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Read Vibe Check №8 A digital scan of the cover of the journal I used during August, 2025. It's a custom MIKIE NOTES 'Save Ferris' edition, featuring a scene of Matthew Broderick and Mia Sara taking in some fine art at the Art Institute of Chicago from the 1985 film Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Vibe Check №8

Notes from August 2025

TL;DR

Bidding adieu to Audible, the 2025 G1, and a used Honda Civic’s worth of action figures.

Office Revamp

I’ve decided I’m kinda sick of my current room layout & decor.

August 1, 2025. 11:54 AM

And that’s about all the thought that went into spending the next four weeks tearing apart my office. Must be something in that late-summer air, because I’ve just been feeling like I need a bit of a change recently. What better place to start than where I spend the majority of my time?

An angled view of my office (it's a corner in my bedroom lol) featuring a new 9-foot shelf above my desk and TV. I also have some cool posters for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Kill Bill, and Pulp Fiction from illustrator Joshua Budich above my desk.

So I switched up the posters above to these sweet Quentin Tarantino joints from Joshua Budich. By far the biggest addition here was adding 9-foot shelf that runs the length of a wall above my desk & TV, which adds a ton of functional space to keep things off my desk. I haven’t really gotten around to styling it but my goal is to fill it with plants and book and lamps, maybe a vase or two.

A POV of my current desk layout. There's a pair of white Yamaha monitor speakers framing a 27 inch Dell monitor and Apple Mac Mini, on a white monitor riser behind an orange desk pad. There's a set of LED

The hardest part of the revamp was saying goodbye to the couple hundred action figures I had on display. To be honest, they just don’t bring me the same joy that they once did. And I don’t regret the time, care, and money I put into collecting them, but it’s just not where I want to spend my energy anymore. I haven’t decided if I want to go through the trouble of finding a buyer, so for now they’re relegated to the basement.

A set of display cabinets filled with action figures I had in the corner of my room.
A FJÄLLBO sideboard from IKEA that now occupies that space.

So much room for activities.

I’m not entirely sure what to do with this new space. I’ll probably either add or extend the existing wall shelving here, or maybe do an artificial green wall to freshen that corner up. I’m also considering swapping out the sideboard for a small desk to give myself a second workspace for arts and crafts.

Having this extra wall space allows me to move my guitars from the floor to wall hangers to reclaim some floor space, and moving the sideboard from below my window to the opposite wall allows me to actually open the drawers below my desk. The overall feeling is that not only do I have a lot more functional space in here, it doesn’t feel nearly as enclosed as it used to. Still a work in progress but I’m really happy with the decisions I made.

Goodbye Forever, Audible

Making the switch back to Spotify last month had me excited to dive back into some audiobooks with the 15 hours of listening time you get on a premium plan, but I quickly became annoyed when I hit that allotment in like 5 days. And then it hit me like a ton of bricks; what if I just host my own audiobook server?

I’m no stranger to a self-hosted media library. I have an expansive Plex server already runnning on my Synology NAS that I’ve used pretty much every single day since I bought it back in 2023, filled with thousands of hours of movies, TV shows, and pro wrestling. For whatever reason, I just never really considered I could also add audiobooks into the mix.

A screenshot of the UI for Audiobookshelf, an open source self-hosted audiobook server solution.

Enter audiobookshelf. Not only does it offer a Plex-like experience where you can fetch metadata & hi-res artwork for any files you throw at it, you can also edit the chapter data info and generate .m4b files with a few clicks. I’ve mainly been using audiobookshelf to handle the tagging & converting of audiobooks, then importing the same library into Plex where I can serve it to my phone with Prologue. Overall, I’d say it’s really improved my reading experience, especially on nights where it’s hard to keep the eyes open, but harder to fall asleep. I’m curious to see if it increases my overall reading time per day.

G1 Season

It’s been bittersweet to watch the 2025 NJPW G1 Climax tournament come to a close. This year marks the first tournament in which I’ve been able to actually watch every single match. And while I wouldn’t say it’s been as strong a tournament as year’s past, I still enjoyed the hell out of spending three weeks worth of evenings watching it. I had picked Konosuke Takeshita to win before the tournament started and my sweet Cinnabon Boy did not let me down.

EVIL posing with the G1 Climax trophy.

Congratulations to this year’s winner of the G1. Photo unrelated.

Highlights

Here’s all the stuff I’ve been into this month:

Movies

Superman 2025

  • Directed by James Gunn
  • Loved
  • `4/10`
  • Watched on August 18, 2025

James Gunn did the impossible; he made me not hate Superman. Way more fun that it has any right to be. “Still punk as fuck”, I whisper as I shed a tear over a fictional superhero dog’s imprisonment.

TV

Alien: Earth 2025

Season 1

  • Created by Noah Hawley
  • Watched on September 19, 2025

I usually wait until I’m done watching a season before I review them here, but the first few episodes have hands down been the best TV I’ve watched this month. Just an incredible tribute to the original movies in the set designs and tone, a must watch for any fan of the first two movies.

Books

Kitchen Confidential 2000

Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

  • Written by Anthony Bourdain
  • Loved
  • `4.5/10`
  • Read on August 6, 2025

I had picked this up on my trip to Montreal last month and found it entertaining as hell, especially once I dug into the audiobook featuring the man himself narrating his various exploits in the way only Anthony Bourdain could.

Gone way too fucking soon, man. 💔

Music

STAR LINE 2025

by Chance the Rapper

  • Loved
  • `4/10`

This is technically only Chance’s second album after the disastrous 2019 debut in The Big Day, but it’s a stunning, unexpected return to form for one of the 2010’s most promising rappers, and a welcome one at that. I subjected myself to a lot of mid albums this month, but this is not among them. “And we back!”

Favourite Track: “Link Me in the Future”

YouTube

Some things don’t need saying, but we say them anyway. I’ve never been so instantly smitten to see Arsenal sign a player. And not just because Tottenham lost the one-horse race.

I enjoyed these other videos, and you might too:

Purchases

“Just remember ALL CAPS when you spell the man name.”

I knew it was an instant purchase the minute Hasbro announced this official DOOM cosplay helmet. Had to wait a few months for the pre-order to arrive, but it was well worth the wait. Sadly, it does not fit on my massive head, so I turned it into a smart lamp with a few LED strips.

A list of the other impulsive purchases I made this month that I don’t totally regret:

A self-portrait photograph of the author holding an SLR camera viewfinder to his eye, obsuring this face.
Mike Mali (@mikie.zip)

If you're reading this, it's too late please let me know any thoughts, ideas, questions, comments, concerns, or corrections at howdy@mikie.zip. It would literally make my day to hear from you. 🤠