Mia Pantoja (EmailOctopus) answers The Questionnaire

Edition No 18. Date: 15 September 026
If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend. You can sign up here.

The Questionnaire is a collection of six questions featuring interesting people and their recommendations for books, apps, and media.

Mia Pantoja is a Customer Success Specialist at EmailOctopus. Outside her job of making email marketing accessible, she is a multifaceted artist working on a mixed-media project as illustrator, writer and animator.

EmailOctopus is a British email marketing solution. It's one of the easiest ways to send emails and newsletters for small businesses, artists, non-profits and others.

They have a generous free plan with automations, templates, forms and where the first 2500 subscribers are free.

What is your favourite bookshop?

The first shop that comes to mind is the Cambridge University Press Bookshop in Cambridge, UK – my good friend who studies at King's College took me there. Lots of classics, novels, studies, you name it. All packed into 3 levels of nerdy goodness.

My second favourite is a bit more niche, hidden in the old alleys of Gdańsk's old town in Poland, called "Antykwariat Rejs" – it's an antique shop that only sells books. People can bring their old books to sell, and the place is super hard to walk through – the books are on the floor, on tables, and on walls. With each step you take, something is bound to fall. I'd spend hours there going through all these forgotten gems! A great way to spend the evening.

What piece of technology/gadget do you miss?

Devices created only for music-listening purposes. I miss when we cared more about sound quality! I remember having my tonsils removed as a kid, and being so excited about the surgery only because my parents promised me a Walkman if I did it. iPods, Walkmans, cheap mp3 players – each had a memorable design, distinct functionality, and personality, but one purpose. Technology nowadays tries to give you everything in one device – I'm not a fan of that. Good thing my Discman still works, and that we still print CDs!

What is the app or software you cannot live without?

Definitely Shazam, the song-finding app. As a huge music-lover, I'd feel naked without it downloaded on my phone. There were so many situations in my life where I just wished I knew the song playing at the grocery store, in a cafe, or even at a concert I tagged along to.

The second one is Merlin Bird ID – an app that identifies birds from their songs or from photos. It's not as reliable as Shazam is for music, but it's still genuinely useful for fellow bird watchers. The reliability issue comes down to the app's own data: a while back, thousands of people misidentified common birds as rare or as native to their region, and those errors skewed the species-detection algorithm. Picture someone spotting a flamingo in the middle of Hyde Park and logging it as native to the area – that's the kind of noise it's had to work around. So it's worth taking your results with a grain of salt.

What’s in your to-be-read pile?

Oh, quite a lot. I'm currently reading House of Leaves by Danielewski, and it'll take me a while to finish because it's a hard read.

The next book on my list is La Araucana by Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, Chile's national epic. However, I've yet to get my hands on the English version, so I'm learning Spanish intensively to read it in its original language.

Next, I've got The Cossacks by Tolstoy, which I never finished, then the infamous Blood Meridian by McCarthy, and... Twilight: New Moon by Stephanie Meyer, but I only read Twilight when autumn comes, I don't touch the books in other seasons. If you know, you know.

On the left Cambridge University Press (image via Mia P); on the right Antykwariat Rejs (image via Antykwariat Rejs Instagram)

How are you taking notes on things you find interesting?

Chaotically. I'm usually all over the place. I use Notion for most of my writing, notes, and art projects, but sometimes I wake up at 2 am and need to write down my dream or a weird, scrambled idea, so I use my built-in mobile Notes app.

Other times, I send myself a 'note to self' on my messaging app instead. And probably half of my writing and ideas live in iCloud notes since I switched from Apple to Samsung a while ago, but I use them more as an archive of old thoughts to satisfy my data-hoarding needs.

What’s the last piece of media that made you feel something?

A week ago, I finally got to see Spike Lee's film titled 'Do the Right Thing', after hearing about it in a YouTube video about cultural stereotypes and racial hierarchy in the United States. I recommend it to everyone who wants to understand how it feels to experience systemic discrimination firsthand in American society. It made me feel so many different things: anger, grief, hope, confusion, indignation, helplessness, sympathy. We finished the movie in silence, just sitting there with my family until the credits finished rolling. It felt like a funeral – the silence was heavy with sorrow, but you could sense hints of wishing that the systems of oppression the movie was about would disappear one day, giving us all some hope.

Disclaimer: This newsletter uses EmailOctopus as an email engine. EmailOctopus was not part of the editorial process.