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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