hey it's Kishore and these are some of my favorite things in 2020. uh this has undoubtedly been
a very weird year so my choices this year aren't usually in the category that i talk about like
the things i love like cosplay and live events all of those were kind of pushed off to the side
with a pandemic so i'm trying to just give you an assortment of things that made my
life a little bit more livable this year i'm going to start off with something i kind of mentioned a
couple years ago which was the koa air mega air filter given the wildfires in california i found
that air filter to be indispensable because of just the particulate matter and there's so many
days uh living here in san francisco we couldn't go outside i got a smaller one this is the koa
mighty air that i use in my office and this one i really put through the paces this year especially
with the wildfires it was the air quality was very bad and i actually got a particulate
air detector to measure what the how much this actually reduced pm 2.5 concentrations in my house
once i started running it and it was incredible within minutes you could see a marked reduction
this one even though it's a relatively small size it works really great in bedrooms and i have this
one in my office it moves a tremendous amount of air but even though it moves a ton of air
it's actually pretty quiet and i love the eco function because it has
just a really simple indicator of the air quality and it spins up or spins down based
on that air quality i can't recommend this enough and it was wire cutters choice this year as well
i also have been wearing a mask pretty much every day for this year
and i have a love-hate relationship with all things mass mostly because my glasses pretty much
endlessly fog regardless of what i'm wearing um but i found the one that i love the most is from
a group called vog mask they make these really brilliant designs and these are are n95 integrated
with a fabric design on the front i really love the one that they made for kids that has
um the gamer kind of effect on the front and i use it in conjunction with fog away which is a
spray that i put on my lenses that i rub in and just wipe off with a microfiber and i haven't
had as much trouble with fogging on my lenses as even when i go on short little jogs in the park
it's still not perfect but this is the best system i have and having it be an n95 in addition to
being a fabric mask for for the pandemic has has proven invaluable i have a couple book
recommendations first up i think most people know i have a love affair with all things batman the
animated series i got my mondo mr freeze figure this year i even made myself a cover art book
from all the batman the animated series events but this is the book that i'm gonna recommend it's a
it's from the phantom city creative collection and it has a forward from pauldini and it goes through
the stories of of the cover art and posters for all the episodes uh in the entire animated
series there's some really good alternative poster designs that you can see in here
my favorite is the almost got them episode and you can see a couple different variants there the
amazing set of art if you're a fan of the series like i am this is a must-have for your collection
and the second book i have to recommend is all we can save um my friend ayanna elizabeth johnson and
her collaborator catherine wilkinson put together a compendium of essays all by women all by women
that are work in climate and these essays are really paint a hopeful picture towards the future
of how we can address climate change and one of the things that i love about the series is
it came together with this one quote i'm going to read it here my heart is moved by all i cannot
save so much has been destroyed i have to cast my lot with those who age after age perversely with
no extraordinary power reconstitute the world this is one of those books on climate change that gives
me hope about our future uh and there's poems there's essays there's musings about how we can
really work together in our future and i think it's really encapsulated by that phrase all we
can say lastly i have a fun recommendation i spent a lot of time this year playing board games and
doing puzzles with my family at home and i can't recommend enough liberty puzzles they're maker
of all wood jigsaw puzzles and they have an incredible assortment of designs and different
levels of difficulty they make their puzzles in colorado and what i love about these puzzles is
that there's such a diverse spectrum of different puzzle types as i mentioned the difficulty levels
vary but there's something just really really enjoyable about a wood jigsaw puzzle it's really
satisfying when they click together these are really popular puzzles i think there's about
a month waiting list just to order one right now they're trying to ramp up production but this was
easily the most satisfying puzzle that my family put together this year and easily kind of calm me
down of with all the news that was going on so those are just a few recommendations an unusual
year for sure but these all made my life a little bit easier and a little bit happier this year