Here are a few things I did or thought about in 2025:

• We did some traveling, Austin and NoVa, a big boat with a mouse, Catalina, Las Vegas, and Washington.
• I played video games with J, Dani, and the PUBG squad. Among them: Abiotic Factor, Aliens: Fireteam Elite (&), Astro Bot, Borderlands 4 (&), Horizon (&), Persona 3 (&), Sackboy, and Shadow of the Erdtree (& &).
• I coached soccer again.
• Last year's recap post had a touch of dread regarding the new political regime. It has more than lived up to expectations.
• I worked on the Outer Web a lot. Big improvements included embeddings, improved embeddings, and improvements upon the improved embeddings.

Back in March, Elon posted a really dumb meme indicating that Zelensky could easily stop the Russian invasion but stubbornly refuses do. Elon apparently takes issue with Zelensky wanting guarantees that Russia will not simply consolidate its overtaxed military and economy, then resume the invasion. A guy called Alfonso replied with a corrected version, replacing Zelensky with Putin. I zazzed up the corrected version just a bit and for some reason that became my most clicked-upon image from 2025. Maybe it says more about 2025 than the actual picture.


I guess I am a cruise blogger now.

1.Mos Eisley Marina Cantina

I've been on a couple of cruises - a three-day Ensenada party boat and a Caribbean family cruise. They aren't really my cup of tea but when Cheryl says you should go, you need a pretty good reason not to. Not lost in the calculus was the fact the selected cruise was sailing out of our local harbor and was thereby simpler than other vacation itineraries. Most notably, it was a Disney cruise. Danielle hasn't watched much Disney but likes her Star Wars books and really likes pools. Jessica hates everything Disney stands for and sings/hums the music frequently.

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2.Rogues

I finally got around to ticking another film off my finance watchlist. Since Rogue Trader is freely available, I put it on while I slogged through the refactoring discussed below.

Turns out the refactoring was more interesting than the movie. The premise of Rogue Trader is solid - the true story of a guy who made a bank insolvent through ill-advised futures ͥ trades. But there isn't much more to it than that. The film spends most of its time beating the viewer over the head with Nick Leeson's (Ewan McGregor) gnawing guilt, unconvincing lies to his coworkers, and problems at home.

It secures the bottom spot on my running ranking of Wall Street/finance/scam films:

In other news:

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3.Showdown

On Friday, SCOTUS issued an injunction preventing the deportation of Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act.

The opinion colored its rejection of the Fifth Circuit's procedural denial (of the injunction) with some direct language about how the lower court's decision amounted to an irreversible deprival of constitutional rights.

The habeas claim returns to the Fifth Circuit with the subtext, "we know you'd try to deny it at 3am on a Sunday and the detainees would be on a plane at 3:01":

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4.Saved rounds

On the PS5:

I've been on the lookout for a game I could play with Dani since we beat Stray. Aside: I wouldn't play Stray with her at age four. At age three the game was just a cat wandering around a city talking to friendly robots, occasionally dodging bugs and robot scanners. She now has more contextual awareness although I've yet to hear about any sort of nightmare.

Anyway, since we both enjoyed Rebuild the Galaxy and it was age-appropriate, I thought we'd have a go at the PS+ game Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga.

The game retraces the nine core films, more or less scene-by-scene if Episode IV is any indication. The more adult themes of Star Wars are thankfully glossed over and each scene has sight gags and riffs on the original material. Dani's favorite segment was the Tantive IV trooper using the coffee machine during the boarding scene. I also LOLed.

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5.120 stars

In the days before platinuming video games was a thing, we had unofficial achievements that didn't show up in an online profile. One such achievement was the then-daunting challenge of gathering all 120 stars in Mario 64. My last few weeks in gaming felt a bit like that star chase.

In the past couple of months, Dani and I worked through the Sackboy main game, beat Vex, and unlocked the challenging bonus world. The 275 dreamer orbs required to access the final level reminded me very much of Sackboy's spiritual ancestor (Mario 64, in case that wasn't obvious).

Considering the difficulty of some of the time trials, I was relieved to find that you don't need all of the dreamer orbs in the game to reach the 275 mark.

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6.Medicine

A quick follow-up to yesterday's finpost: things didn't go quite as expected but the White House is continuing to administer 'medicine' to Wall Street. Surprised no one's said "I'm not against the medicine, I'm against the mandate".

Before New York woke up, bears had already run amok at other exchanges.

Yesterday I reposted Bill Ackman's simpish request for a three-month pause of the tariffpocalpyse. That tweet seems to have started a game of telephone:

Indexes ended the day close to flat (well, DJIA was down almost 1% but nobody cares about the Dow).

The WSB daily thread had more than 40k comments; that is, many were gathered around the water cooler to shitpost about their losses.

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7.Roguelikes

After a lot of tries, J more or less soloed Annihilation to complete our second Remnant II playthrough. Great game.

Last year's big deckbuilder roguelike was Balatro, yesterday I finally got around to playing it. It's like Slay the Spire but with poker hands instead of combat.

Quick summary:

I really enjoyed my first few runs. I might fire it back up when I want to game but don't have a ton of time, but ultimately the combat mechanic is fairly limiting. That is, there are only a few poker hands to begin with, each run the viable plays quickly narrow to one or two. So you just end up playing, say, flush after flush. I think, I've only played a few times.

While there are a couple flavors of boring consumables that just provide flat stat buffs, the equippable items allow for excellent build variety.

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We did some travel. And we walked around some trees with lights on them, and saw the Grinch (theatrical), and built some Legos.


Jes, Dani, and I took a trip up to Washington to see the fam, the main event was a cabin at Snoqualmie Pass. I was hoping to get some skiing in but alas there was no base. On the plus side, it snowed continuously the entire weekend so there was plenty of sledding.

I did give Jon the opportunity to dig The Rebel out once or twice.

Museum of Flight

Monday, after returning to the metro area, we went to the Seattle Museum of Flight. I was excited to see (and walk through) the Concorde, which is parked in a huge hangar with a bunch of other airliners. The Constellation, P-38, and retired AF1 were also highlights, the stucco space shuttle wasn't.

Pike Place and SEA

We spent Tuesday morning at Pike Place and then headed to the airport for our flight home.

Thanksgiving

A few weeks before Washington, visited Grandpa Jeff for a pleasant Thanksgiving lunch. Then, having spent the night in Glendale, we found ourselves with a few hours to kill before the train. Since Glendale happens to have two adjacent malls and it happened to be Black Friday, we decided to swim through crowds without any actual intent to purchase things. I can't complain, I had some Mongolian wok for lunch and Jes bought me some jeans.

Home

Between trips we've had plenty of Lego time, reading time, and hot cocoa.

Out and about

We did the Grinch at The Old Globe.

RBW had a lot of balls.

I came across news that the 1970s French sci-fi mag Métal Hurlant was being re-released with translations and some new content. The stories are all distinct and 1-10 pages long so its a lot like the streaming serieses Black Mirror and Love, Death, and Robots. Likewise, the graphic format means the authors can worldbuild without a wall of expository text.


There are some horror stories, some trippy ones, and some that comment on war or politics.

Only a few hours in, I didn't have much commentary on BL4 back in Septermber. And then things got a bit busy. Me and J have managed almost-weekly sessions so here in December we've defeated the three area bosses and are knocking on The Timekeeper's door.

And on the daddy-daughter gaming front, Dani and I blasted through Astro Bot and are on to the endgame stuff.


Astro Bot is the feature-length sequel to the platformer demo game that shipped with the PS5, Astro's Playroom. It won 2024 GOTY according to one of the main award-givers, so between the critical acclaim and our enjoyment of Playroom, Dani and I had high expectations.


3D platformers don't really need a story. Astro Bot gets this and only shows brief sequences of an alien breaking apart the PS5 spaceship and scattering bots across the galaxy. The game's quest consists of rescuing the bots and recovering the PS5 hardware components.


The Astro Bot experience is pretty much the same as Playroom: 3D platforming with special items in every world that add a gameplay mechanic like slowing time or deploying climbable platforms.


The first game was a nostalgic experience; each world unlocks a PS1-5 and their associated peripherals. Throughout the levels are little scences of bots playing famous characters like Crash Bandicoot, Lara Croft, and Pyramid Head. In this game the costumed bots are rescuable and, once freed, have their own little diorama at home base. With 300+ bots to rescue, there are many more cameos to discover - Nioh, Persona 5, Katamari, SotC, Gran Turismo, and so forth.


It's upbeat, it's easy, it's lighthearted. It's perfect for playing with an enthusiastic four year old. Dani is still nervous around bad guys so most of the time I held the dual shock while the little one played co-driver. The home base area, however, is large, safe, and has a bunch of stuff to do.


I have to say, it feels like Sackboy got shafted by the GOTY thing -- well not exactly, Sackboy was released in 2020 so the games aren't in direct competition. Sackboy a better 3D platformer than Astro Bot in almost every way (though not by a large margin) but it didn't even get an award nomination.


Borderlands 4 is excellent. It says a lot about the franchise that I can't really say how great it is until I've finished a couple of playthroughs, taken on some raid bosses, and played the DLC. But the way things are going right now, I'd say once all is said and done it'll be the second most enjoyable game in the series (after BL2, of course, and recognizing that BL1 is the only reason we are here).

New Game+ has to not suck. And the DLC has to be as amazing as the previous games. But I'm optimistic.

Me and J have a good chunk of playtime under our belt, we're approaching where the plot indicates that the final confrontation is nigh. The actual final battle is almost certainly a bit farther away but I think we've unlocked most of the game's geography.

Kairos, map, and area bosses

The layout of Borderlands 1 and 2 felt like a hub-and-spoke layout centered around Fyrestone and Sanctuary. B1.5 and BL3 were more of a linear journey with occasional reasons to return to previous areas. The BL4 map changes the formula and offers a sprawling, contiguous donut-shaped outlands surrounding the antagonist's dystopic home city. The donut is partitioned into three domains, each ruled by an area boss. As you might imagine, all three area bosses must be defeated to access the center city. This layout, coupled with the size of the map, means that the BL4 journey is neither linear nor a series of sorties from home base. You sort of drift around the map and make use of the scattered safe houses and ally bases (there is a resistance movement fighting each area boss).

Like its open world kin (Elden Ring, Horizon, Zelda, etc.) Kairos has all of the obligitory biomes; plains, deserts, forests, tundras, and some more science fiction-y environments. While the ample visual variety feels a bit contrived, it's important for a game of this size to not be all desert wasteland.

The story

BL4 doesn't have much story but it has plenty of narrative. That is, you're pretty much just trying to find a way to nonfatally remove your mind control device but wind up running into a lot of good and bad guys along the way. Like with BL3, I'm glad they didn't try to do another Handsome Jack and it's nice that The Timekeeper isn't nearly as annoying as the Calypso twins. Similarly, even if some of the dialogue and subplots are ho-hum, the steady stream of interactions makes for the feeling of being part of a story.

Me	I read some initial speculation that the hand [picking up a psycho mask on Kairos] belongs to an Eridian, possibly The Watcher who appeared at the end of TPS. Does this mean the omegawar mentioned in the TPS epilogue is upon us?

Barring an extensive Act III, I don't imagine we're getting the mysterious galactic conflict that was foretold. Oh well, I just hope BL4 doesn't continue teasing a mysterious galactic conflict that Gearbox don't intend to write.


Despite BL4 taking place on the other end of an interdimensional shift, a few familiar faces that have come looking for the cause of the shift (Lilith).

Gameplay and QoL

BL4 introduces some new movement mechanics: grapple, double jump, and glide. These moves don't especially impact the way the game plays (you don't use them much in combat) but the greater freedom of movement probably means Gearbox had more latitude with level design.

The biggest change to gunplay added with BL4 is knockdown. It's fairly common to send an elite bad guy to the ground, granting a brief opportunity to finish him or find cover. The knockdown mechanic is both tactically helpful an cognitively more reassuring to see an onslaught of exploding stuff occasionally send an enemy to the floor.


On the quality of life front:

• You can digistruct (spawn) vehicles anywhere you can drive them. I'm actually okay with being punished for getting my ride blown up but I can't deny the convenience.
• The GPS track (see the image above with a pod racer-like vehicle) is really useful for getting around the expansive overworld.
• You can send items to your bank from anywhere, freeing up precious backpack slots.
• Boss battles have a replay kiosk where you can spend eridium for some quick farming.
• Low gravity returns for part of the game but without the need for oxygen.

Sidequests, bounties, minigames, distractions...

There is plenty to do in BL4. But is there too much? Is it fresh and fun or diluted with fetch quests? I don't know yet!

• BL4 has tons of sidequests including the classic Face McShooty- and The Bane-style ones. We decided we'd do a few now and catch the rest on the next playthrough.
• Each safe house has bounties and things to retrieve. The bounties can largely be accomplished by wreaking ordinary havoc in the area so they're a bit like passive rewards. Similarly, there are global rewards for doing x, y number of times (e.g. 100, 500, 1000 headshots with a Vladof).
• I guess slot machines have been replaced by Plinko (above)?
• Scattered across the map are vault fragments which may or may not lead to greater amounts of loot down the road.
• The coolest new side activity (see Poison Ivan above) is the introduction of randomly-spawning field bosses. They're not easy and if any player dies or is knocked out of the boss's boundary, the boss despawns and you get nothing.

Weps and builds

Coming up with a neat character build in a game like Baldur's Gate 3 or Slay the Spire is one of the more enjoyable aspects of their respective genres. The Borderlands series has the same CRPG and deckbuilder depth but since it's a FPS you really get to feel how well your build works, or doesn't. BL4 has numerous distinct dimensions along which one can customize their build:

• Weapons: WGBPO guns with damage types, unique manufacturers, and randomly-generated attributes/parts; it's kind of Borderlands's whole thing.
• Skill trees: each character has a set of unique skill trees with a wide variety of abilities and bonuses.
• Action skills: action skills are the Borderlands ult ͥ ability that often does major damage and provides temporary boosts.
• Class mods: class mods provide a unique ability - often related to the character's action skill - and bonus skill points to certain skill tree nodes.
• Enhancements (new): boosts weapon abilities like fire rate or magazine size and, interestingly, has a special modifier for licensed parts (see below).
• Firmware (new): various boosts that increase with more items featuring the same firmware.
• Specializations (new): a bit like badass points from the prior games, you earn spendable points to buff damage, reload speed, etc.

The worry with a scheme like this is that a game is just XP-gating damage and reload speed and that it'd be just as fun without any RPG elements. BL4 has some vanilla buffs like damage and reload speed however they tend to be building blocks for a more sophisticated character customization.

A Maliwan shotty with a shield? Whaaa?

It used to be that if you had a Jakobs sniper rifle, it was always semi-automatic, high damage, and non-elemental. If you had a Maliwan SMG, it was elemental with a mediocre fire rate and magazine size. Borderlands 4 adds the commercial wonder that is IP licensing, so that Jakobs can fire explosive rounds thanks to a deal with Torgue Corporation, the Maliwan might reload via throwing it like a grenade thanks to parts from Tediore.


For someone like myself who is used to the fixed lanes of the Borderlands arms manufacturer system, this feels pleasantly disruptive. It's not always good of course; adding a charge-up or overheat component to an otherwise-good drop is frustrating (for someone who dislikes those mechanics). But the Borderlands experience is shrugging off bad loot and thinking about working the good stuff into your build... or hitting the respec station and changing your build for a particularly promising item.

Moment of zen

After three main games, a pre-sequel, and a bunch of DLCs, BL4 has the first (afaik ͥ ) instance of a loot portapotty that's actually being used. Rude, yes, but not as rude as the the reality-defying odds of opening thousands of doors and never once interrupting someone.

	If you're still alive, grab some ammo. If you're not, THIS MESSAGE IS IRRELEVANT!	�
	From Mr. Torgue in Borderlands 2 (pic unrelated)