In my post for 2024, I took sum of a number of accomplishments and things I created. But this 2025, I produced less software. What gives?

I spent some of my free time near the beginning of this year working on a project I call "Demake86", a tribute for Metroid's 40th anniversary. This was superceded by my increasingly heavy workload at my employer until I was laid off at the end of the year.

In my scant free time, I spent the good days climbing mountains. I climbed a good variety of them in 2025, including seven(!) new-to-me mountains, among a few others. I produced a few pieces of new Blender art that aren't too pertinent to this blog, and I started hosting a new small-social-media forum online for my new community, and I even made several stickers for it. I also did some maintenance, like moving all of my domains off from IWantMyName to Porkbun.

Moving was also a project in itself: Auditing the apartments, testing the windows and sockets, planning out the places, building Ikea furniture, trying to get the landlord and the fiber companies on board to wire the place up, and so forth.

In getting ahead of Trump's tariffs, I continued to splurge, building a new PC. My timing could not have been better- I got in just before prices skyrocketed. I used it to render some new art on Blender, including these Metroid doodles and some Windows 9x fanart.

Building a new PC, I installed the latest PopOS (which was in alpha at the time), and ran into the first Linux issues I ever had in my life. Being a development release on new hardware with Nvidia (notoriously tricky on Linux), I sometimes ran into issues where the newer kernels would not boot. This is all fine now, though.

I spent a lot of time also making new friends in the city I moved to, helping with unhoused activism and harm reduction direct action. This is work I feel proud of, but it's labor- it hardly makes for a blogpost here. I am also working on a tool to make it easier to make these kits, but that's still a WIP. I also became the resident security expert in my circles, hosting small security seminars for people. I was able to give in-person tutorials on making a personal website (thank you to Neocities for doing all the hard work!) and on torrenting. I also went camping for the first time in my life in June, which was special.

In free time around the holidays, I finally got around to setting up a NAS, and then I made a little shitpost clicker. Content warning for edgy "dril-esque" posting language, and the fact the project is kind of broken and works best on Chrome and lacks the ability to 'save'.

In terms of things I consumed:

I also played a number of good videogames this year. Deltarune Chapters 3 and 4, Donkey Kong Bananza, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and even Metroid Prime 4 were all games that occupied my attention even as I am increasingly uninterested in gaming. I found Silksong to actually be pretty easy, which tells me I have probably played too many videogames in my life.

I read some books, too. The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed was short and bitter. The Necropolitics of Language Oppression Gerald Roche in Annual Review of Anthropology was recommended to me by a friend and was well worth the read. I started to re-read Homestuck with some friends, and we got to [S] Cascade, which is a great ending point. Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams was a harrowing account from a Facebook whistleblower and is something I recommend to everyone I know-- it is hard and thankless work to get my community off Facebook but this book makes for an easy recommendation on the matter. Project: Hail Mary by 'The Martian' author Andy Weird was another fiction book, and though the writing and dialogue is mediocre, and the "science" in "science fiction" has mixed depth, the book itself was too enjoyable to put down, and I finished its ~500 pages in only two sittings. I finished off this year with A Physical Education by Casey Johnston, which has already been discussed at length.

Books I started but did not finish were Starting Strength (as mentioned in APE), Racecraft, Dante's Inferno, Detective Pony, Bad Blood, Character Limit, and the classic Stewart Calculus textbook (which I used to refresh my maths knowledge). Probably not an exhaustive list.

Of the good TV this year, Vince Gilligan's (overproduced, imo) Pluribus was refreshingly unsubtle with its political commentary. It's somehow contemplative while, at the same time, a character turns to the camera and describes the moral of the story, such as in the episode "The Gap".

Oh, I also played around in TidalCycles and created a few tunes, such as this Metroid item pick up theme, this alternate, and a few little tunes such as this and this. :)

Further, I cracked some of the documents in the Hofeller files, from about five years ago. Expect a post on that soon-ish. It's harrowing, bad bad stuff.

Oh, I also got caught up as a third-party in a police chase. That was intense, and admittedly kind of cool. My favorite part was surviving it!