Notes from November 2025
2025-11-01
TV Tropes just blocked me from reading their page until I turn off the adblocker. I guess that's it, then. I've been reading this fine and educational page since 2011 and now it's over. I'll have good memories, but I won't look back.
A couple of hours later...
It works on a computer browser, so I might use the page there. But I will never link to it again.
CRT filters in games prove that old technologies survive as aesthetics.
This year, Halloween was on Friday the 13th.
"The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More" is an anthology of four stories by Roald Dahl, directed by Wes Anderson. I was expecting visual wonders, but what I got was way better, but it's difficult to describe, as it's one of a kind thing. I would say that it resembles theatre practical tricks at times. And the narrative is taken from the stories, so a character sometimes adds stuff like "he said." And then Roald Dahl himself steps in. Wonderdful. I need to find and read his stories.
"Monster: The Ed Gein Story" is this year's entry into the Monster anthology, joining Jeff Dahmer and the Menendez brothers. The show is very graphic and full of "in your face" moments addressed to the viewers. Because it is us the viewers who make people (and characters) like Ed Gein popular. The creators even comment on themselves (in disguise of Alfred Hitchcock). But at the same time it's a solid story. Reminded me a little of Spanish "Dhogs." Too bad there are so many changes from the history.
"Possessor" is a story of a hitman who possesses a person and fulfils their contract like that. From the synopsis I assumed it's gonna be supernatural or demonic even, but no, it's a technothriller. After an introductory hit, we move to a second assignment, but things don't go smooth because years of taking over others' bodies came up at a cost. It's a very bleak and depressing story. Kudos for creative visualisation of battle in the mind; I guess budgetary constraints played a role here.
I liked this movie more than Brandon Cronenberg's earlier "Infinity Pool," which seemed to lost itself on a way. Here all was good till the end.
I was 10 when I saw "Batman: Mask of the Phantasm" in a magazine, but back then there was no way to see it in Poland. And I didn't. Years later, HBO helped. Despite what its creators said, it doesn't feel like an extended episode of the animated series but rather a stand-alone film. It's a bit of Year One in flashbacks and it serves as an alternative origin story, however, not when Bruce was a boy but when he was finally making the decision. That being said, I saw it too late to fully enjoy it.
2025-11-02
Sun is weaker and it sets me into a more melancholic mood. And the funny part is that it's probably still stronger than during the summer where I come from. But I adjusted. A return to the original ways would be painful for me.
"CRINGE!" level 7. Next week the boss level and then I can go to record selected single levels of my choice.
2025-11-04
What if we kissed at the Black Lodge?
That moment when you want to write 🍅 in Maltese, but you're typing too fast and skip the last letter and you end up with 🎉.
"Ride of the Valkyries" from Command & Conquer soundtracks heavily sounds as if taken out of John Williams' Star Wars. And I know that he was inspired by these classic compositions, but there is something in the execution here.
Mastodon anniversary
It's my third anniversary on Mastodon and more widely, on Fediverse. Thank you for being with me and commenting my posts and liking them and... *bursts into laughter*
No, but seriously, I'm glad I'm here and not on the Nazi Bar. A very refreshing experience, akin to the Old Internet I remember from late 1990s and onwards. Before big entities smelled money and all. So, it's still alive and well in places like here. That's our strength.
That feeling when you meet your FediTwin. One of a kind.
A post from Jason Gorman
What makes LLMs work isn't deep neural networks or attention mechanisms or vector databases or anything like that.
What makes LLMs work is our tendency to see faces on toast.
2025-11-05
I think that a really well-written book, heavily embedded in its medium, cannot be made into a movie. (This actually applies to any work of art of any medium.)
2025-11-07
I had to put on socks today and hoodie to the office. The warmth lasted longer this year and it was nice, but now it's time to accept the facts.
On changes of own style
When I see my old writings, I see a different style. I would call it more decorative and less terse myself, but that's not the point now. I was wondering when did that change happened and if it was sudden or slow. This week I found a short story from 2018, a recollection of real events, really, just thinly wrapped into a fiction excuse. I thought I lost this story, btw. Anyway, it's written in the old style. I would expect it to be different by then. It might have been more sudden, then.
It could be related to switching from Polish to English. Different language have different levels of expression. There is also an aspect of a native versus an acquired language: the native one is more emotional.
(That's why I like to think about solutions to problems in English: it's more analytical for my own sake.)
That's it, an observation.
That being said, I prefer a minimalist style and for a while now, I have been working on it in all the languages I use. Funnily enough, when I see my old style, I have a sense of loss, but I immediately realise that I wouldn't want to go back to that. It only makes the old writings more valuable and unique because they are not going to happen again, in no small part because I don't want them to happen anymore.
2025-11-08
"Task" (2025) is a 7-episode HBO series about an FBI task force assembled to investigate armed robberies of drug houses of one particular gang. What I liked about this show was that it was not action-oriented but rather building personal stories of all the characters, and the robberies and the investigation was more of a means to an end, not the purpose of the whole show. It's also not set in one of 2 main locations in the US, which I'm fed up a bit with.
Guillermo Del Toro's "Frankenstein" (2025) is an adaptation of the famous horror story, and it's faithful on one hand (with the structure) and expanding on the other one (the brother's character). It's also stunning and well thought-out visually, with colour-coded characters and places/segments. It made me think of Tim Burton's gothic productions yet more anchored in reality. It certainly landed better than the last year's remake of "Nosferatu." It felt more like telling a story than focusing on visuals.
"Yes, but does it scale?"
2025-11-10
Nadja
"Nadja" from 1994 is an arthouse take on a vampire story, reminding me a bit of early Jim Jarmusch maybe. Financed by David Lynch (who has a cameo), it tells a story of Count Dracula's twins, living now in New York. There is just a couple of actors but all known; Peter Fonda the most, but my personal favourite is Elina Löwensohn, whom I know from "The Wisdom of Crocodiles," my once all-time favourite. Extra points for pixelated segments, which I did not expect from such an old movie.
Regarding the pixelated segments, they were shot with Fischer-Price PixelVision, a camera introduced in 1987 and being sold for a year and discovered by filmmakers in 1990s. Which means that "Nadja" is not the earliest example. What I find interesting is that it records this pixelated image onto a tape, so the outcome is digital-analog (or the other way around).
2025-11-11
I ordered a CD from Discogs because it was cheap, but then, after paying, the seller wrote to me that there is a minimum. I missed that because it's probably dug in their page and who reads that; I'm a Pole and info like that falls under manuals and we don't read them. I probably could have written that in that case I'm cancelling and give me my money back, but I decided to explore their offer, as it was big, and I found something interesting in the end for only 5 euros more.
Taking notes started as an exercise where I write one thing a day, and at some point I started writing cultural reviews, but then they evolved into threads, which I liked but they started taking too much time, so I begun to postpone them for the weekends, which is not always doable, for a number of reasons, and this in return begun to undo the whole idea, so maybe it's time to scale down to shorter notes but more frequent.
2025-11-12
The year is 2025. I am charging my watch through my keyboard. I feel like a character from "Neuromancer" when I write that, although it's much less cyberpunky than I pictured it back in 1998.
On our way to the grocery store, we noticed clouds being quite low and encapsulating the pueblo above. Later, when we went out with our dogs for the evening walk, we noticed that the clouds came to us and the whole area was foggy and damp, and cold-to-the-bone as the result. We have taro (when the humidity from above the sea moves back into the land) and we have literal clouds coming down, but we never have actual fog.
One day later...
Yesterday I wrote that the cloud came down to our neighbourhood, but it was taro after all. Maybe we're too low to have a cloud.
I couldn't get myself to buy boar pâté because I see those rouge hogs almost every day, and it made me partial to them. It reminded me of a discussion I held two decades ago where we agreed that if we had to kill animals for our food, then most likely we'd become vegetarians. The delegation of responsibilities that we developed moves the hardship of slaughtering the animal away from us, thus making us impartial to it.
(I settled for bird pâté.)
I am listening to a series of acid jazz albums and they sound like 1970s police procedural soundtrack. And it's amazing.
2025-11-14
It rained all night and the floor became chillingly chilly.
I am listening to a selection of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' albums, and I got to the song "Loverman" from "Let Love In," which I haven't heard for years, when I was comparing it to the Metallica's cover from "Garage, Inc.," which would make it many years from now. So, this time, because I listened to EinstĂĽrzende Neubauten in the meantime, I can clearly hear Blixa Bargeld singing back vocals here. It's worth to revisit the old songs sometimes.
I also learned from Wikipedia that Blixa Bargeld was not only a member of the band but one of co-founders, and that comes as a surprise. It's worth to open Wikipedia on the old bands sometimes.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' debut sounds as if it was recorded during a theatre play. In case it's not clear, it's a praise. I like it. There's a breath of fresh air to it.
2025-11-16
"Radio Free Albemuth" (2010) is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's posthumously-released book which I didn't read, so it was my big surprise when I noticed elements of "VALIS" in it. Turns out, the book was a draft version of "VALIS" that was rejected by publisher and reworked by Dick. His writing was always a bit pulpy, so I found it very fitting that the movie has TV production quality to it. The plot is unpredictable and I liked that a lot. This includes sudden appearance of Alanis Morisette.
One Battle After Another
"One Battle After Another" is another fruit of cooperation of Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon (after "Inherent Vice"), although this time is a much looser adaptation. I thought it was supposed to be post-apocalyptic but the story follows the moment of societal decline into its collapse. It's very epic in a sense of a lot of things per its time. The core story of father and daughter is a vehicle to show the authoritarian regime reminding me of what the U.S. seems to be aiming to achieve.
As with those good productions, it reminded me of some earlier movies:
- "Southland Tales" for its epicness and the ongoing regimification.
- "The Counselor" for the general vibe and many overlapping layers which create the final story.
- The pursuit segment brought back fond memories of "Bullitt."
- The part where Lockjaw talks to the Christmas Adventurers Club at the end feels like the end of "Fargo's" season 2.
And finally, especially after releasing the recent Jeffrey Epstein's emails that revealed how unsophisticated the real world villains are, the Christmas Adventurers Club is very slick organisation. This is my general reflection I have when I watch movies now and there are some corrupted execs and/or politicians there and they are so elegant and well-spoken and organised, while the real ones are like a crude joke. If you wrote them like that, the audience wouldn't buy that. And yet, here we are.
The rain is over. The dogs can finally stop sleeping and go for a decent walk. Both hate rain so much that it's comical at times. But being Andalusian dogs, they have a comfort of not having to have to deal with rain.
"Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition" for €5.99 in the Nintendo store, so I thought why not. I am mostly interested in the new episode which uses an updated features from the engine, which I find amazing in a case of a game from 1994. Notes to follow soon maybe because I already started 2 other games and I don't wanna spread myself thin.
2025-11-19
My next Egyptian-themed game is "The Talos Principle's" only DLC, "The Road to Gehenna." While it's only one of the themes, it has been realised fantastically, both visually and muscially, and it's represented in around one fourth of the game, so it's a strong candidate. I played the base game exactly 4 years ago, in November 2021. I promised myself to play it earlier, but time has flew by. But now I'm back.
2025-11-22
Another "Blood" remaster is on the way.
https://nightdivestudios.com/blood_refreshed_supply/
Also for Switch, but I find it challenging to squeeze all the controls on a gamepad. Concessions will have to be made.
I realised that my favourite game aesthetic is a 3D world with 2D sprites, and there is nothing special about it in itself, it's just what I played the most when I was 12 years to 16, and it turned out to be my formative years in that regards. Luckily, it's quite popular (and I believe that's partially due to technical aspects: it's easier to do than 3D models and less resource greedy). Either this or fully realistic 3D; I'm not nostalgic on early, clunky 3D models; those got old pretty bad.
Right after posting that, I went to wishlist "Wizordum." It doesn't look like I need a new game now, so it'll spend some time there. But one day I might go for it.
2025-11-23
Somehow I missed that I finished season 2 of "Bored to Death," but I also realised that I don't have much to say about it. It's funny in a very light way and it's probably the cosiest watch on my list. I still like the guys. The actors have really good chemistry and dynamics.
"The Pledge" is a 2001's Sean Penn's movie packed with known actors. We decided to see it after opening credits were rolling and each name was famous. It's a story of a retired cop who still investigates a murder case he *pledged* to solve. Around the third, we realised it's based on the same book as Hungarian "Twilight," so this became more interesting. Due to budgetary reasons they had to skip some scenes which made the plot more original, I'd say, while still preserving the finale's point.
HBO recommended me "The Running Man," a 1987 action flick with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Initially getting mixed reviews, the movie got better notes over the years. It's so densely eightish that you could slice it with a knife. Schwarzenneger has a lot of cheesy one-liner that work perfectly with his flat delivery. He actually says "I'll be back" in this movie too! They were so shameless. The social commentary fits nowadays MAGA, though. I imagine the same hype if USA organised a show like that.
2025-11-25
There was a thread here, but it was immediately re-made into a text: "Dream of the impossible".
2025-11-26
I would like a modern remaster of "Fade To Black."
2025-11-27
My project went live, so I might have more time now for taking notes and writing the book and calling my parents.
2025-11-28
That was a cool experience.
Let's buy some games that I might never try. This time it's "Mortal Shell" and "The Serpent Rouge" (both for Switch), but I also think about "Dex," which is patiently waiting for me.
"The Serpent Rouge" is 90% not my kind of thing but playing as a plague doctor is my soft spot and it was only 2 euros now. What @atomicpoet made me realise is I don't have to finish every game I start. I might just dip my toes and see what's what. And that's okay.
The cold days came suddenly this year. There was no gradual change: one week I was wearing T-shirts and the next one it was "winter" gear. I'm quoting the winter here because it's not winter by my Eastern European standards (or Central European).
I'm not saying it's easy or pleasant, but I expect senior devs to be able to read minified code. Sometimes a need arise.
I realised that due to my gaming experience, I prefer to play boomer shooters (but unlikely anything new) and at the same time, modern (post-2020 even) Souls-like games (I generously include Zelda games here because mechanics are similar, just less dying). Luckily, there are some modern boomer shooters whose creators know what's what.
2025-11-29
I played "The Serpent Rogue" and it's cool game, at least to begin with. We'll see later. We play as Warden, who sports a plague doctor outfit and I always had a soft spot for it, so I was eyeing that game for a while. One of criticisms was that there's no sense of direction, but it's not a bad thing for me; I prefer that over hand-holding for a couple of first hours. So, I'm roaming a bit lost but that's part of the appeal here.