Notes from December 2025
2025-12-01
I bought a new pillow in IKEA, one that is shaped better for the neck, and the first night was really good; I even had a dream about being in spa for a week and I woke up refreshed and like after guided meditation. I'm afraid, though, that it's not going to repeat. These things rarely do.
Iron Reign
"Iron Reign" is a Spanish show about a family running the port in Barcelona. Drugs are involved and seemingly straightforward deal goes wrong and things suddenly complicate. Following the Spanish formula, things go in weird directions, the alleged main character ends in coma at the end of episode 2, two other characters kill each other, and then a shaman shows and things turn magic but only for a moment. The cliffhanger will stay with us because there are no plans for season 2.
All this tooting and retooting brings back fond memories of flatulists.
Death By Lightning
"Death By Lightning" (2025) is a limited series that tell a story of the 20th president of the US. It's all-star-driven (with my beloved Michael Shannon, Nick Offerman, and Shea Whigham, among others). While it sticks very close to the facts, from what I checked, and has only understandable shortcuts (like only 1 doctor), it feels very much like a comment to our times in the first place. And the metaphors are not subtle. There is even disenfranchised lone shooter.
Stranger Things (Season 5, part 1)
Volume 1 of season 5 of "Stranger Things" continues the master arc, with Hawkins being cordoned off the outside world and Vecna in the wild. I don't have much to say apart from the fact that it's just perfect: the writing, the visual references to the 1980s movies, the soundtrack. And we're watching this last season with our daughter, which is something that I did not anticipate 9 years ago.
The Blair Witch Project
I finally saw "The Blair Which Project," the famous 1999 found-footage horror. Technologically, it aged very well because the camera tapes they used were lo-fi back then already, and coupled with the plot, it reminded me heavily of Kane Pixels' Backrooms. I get that there's a witch following them and all, but being in my forties, I find getting lost in the woods way more terrifying because it can happen to me. The house at the end reminded me of "House of Leaves."
Train Dreams
"Train Dreams" is Netflix adaptation of a 2011 book of the same title. A story of Robert Grainier, a lumberjack living in the early 20th century. Along with the narration, it's slow paced and poetic, though filled with a dread of wondering what bad might happen any moment. But it's not a scary movie; if anything, it reminded me of Wim Wenders' "Perfect Days." It's a meticulous meditation on a human life. It reminded me also of Cormac McCarthy writing. I felt very touched by it.
2025-12-02
In the spirit of Black Fridays, I also got "Heretic + Hexen." It was discounted and I wanted to try the cleric with the shield and I always felt that I didn't play "Hexen" the proper way: always with the god mode on, etc. I was too young to munch through like a pro.
Recently I changed the way I drive to and from work, and I no longer try to get there fast by changing lanes and taking cars over; instead, I drag behind the car in front of me. It probably adds somewhere between 3 to 5 minutes of journey, which is an acceptable cost because it allows me to focus more on music I chose for the day and allows me to emulate entire debates, which I win, akin to the ones we usually hold during the shower.
2025-12-03
Post from heathcliffscreens
Frame #600 from Heathcliff S01E61 - Momma s Back In Town HD-[pHbX9enyJdc]
![Frame #600 from Heathcliff S01E61 - Momma s Back In Town HD-[pHbX9enyJdc]](/img/heathcliff.jpg)
For some reason, Heathcliff was renamed in Poland to Harry, or even better: Łebski Harry. I am guessing that they wanted it to fit in the theme song, and just Harry wouldn't cut it. I looked now for a translation for "łebski," and according to Google Translate it's brainy or clever, but it made me realise that it's more nuanced. Someone łebski is smart but in a cool way, someone who you want to have around you. Because he's cool.
"Heathcliff is not a name for a cat, c'mon!"
2025-12-04
Kernel panic
My first kernel-panic: checked.
Although, to my best knowledge, I was not updating the kernel. I was able to choose the older one and this one ran.
This is one of the reasons why I am reluctant to recommend Linux to anyone who's not within my driving range. It might be the true meaning of Linux community.
2025-12-05
I think I'm becoming a fan of Andrew Hulshulth. I listened to his "IDKFA" many times, but I went through "Rise of the Triad" and "Heretic + Hexen" soundtracks, among others, and they are all lit. It's a pure fire that can be listened with pleasure even without the games.
2025-12-06
I started to delay my responses to people because I realised I became a bit snappy when replying quickly, and I didn't like it. And it worked charms. I am much more pleasant and easygoing now. I really like it. And I think it works better for overall communication and cooperation with people.
Though, maybe I sleep better with a new pillow and after I finished a project at work, and as a result I'm a bit more calmer.
One way or another, it's better.
2025-12-09
Boiling Point
"Boiling Point" (2021) is a project from Philip Barantini and Stephen Graham, who gave us "Adolescence" earlier this year. Just like the show, the whole movie is done from a single shot. The plot is on one hand pretty trivial and very occupying on the other hand because everything happens so fast. And it's despite the fact that I'm not a fan of cooking-oriented stories; they just bore me. I am also once again reminded of how hectic working in a restaurant is.
Severance (Season 1)
"Severance" is probably the most liminal-space show that was made for general public. The maze-like office could enter into The Backrooms at any point. The plot itself is closer to "Black Mirror." I don't wanna say anything more, but it's one of the better things I saw this year. And luckily I have season 2 as well; perks of watching stuff at a much later time. Quite a cast too, but the most surprising thing it's been directed by Ben Stiller. Kudos!
A bit of a side note: Adam Scott got old the way I would expect Tom Cruise to, which came up interesting after watching "Parks and Recreation" fairly recently, which gave me some thing like a decade jump in case of his age.
Flamenco
After 7 years in Spain, I finally got to see a proper flamenco performance. I saw one in an open-air kind of event and I listened to recordings, but I never got to see it live in a more intimate setting. Malagan' Museum of Music has a 45-minute show, which I attended. Three performers (a guitarist, a singer, and a dancer) gave quite of a show. I didn't realise until Sunday that the stomping is a concealed drum layer. At some point they gave a solo like straight out of "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida."
It's also way more organic than it would seem from recordings: the dancer set the pace while the others were following her lead. It makes sense, even if for practical reasons, because she was the one that the other two could see.
I need to go to flamenco more often.
It was also nice to understand what the singer sang, not necessarily to a point where I can follow the whole story, but it wasn't yet another instrument. I could understand some parts.
2025-12-10
Just when I was not expecting it, Soul Coughing released an album with remixes of songs from their debut album, which had itself a 30th anniversary release last year.
At 23:47...
"Doom" (shareware) anniversary and I realised that 21 minutes before the midnight.
2025-12-11
My personal computer froze and restarting it gets me at best a minute or so before it freezes again. I'll try over the weekend and I'll blow it with compressed air maybe, which helped me in the past, but it made me realise that I could be better at data backup. I have a lot in the cloud and there is another HDD inside that has some data on it but not all.
Two days later...
I cleaned it and it ran no problem. But I still don't know the reason.
2025-12-12
Yet another kernel-panic, but this time I have actually registered an attempt to update the kernel. It was an automatic operation that Ubuntu notified me of. And yet it failed twice in the row. I might need to dig deeper.
2025-12-13
I went to a company Christmas event yesterday and did it in Ron Swanson style, like a year ago. Well, almost. My plan was simple: to eat all the food and desserts, then have a coffee, and leave for home. It was so loud that my plan seemed like an endurance competition at some point, but then my colleague found an area where it was quieter and I stayed three hours longer. Overall, I had fun.
2025-12-14
Furia
"Furia" ("Rage" in English) is a Spanish show about 5 middle-aged and 2 young women that reach their boiling point. It's crazy in a Spanish way, so anything can happen at any point. In spirit it's very close to Pedro Almodovar's movies and there are at least two, if not more, actresses from his movies. But where he series excels is at its structure: the first 6 episodes happen all at the same time and we see the same events from different perspectives. Superb writing.
Veep (Season 4)
Season 4 of "Veep" follows a campaign and presidential election that follows a resignation of the president of the United States of America; a president that was never shown on screen. The series holds its level and mid-season Hugh Laurie joins the cast. Sorry for the spoiler, as it took my by surprise, but it's not that much plot-related. I begin to like the character of Pierce, who's a helpless fool and should not survive a day there. And yet, he does.
Wake Up Dead Man
"Wake Up Dead Man" is the third movie from a series which started with "Knives Out." Benoit Blanc returns to help a young priest but also to solve a case, something that is a pleasure of its own. I liked the writing and the pacing, like the opening part when they introduced all the characters, so we can guess from the beginning, despite not knowing who and when is going to die; although there are signs. I hope there will be more.
Looks like Daniel Craig found a new character after retiring James Bond. Good for him. And also good for us.
Bugonia
"Bugonia" (2025) is another Yorgos Lanthimos movie, again with Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone. They really like each other. The story is much more intimate and includes only a handful of characters. A man with mind filled with conspiracy theories abducts a CEO of a pharmaceutical company, believing she's an alien posing as a human. And so a psychological game between abductor and abductee begins. If it feel less Lanthimosy, it's because it's a remake and he was hired later in the process.
New CDs
Chicks On Speed's "Chicks on Speed Will Save Us All" is an album that I bought on a whim and went for very good state instead of the usual mint or near mint. If it plays fine, I can live with it. And it plays fine. I realised I had most of it on mp3 a quarter of the century ago, so it was more like a return to an old album. It sounds like recorded in a garage and reminds me heavily of Peaches debut. Favourite song: "Kales Klares Wasser," which is how I learned about them in the year 2000.
To meet the minimum for the order, I also took "Blue Asphalt" from Pat Metheny Group. I recall boom on his music in Poland somewhere around the year 2000. I was always curious about this jazz guitarist because guitar doesn't connect in my head with jazz so easily. A guitar is not for playing jazz, and yet, he does it. It is, I think, a live album and it's very short, so it serves me well to breakfast as a non-obtrusive background. Sorry, Pat, if you were aiming for something more ambitious.
Those are the two CDs I ordered last month. They arrived, like, a month later and then I didn't listen to them immediately.
2025-12-15
I don't write texts for my site anymore. I write threads now. The idea for threads was to create notes in a heat of thinking, to later organise them into texts, but this barely happens (I can only recall "Dark Crime" that doubled as a text). I'm not gonna fight it and, as a matter of fact, I realised that I started writing threads the way I can just glue them together later and have a quasi-post. But I don't see it as a failure. No, I adapted to the new circumstances.
2025-12-16
New headphones. 😎
The previous ones broke on Cyber Monday, so I got gaming Razer's for a half-price. Might be an autosuggestion, but they sound better; testing 'em now with 50th anniversary version of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here."
2025-12-17
My attempt to being in the office is this: if there are no people, I see no point in going there to just sit and do nohing; if there are people, on the other hand, then it's loud and distracting and I'd rather avoid it if possible. Therefore, there is no good moment for me to go the office. But I agreed to one day a week, so I mark it internally as a day wasted for work. But socially it's fine. I actually started using them to align on some stuff with my manager and a manager of another team.
I read that long sentences are confusing for LLMs. It was a post here, I believe, and it urged us all to use long and complex sentences that might be more approachable for people than machines. Or something like that. It also overlaps with my borrowing the style of a currently read book, which in this case is "Moby Dick," which has ridiculously long sentences with multiple semicolons on the way. It's probably a lost battle, though, as they will add more GPUs and laugh in our faces.
Capitalism works tremendously well when you have the capital. And while that is not where the name comes from, not really, it ended up describing the phenomena pretty spot on. When you have more capital, you can do more things; and when you have the most capital, you can do whatever you want. Thus, capping of wealth seems like a necessary safety feature.
2025-12-18
Black Rabbit
"Black Rabbit" is 2025's limited series about two brothers, played by Jude Law and Jason Bateman. I was gonna take a longer break from Jason Bateman after "Ozark," but the combo was too good to wait too long. It's a solid story that could be as well an HBO production. There are some nice twists and it's the first time that I see Jason Bateman not in a shirt and chinos (he's sporting T-shirt and cargo pants), so we need to take a note of that. There was also nice New York City showed here.
We're going to see Underworld in August. They're playing and the tickets are in a reasonable price, so we decided to use this opportunity.
2025-12-19
If it's true that Fediverse works so well around the social dynamics because there is not that many users here compared to Bluesky even and because we are fractured due to instances federating the way no one can see all the posts, then it might as well be in our best interest to keep our numbers uninflated. The idea to grow as big is possible is typical to cancer. I meant capitalism, of course.
This reminds me a fragment from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Skin in the Game" where he wrote that we did not evolve to these volumes of information we get nowadays. In the old days, the news would travel slower, which would also mean that it would get rectified on the way (or simply die), to no one's loss. And I think think that the fracturisation of the social graph, counter-intuitively, works in our benefit. The most crucial news gets to people and dramas die out.
2025-12-21
Zola generates a file that allows building a search engine, and I've been meaning to look into that ever since I started building my website based on the notes here; back in May 2024, which is 4 months before I actually started the website (I've been meaning to use Neocities at first, but they were closed for registration and I found out that my domain is available again at a little cost). It might be an idea for next year's project.
The Phoenician Scheme
"The Phoenician Scheme" is the latest Wes Anderson's movie, with Benicio Del Toro and Mia Threapleton in the mainest roles and a myriad of other actors in other roles, a lot of which are Anderson's regulars. A story of a businessman trying to close a deal and spend some time with his daughter. Fast action, a lot of absurdities, and funny dialogues. This movie feels stronger on the plot compared to a couple of previous ones which were more consumed with elaborate visuals. So, it's an improvement.
Fargo (Season 5)
Season 5 of "Fargo" holds the level set by its predecessors. As always, there are many characters but the plot revolves around Dot, a wife of a son of a wealthy businesswoman, who gets kidnapped in the first episode but manages to spectacularly free herself. Then the usual Fargo ensues: people do stupid things and get hoisted by their own petards. This season has no connection to other seasons, which I was hoping to catch until the very last scene. I hope there will be more seasons.
One more thing from "Wake Up Dead Man"
I was gonna write about something around "Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Story," but the Fargo thread took longer than I thought, so I'm only leaving this note in case I forget about it, in which case I will find it in early January and maybe come back to it. The power of notes-taking.
Me taking notes is letting you, dear followers, to follow my writing process process. It's ain't much, but it's an honest work.
2025-12-23
I'm redeeming a lot of Bandcamp codes recently, so if I ever can't afford a streaming service, I will have a lot of music to listen to. Currently, I listen to those grabs on Wednesday's, when I write my book for children (but not very young, I suppose).
I spilled coffee all over my desk. It has been many months, if not outright years, since it happened last time. It was enough for me to issue another cup.
"I'm not a ____ist," he said. And then, after a pause that felt like eternity, he continued, "But..."
TIDAL. In the playlist view, I select multiple tracks and press delete.
What I expect: the tracks get deleted from the playlist.
What I get: a search box opens and types there "Delete."
Dafuq.
I am generally happyish with Tidal, but then they do stuff like that. :D
Don't go with vanity domains.
Hello, compression gloves. Long time no see.
I was wondering if the new keyboard was to blame, but it looks like it was simply too cold in the room and my hands were the first to go; which makes sense from the point of view of body temperature preservation. But now it should be better.
"Fallout" is the last thing that I am watching on Prime Video because they are injecting now adverts into the shows, and awfully lot of them at that; and I'm watching it there in the first place only because I started before they were doing that.
I like that WebStorm suggests pieces of code, but it could also inject imports for relevant bits. As is, I'm torn between choosing items myself, so they are automatically added to imports; and accepting the suggestion and then manually adding all imports. And sometimes it's not worth it.
2025-12-24
I played "Duke Nukem 3D" a lot in the 1990s, but after that I didn't feel like getting back to it. However, at €1.99 I might play a couple of levels.
Two new CDs to collection. But let me listen to them first, then I'll write a word or two.
2025-12-28
The Chair Company (Season 1)
I decided to see "The Chair Company" after watching a trailer which didn't tell me absolutely anything; there were characters and events but they didn't add up to anything coherent, which sounded exactly like something for me. A story of a normie who gets obsessed with a mysterious company that produced a chair that broke under him during an important company presentation. The conspiracy is there, but it unfolds in such an unpredictable way that it's a treat.
The story was presented in a way which I did not think was possible outside of "Rick and Morty" and "Smiling Friends" form. And yet, they pulled it out.
Part of the appeal was that I read about weird companies ([1] & [2]) that seem to pretend to do something but it's unclear what and how they profit from it.
And at the same time, it was all so small in its scale: small company in a small town and the conspiracy that was aiming at a low level.
I can't wait for season 2.
Die Hard 2
"Die Hard 2," sometimes known as "Die Harder," to confuse viewers, is a continuation of "Die Hard." It's also based on a book but unrelated and from a different author. Whatever works, I guess. And it works. John McClane once more saves his wife from terrorists, who took an airport this time. It's a typical action flick, but Bruce Willis is good at portraying a relatively normal guy who accidentally gets into action. These days everyone is beefed up and less relatable due to that.
Rick and Morty (Season 3)
"Rick and Morty," season 3: checked. The same level, the same over-the-top adventures, etc. I finally got to see Pickle Rick, though, and I've been waiting for that one episode ever since I started the series. So, that was good.