2025 in review

Film watching

• Microcosmos (France, 1996) · Insect life filmed through specially-built cameras. Practically no narration, unlike most nature documentaries. The editing elevates it to an art form.
• Calexico: World Drifts In (USA, 2004) · Americana indie group Calexico plays the Barbican. 30 minutes in they're joined by a mariachi band. On YouTube.
• The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Australia, 1994) · Two drag queens and a transgender woman travel the Outback on a bus.
• Meshes of the Afternoon (United States, 1943) · A 14-minutes-long surrealist short. Dreamy.
• Hundreds of Beavers (USA, 2022) · Black-and-white Looney-Tunes-ish live-action comedy. Feels like watching a video game in the best way possible.
• The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (France, 1964) · A very musical musical romance in which every word is sung. Bright beautiful colors.
• Kontroll (Hungary, 2003) · Murder mystery centered around a subway train station staff. Filmed entirely in an underground station.
• Chime (Japan, 2024) · A 45-minute-long horror film by Cure's director Kiyoshi Kurosawa about a mysterious chime that makes people uneasy when they start hearing it.
• Klaus (Spain, 2019) · A Christmas animated movie I've been meaning to see ever since it came out but always missed the timing. I missed it in 2024 too, but decided to just go for it and watch it in post-festive January. Best looking animation I've seen in a long time. A beautiful story beautifully told. It won every Annie award it was nominated for, and rightly so.

Book reading

• The Palm-Wine Drunkard (Amos Tutuola, Nigeria, 1952) · Yoruba-inspired fantasy. Magical realism with an emphasis on the magical.
• The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories (1898–2014) 34 short stories ranging from 1898 to 2014 chosen not because of their cultural relevance but by their memorableness to the curator. Introduced with story-by-story brief commentary by Haruki Murakami.
• Locus Solus (Raymond Roussel, France, 1914) · A scientist invites colleagues to his estate. Each chapter opens with a detailed description of an absurd scene featuring an invention. The invention is then explained, the mechanisms being as absurd as the scene first described.
• A Philosophy of Software of Design (John Ousterhout, USA, 2018) · A book on how to detect and avoid complexity in software. Starts by clearly defining complexity as anything related to the structure of a software system that makes it hard to understand and modify the system. Symptoms of complexity are classified into three categories: change amplification, cognitive load and unknown unknowns. Causes of complexity are classified into two categories: dependencies and obscurity. What follows are examples and strategies for simplification. Worth reading for the first two chapters alone. Felt like the kind of book that organizes what you already believed in but could not articulate simply.

Video game playing

• Blue Prince (2025) · A first-person unique mix of puzzle and strategy. Incredibly deep. So many puzzles of so many kinds. Rebus, wordplay, Myst-like classic video game puzzles, environmental puzzles. Probably my favorite game of the 2020s so far.
• The Case of the Golden Idol (2022) · A detective puzzle in which you're presented with frozen-in-time scenes and must piece together what's going on by answering who's who and what's going on by filling in slots in sentences like "__ got ambushed by __". Not too different from Return of the Obra Dinn in gameplay mechanics, but original and clever enough to set it apart. A great game to be played in a group.

Software writing

I feel like the streaming-era services like Spotify and Apple Music don't give you enough control over personal library organization, so I wrote a web-based tool named Crates to store my favorite albums and EPs along with a very limited set of metadata: the country for each artist, the first release year for each album and an external link to the resource on Spotify. Album art is sourced from Last.fm and metadata comes from MusicBrainz. These days I use Notion for most Personal Information Management as it handles not just CRUD but different views, sync, history, data export/import etc. In this case I thought a little custom web app was justified for the high-density album art view and Last.fm and MusicBrainz integrations. Or maybe I just wanted to scratch the itch to write some software. It has been working well as a daily driver to decide what I should listen to next.

A new hobby

I got a Nikon FE film camera for my birthday and managed to go through a couple of Kodak Vision3 rolls. Most of the photos of the first roll were a blurry mess, but it's a deeply satisfying process, and when a photo looks good, it looks really good!