Dan Ballard

On the Merits of Distro Package Managers vs Language Package Managers

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been journaling more and this is something that was percolating in my head the last bit of time and I finally dumped to there. It seemed adequate enough to then further dump to my blog, so it’s presented more as thoughts in progress than a strong argument

C never had a package manager, and it’s always been a bit hard to include packages, usually need to get the precompiled and supplied library (dll, so) and a header file with defs, link against it etc. On windows and MacOs that also meant shipping all your dep libs with your app. In practice we saw a pretty low ceiling on the amount of libraries C apps would depend on, and they’d also skew to OS supplied support libraries like widgets and audio and etc.

There was where Linux distros shined with their package managers, and in part why I loved them. Every library you could imagine and it’s dev parts was just a package manager command away, your whole Linus OS + package manager WAS the C library package manager. And everything was managed and worked together, you didn’t even have to worry about version management.

Newer languages tho started inventing their own package managers. Java, more awkwardly, and then newer ones since, Python, JS, Go, Rust, etc, now they all have their own package managers. I suspect this was motivated by two factors: devs on non Linux operating systems wanting this, and in some cases second, by wanting to have updates incorporated faster than Linux distros would update, wanting to “go fast”, which, I can kind of understand if you’re on Debian stable and it’s updates every 2 years.

This results in different tensions, app developers are now more used to being able to use all the latest packages, stable or not, and weather they are writing user applications or server side things. The reasons Debian stable is so fixed and “slow” is exactly to provide a rock solid and stable server experience. Writing stable server apps with all the latest barely checked deps still makes me a bit itchy and uncomfortable, but we’re seeing more of it.

As a result of all of this, languages now all having their own package managers, we’re seeing a tension with Linux distros and their package maintainers. Standard language community advice is always ignore and by pass distro packages and use the langauge package manager to get deps. And that’s when there’s a choice at all. Languages like Go with no library support don’t even offer the choice. As a result I think I’ve seen chatter that more package maintainers are getting tired of even trying to offer an in disto set of libraries if no one wants that, and the community perpetually wants to apply pressure on them to update faster than they’d be comfortable with.

Following from this, I think we’re seeing a bit of a loss of value to some extent of the Linux distro package manager. In it’s peak days, for me, my whole distro moved lock step as a single development environment and it felt glorious. Now we’re increasingly moving away from that and it provides a base, and each project now has it’s own package manager the manages all it’s deps, and one can work on multiple projects at the same time all with different versions of even shared dependency libraries. The dev environments are each swelling in size and the host OS is shrinking.

This is also walking side by side with the increasing push to containerize apps with their dependencies and not depend on the host OS for anything, build the entire app on your machine once and ship it as is, a bit more like app installs on Windows and MacOS have always been.

The efficiency optimizing part of my brain that worked out a lot in the 90s and 2000s when resources felt more scarce was really proud of Linux distros on this front. One copy of all needed dependancy share libraries system installed and shared by all apps should def get memory usage to an optimal low, while Windows and MacOS apps all carrying potentially many duplicate copies of the same libraries around taking more space on disk and more space in memory just seemed, inefficent and less optimal.

And yet we’ve been steadily moving away for that coordination on Linux now for decades and very much a part of me mourns that and feels nostalgic for it and misses it.

Weather or not in the big picture that is fair or “correct” tho even I’m undecided. Some of the arguments that could fall on the line of “we have more Ram and harddrive space now” just feel like echos of Moore’s law excusses for inefficency, and now that Moore’s law has kind of run its course and we’re starting to hit more limits and rate of growth of resources has slowed, that feels not just invalid but wrong. If we’re gonna want to get more out of our systems going forward, it may increasingly come from reclaiming various efficiency gains we’ve been ignoring increasingly for the last 2 decades.

There’s some arguments about wanting to use the latest stuff, I’m not a huge fan of those. There’s some arguments that containerization and etc can provide more security, also not entirely sold on those. Some of those arguments from certain crowds have tried to also then argue as far as “since we want to containerize apps so far, we must also give up unified customizable desktop themeing” and that’s just not an argument I’m going to concede. Whimsy and flexibility must always be a part of computing and user choice matters.

There’s a part of me too that appreciates that having to be aware of supporting not always the newest libraries but the most widely shipped versions does potentially create a little more burden for developers, but more so ones currently not doing that and transitioning to it than those already trying. But it gets to a gnarly argument. I do like coordination between works. I like that apps on Linux for instance can work in multiple Desktop Environments. We’re seeing some break down now with Wayland and modern GTK and QT, Gnome apps increasingly insisting on drawing their own and different window decorations. I’m not against apps having the option to do that, I was a fan of winamp back in the day, but at the same time, broadly, I like the option myself to have uniformity now, and with Gnome apps refusing that, they stick out, and I’m increasily migrating off them. Personal choice. Which is all kind of swirling around, I do like coordination and cooperation, and I think as out lined above real gains can come from that but I’m not quite sure I’m willing to too strongly say we should have distro managed deps for all things. Just that I with perhaps it was not a continuingly less chosen option? I’d love to see more apps maybe play a bit more towards stability and shared resources, but, it is potentially some kind of OS archetecural taste aesthetic on my part more than any strongly backed technical and social argument. I have my opinions as outlined above but I’m not super confident in their strength.

Generating Android 16kb Page Size Libraries from Go

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 10:45:00 +0000

Google is requiring all new submissions to playstore have 16kb page size support/alignment. This is I assume for new devices anyways so is what we should all be doing and aiming towards. If you have an android native project, just using newer SDKs should do it. If you’re compiling some C code for android to bundle, using NDK 28 or later “should” take care of it for you.

However at Open Privacy we build Cwtch in a combination of Go lang for the protocol library and Flutter and Dart for the UI. One would think Go also being a Google project would seamlessly support this, but that is not so much the case, in part because gomobile is still an ‘x’ project and not official, and that is what Open Privacy has been using to package our Go library for Android.

However, all the pieces are there, just took a little collecting to assemble.

I grabed the latest gomobile, ([email protected]), and NDK 28.1.13356709 to start. Gomobile is flexible on what NDK it works with, so for now it’s minSDK is still 16, however NDK 28 needs to target 21 and above, so a crucial step was adding -androidapi 21 to the gomobile bind compiler call. The other required piece AFAICT was adding env CGO_LDFLAGS="-O2 -s -w -Wl,-z,max-page-size=16384". The -O2 was just maintaining what go env said the default CGO_LDFLAGS had. -s should strip sumbol table info, which probably happens later anyways, but was suggested and didn’t seem like a bad idea. -w “inbibits warning messages” so take your pick. The important part is -Wl,-z,max-page-size=16384. -Wl passes linker options, the ‘-z’ appears to be a strictness add to linking causing errors on symbols it can’t find to link to at linktime rather than later at runtime. And finally -max-page-size=16384 is the important option -Wl passes to the linker telling it to make bigger 16kb pages. The result should look something like:

env CGO_LDFLAGS="-O2 -s -w -Wl,-z,max-page-size=16384" gomobile bind -androidapi 21 ...

To confirm, you can unzip your .aar and use llvm-objdump. For example:

> unzip cwtch.aar
> llvm-objdump -p jni/arm64-v8a/libgojni.so | grep LOAD
    LOAD off    0x0000000000000000 vaddr 0x0000000000000000 paddr 0x0000000000000000 align 2**14
    LOAD off    0x0000000000169db0 vaddr 0x000000000016ddb0 paddr 0x000000000016ddb0 align 2**14
    LOAD off    0x000000000050bd20 vaddr 0x0000000000513d20 paddr 0x0000000000513d20 align 2**14
    LOAD off    0x0000000000770e70 vaddr 0x000000000077ce70 paddr 0x000000000077ce70 align 2**14

What you are looking for is the align to be 2**14 which is 2^14 which is 16384, or 16kb alignment. By default we usually get 2**12 which is 4096 or just 4kb page size alignment.

If you use Docker for your CI and builds Open Privacy managers the container openpriv/go-cross-compiler which with the new 2025.09 tag comes preloaded with Go 1.25, Android SDK 35, NDK 28, gomobile, arm8 gcc cross compiler, and mingw for compiling to Windows. The Dockerfile is in Open Privacy’s gitlab for inspection and personal adaptation. You can inspect our final build commands in the Cwtch autobindings Makefile and you can see the simple invocation and use in autobinding’s .drone.yml CI file. (Note the gomobile init is now deprecated and unneeded as it’s done in container build and will be deleted from our CI steps shortly after publication).

Jekyll and Multiple Sites With Target

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 09:37:00 +0000

I have a problem where I look at software and want to add onion service support to it because they have a lot of useful properties including making self hosting from residential easier, and just generally being a good tool for making some software more p2p capable. And making distributed and p2p software is another life long interest of mine.

To that end, I’ve been hosting this site, made with Jekyll on an onion service as well as danballard.com for a while now and wanted to “add onion service support to Jekyll” (along with a long list of other software…). What does that mean for Jekyll tho, a static site generator?

Well the conclusion I came to is that I might like to have some content on the onion service version of the site only. I can even envision a potential future where the open web site gets paired down to a landing page directing folks to the onion service where all the content becomes hosted.

How did I enable this? Well I wrote a small patch for Jekyll that adds a new optional config option to the site _config.yml called target. It is set to “default” by default. The same option has been added to frontmatter for content, and defaults to matching the site’s value. What this means is that by default, the site generates the same. If you want specific content for a specific site, add target: onion to that content, and create a second site config, like `_config_onion.yml’:

url: http://danbal6a2lkho4arcx2dpa6ykg6fyvukeoqowjlgs3uzmt6wrz4s54id.onion
destination: _site_onion
target: onion

and then generate a second site (which will appear in the configured _site_onion) with:

bundle exec jekyll build --config "_config.yml,_config_onion.yml"

Jekyll configs stack and override previous versions.

I’ve done just this, you can see that the new page onion-test.html is only available on the onion service version of this site, generated from the same codebase:

You can also adjust content inside the page using Jekyll templating now:

{% if site.target == "default" %}
Site target: Default
{% elsif site.target == "onion" %}
Site target: Onion
{% endif %}

Demo:

Site target: Default

You Can Too (The Code)

Having done this work, I obviously want to share it, so I’ve created a PR with the Jekyll project but I’m not actually sure it is something they will want to adopt and accept.

So if you’d like it now, I’m hosting it in a post 4.4.1 branch and also as a patch file you can apply, as I have, to a checked out 4.4.1 branch on my server

0001-Add-target-config-setting-and-front-matter-variables.patch

Then in your site’s Gemfile change:

gem "jekyll", "~> 4.4"

gem "jekyll",  :path => '~/src/jekyll'

adjusting the path to where ever you have checked out the jekyll repo and applied the patch. You’ll need to do this locally and on your server if you build on it rather than rsync to it.

Coping with Impossible Situations

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 12:07:00 +0000

Originally stream of conscioused on social media and reposted here with minor edits and formatting.

I’m still trying to recover from a friend telling me about the “tech lead” at their security job who wouldn’t merge my friend’s Merge Request because “why does it have all these functions? i can’t read it, just make it flat and put it in one big try catch? here I redid it for you, see with out the function definitions its 8 lines shorter so it’s more efficient”. Audience, it was 4 functions. The lead demanded an 8am meeting to have my friend walk them through it line by line because they couldn’t read it or understand it.

Also they maintain an internal tools library that is like 3000 lines of flat functionless code in one big try catch.

Also separately when my friend had another MR for deploying some automation to their fleet, it was blocked cus they had a one liner that dumped data to CSV files and the lead said “ah my library has a function for that, use that instead”. And then it failed to work, because, would you believe it, if you could parse their code that my friend suggested was so deeply nested and functionless it stretched to the far side of their widescreen monitor, the tech lead’s save to CSV function had a UI prompt, so the entire fleet was paused waiting for UI input to save.

It’s been a minute since I’ve heard of someone so incompetent failing up enough to manage other people. Students in entry level programming classes are subject to industry standard linters and yet this work place and lead is not. And the claim is somehow I guess that their work is security and not dev so … somehow that’s ok?

I really… despair. No shock there’s been some churn there. Told my friend to try and get their brand newest manager to adopt decade old industry best practices of linting code and that might just… solve this otherwise maybe impassible problem, other wise enjoy not getting work done or moving on.

And this dovetails with my learned philosophy that honestly many big corporations are unserious about doing any work. management will scream till they have ulcers they want work done, but then leave you in impossible situations. like this where the lead in charge of approving code has the comprehension and understanding of less than any first year student, less than.. nothing. actively code illiterate and labouring under a bunch of misapprehensions like “functions are inefficient” and “less lines of code is efficient”.

Or like some of my experiences where the designs we were given were impossible based on the reality we were in, all the teams we needed support told us to fuck off till next year, and over time, the churn of upper management politics and decisions resulted in perpetually monthly scrapping of plans before we could launch a thing and new plans being assigned that it was clear that weather we worked at all or not the results were now identical, so we just, didn’t. Came in late, long coffees, long lunches, long afternoon coffees and taking off early.

But being in an unserious work environment is still sadly very draining cus everyone above you and often most of your peers are all play acting like everything is the most serious and expecting you to play along too.

I read books on computer team management from different decades:

and as a bonus

And basically we were doing chapter 1 stuff wrong across the board, across all the books, across all the decades.

How can any place that operates against the collected knowledge and studies and research of decades really be serious? about doing anything?

But then the question comes: what does an individual do when this is most work places and most of society?

We have decades of research on how to organize well to produce optimal results in so many levels, ways, places, with such a variety of goals. And yet most of society ignores it all and pursues paths, methodologies and strategies known well to be suboptimal if not down right guaranteed to fail.

We have a bad society, and I don’t really know how to live in it or what I’d have to do if I had to live in it more.

But that sort of is the answer, find little pockets of slighter sanity out side it.

I left big corporate life to start my own nonprofit, and now am in my second tech nonprofit run by folks a little more idealistic and in some ways grounded and not committed to management styles that are obvious paths to failure and misery.

But I’m lucky. And weird. I’m in privacy and security, but still a dev (so kind of a the weirdo at a lot of the security events I’ve found myself attending in the last year), and I’m now approaching the point where half and shortly over half my career in tech will have been at privacy focused nonprofits, and not at for profit companies.

So I’ve somewhat found my immediate answer and am living it as long as I can, but even from here the broader question remains, what does anyone do when it’s most of society, and the peak of this is centred in a country where we’re starting to really see some, unoptimal results now breaking out everywhere. One can get a little distance, but full escape? on this small planet? that’s a harder question.

Perhaps I’m in a mood. I’ve just finished two books, Exordia, and The Light Brigade, and they are both asking Some Questions. and the answers I am seeing them lean towards seems to be “you can’t save a system doomed and committed to failure”, you can just try and get outside the blast radius, try and survive, try and help those close to you survive, and mourn all the rest. And that’s pretty grim, but also still more than anything else I’ve seen, which has mostly been just “and die trapped inside futilely trying to change a system from within that can’t and won’t be changed and is terminal”

2024 in review

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The last year was good for me but tiring. Been enjoying some time off doing just about nothing to charge up for the new year. To that end, as much as I like doing these, gonna whip through it with some briskness.

General

As I said, the year was good to me, as much as could be, but tiring. A lot going on.

Direction and trends wise, it continues to be clear that for app development, despite my grumblings about the platform, Android is big, and it’s where the users are. Both Tor Browser and Cwtch appear to have way more android users than any other platform. Thankfully Tor has been taking advantage of my past bits of experience with Android and kept me on Android work this year. And I’m becoming grateful. Didn’t intend to add “Android dev” to my long list of titles but it only makes sense going into 2025 and beyond to lean in so I’m glad work is feeding me those opportunities. At some point I may even feel comfortable with the title, but I feel I have plenty more to learn and master first. So that’s a goal for 2025.

Work / Tor

As I said, mostly Android related work. We got the new tor bootstrap launch screen lanuched in the first half of the year, large in part to our actual android dev’s work, but I def helped out. I handled the firefox-android rebase from firefox 115 to 128 over the summer and that was a lot of work. And in the fall I’ve been working on something else android for something new.

Work / Cwtch

Due to funding or lack there or the entire team is now volunteers with no paid staff, so work has definitely slowed. Still, we launched our new themes revamp and custom theme loading at the start of the year and refined it all across the year. Cwtch is as sharp looking as ever. Lots of bug fixes and small improvements, which can be seen in the changelog. We also partook in the Tor State of the Onion Community Day.

For 2025, I still have packaging goals left over from last year, and then I’d like to spend what time I have diving into performance improvements for android and helping our new managed groups get into the UI and more usable.

This work always feels needed and more, and this year is no different. It was nice to see in 2024 some volunteers emerge and contibute some code fixes too, so hopefully we’ll see more of that going into 2025. Thanks all!

Media

And here’s what I’m here for, listing all the media I consumed in the year and dropping some notes about it. This year was notably poor on the reading front, I am hoping to improve that in 2025 but we’ll see.

Before I get into the individual reviews, a small epiphany I just had was, part of the reason I seem to be enjoying rewatching older shows, well one of the many reasons, which also include episode counts being way higher, is that there were more shows where people got to be excellent at their cool jobs. Star Trek, Star Gate, etc, excellent smart people excelling. I look for that still in new shows but it’s so often mared by newer genre conventions forcing interjection of more interpersonal drama into everything and that bogging down, occluding, or just replacing characters being excellent at their work and instead their work is a back drop for a drama, and too often, one where characters are down right stupid, low EQ, etc. See my end of year notes on Mr and Mrs Smith for just the latest example. But also we can see that change when after Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis, we got Stargate Universe, and OMG the stupid interpersonal drama. It’s been a long forming trend but now it’s nearly everywhere.

TV

Lost (s4-6 rewatch): continuing from the end of 2023’s start of rewatching Lost, I finished the last 3 seasons at the start of 2024. I’m looking at the point form notes I took and briefly, season 4 seemed fine and enjoyable still, but s5 is where it started to turn, I wrote “both halfs of the story seem like filler”. I think this is when the character driven nature of the show that fans loved started to fall aways as characters just danced like marionettes from one contrived plot point to the next. And then season 6. I have a lot of angry notes that I think boil down to they just kept adding more unexplained shit that didn’t make sense and was used to “explain” previous mysteries but didn’t. And just frustration with the end game they decided to drive us to and just being unsatisfied at best with parts and just annoyed and angry bored by others.
Yellow Jackets Season 2: Pretty fun. Interesting to see how bad it was getting for the team in the past. I’m a little unsure if they had this fully planned out before they started or if they are just sorta feeling their way through this. Curious to see where it goes. The present time felt just a bit contrived I think but still fairly character driven. Will be back for season 3 to see where this goes but I feel they may be running out of material and hope they opt for ending it sooner than dragging it out.
Burn Notice: I rewatched most of Burn Notice. There’s a show that def didn’t have a plan and just got more ridiculous and nonsensical as it went on. I don’t believe I could even bring myself to watch the final season. Michael just makes less and less sense as a top spy which his goal to get “cleared” and “work for the good US gov” as we see season after season that the US gov spy shops are just shell games of corruption and he sure never was going “good” work and after all he’s learned why he could see some hypothetical optimal good to go work for. Rather than just throw in with any of a dozen parties. Michael’s main goal just loses all sense and becomes incoherent as we learn more about his world, life, work, and the agencies and etc. He had no growth as a character even under the weight of seasons.
Hustle: Tried a few episodes of this but it just felt so much like a “proto leverage” it made me want to watch that more than anything. They had a “lose” code instead of the Leverage team’s more concrete focus. And the heists often had a kind of wonky bit when it felt the writers were a bit stuck. If I’d watched this first 2 decades ago I’d prolly have enjoyed it more but I gave up after about a season.
The Stranger: I’m a fan of Hannah John-Kanen from her work on Killjoys so followed her into this miniseries. It was fine, reasonably intriguing. A mess of overlapping incidents to untangle. She was sadly not in it as much as I might have liked but oh well.
Origin: Streaming service freedom to be 50-60m is a double edged sword, lot of episodes feel slow and long and could be edited to be faster. The Lost style flash backs don’t provide enough character info, and aren’t as related to episode by episode dilemma. They do show some of old earth but not enough. Killed my favourite character in ep 8 so that was a bummer. Still the show had a little potential. Some ok characters but the last episode set up of the parasite learning about being human, compassion and connection, not killing and heading to the planet warnings coming from and the company knowledge… I’d have watched a season 2 if it wasn’t cancelled for understandably not being that good.
Beacon 23: JFC what to say. Ok. I came to it cus Lena Heady was in it, and I loved her performance in it. Her entire physicality was wonderful to watch, she had a wolf’s confidence and loped through scenes amazingly. Just really cool to see a middle age lady with such quiet physical confidence and command. Sadly her performance is the only good thing about this show. It’s got great ideas and aspirations and just shits the bed with them all. Starting by killing of Lena’s character at the end of s1 and then killing the other main character by the end of s2 with a piss take fake out where we think he could be ok and are following what we think is him trying to survive, but he’s ALREADY dead and it’s just someone else’s dream. I think some writer thought they were clever for that but omg wow no. And now if they want to do a season 3 they have 0 of their two main characters from the start of the show. Good luck with that. It’s a short show with just like 16 episodes and yet manages to be staggeringly time wastey with them. I found this show so frustrating for the potential it had that it kept squandering.
Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles (rewatch): Origionally: Show was good. I’m even more sad now it was cancelled. Unlike the other 3 T3 attempts, this one is probably advantaged by being a show and having more time to breath and explore characters and concepts but that is by no means a guarantee that would happen. But it did, and I think well. Exploring more the isolation and loneliness John might fall into, Sarah’s difficulties in raising essentially a teen messiah. Adding new characters was good and went well, I’m a sucker for AI in tv so Cameron was interesting at times. And as the show ends on a cliffhanger we get some good reveals for even more how the show was diverging from each movie attempt to follow T2, by showing more factions emerging and new successive timelines emerging with ppl being sent back from futures earlier time travellers don’t entirely recognize. All in all some fun stuff. And checking Rotten Tomatoes and other reviews I see I’m far from the only one to rank this as the next best entry in the franchise, by a lot in most cases.
Forever (rewatch): I know, it’s essentially a cop show with the format of “cop + $Weird partner” but in this one the focus is on an immortal of 240 years who doesn’t know why he’s like this working in the morgue and less by logic and more by TV tropes ends up working with a cop. The things I like about this corney show is it shows a few things we don’t get treated to too often in immortal fiction (vapires esp). Instead of showing him falling for some teen, he did fall for the love of his life, in the 1940s, and via flashbacks we see him aging and him not, and her eventually leaving him after being mistaken for mother and son on an anniversary dinner. They also had a kid, whos now 70s and appears much older than his dad. Just some fun quirky interactions we’re rarely treated too. Also the villain is played by the excellent Burn Gorman, who’s a 2000 year old immortal who’s just discovered our main character and is initially confused by his lack of disdain for humans till he realizes how “young he still is”. Just one season, then was cancelled, because, it’s not that good and had some pretty inconsistent characterization, like our lead’s son Abe, who most episode writers use as a stock 60s beatnik/protester son in references they talk about such as his protesting, 60s counter culture enjoying and partaking in etc, until inexplicably one pro military writer gives us a flash back to Abe proudly enlisting for Vietnam and hanging out with his old army buddys.
Imposters (rewatch): A Heist show with some twist, and absolutly tons of personal drama, but it’s not piss poorly written and is foundational to the show (three marks of a grifter catch up with her and then get drawn into her world). It’s fun.
Dark Angel (rewatch): Originally: Rewatching Dark Angel and it is weird the shift between season 1 and 2. I blew through season 1. They had good elements like the tension between Max and Logan, and not just romantically, but Logan’s overworking idealism vs Max’s survival instinct. They had a good story generating engine with Max being on the run, mysteries about Manticore, the other escapees etc, and it created tension and pressure. Episodes had little twists you didn’t always see coming. Then season 2 comes, Manticore is gone, Max and Logan can’t touch, and all the others have escaped. But Max isn’t looking for the rest of the original 12, even tho there’s no one ostensibly hunting her and them (I know White will emerge later this season), but yeah, the episodes are suddenly dragging. There’s no threat, no mystery, each episode is just a weird slice of life now? We’re not even really doing Eyes Only work for Logan. We even have so little idea what to do this season 2 we have a whole episode that is a dream. Even when an episode has an A plot, sometimes it’ll be so anemic the B plot will take up as much if not more time and I’ll get done scenes on the B plot only to get back to the A plot and have forgotten it was even happening cus pacing and tension are just… gone. Real weird and disappointing but it sounds like network interference (Fox) and show runner change just murdered the vibe, and style of the show and ejected and blunted the story. I can see why there would have been a ratings drop and then it got cancelled cus I’m not even half way into season 2 and it’s dragging so hard it feels like it’ll be hard to complete. Which is a shame since I blew through season 1 happily and felt pulled through it.
Evil (season 1 and half of season 2): I’ve seen some Good Wife and 3 seasons of Good Fight so its fun to see the King couple in their most “experimental” show, channeling some 90s XFiles vibes in an updated format. Also Michael Emerson is a delight in his easily most villainous role. Got distracted mid season two, need to get back to this and see where it goes. Tho that can be the challenge of modern shows. 90s shows were super episodic and could breath and didn’t have to have a destination. Modern tighter more serial shows kinda all get you in with a promise of a destination but then may not have one? As modern shows go this is actually more pleasantly episodic, but it’s still lightly in a weird place that made falling out of it possible. But I prolly will resume :)
The Strain: Started really interestingly. Vampirism as an infection, through the lens of a main character working in public health and infections for the federal government. Vampirism with nearly zombie underlings. Def some of the grossest vampires we’ve seen. And some fun cast members. Lots of good ingredients. And then in the season 1 finale they had the big bad on the ropes but somehow then shit the bed and let it escape just so the show could go on. And on it went, deeper into interpersonal drama and etc as the hope of actually defeating the big bad faded into the distance and we just had to roll on in this new status quo. And so I quit a few eps into season 2 as it lost all momentum for me.
Creamerie: A New Zealand comedy about a dystopic gendercide. Some pretty funny bits and fun. I think they retconed in transmen in season 2, so better late than never. And otherwise some commentary in the world building on stereotypes for both genders.
Doom Patrol: I was intrigued by the off kilter pacing and characterization and far back starting point in character development it started on (they are all disaster messes), but as the show went on, there was a lot less character growth than I’d have hoped and some of the characters I swear were worse by the final season. I enjoyed it for a while but the last season felt a bit of a chore to finish.
Twin Peaks: Finally watching this oldie and cult classic and I can kinda see why. It’s an odd mix of soap opera, horror, detective show, and supernatural show with some social commentary that provides a pretty unique vibe. The initial mystery wrapping mid season 2 was a little surprising and it sure seems like it left them off kilter too? Some of the character arcs after that went super no where, but as the season progressed it seemed to be starting to find it’s footing again, but then was sadly cancelled. I liked the prequel movie ok, kind of some genre shift and I’m not usually a fan of prequels as they show stuff we already know and have imagined and usually do a worse job pinning it down. This was ok as they go. And then there was “The Return” season 3. I think I get what it was maybe going for but just cus it had a conceit doesn’t mean it wasn’t boring and unfun (“hey that’s the point” lol). Still, it had it’s moments and banger lines “Fix your heart or die”.
Lower decks s5: More fun with the gang. Best modern Star Trek. Only sad it’s cancelled.
Devils Hour s2: More fun with this gang too lol. A few bits did feel a bit contrived (why she didn’t move her mother in with her, why then the cabin, but almost explainable, wish the show had left a line of dialoge or two for that). But yeah, the mystery is developing, Peter Capaldi seems to be having fun and I’m having fun watching him, and the show is building it’s mythology. I’ve got a pretty good idea who the mystery person is but I’m not sure the show was being too subtle about it, but if it’s who I think it is, fixing that in future loops should be easy? So not 100% sure where that’s going. The bigger surprise is her son. Anyways def looking forward to more.
Mr & Mrs Smith: I went in clearly mistakenly looking for a show about competent spys and assassins and ended up with a semi well written romance with semi adequate spy work and assassination as a back drop. It’s not bad I don’t think but it wasn’t what I was looking for. The two leads give great performances but I think their characters are overall dumb.
Utopia uk: Gave this a try. There’s some fun writing and characters but the overall conspiracy turn that vaccines are part of an evil conspiracy sat really poorly with me in 2024, and the second season opened with a completely superfluous full episode flashback that showed us nothing new, only things we knew from dialog in season 1, and not the most convincingly. Gave up in season 2 ep 2 but had some fun with parts of season 1.

Movies

The People’s Joker: Again, in theatres, with more friends, for the actual theatrical release. Super fun again.
Love Lies Bleeding: Not exactly my normal genre but wanted to check it out. Messy sorta stressful romance and drama. Interesting visuals.
Abagail: Delightful. Exceeded the trailer. Not setting out to do a lot, but doing well and slightly exceeding that, so good times
Polite Society: Pretty fun and enjoyed the lead actresses
I Saw the TV Glow: Oph wow. Well done but heavy and draining. Intriguing to watch to.
Bottoms: Absolutely silly fun times!

Games

Armored Core 6: Lots of vibes, that were neat and fun to be in. Haven’t really played a mech game before and this was fun. Heavy feeling but a surprising emphasis on manoeuvrability and movement, which I like. But the idea you should play it through 3 times with such tiny changes in missions all for 3 different endings that are like 30s cut scenes… you could youtube the last one esp, which I did.
Helldivers 2: Got in on the Starship Troopers inspired silly alien shooty with some friends at launch this year. It’s a decent blast but I at least started finding it a bit repetitive. But I believe it’s not that big a team, and I think they were incredibly smart with how the used their resources and I think the game is a good acheivment. Also there’s a whole new race added now so I may poke back in for a bit this year.
Warframe: Back on my long term looter shooter mmorpg-lite addiction. It’s been good to be back, or rather, after being away for a few years, a bunch of stuff has piled up that’s been fun to dig into. Duviri ended up being pretty fun, The Zaramin 10 was fun, the new mission types being added like Alchemy and Void Cascare and Flood have some nice new design, little bits more interactivity along the mission type. And the Whispers in the Wall end of quest had me gasp with how unexpected and cute it was. That was the summer, took a 4 month break, and then spent the last month playing Warframe 1999. What an amazing update. I’ve been gushing to all my friends IRL. The sound track was hilarious and excellent. The new romance system was a treat to engage with and it’s been delightful watching the entire community get into it and get VERY excited for their first New Years Kisses. What can I say. The game continues to innovate, add wildly new mechanics to the game, pull in all kinds of inspiration from across media, and stay fresh and exciting. Can’t wait to see what they come up with next.
Minecraft: Some friends spun up a server this year and that’s also been some fun! Especially since we made a choice to wait 2 months for nether and portals and 2 further months for end access (and elytra) so it forces us to dig into less used mechanics like horse taming and riding, path building, etc. Some small organic fun role play lite stories have also emerged. It’s been a good time, and as always, lots more new content to learn and engage with since the last time I played minecraft like 4 years ago.
Pacific Drive: Steph Sterling described it as a “comfy survival horror game” and I think that fits well. I’d like to sink into it more, but the first few missions didn’t quite suck me in and I fell into something else. Hopefully will come back to.
Remnant & Remnant 2: Came back to when some friends joined and also played the second DLC. Good times. Just a solid game. Still need to hit up the third DLC.
V Rising: Played with a few friends. Pretty fun routine of base building, teching up, boss slaying for progress, and repeating. We got a little stuck on the last 2 bosses and didn’t quite finish, but all had a good time. Def a fun time.
Metaphore Refantazio: Really interesting story unfurling here with some things to say. Really curious to see how it concludes the story and says in the end. However as it’s kinda my first JRPG and first Atlus game, I’m finding I’m def struggling sometimes with the mechanics and pacing. I’d love to be able to just grind out all the skills I want, but I have to actually… chose, as I have limited dungeon time? and then it’s like interspersed with like an hour of story. So I’ve gotten half way and run a little out of steam. I’m really trying to either work up the energy to dive back in and try and finish, or lacking that watch a playthrough to see where the story goes. Very attached to that aspect of the game. They really seem to be doing something nice and a little thoughtful there.

Books

It wasn’t a good year for reading. There are reasons for that. I’m looking to do better this year. One small home project is to create a dedicated reading nook. We’ve cleared a little space, and are looking into getting a nice reading chair, side table, and lamp. While it shouldn’t have been a real blocker, I am hoping it will help :)

Translation State - Ann Leckie: Another relaxing sci fi romp in the Ancillary Justice universe. Good times
Glasshouse - Charles Stross: Reread this one this year and it’s still a good time exploring some gender issues via scifi.
The Widening Gyre - Michael R Johnston - Scifi political intrigue but the story telling style felt shallow on characterization and more just characters going from place to place and plot point to plot point. Didn’t work for me.
Notes From a Burning Age - Claire North: More of a post post apocalyptic spy/detective slow burn as war breaks out in semi recovered age. Slow but kinda interesting?

Year Ahead 2025

I did the yearly look at my tools and try and find something better to help organize for heading into the new year. Between requirements for productivity tools that sync between desktop (linux) and android, ideally not a paid 3rd party service, self host instead (one day p2p), and open source, there weren’t a lot of viable contenders. I’m settling into using nextcloud deck and it’s going ok. At least it was a way for me to make a bunch of projects and dump the early thoughts on them all out of my head into somewhere, and have fairly well signposted “next thing” starting points for all of them.

Upgraded my main computer from 64GB ram to 96GB over the holidays for that extra bit of workspace.

As mentioned before, looking around the tech landscape, for better and worse, Android is by far the most widely deployed platform and for the things I work on, where the largest userbase is, so I’m going to lean further into to learning Android dev this year, which is great cus work has conspired to give me increasing opportunities to do just that!

Continuing various selfcare and self health projects so hoping those will both keep me in health to be productive and maybe even improve some on that front. We’ll see. Also even in a busier age in my life and with things still not recovered from the pandemic fully, still pursuing some small networking and community building efforts locally. I love making connections so riding some from last year into this year seeing where they go.

2025 is probably gonna be a tumultuous year so it’s hard to predict much. Let’s get into it I guess.

Shows I Like (2024)

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 16:42:00 +0000

A bunch of folks are feeling, to put it mildly, off balance, in need of distraction, or recentering. I’ve been asked by a few people this week about shows I like, so here’s a quick list of shows I am attached to, in alphabetical order:

Babylon 5: Peak space politics and anti-facism. Some of the best character arcs on TV. Slooow start tho.
Being Erica: Cute show about finding self acceptance by having a therapist who sends you back in time to relive “regrets” and learn some thing’s you had spent a lot of time regretting maybe weren’t so bad and shaped you and you’re not so bad.
Birds of Prey: Corny early 2000s DC hero show but kinda a fun vibe.
Bojack Horseman: It’s a good show about depression and how we deal with men who are bad, prolly not really recommending for anyone right now, but I do like it.
Black Sails: Amazing pirate show (cw: there is a SA plot in s1) that has a lot to say about rage and society and in group politics and the costs of those. Also pleasantly queer.
Breaking Bad: As with Bojack, show about an “everyman”’s decent into villainy. Not the right vibe for right now probably.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer: 90s camp. Slightly guilty pleasure given geastures the show runner
Chihayafuru: Anime about being way to into and competitive into an incredibly niche Japanese poetry card game. It really is an experience. Very earnest and passionate. Also love triangle with clueless girl at the center who just wants to be better at the game.
Counterpart: Excellent Spy show and cold war vibes except set contemporarily with a scifi conceit. Also big philosophical dives into identity.
Cowboy Bebop: “Cowboys in space”. Follow our motley crew of bounty hunters bumming around the solar system always trying to make enough money to stay afloat and usually struggling. Good show but not one that’s overly mood boosting.
Dark Angel: Season 1 really. I enjoy the dynamic of the idealist (rich as well) hacker boy Logan, and the pragmatic, on the run, amped up main character Max. Set in the alternate dystopia of 2019 (show is from 2001), it’s a good time on folks building community and getting by in a light dystopia.
Elementary: The better Sherlock Holmes show, as an episodic procedural, so it is a cop show, but Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Lu have fun chemistry in the early seasons.
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Top tier cyberpunk from the 90s/early 2000s, examines a ton of issues in an episodic nature around the intersection of philosphy, psycholgy, what it is to be human, and evolving technology that is bluring the line. They are essentially cops tho.
Hannibal: Incredible heavy atmosphere. Watch Hannibal and Will Graham chase down murders and each other.
Imposters: Fun fairly light hearted heist show with a love square of sorts.
Killjoys: Scifi bounty hunters. kind of fun vibes and some interesting starts of world building but a little weak other times. Good chemistry between the characters.
Leverage: Peak best heist show. Take a crew of solo criminals (theif, grifter, hacker, hitter) and pair them with each other and someone who used to chase them as the “mastermind” to lead them as now they play “black king / white knight” and are essentially “Robin Hoods” going after generally rich companies and individuals who have screwed over normal folks who the system has let down.
Noragami: Gods are real but live and die with people’s belief in them waxing and waning. Join Yato, a down on his luck god doing odd jobs to try and remain relevant, when of course, he gets paired with a highschool girl, and the ghost of a teen boy as his newest weapon (it’s a whole thing). A fun rock style permeates the show, haven’t seen anything else quite like it.
Orphan Black: Really good contemporary scifi mystery thriller as our main characters are always trying to unravel layers of a corporate and governmental conspiracy concerning their own lives. Tatiana Maslay gives a career defining performance as the lead.
Person of Interest: Procedural show about a hacker and ex CIA guy trying to save people each week. Starts off slow but grows into a full on singularity war scifi. They do work along side some cops, but not quite a cop show, and systemic crooked cops are more often the enemies.
Red Dwarf: British sitcom in space. Some dated humour (of course) but also surprisingly good tour of scifi concept of the week like the scifi shows it is also satirizing.
ReGenesis: Team of north america doctors battling slightly scifi outbreaks. If you likes teams of smart people working problems, this might work for you.
Russian Doll: Groundhog day style show. Natasa Lyons mostly sells it. Grungy vibes.
Severane: Split your memories so one of you has the work memories and one of you has the rest of life memories. Surprising no one, it’s actually a nightmare for half of you. Season 2 finally coming next year.
Serial Experiments Lain: Kinda psychedelic cyberpunk anime. A classic of the 90s.
Stargate(s): “Your gods aren’t real, and we’re here to kill them and free you”. A team of experts in their fields (military, science, anthropology and history) working together.
Star Trek: Lower Decks: The best new star trek, the most utopic and optimistic, and a great laugh to boot. What more could you want?
Station Eleven: A mellow trek following a travelling Shakespeare troupe through an apocalypse. An interesting meditation on the importance of stories. My kinda thing but arguably meta.
Steven Universe: Feel good show with really good plotting, revelations and character development (falters a bit when the end is rushed for fear of being canceled, but totally worth it).
Task Master: Distilled pure fun. If you need a laugh just go watch. It’s all free on youtube.
Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles: A moody deeper dive into the Terminator universe and mythology. It is apocalypse assuming and somewhat antitech as a result, but it also spends more time starting to delve into the issue of humanity.
The Good Place: Pretty fun comedy and tour of philosophic topics
UnReal: Drama about the team behind a reality TV show. One of the show runners actually worked in reality TV so it acts a bit as a dramaticized confession. Provides new perspectives on the creation of reality TV. The two leads of the show are at the peak of their performances with their characters, they are something to watch, even when they are not doing well.
Yellow Jackets: Dual timeline about a 90s highschool soccer team that crashed in the wilderness and wasn’t found for 18 months and the present day drama of the remaining survivors. Ongoing.

Beacon 23 Season 2 review

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 10:15:48 +0000

So the show in my head I was calling “Lena Heady in space”… they killed Lena Heady’s character Aster technically in the finale of s1. they just instantly confirmed it in the opening of s2. So that was a gut punch. Get rid of the high profile main character I was here for. Her performance of the character (less the character and writing) was what drew me in in season 1. It was just really fun to watch her lope through the sets and interact with the characters in a way I hadn’t seen her before even between Cersei and Sarah Connor and with a wonderful physicallity and relaxed confidence you rarely see women in their 50s get to have on screen. But I gave it a bit of a go. Just to see what was happening. ep 2 was semi filler, just AI character Harm in AI office. Then she escapes so finally we start? remember its 8 episode seasons so with 2 down we’re 25% done. nope full ep and then some to introduce the new main character who can now only be here fore 75% of the season, gonna be hard to get me too attached, I’m barely here for the other human main character (Halan) and I guess the AI is a main character?

Then the standard invaders of the Beacon, we’re captured, cliff hanger, but then to kill pacing (I mean keep us on the edge of our seats?) the whole of ep 6 is a slow flash back for Aster (Lena Heady’s character, who, do I need to remind, is dead?). So it’s played by a younger actress so it’s blah. And then that ep too somehow ends on a cliffhanger unresolved? but we never get back to that. Wild

The main plot, such as it is resumes in ep 7, the final quarter of this season lol. And then Halan is throw that maybe his main memories and trauma that have been driving him are fake implanted memories? which would be a ridiculous rug pull, and boy howdy is he ready to rejoin the just terrible military when he hears this. But then they just drill holes in his head, and we think he’s maybe in heaven? or the artifact for most half of ep 7 and all of ep 8? but no rug pull, it was a hallucinated space made by Harm the AI, and actually Halan also died a while ago, didn’t you notice?

So that’s s2 and it’s finale. Kills it’s other main character, and I guess the AI Harmony is our new main character going into s3, along with the new girl Iris and then someone else she collected in the latter half of the season.

This is sadly another case of a show that thinks it’s wildly smarter than it is. There’s a million tiny examples of the writers demonstrating they heard about some scifi concept but didn’t even read the wikipedia page on it, like the “solar sail boat” that some folks come in on? That someone “fell off clinging to a rope as the ship was being rocked about” ??? And then when we see it, the sail to ship ratio is like less than traditional sail boats on earth, lol. And it takes this same lack of care, research or any depth to it’s handling of AI which is becoming the central focus of the show. It talks a lot about “imprints” and having none, one, or a few, that some were installed? or created in Harmony, and by the end of the season she’s some how got like 4? That she made some herself? It was never clear to me if the Halan one was added to her or she made even. I’m not sure all the writers could agree and tell me. So with handling of supposed core material this sloppily, we don’t find much worth latching on to here, even in the burgeoning main focus of the show.

Which is all to say this is a show that has trapping of wanting to say things about things and use scifi concepts but no one seems to actually know what they are doing so it’s not going terribly well and they seem to be inexplicably addicted to killing off their cast that you might possibly get attached to. They really seem to want you not attached to anyone on screen ever so that’s a choice. I can’t believe I watched season 2 actually after Lena Heady’s character’s death instead of just reading the wikipedia summaries but I was 2 eps in and already 25% done so it seemed easy enough to just finish the other 6 episodes. I think in hindsight that was a mistake, and if this show ever does get another season I’ll just read synopsis. Cus if they don’t want me attached to the show or caring about the characters or experiencing it, then, ok, I won’t.

Dark Angel mid season 2 review

Thu, 02 May 2024 10:15:48 +0000

Rewatching Dark Angel and it is weird the shift between season 1 and 2. I blew through season 1. They had good elements like the tension between Max and Logan, and not just romantically, but Logan’s overworking idealism vs Max’s survival instinct. They had a good story generating engine with Max being on the run, mysteries about Manticore, the other escapees etc, and it created tension and pressure. Episodes had little twists you didn’t always see coming.

Then season 2 comes, Manticore is gone, Max and Logan can’t touch, and all the others have escaped. But Max isn’t looking for the rest of the original 12, even tho there’s no one ostensibly hunting her and them (I know White will emerge later this season), but yeah, the episodes are suddenly dragging. There’s no threat, no mystery, each episode is just a weird slice of life now? We’re not even really doing Eyes Only work for Logan. We even have so little idea what to do this season 2 we have a whole episode that is a dream. Even when an episode has an A plot, sometimes it’ll be so anemic the B plot will take up as much if not more time and I’ll get done scenes on the B plot only to get back to the A plot and have forgotten it was even happening cus pacing and tension are just… gone.

Real weird and disappointing but it sounds like network interference (Fox) and show runner change just murdered the vibe, and style of the show and ejected and blunted the story. I can see why there would have been a ratings drop and then it got canceled cus I’m not even half way into season 2 and it’s dragging so hard it feels like it’ll be hard to complete. Which is a shame since I blew through season 1 happily and felt pulled through it.

There’s other warning signs. Herbal Thought’s character disappearing with out a mention. Original Cindy def is taking a further back seat in the show. All it’s season 1 vibe, edge, representation, messaging, just gone or sanded down. Someone wanted to make this show more “palatable” and killed it instead, as is often the way of these things

2023 in Review

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

General

2023 was a good but tiring year. In retrospect I took nearly no vacation and that was a mistake. Even when travelling and visiting family I worked pretty much the whole time “saving” my vacation days for a vacation we never got to planning or taking. And after also running ragged in 2022 and not even taking a break between leaving Open Privacy and joining Tor, that was prolly dumb. So this year I think I’ll try and make my self take my weeks of vacation even if it’s stay-cationing or with much less excuses, and if a big trip does materialize, I’ll figure it out. The mandatory 2 weeks over winter holiday Tor gives us has been really nice and a good step to restoring capacity but I need to not run myself so low in the first place. A lot of sleep, TV, games and even a little reading has gone a long way already. Also stopped drinking coffee over the break to help with my refresh and sleep. First drink back always works a charm after a break to lower tolerance.

Since the pandemic, and working from home even a year or two before that, I’ve def been trending in a more reclusive direction, which is in contrast to my prior life as an extrovert. I’m more set in my ways and pretty comfy with my life and routine and not making a lot of effort to get out and do things, and especially meet new people. I think that’s also something I’m going to have to take a more proactive look at in 2024.

Otherwise it’s been a good year. We continued cat fostering and that’s been fun and rewarding and I am glad I we can do it. We’re on our 10th cat now and she is likely getting adopted in a few weeks. No real big events or upsets this year, it was pretty quiet. I have a great home office I’m slowly decorating and loving to work in. Got some new gear that’s been great like a second monitor and bar mount, a beefy new work desktop with 64GB ram and an NVidia 3060. Also picked up a 20TB mirrored NAS to replace my full 5TB one. And we got a Steam deck! It’s very much been a year of slowly reinflating my gear after running long on the last big batch of gear.

Work / Tor

My first full year at Tor and it was a big one. Still so much to learn when we have coverage of parts all over Firefox, but did bits in the UI around the download dialog and some UI revamp updates. Then spent the middle of the year heavily refactoring our Android browser’s Tor integration, work that was much needed and still with months done, has more work to go, but it’s now at least more modular and easy to reason about, and we have a new Android dev to help, and we’re rewiring from using tor-android-service from Guardian project to our own internal tor running engine, the same that Tor Browser uses, which is a big win moving forward. Finished off the year contributing to some of that wiring. I also got to do some really amazing travel to see my coworkers and that was delightful for so many reasons!

There are some exciting plans for 2024 for Tor Browser and from Tor as well, especially on the Arti front, and I can’t wait for those to roll out more and talk about them more. 2024 I think will really help kick of making Tor easier to integrate into apps and I cannot wait. Also our Tor University Challenge has kicked off and I hope that takes off!

Open Privacy / Cwtch

Work progressed on making Cwtch something we’re comfortable and happy to call stable and with 1.13 we’re pretty much there! I’m really happy with the solidifying of API work that was done and what that should hopefully enable going forward. On that front we’ve just announced that we’ll be tackling one of the big ideas from our big idea roadmap of 2022: hybrid groups in 2024 and I’m very excited.

I spent the end of the year quietly starting work on making theming in Cwtch more accessibly and just more. I converted the themes from code to run time loaded .yml files, and have added one example of using an image for a widget (tiling in the chat window). Coming soon in 2024 I want to add a few more image widgets and then add custom theme loading so the community can make and use their own themes!

I’ve also dropped in a quick revamp of the settings and gave it sub tabs for each section to clean it up a bit :)

With Cwtch being more stable I also have some less fun work around trying to get code signing certs and using them so we can make using Cwtch on Mac and Windows less painful. And I want to look at more packaging options like distributing a .deb, and getting into f-droid, and maybe some privacy focuses distros if we’re lucky. But that’s some tedius work so will be very capacity dependant. We’ll see :)

As always, Open Privacy and Cwtch are funded by the community so please think about donating. Cwtch is coming up on 6 and becoming quite mature now, but there’s still so much work we want to do to make it more amazing.

Media

2023 was a pretty good year on the media consumption front. A great year for gaming, pretty decent on TV, and a little sub par on movies. I also opened the year with a lot of good reading though that petered off as the year progressed and I got a bit more tired and also tried to pile on some more non-fiction.

Games

2023 was the year of Linux gaming for me. I tried out Steam’s Proton (bundled tweaked Wine windows emulator with per game configs) while traveling and OMG, I was more limited by the weak graphics card in my laptop that being on Linux. So when I needed a new work desktop mid year, I whacked a graphics card in it too (first time doing that to a Linux machine of mine in line 15 years) and I’ve been gaming on it exclusively since. Valve is doing some heroic work to make Linux a viable gaming platform, as we’re seeing bear out with the Linux powered Steam Deck having sold over 3 million units. And it’s a a good feedback cycle, because with a nice install base like that, couple with a much easier porting target of just Proton, not a full Linux port, I think it’s an easier sell to developers to test their games on Proton and fix any obvious bugs to get the compatibility. Kinda a Linux goes 90% with Wine/Proton emulating Windows and now devs just have maybe 10% work to do in a few tweaks for it. So we’re seeing unbelievable compatibility for Linux now. It’s been a fun and good year for me!

So games I played and notes in rough order of liking

Remnant 2: Clearly my Game of The Year, the game I was looking forward to and it delivered. Big growth since the first, coming strong with a very confident design team this game for their worlds. The previous game wasn’t uncreative, but it was kinda: desert world, swamp world, forest world. This time we got forest world again, but also desolate and haunted scifi world, and the one I think they were most proud of, a mix of Bloodborn like Victorian England but populated with elves smashed into the world of the Fae. It’s been a really good feeling game to play, to unlock classes is, mix and match dual classing gives great build flexibility and options, tons of loot I’m still chasing. I’ve spent lots of time in the game this year, it’s been fun.

This game has a lot of progression with 4 difficulty settings, 12 classes to unlock, level, etc, and so much gear to acquire and also level some of. I’m happy to report that I’ve unlocked all 12 classes and got them all leveling, with 4 maxed now. And my gear situation is that at the end of the year I was able to just finish a run on Nightmare difficulty after doing the first DLC a few times. There are apparently 2 more DLCs coming so I don’t mind pausing progress and leveling now and leaving a difficulty 4 (Apocalypse) and more leveling for those in the coming year :) I really have enjoyed this game like I did Elden Ring, for gear collecting, build craft (oh the spread sheet I have for this game) and good combat.
A Bewitching Revolution: Playable on Itch.io or free on Steam, this game is a 45 min experience where you play the Witch of the City helping shepard a revolution in a work heavily inspired by the writings of Silvia Federici. Absolute gem of a game, go check it out.
Tunic: This one really sucked me in. It’s kinda a Zelda like, with a twist of trying to capture the experience of getting a game with a manual in a language you can’t read. As you play you unlock manual pages which can hint at features you didn’t know about that help with progression. Really quite well implemented and a lot of fun. There was some mention of it being a bit of a “souls like” and at first I assumed that was mostly around the difficulty of it at times, as otherwise it’s bright, animated and you’re a cute fox. But spoiler warning: it’s also about the overall tone of the game, which slightly caught me out in the ending leaving me feeling a bit mixed initially. But over all I really like this game and recommend it!
Dome Keeper: This was just a fun little kinda tower defence, but between runs you mine down to get resources to expand with. The first thing I tried on vacation with Steam on Linux. It was a fun distraction for a week or two.
Dead Cells: I know, I’m very late to this game. I wasn’t sure I wanted a Rouge Like. Hades worked for me cus the added on story helped keep me in a lot. But playing this, they’ve done a good job, it feels good. Haven’t finished a run, got distracted, but will prolly go back and keep grinding. It does feel good but it’s also not quite gripping me. Other games can feel good and just use a bit more design or story to keep me hooked better.
Trinity Fusion: I showed up for this game because a fab author of mine, Ada Hoffman, did some writing for it. It’s another rouge like, like Dead Cells, with the gimmick that you have 3 characters who have each their own world/map but can later fuse some of their powers. It’s pretty good. Also feels fairly fun to play. I haven’t quite finished but should soon.
Alan Wake: With Alan Wake 2 coming out this year, and my love of Control, decided to check out the original. It was fun. The story is pretty ok and interesting (prolly a lot better if I’d experienced it a decade ago when it came out). The gameplay isn’t bad. I did one of the DLCs and that was… enough. Looking forward to hopefully Alan Wake 2 coming to Steam in 2024 so I can play it and see where these franchises are going.
No Man’s Sky: This was kinda a meme as it was Starfield’s release window when I booted this up, but it was pretty good. Kinda what it advertised, fairly impressive random biomes, fly to space seamlessly and other planets and stations. A small story slowly unfodling grafted on top. But at some point the grind to build my base just to progress the minimal story became a bit too much for me, for my tastes the rewards vs effort vs gameplay wasn’t paying off enough so after building a base, having two ships, and filling the base with some printers and stuff, I kinda lost interest.
Abiotic Factor playtest: This is basically “What if Half Life but you’re a group of scientists deep in a science lab when the portal invasion goes off” the survival game. It was cute and pretty solid, played with some friends, and when after two nights we reached the end of the play test we were all pretty up for more still.
Cult of the Lamb: Super cute premise, but I didn’t connect with it. Possibly I should have been naming the cultists in my flock after people I know or something to bond with them a bit more.
Darkest Dungeon: Played for a bit. As the review suggest, tough. May go back to one day, may not.
Bone Raiser Minions: Well recommended, pretty fun, and I mostly like the graphics but it get a bit hard on legibility after a certain point and harder to follow. Played for a week or two and fell off.
Karmazoo: Cute concept. 10 person very cooperative action puzzle solver. Pretty cure.
Solar Ash: Stylish and pretty, but either a bit hard or clunky? Gave up after the reaching the third area. Kinda want to go back to but the bosses are punishing.

TV

I’ve watched a good smattering of things but a lot of it’s been checking out semi bingable 90s shows I’ve seen. There’s not a lot of worth while TV coming out these days, and even when it is, it’s like 8-13 episodes only with sometimes 2 year gaps between seasons, if they don’t get cancelled. Hard to compete with behemoths from the 90s that have 100 or 200 episodes.

New Things I Watched

In rough order

Station Eleven: This was a year or two old but watched over the holidays. An interesting thoughtful slow take on the value of stories and media to people as told about a travelling Shakespeare troupe in the post apocalypse and about the deep impact and importance of a comic to a few people as well. I’m also a fan of the lead Mackenzie Davis so it was fun to see her in this. I enjoyed this pretty well. The older I get and more I see I think it gets harder to wow me, but I did enjoy this, it’s message and thoughts, and don’t really have any complaints. Most folks should check it out.
Silo: Loved the books. They’ve done a pretty good job adapting the first one here. A few weird changes that I felt lowered the impact from the book but were prolly don’t for TV reasons. And a little pacing lag in the middle of the second half, could have been maybe 8 episodes instead of 10, but over all quite good, and seems it got people stoked. I’ll be looking forward to season 2 and how they adapt that. Good stuff.
Star Trek Lower Decks: The good new Star Trek. Caught up on season 3 and 4 (and maybe 2?) and it was delightful. It’s funny, and doing that thing all the new Treks do and making a healthy dose of references, but most of them are to dumb old Trek things and taking the piss. It’s great. Reoccurring badguys for this crew being the Pakleds, LOL. Getting a Temarian on the crew, hilarious. It goes on and on. And unlike some of the other properties that then also seem to just remake old episodes, but like less well and with nothing new of note, Lower Decks routinely will start with a reference to a whole previous episode in like the opening and then build something new out from there. There’s some legit innovation in the plot and all and that’s a bit rare I’m finding with the new Treks. So good times.
Star Trek Strange New Worlds: Strange New worlds can do some pretty ok episodes. For what it is even some decent ones. It’s got some pretty potentialful characters, good actors. But it just keeps seeming to get hung up on and held back by a few things, including sub par writing and way too much referential TOS fan service. It’s at its best when it’s doing it’s own thing, mostly, and at it’s worst when it’s doing a TOS style episode or worse a TOS reference episode where some characters jerk out of acting remotely like themselves to give us, the fans, a moment of like, the pre TOS crew together that we’ll “appreciate” even if it doesn’t entirely make sense. Season 2 had some real low lows. And I think they continually do Pike dirty cus they feel they have to keep establishing that he is not Kirk and that is bad on Pike cus Kirk is better. Which… isn’t great since they aren’t making a Kirk show, it’s Pike’s ship and show. I will prolly still watch season 3 when it comes out.
Clone High: Who had a second season of Clone High coming out 20 years after the first on their bingo card? I sure didn’t. Rewatched the first season too. The second season is interesting, structure wise, as they drop one s1 character and add a bunch of new ones that they ease us into. I think the show def works into it’s groove across the season. Pretty fun and funny for what it is. Here’s hoping it’s not 20 more years for season 3.
Scavengers’ Reign: A pretty sci-fi experience mini series I guess. But it’s less science fiction and more science fantasy. Mostly its just 3 characters on long journeys on a planet that is very strange and different to what we’re used to, dare I say, fantastical, and nothing’s much explained, and there isn’t a terrible amount of character growth. Mostly it’s just a long series of events that loosely lead from one to the next. It’s pretty. It’s fantastical. There’s not much substance here.
From: Curiosity got the better of me. “What are a bunch of the team who developed Lost gonna do here?”. Well the answer is mostly speed run Lost. In two shorter seasons, they’ve raised the “is it the afterlife question” and passed it off with “would it matter if it was, would you act differently”. In part referring to the “threat” which to start with is talking people like monsters who emerge each night and horrifically eat anyone they get access to. But this show is also speeding through spending credit and accumulating plot debt. There’s the monsters, there’s the magic wards that protect houses. And by the end of S1 and through S2 we learn about successive further out surrounding layers of badness and awareness. And in the S2 finale, someone is magiced out and “escapes”. It’s a lot, and I’m def curious to see if and how they’ll try and explain all this. But I’m trying to relax here and listen to a Lost apologist I see on social media who my take away is “relax, enjoy the character driven show with decently well written characters for TV in magic situations, it’s not about the destination it’s about the journey”. So I’m trying.
Spy Among Friends: Started on an Airplane, kinda want to finish before saying much. Seems pretty well produced.
Quantum Leap: Season 2 has started. S1 gripped me cus the show runner was layering on a bit of the longer for mystery that he injected into his last more episodic cable show. But that mostly wrapped semi satisfyingly at the end of S1 and now there’s not so much this season. Just “some changes”. I’ll try to finish out the season. There’s some well meaning earnestness to the show that’s a little charming, but it’s not great.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Rather late to this game but checked it out and watched seasons 1-4. This one’s a bit tough for me. The humour is of the type of trying to “have it’s cake and eat it too” as it keeps doing terrible things but they are bad characters so it’s not supposed to be endorsing it, they are bad, so it’s “ok”? And I don’t know if that is working for me. It prolly worked the best in season 1, I think they had the most bad outcomes then. As my watching went on it seemed, they just got into more and bigger and worse situations and nothing really touched them and that balanced I think just tipped a bit away from enjoyable for me. I think it’s not a bad show and there’s some wit, but they just keep doing things that make me uncomfortable at times too, and the trade off that’s supposed to justify it doesn’t always feel like it works often enough for me. It’s a tricky one.
Ms Marvel: Randomly binged this. Seems like the least worse of the MCU shows. It’s good at points, esp early on. But the of course has to scale up rapidly to a save the world crisis. Sure wish it hadn’t had to. Also spends a whole episode teaching Americans about partition. So that’s good? But also kinda a shot to the gut for pacing.
Future Man: Started this, need to get back to it. Crass, kinda funny, low budget and stakes sci fi comedy.
Orphan Black Echos: Oph. I had some hopes for this. If you’re gonna leverage an IP and do a “sequel” using it’s name to sell you’re completely new scifi story… Well one of the big things Orphan Black is know for is like pioneering complex shot composition, esp for TV, with getting all the clones played by the same actress on screen interacting. This show has a “new” take on the clones, in that they are at different ages so all played by different actors. Which, could be ok, but it seems almost to go out of it’s way to stick to that and refuse to do the old things so much so that spoilers: they shoot a main character killing her in the last 2 mins of the finale just to open a door beside her corpse and show her same aged clone in that room, who I guess will be the replacement character as they are keeping the actress. Major bummer for me. The show went from me enthusiastic to work to slog through by around ep 6 or 7 and that utterly murdered any good will I had left in the last minute or two. I don’t want to watch another season, hope it’s cancelled, cus I fear my curiosity might get the best of me and I might try and sit through more still. But yeah, a real shame this is carrying the name Orphan Black and bagage from that instead of being allowed to be it’s own thing.
Master Chef s3: I heard from some comment somewhere a blind woman won, so wanted to check that out. And she sure did. Awesome on her. But otherwise it’s classic antagonistic reality TV, kinda tiring.
Bake Off s14: Went right into this conveniently after Master Chef and what a relaxing relief. Bake Off is such a pleasant chill show to “come home” to and relax each time it comes out.
Task Master s15 & 16: More laughs. It’s still rocking the formula. What more can I say.
The Ark: I picked up a recommendation for this I think because some of the Star Gate crators were involved but we couldn’t finish episode one. The writing and acting is phenominally bad and stupid, the “characters” aren’t, they are just a big “trait” or two and jerking from plot point to point semi sensically at best, no actual character on display. Disappointing, but perhaps I was very misinformed and looking for the wrong thing here too.
Poker Face: I love Natasa Lyons and thought I could watch her in anything. I think think this’ll be my most contraversial take on this list but I couldn’t get past episode 4 or 5? Prolly my fault a bit. It’s gotten much harder for me to enjoy crime solving and procedurals as shall we say, I’ve grown up and become more educated. And while our main character is on the run, she can’t help using her super power of always knowing when someone is lying to solver murders where ever she goes. And then call the cops. So I settled into a slightly uneasy tension with the show, wishing perhaps she’d help the folks locally settle things than invoking cops, until I got to the episode where there is what almost appears as a queer lefty couple, but that I think was also semi queer baiting, as “they’re just friends”. And who when introduced, I bonded with right away, also over their politics and general sass. But as they are developed they turn into some wild caricature of just literally child murdering “leftist protesters” who will murder anyone easily for nonsensical political reasons. So all I can take away from the shows message is that cops are good, leftist protesters are insane, violent and dangerous, and a bit of what read like queer baiting, but I might be reading into that. So I stopped.

Things I Rewatched

ER: We watched like 10 seasons earlier this year. This show stands up amazingly well for its age. They keep steady tense pressure on, not much lulls in the episodes, and still it has a solid cast of characters. Very impressive for it’s age, and to be honest, would even be a feat now with minimal updates. I double checked and it still tops #1 on most “top medical drama shows” beating every thing that’s come after, and it’s easy to see why.
Revenge: I forgot how far I’d gotten before, knowing vaugly I’d prolly dropped in season 2, so tried a full new run with determination to get further. I think I did. I don’t think I finished season 2 last time, but OMG, S3, after all the nonsense of the previous seasons, just, like, full resets. Our main revenge girl like, forgets all shes done and all the data shes amassed over the last two seasons, the people she’s killed, and just like, reverts to an early S1 plot of trying to marry into the family to “get some evidence”. Completly wild, nearly like the prev two seasons didn’t happen. So much plot just dropped on the floor. Stopped an ep or two into S3. No pay off to be found there. Sad. I like the leads in Emily and Nolan.
Earth Final Conflict: Made it into season 2 of this semi train wreck of a show I watched on cable from my childhood. May return to and try and push forward, but in S1, the “good billionaire” fakes his death and is using his money to lead the rebellion against the mysterious aliens. In s2 he suddenly comes public and then decided to run for president of the US as that will somehow give him a better position to oppose the aliens. Lol. And I know this show has a pretty doomed running losing all it’s leads, in some cases more than once, and behind the scenes, creatively, it’s pretty clear they were struggling about as hard.
Forever Knight: This show walked so “Angel” could run. “A vampire detective in a convertible who wants to become human”, but in Toronto. And he’s not a PI, but a real cop. And it’s a Canadian TV show from the 90s. I was curious. I’d caught the odd episode on cable as a kid but never really watched. It’s not great. There’s bits that are ok, but as it is a cop show, and it’s from the 90s, it’s… wow. Very pro cop even if they are lying to convict ppl, doing some violence of their own, etc. Everyone around our main character is pretty awful and it kinda makes me wonder who the real monsters are … oooh, thats cleaver and prolly totally unintential. Anyways “got distracted” part way through season 1. I really like the actor who plays our main character’s sire but I don’t think he’s there much till season 2, so bummer.
Sliders: With so much multiverse stuff going on and weirdly many people crediting the MCU with bringing this to the masses just ahead of Everyone, Everywhere All at Once, I figured I’d go check out the OG (at least for me) 90s show about jumping through a portal each episode and ending up on an alternate history earth. It’s ok, some cute ideas, but most episodes drag a bit and the characters are uneven, and not super likable. Watched a good chunk of S 1
Lost: As I mentioned when talking about From, I’m trying to see if I can enjoy some shows with strong characterization for the journey and not the destination, which has historically been something I’m very focused on. In S3 now and yeah, it’s not a bad show so far, pretty interesting characters, fairly character driven. It’s pretty well done seeing them bounce off each other. Also, kinda a meta note on many things I’ve seen but very relevant here, OMG people just need to communicate better. So many sitcom plotlines and Lost plot lines alike wouldn’t be a problem if people just talked more about what was going on rather than siloing knowledge. But that goes a bit hand in hand with all the toxic masculinity gloriously on display here. I mean some characters are obvious, Sawyer, Jin is baffelingly and not entierly consistently awful, but even Jack feels like he kinda owns the women around him and is deeply hurt when they aren’t all just fixtures in his life, and nearly all the men exhibit this, this desire to own the women, and not treat them with respect, to be in charge, not communicate well, etc. And then there’s Desmond who can’t just live with a woman unless he’s “the man” and bread winner etc. All pretty pathetic. And then it doesn’t help how many times Kate gets captured and needs rescuing or fucks things up. As main “action girl” she mostly just fucks up. Sawyer, Sayid, Jack, Locke like combined need less rescuing then Kate does. Just things I’m noticing binging the show. Get some healthier masculinity models folks. Be a little more cooperative. LOL. But it’s an “old” show now, so all I can do is laugh. Newer shows I’ll hold to newer standards I suppose, and I’ll try and let this one slide for a bit.

Movies

I’m more a TV person than a movie person and it was definitely not a good movie year, but there were a few, and I’ve been building a list of old weird stuff to slowly check out too. Did a few this year. Again, in very rough order:

The People’s Joker: My movie of the year. I want from my media sharp critic and anarchist and socialist politics. I want queerness. Movies I find are the business least suited to deliver on that as they are the biggest budget and have to have the most bland mass appeal. TV is a little better. Comics and books are where more of the innovative voices can actually be found. This movie is a rare treasure of an exception. (Possibly I just need to watch more lower budget stuff) Also it’s a massive IP land grab and I love it for that. It’s got a distributor now, I managed to see the single screening my city got nominally for a film fest. But hopefully it should get wider showings than that in 2024 so try and check it out if you can. It’s a trip.
RRR: Ok this was a delight. There are some politics in it that with out context go over most western audiances that are worth learning about. But that aside, it was a flashy, camp, bright, over the top, well coreographed, and earnest action movie audiances were clearly yearning for in the age of dull drag super hero action movies that are also over the top boring CGI fests. The west has rarely done action well, and rarely Incorporated plot and action well. Movies that do are rare. Like the Matrix that were seismic shifts, and for a bit all action movies after had martial arts fights, but that wore off by the 2010s back to the worst blandest worst coreographed most pointless fights. Mad Max was a rare action movie, but as has been talked about elsewhere it was a unique one off that Hollywood isn’t setup to ever replicate. So RRR hit like wildfire and hopefully it’s part of a trend of western audiances getting more outside their media bubble and consuming more media from outside the west.
The Menu: Fun. I enjoy Anna Taylor Joy in things, she’s good. Cute ending.
Bodies Bodies Bodies: Honeslty, delivered just a bit more than the little I was expecting. A slight twist is something, so thanks.
Midsommer: A slow burn disturbing psychological thriller. Late to the game here. But good times and left you with a bit to chew on. My fav digestion was no surprise Kay and Skittles’.
Barbie: Watched Barbie late in the year finally to catch up on all the hype. It was fine, but probably a little over hyped but it was also a lack luster year so it cleaned up at the box office cus what competition was there? Not saying it doesn’t deserve most of that, and it’s nice there’s a movie doing some feminism and kinda poking at capitalism (while being a big corpo product) but it’s also pretty 101 “if you tell them about patriarch then it’s done and defeated”, and doesn’t really look further (the homeless Ken class?). I know, its a fun toy movie comedy, I think peopl over hyped it saying it was the greatest. It was fun.
Predestination: A little awkward I found but also interesting. Not the most best execution but it kept us engaged well enough.
Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse: Somehow Sony is delivering the last good MCU adjacent super hero media. Surprisingly well done, loved the semi pivot to Spider Gwen’s focus. Pretty solid execution.
The Banshee of Inisherin: It was something. Men need therapy.
Cocaine Bear: What the title advertised it delivered. It was a few laughs.
In the Mouth of Madness: One of the oldies I finally got around too. Not a bad cosmic/existential horror flick.
Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever: I’d heard a few references to this truly terrible movie and finally decided to check it out. As a surprise treat this train wreck was filmed very obviously and openly in my home town so that was a LOL. Wow bad.
Uncharted: Terrible. We paused half way through and then never came back.

Movie I Watched on Airplanes

Aqua Teen Hunger Force the Movie: Another old animated film getting another breath of life (Clone High was the other). Weird. I was never a huge fan of the origional but it would come on around midnight, and sometimes my coworker and I upon closing the bowling alley would have a beer and watch an episode before starting cleaning up. It was a weird movie from a weird show. I think I chuckled a bit.
Black Panther 2: Wakanda Forever: Woof. Marvel has lost the thread. They used to use a stinger like post credits two minutes long to do tie ins to the wider MCU. Remember Nick Fury lurking in post credits all phase 1? Now this movie crashes for 45 min mid run to soft launch Iron Heart, who is scheduled to have a whole show to herself, but it can’t be her origin now, since this show started in-situ with her, already established with a base, making suits, and then she got exceptional kid school spending a week in Wakanda with Shuri. The rest of the plot was all over the place, the CIA plot felt very anciliary, but I guess someone felt they had to keep the hobbit and the blue hair lady who’ll be important one of these years. So this movie, with it’s collosal run time, spends like over a third just as previews and setups for other projects and utterly drags. It’s own plot isn’t great either. Another faction wants to hide even harder, so they are gonna destroy Wakanda? Esh. So basic and dumb, it’s exhausting.
Eternals: There was a flicker of something here, but it was way too many characters with way too much history to do any justice to in a movie. Marvel used to get this when they established half the 5 person Avengers 1 with their own movies first, but I guess unlearned it by trying to do a like 10 character movie of folks who are 5000 years old. LOL Sigh. I blame Disney’s stewardship. Also love the triple cliff hanger meaning zero of the characters are available for an Avengers movie unless they get a sequell movie untying them up, which won’t happen.
Dr Strange Quantumania: From a team who apparently didn’t watch Wanda Vision, comes a movie undoing or ignoring her character development there and turning her into a crazed mommy villian mass murderer. Cool. Dr Strange is still kinda a prick. Introducing America Chavez… who mostly screams. or something. And ending also with Doctor Strange corrupted, so look forward to that getting resolved in Avengers? or before that? or dropped? MCU is such a train wreck now lol.
Guardians of the Galaxy 3: The only one that was semi fine. Rockets plot was pretty good. I was grinding my teeth when Starlord was on moaning about Gamora. It never made sense, I was glad when it was over, it was exhausting and grating him seeing him whine about it. I’m glad it’s now more closed.

I like that all the super hero franchises are crashing and burning. Can we get something new please.

Books

I started off the year reading a lot but got bogged down mid year, as I often do, esp trying to read any non fiction while busy. Still it was a pretty good year and in general trying to stick to newer works has been fruitful!

Capitalist Realism - Mark Fisher: A good read oft referenced so also glad to just have the reference now. Short and too the point. Also a little despairing. But some good additions to frameworks in my head.
Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism - Murray Bookchin: My central take away from this book was that Anarchism needs some form of socialism or it ends up up it’s ass self involved, individualistic, libertarian. Spent a lot of time looking at the difference between Autonomy (from) or Freedom (to) and then using that lens to examine modes of Anarchism. He concludes you need socialism, and social fabric to create a society that gives you more “Freedoms to” do things, like order take out, rather than a more individualistic “Autonomy from” which leaves you maybe in a log cabin alone in the woods shitting in a trench you dug (my slight paraphrasing). As a mirror, some other reading I have done this year has emphasized that socialism esp communism needs anarchy lest it just repeat swapping out authoritarian leaders and nothing actually changing.
The Masqerade Trilogy (Baru Cormorant) - Seth Dickinson: Fun angry queer anti empire fantasy. Leaves you with some thoughts on approach and depth of willingness to go and the general ability of empire to absorb and co-opt. Really looking forward to the concluding book(s?) to see where it goes, but as is ended on a poignant note and maybe pivot.
The Infinite (last of The Outside Tilogy) - Ada Hoffmann: Pretty solid conclusion. A queer scifi/cosmic horror anti-empire series. Again, examining a bit approach and methods. Some anarchist angles more than some of the other reading this year.
The Machineries of Empire (Ninefox Gambit trilogy) - Yoon Ha Lee: The third queen anti-empire series I read of the year. Notice a theme? Scifi in name but possibly the most fantastical of the three. Another examination of the horrors empire demands to keep existing, and the difficulty with unseating it. More fun times.
This is How You Lose the Time War - El-Mohtar Amal: Thanks to a viral post by Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood I checked out this queer scifi love story, and it was a short humorous blast!
Children of Time trilogy - Adrian Tchaikovsky: This was some pretty fun scifi with hints from many previous works mixed in. Def feeling A Deepness in the Sky with book one and the arachnid population, although a very different take. Pretty fun and imaginative trilogy, tho perhaps book 3 was a bit more of a drag for me. But I tore through them all pretty fast.
Moxyland - Lauren Beukes: Small cyberpunk South African story. Pretty fun. A few cute uses of tech.
Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - N.K. Jemisin: pretty interesting fantasy, mysteryish, empire book with gods. I enjoyed but was left well satisfied by book 1 I wasn’t sure I wanted any more?
Raft - Stephen Baxter: Didn’t click with me. Not unimaginative, but just, never seemed to do much with what it had.
vN - Madeline Ashby: many moments of potential but also didn’t seem to come together to say a lot. I left it at book one.
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engles: Finally got around to this. It was shorter than I expected… There’s some useful frameworks for thinking about things, but their prescriptions are all pretty comically bad, as we’ve seen bear out for a 100 years. But again, reading it for reference point, before returning to more newer more contemporary stuff (or trying to)

Last year I also mentioned a few “top books” and I gave rereading a few a try and… it was hard. I’ve grown and changed. They were influential on me at the time, but they either are just a bit old now, I know them too well, and flaws have either emerged with time, or just the balance of new overshaddowing them has changed. So that was a laugh. I couldn’t say what my top books are now as a result.

Tech Thoughts

I’ve mostly been a C++, JS and Kotlin developer for work this last year with only some side time in Go, Rust and Dart. So nothing much has changed there for me since last year.

The biggest thing I eluded to earlier, is that Valve with Steam and Proton have made gaming on Linux (for their steamdeck, but also everyone) not just viable but pretty great. And probably as a result we saw Linux overtake and hold lead on MacOS as second biggest steam installation OS for gaming after Windows this last summer. That is rad.

Where Linux is going I couldn’t say. There’s been a bigger push towards Wayland this year than I’ve seen in a big so it’s funny to me that after using Wayland for maybe 5 years on Ubuntu, I switched to Debian and XOrg this summer. Once switched to Debian I tried stock Gnome Shell and extremely didn’t enjoy it so retroactive kudos to the Canonical devs who made it more pleasant. Been using XFCE as my fall back since. It’s fine, doesn’t get in the way and I can have some funner themes. Systemd is ever present and just… a small cancer. There just isn’t a lot I’m excited for in the Linux space right now. Wish there was.

I never had time to get to any of the UI based projects I’d thought about and therefor no time to test any new UI frameworks. This year will likely be the same.

Got a Steamdeck tho and that is pretty rad.

Health

Saw my trainer through out the year and exercise and attempts at daily walks have improved my posture and I’m not really dealing with the back pain that started me on this journey. So quite pleased about that. Still a long way to go, having a job and hobbies that have me mostly sitting def needs persistent effort against. Had a nasty cold near the end of the year, prolly covid, that slowed me down for a month too which was a pain in the ass and unneeded. My desire to get out and be more social is continually tempered by the fact we’re still in a global health crisis pandemic and no one’s masking any more. Masking is a topic I’m frustrated on too, I’ve eased off some, because it’s a team sport, we’re all supposed to be masking to protect each other if we’re pre or asymptomatic carriers and infectious, but if no one else is, my mask won’t be offering as much protection in a crowded setting. So I mask when I’m sick if I have to go out or if I’m still in a big tight crowd like the bus, but less so other times. It sucks but it feels like everyone’s given up, tho I should be more diligent and maintain myself as an example of better masking too. Something to remind myself of more in the new year.

Outro

So that was 2023. Not a bad year. Good for games. Work is decently time consuming but as they say, “Do what you love… and you’ll totally over work because it’s your passion and what you think about” so I need to keep that in mind. The general world and politics is, lets generously say hilarious, embarrassing, dire. It’s grating watching multiple wars, ethnic cleansings, genocides, and seeing sides just pour more fuel on the fire rather than try and intervene and stop it. Global climate change continues pretty much unabated. I have more and more discussions with milenials suffering existential dread trying to do long term life planning around anything from savings, to living, to work to learning, and my friends with kids, I try not to bring it up but sometimes they do and it seems very hard on them. I left out a politics section this year, as I’m continuing reading and learning, but between that and whats happening, I’m continuing to develop my understanding, but I don’t see much in the way of long term paths out of this or much concrete suggestions for building something better, other than bits from Anarchism of just focusing local and doing what you can there. Which all feeds back to limiting my exposure to the news and taking care of myself because you can’t help others if you can’t help yourself. To than end I am still doing what out reach and steady contact with friends that I can, but also many of them seem to be a bit more closed off, especially some I worry about more, so only so much I can do there. Ha wanted to end on perhaps a more positive note and not do a politics section but I seem to have. I think I’ll do a proper separate opening of 2024 post and that might contain a little more optimism on these topics.

In the end tho 2023 was a pretty good year to me, no personal complaints, so there’s that. I’m pretty lucky and privileged. I will continue to look forward to pay that forward what I can.

1 Year Fediversary

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 16:30:00 +0000

Looks like it was my 1 year “fedi-versary” last week. A year since I set up on Mastodon initially as a fallback from Twitter and pretty rapidly over the next few months it became my new social media home. I’ve since pretty much fully abandoned twitter.

It’s fine here. Definitely more chill. I think all in all there’s just less social media in my life in the last year and that’s probably OK. I haven’t quite managed to figure out reliably blogging more yet even tho I keep thinking I want to (ignoring today clearing out some WIPs). Mostly just working on good software (tor browser, cwtch) and doing things for me (games, media, reading, seeing folks IRL).

I do think there’s some potential for cooler social tools coming, maybe more folks getting interested in p2p stuff. We’ll see.

I’ve seen people bemoaning the loss of “older versions of the internet” and I dunno if I agree. They weren’t sustainable on multiple fronts and it’s not like IRC or phpbb have gone away, we could still set those up. But the awareness of privacy and identity and anonymity has changed. as have some of the threats. 20+ years ago it wasn’t so common to think about things crawling most of the public web and crunching processing power on that.

I think it’s important to keep building social networks of people yourself, more slowly and keep evaluating new tech as it comes along.

Some one was recently shocked I’m still a Slashdot reader and it exists at all still. It never went away, tho I don’t visit it, I just sub to a few categories in my RSS reader. Some “old” stuff is still around good too.

It’s a weird time in the internet’s growth and all I want to see is more distributed stuff. The VC backed centralized apocalypse of the last decade really seems to be getting pretty terminal. Maybe we can see some community grown distributed solutions slowly popup to supplant some of that. 