December

This month's been a bit hectic. I feel like everything's been leading up to having some time off over Christmas/New Years and I haven't done a lot of anything other than work and stare longingly at the calendar.

I did play a tonne of Balatro. I didn't like it at first, but I love it now.

Tabitha got her portrait drawn by Chris Riddell.

I played Forza Horizon 4. Actually I played a lot of games this month. Got a good whack of Steam vouchers for Christmas and there's a great sale on.

Apple Intelligence met with expectations and I disabled it very quickly.

Instagram rolled out new share tracking, which forced me to up my game.

And I took a tonne of photos then posted them all at once because I'm lazy and figured posting them all like that hides their mediocrity. I think it works.

I've read/watched so many "gifts for the ... who has everything", and "last minute gifts for the ... in your life" this month, and I don't like it. Why are you trying to buy something for someone who has everything? And why are you stressing yourself out shopping last minute for things?

If that person you're thinking of would be hurt or upset that you didn't buy them something, I think there's a conversation to be had there. I'd be more upset if trying to buy me something caused someone stress. I would love to normalise giving gifts throughout the year, rather than waiting until the two times you're allowed to give gifts. Relationships aren't a list of checks and balances, and they ideally exist throughout the year. Or, at the very least, not at predefined points.

So I think if you see something you think someone would like, get it for them and give it to them now. Don't wait for birthdays and Christmas. Life's too short for these times that are supposed to be happy or relaxing, to be stressing people out instead.

Music

• Coilguns - Featherweight
• Knocked Loose feat. Poppy - Suffocate live on Kimmel
• Sky Ferreira - Leash. New Sky Ferreira??
• Amenra - Skunk this came out in February but I missed it

YouTube

• Steve Carell on Snack Wars - this is worth it just to hear him say "jelly tots" in a British accent, I promise
• Razbuten - games I played in... series. Love hearing this guy talk about games.
• NASA's images of Jupiter
• How Pringles are made
• Adam Savage on pencils. I love pencils, and I shouldn't have watched this.
• Installing MacOS on a Steam Deck. One of my friends needed MacOS reinstalling on their Apple laptop and it felt a bit like this. Apple's support for their older hardware/OSes is abysmal at times. It should not be possible to get into dependency hell when installing an OS from a trillion dollar company.
• DOG MAN trailer. I've seen this trailer twice at the cinema this month.
• Music and Entropy. Watch every Benn Jordan video
• Simone Giertz - A chair for your half-dirty clothes. Only Simone is allowed to be this wholesome without me wanting to puke
• The Nice Guys and wit. I've watched this video so many times, and I love The Nice Guys.
• I spent a year finishing my gaming backlog. I don't recommend watching this video necessarily but it's funny how people carve out niches on YouTube. This guy's whole thing is the admin associated with tackling his gaming backlog. He's made multiple videos about it, and I think he's going to continue to. I wonder if that's fulfilling.
• Trendy designs that don't work. I've always said about those stairs that they look sketchy, and I spent years of my youth climbing extremely sketchy staircases in churches.
• The obscure world of model train synthesizers. More Benn; just watch.
• 28 Years Later trailer. I need to watch the others again.
• Numberphile - the problems with secret santa. I love stuff like this, and I love Dr Hannah Fry.
• Sam Campbell's best Taskmaster moments.
• Hyper Light Breaker trailer. IT'S NEARLY HERE
• Yorkshire Pudding tips. We are a Yorkshire Pudding house. Being vegetarian, we don't really have roast beef, and that's quite liberating. You can have Yorkshires with anything, and I recommend that you do.
• Intergalactic trailer. Porsche designed a spaceship for Naughty Dog's new game.
• Lads who think they're Paul Mescal.
• Why are Leica cameras so expensive? Some good info in this video. I did not know that "Leica" is a contraction of Leitz Camera.
• How to fit and use a Halti. Forest is a puller so we're using one of these. It works quite well, even with the long-line.
• How much money I lost playing 1 season of pro tennis. I love stuff like this. Almost seems impossible to actually break through and make real money from it. I wonder how long most last at this.
• David Mitchell on every panel show. Nicely observed. We've watched Would I Lie to You quite a lot and I've grown to dislike his persona on that. Smug know-it-all who just shouts loudly when it's demonstrated that he's incorrect. Hope he's not like that in real life. Actually I don't care; I'm not likely to meet him.
• Making a luxurious walnut lounge chair.
• Inside Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. What an incredible place.
• Death of a Unicorn trailer. This looks insane (and NSFW or children)
• Can Olive Garden compete with the nation of Italy? I love Eddy but his videos are starting to go a bit stale.
• Wireless High Resolution Scrolling. This looks so great - some people are too good.
• Shooting Stars - Masterchef.
• Bowling Ball vs World's Bounciest Trampoline from 45m. Australians doing Australian things.
• Look at this crazy bridge. Who doesn't love a good bridge.
• Colin and Michael Christmas Joke Swap 2024. A favourite Christmas tradition. Some of these jokes are unhinged.
• The art of dog acting.
• The Japanese man who gets paid to do nothing.
• Noel Gallagher on YouTube guitar videos. I love the idea of him driving to someone's house to learn a chord.
• Lewis Hamilton racing R/C cars.
• These FDM printers are coming for your Tabletop Hobby. I wanted to see how well the Bambu Lab A1 prints fine detail and now YouTube thinks I love Warhammer and Magic.
• Why a city in Sweden filled caves with almost boiling water. Sounds like clickbait but it's not.
• GPD Pocket 4 review. I've always been into the idea of one of these little laptops but my thought process is always the same, and ends up with me either wishing I brought my laptop, or wishing it did something my laptop does. This keyboard also looks annoying. If my main computer was a desktop, maybe one of these things would be more viable, but this thing runs Windows, which is...just no. And I'd probably just prefer a Thinkpad.
• The ancient computer that simply shouldn't exist. This is clickbait a bit, but it's an interesting video, and I learned where Mercury in retrograde comes from. Reminded me of this LEGO clock Sven sent me.
• My racing sim feels like real life now. I don't know who this guy is but I am usually interested in sim stuff. This guy's brake pedal was €2000.
• Tyler Herro and Amen Thompson fighting at Rockets/Heat. This is pretty wild.
• Garron and the Big Light
• Iron Pineapple plays Path of Exile 2. I want one of these but definitely need a decent gaming rig for it and that's not on the horizon!
• Zeromouse Blade. This looks awesome.
• YouTube is obsessed with AI.

Links

• Stuff. I've been thinking a lot about my self-organisation system, and planning an app that fits it perfectly.
• It's going to need dates, and the Soulver devs seem to have solved a lot of that.
• Balatro Playing Cards.
• Swaziland bans witches from flying above 150m on broomsticks (for the love of god don't click this unless you have an adblocker). Tabitha has this amusing habit of sharing stories that she's half-understood, or not completely read and parsed quite correctly. It ends up with some funny scenarios where I have to try to Google and find out what she's actually talking about. Here's another.
• There's a Netflix Christmas Cinematic Universe, and I hate it.
• I'm currently saving for a Bambu Lab A1, and these DES keycaps are what I'm going to print first. After a Benchy, of course.
• This is some old-skool internet weirdness. Cataloguing those little plastic bag tie things.
• No Hello. I know someone who does this. It doesn't bother me enough to make a website about it - just amuses me because you could get the answer to your question so much quicker if you asked in the initial message, but different people are going to communicate in different ways so 🤷
• The Onion is blocked from buying InfoWars. Stupid American justice system.
• Writing down and searching every UUID. via Luke
• Children in tears after vicar tells them santa is not real. There is not a chance that children in year 6 thought that Santa was real. Tabitha went to a tiny Church of England primary school, there was about 25 kids in her class. It's a fairly sheltered environment. Most of them had phones. And not a single one of them still believed in santa. Whoever blew this up into a story is psychotic.
• coto chore jacket.
• Daniel Pietzsch's photo journal is getting updated again! 🎉
• ALDI released a Brussels Sprout Kimchi and Spiced Cranberry Hot Honey collaboration with Sauce Shop, and none of their stores seemed to have it.
• Renault 5 Turbo 3E EV. I'm not an EV guy but I am a Renault 5 guy and this thing looks crazy.
• RCE in Craft CMS. This was not a fun day.
• I really hope this MCON controller is good when it comes out.
• Padel shots all have their own names. This is crazy to me.
• Interesting view on consciousness and philosophy that reminded me in a lot of ways of N. K. Jemisin's The City We Became books.
• Continue and Persist
• Mono Works Denim. I love this guy's work, and he's super friendly too.
• Grace Dent to replace Gregg Wallace. Good. I don't like Gregg Wallace.
• The only year in review I care about: Steam. If I ever get an ADHD diagnosis, I think I should bring this with me.