Happy new year! When all’s said and done, I think I had a really good year. I spent the last two weeks of it on vacation, which means that most of this month, I was completely checked out.
I’m really proud of everything I’ve accomplished this year, and I’m looking forward to the next one!
But, ultimately, here’s the biggest news: M and I got married this month in a very small ceremony at the edge of the woods.
Music
Programming
I did write a fair amount of code for a handful of different projects. I was really excited about Advent of Code this year, but bounced off of it really hard near the end — it started to feel way too much like work, and stopped being rewarding in the last week. I really hope I’ve learned my lesson and won’t try to finish it again next year!
I’ve been hanging out with my friends in the IWYM crew on various platforms for a decade now. The problem is: the JQBX interface looks like a chat room, and it’s filled with distracting flashing lights, even in low-distraction. I instead built a CLI that allows me to treat JQBX more like a special kind of IRC channel, allowing for me to interact with it from my terminal. This has been a fun project to slowly hack on, but it’s also nice to be connected to all my friends again!
Games
I played quite a bit of Forza Horizon 5 this month — I did my races almost entirely so that I could get enough credits to buy a Toyota Trueno AE86. You know, the car from the anime:
Now that I’ve done so… well, I kind of feel like I’ve beat the game.
Reading
At the beginning of this month, I finished Mike Monteiro’s Ruined by Design. I found it quite good — there’s certainly a lot of food for thought here, and though he was doing a little bit of preaching to the choir, I got a lot out of this one to carry forward with me to all of the practices in which I do design work.
The other fiction book I’ve started on is Ideas That Created the Future; more to come when and if I finish it!
For nonfiction, I am still working on The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks. It is quite good, but I’ve just been reading it very slowly.
failbetter
This month, failbetter published:
- “Endurance of the Light Bulb” by Brennan Burnside
- “On the Sudden Appearance of Many Large Invisible Floating Spikes” by Aidan O’Brien
Stats
- I typed 570,000 keys and clicked 84,877 times.
- I listened to 854 songs.
- 0 albums escaped from the Album Gauntlet. Oof!
- I kept up my journaling habits, but I definitely did not write the quality of words that merit counting many days this month, so I won’t add those stats here.
