research. How can any problem get enough attention on it if it’s already forgotten by the next day because something else came and grabbed the attention (how often do we already see this in news cycles of world tragedies today)?
  • Downward trending technical capability of younger generations
    • Reports are surfacing both anecdotally, but also professionally that Gen Z are less technologically literate than previous generations, despite being raised natively around technology. There are even more worrying trends that suggest not only reading literacy, but also IQ is now in decline. If the current generation in power is unable to resolve current global issues, then we are relying on future generations to do so. A downward trend in capability makes this more difficult.
  • Aging populations with fewer people to care for them
    • Connected to both the lack of good pay for key workers, and the declining birth rate resulting in more aging people needing care, there is a looming time-bomb of too many aging people needing care, and not enough people to look after them. What happens then? We let them die? Perhaps supported by state sanctioned “assisted suicide”? To be clear here, when I say “them”, I mean “us”, who cares for us when we are old, when fewer people are being born, and even fewer of those are taking up roles in care work.

Technological advancement in opposition to the benefit of humanity

  • Enshittification everywhere

    • If there ever was a word to represent the current global zeitgeist, it is this. So much so that it has already been chosen as word of the year 2024 by the national dictionary of Australia.

    “the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

    Enshittification of everything, everywhere, affecting all services, particularly those we were previously happy with. Tied to the façade of eternal growth, corporate greed knows no bounds. What happens when they can enshittify no more? What happens when there is no more juice to be squeezed?

  • The value of AI

    • Let’s be honest, a lot of AI (maybe most of) is of no value to humanity. While there are some interesting use cases for large language models, serving up false information, telling people to put glue on their pizza, please die, citing false cases in legal filings, and the countless other falsehoods peddled by such systems are not the ones we need. Not to mention as tools being used by an entire generation to bypass learning by simply submitting generated answers to homework and essays (thus also contributing to the decline in education). Hallucinations and incorrect information are a fundamental part of these systems that will not be solved without some secondary fact checking tool. Yet corporations are rushing ahead to either convert everything to AI, or add AI to everything (presumably out of fear they will be left behind in the façade of eternal growth). What benefit does any of this bring humanity? Progress for the sake of corporate bank balances? Move fast and break things doesn’t work if the thing broken is the entirety of society.

  • Energy consumption of AI, Blockchain, and data in general

Political degradation

  • Risk of global thermonuclear war
    • Not a day goes by without yet another authoritarian, or genocidal warlord killing people or making threats on the global stage, and the more countries that get involved, the greater the risk of a global interconnected war (if the asymmetric one we are currently in doesn’t already count). And to top it off: nuclear risks are rising. Maybe all of the above issues will be moot if we wipe ourselves out in a nuclear apocalypse first.
  • The rise of authoritarian regimes
    • Authoritarianism is rising, potentially to the point that democracy will no longer be the politically dominant social system. The previously mentioned social and economic problems combined with extreme polarisation are leaving people feeling disenfranchised and left-out from traditional political systems. As a result people are inevitably choosing to vote for authoritarian regimes that promise them the world. Once authoritarian regimes are entrenched, reverting to a state of democracy will become near-impossible in the short-term. It is a one-way street that we are already on a path towards globally, and it will continue unless the underlying economic and social causes are solved.
  • Political systems incapable of solving complex problems (both global and local)
    • Finally, and truly the most important problem of them all. Everything is simply too interconnected, and too complex to be solved by individual governments. To solve global problems we need global coordination. Given the geopolitical relationships this is unlikely, and demonstrably so with the lack of actual action on global climate goals. Even within countries, seemingly simple problems are too complex to be solved by a single government focused on short-term actions i