Dec25 Newsletter - Bedroom Finished And Year Review
Happy New Year! Hope you all had a nice xmas and break.
My bedroom finally finished! At least in the sensethat the builders aren’t coming any more and I can sleepin it now.
Diary
Bedroom
The new bedroom basically finished.
The builders finished up and I’ve spent some days doinga final layer of varnish and painting the new bed andwaiting for the new mattress to expand.
Finally slept in it after Xmas.
Added more mirrors, lights, got the treadmill desk running.
More to do, fill it with more lights andfurnish it and fill it with compute, butthat can all proceed more slowly as moneyallows now.
Car
So my car has been complaining I should put some exhaust emissions neutralizing fluid in it.
A thing they call AdBlue I believe.
Bought a big 10l drum of the stuff ready to fill up.
But when I look at where I expect to find the hole for filling it, I just find a capped off tube and a warning sticker “See the GM Citreon Berlingo Blaze manual” for the adblue refilling hole.
Only user manual I have is the one telling me to expect it there.
The car was converted for wheelchair access at some point in its life. I think they are referring to the wheelchair-adaption manual, which the seller did not give me.
🙄
Looked all around the car as much as I can for a couple of hours to no avail. Where have they hidden this hole to fill up adblue?
The mechanics found it in the end.
Sounds like much of what I have paid for was for them doing what I did: Looking all around the car for an ad-blue tank hole and taking things apart trying to find it.
But none of that is the correct solution, which is to put it up on the ramp and clamber underneath to find the tank which has some sort of lowering mechanism, to then lower it and fill it and raise it again.
Not a job for me then. Next time it’ll maybe be cheaper coz of them knowing what to do now and not spending half a day trying to figure it out.
Apparently there is a second emissions reduction mechanism which doesn’t take a wattery bottle of urea, but instead needs a pouch of oily tar stuff.
This is more likely to empty and need replacing next, rather than the piss bottle.
Back in the 90s, my first car cost about 200 quid. This month I paid 200 quid to get someone to fill it up with purified piss for emissions reduction.
Oh how things change. 😆
Just imagining: if when I was buying that orange Alegro in the 90s someone had said to me, “I bet you hundred to one that thirty years from now you’ll pay the price of this car just to get your new one filled with piss” I think I would have taken that bet, then apparently lost it.
😆
Christmas
Like all the rest of the nerds, I did a bit of tech support on family computers.
They’re all popping up windows from scam virus scanners lying that subscriptions need to be renewed or machines are unprotected. People don’t know how to remove these things.
Luckily they also don’t really know how to pay the subscription.
Their phones are updating on them. Changing where buttons used to be. Removing options. Forcing people to register to use they things they have been doing for years.
They don’t know how to register.
Things pop up asking for passwords and they have no idea who is asking or which password to use.
I tell them that I don’t really understand why they keep using Windows now it is so shitty and awful. They say they don’t know how to use anything else. The fact they don’t really know how to use windows either doesn’t seem to register.
The tech corporations have given up completely on being user friendly. They are all deliberately user hostile and exploitative now.
Corporate tech is terrible. The industry is failing it’s users, abusing them. People don’t even know there is any other way. They are just giving up on achieving their tasks until someone can fix the pop-ups and subscription boxes and passwords and 2fa for them.
Tech sucks now. Sucks hard.
Year In Review
I had some serious health worries, made some stuff, did some performance, made money, had some fun.
Not the best year, suspect health things tend to trend down in the second half of life.
Good though, and promising more good to come.
Made 11 Wordcloud Tarot shows.
The target is like 25. So about half as many as target.
Some good, some great.
Made 1 Observers show
Not enough. The target is like 6.
Made 0 main Starship cartoons.
Meh.
Target is for 2026 to be the next one anyway really.
I do have a script and all the assets needed to animate it, but I have become unhappy with the script and failed so far at rewrites.
Should get it done next year at some point I’d hope.
Make 1 Life-Logger app
Overshooting the target of zero there. Surprise new entry in the projects list
Played two Loopy gigs
Just a tiny birthday party and in a camping field with friends.
This is probably about the target number really.
It’s nice to play now and then but couldn’t be monthly or anything even more frequent.
Didn’t feel like either went great. Health issues affecting performance plus nerves
Just one with video of any kind.
Added a couple of great songs to the playlists, need to practise more really.
Performed 2 improv shows.
At the end of a Hoopla class, and the end of a self-organised group class.. They were good fun.
But having to book a course every eight weeks means constantly churning co-players and long gaps where I don’t get around to it or it was all booked up.
Tried to get a more permanent group going…
0 new improv group meets.
Trying to get some sort of indie-group offthe ground rather than just short runs ofclasses with new people all the time.
We found a group and booked the room but didn’t get most of the actual people to turn up. Need to presumably meet more people up for that sort of thing.
So there will be new improv class startingin Jan.
A new show in March at least.
Recovered health somewhat
from whatever that weird fit was at the end of last year. NHS still has me on some sort of list I think, appointment might turn up next year. Last contact with them they were suggesting maybe November. That didn’t happen.
But the private treatment gave me the MRI whichshowed nothing weird and post-fit symptoms have been reducing.
Experimented with eating meat to see if that helped.
Ate Meat
Tried eating meat for a month to see if it reduced the post-fit symptoms. Maybe it did? Tried vegetarian 8again and maybe it got worse?
Hard to tell with intermittent symptoms and a terrible memory.
Decided it’s more likely to do good than harm (to me, entirely harm to the animals obviously), and eat meat till the end of the year.
While I’m better, I don’t really feel fully recovered enough to want to change things so more meat next year I think.
Drank far less
One of those symptoms is that booze tolerance dropped to like zero. Very rarely had more than four pints in a day this year and very rarely more than one night aweek.
1 fractured wrist.
Much high number than the target there really.
Tripped over a guy-rope and fell onto the wrist.
Did two days of the festival and the drive home thinking it almost certainly wasn’t broken and only confirmed it was when I got home and the hospital put it in a cast.
Bought a car/micro-camper
Bought a van to do up as a micro-camper, and did a temporary rush job of that conversion myself while waiting in the list for the pro to do it.
Then the pro gave himself a health criss the week it was booked so I took apart my temp job and only got another temp kit-job in it’s place.
Went out in it like four times during that and then broke my wrist and couldn’t really use it or improve it.
Then had to take it apart even more to tryand figure out where the ad-blue hole was.I will do a proper permanent job of thefloor and walls and ceiling and adjustments to the kit-job to make it the nicest it’s been so far during the spring next year.
My assumption that the prior conversioninto a van and for wheelchair-access meant the microcamper conversion was half-done already turned out to be false.
If I buy a new one, it’ll be one that has never been wheelchair adapted.
But it’s going okay. Only scraped it once so far.
Went to 3 festivals
Fewer than aimed for or booked, but I broke my wrist and had to cancel the second half of the summer.
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Small World
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Private friends camping thing
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Good Vibrations, where I broke my wrist.
Bitfest
Went to a conference about money and computers and fringe decentralized social media and it wasn’t as boring as you might expect and felt pretty much like a festival.
1 bedroom built
Exactly the target number! It’s lovely.
Took 3 times longer than I’d hoped and 50% more money than I’d planned for really.Still improvements to make but they willbe incremental and gradual over the coming year or two now.
Paid off the mortgage
It’s been interest-only for 20 years so a big old lump sum payment that I never really expected to be able to make. Expected to have to sell and move at the end of the mortgage term.
But surprisingly the stocks ISA got high enough to pay it off after all, so I did that.
Cash-flow ruined by that and the bedroom but should start to feel a bit richer next year.
Rewatched all of Buffy
Broken wrist meant I had to sit on the sofa for a month doing nothing really. I re-watched all 200 or so episodes of Buffy for the first time this decade.
What an achievement in TV production. Amazing show.
I’ll watch it again next decade maybe.
Book of the year
Not that I read a huge amount. Hopefully more next year.
Fiction
“Outland” by Dennis E Taylor, and actually also his “Not Till We Are Lost”
Non-Fiction
“Broken Money” by Lyn Alden.
TV show Of The Year
I think “Severance” was the most remarkable show I watched this year, with “Trek, Strange New Worlds” also being great again.
“Pantheon” was a pretty great cartoon, haven’t seen the second season yet.
2026 plans
More than 12 Tarot shows,
About six Observers shows,
The main starship v0.4 cartoon, Along with the pre-release of the main starship app
Improvements to the Exocortex app,
An improv class/show or two (one starts Jan, show March)
An new improv group?
Play a couple of Loopy gigs/open-mics,
Finish the bedroom stuff,
Don’t get sicker,
Break zero bones,
Fix the camper in the spring,
About six festivals,
Maybe a foreign holiday,
Try and read more
Breaking: New War
New year brings a new war! Hummm.
Thank goodness the USA elected the peace president. Could you imagine if instead they had elected a pedophile child-rapist willing to go to war for oil, and to distract from his sex crimes, while renaming the Defense Department the Department for War?
I Wonder if the UK will have to support the USA invading Venezuela because it’s a member of Nato?
Or if we’ll just support it because we also want western oil companies to have access to those oil fields?
Or maybe we’ll sanction the USA like we sanctioned Russia for their illegal invasion?
No? Why is everyone laughing?
Anyway. These days it’s cool to invade other countries and kidnap their presidents to steal their oil it seems. Even though the oil needs to stay in the ground.
🙄
Links
Christmas Message
Nice to see a UK party leader demonstrate some actual compassionand care this Christmas. I’m so fed up with politicians pedalling hate and division trying to pander to terrible racism and xenophobia, trying to pick up the votes of the hateful.
This is what political leadership really is. Not following the right wing media hatred but countering it.
Zack Polanski’s Christmas message is less than five minutes.
Fedi
There is a social network which isn’t run bycreepy billionaires! Honest. Look here’s somethings on it:
Economics
…. So if you are a small-time capitalist, or would like to become a capitalist, your opportunities to survive as a capitalist are small and becoming smaller.
Because even the most innovative or visionary capitalist can hope to aspire, at best, establishing some venture that will be bought up by one of these major firms, either to consolidate that firm’s control over the market or just to shut it down to eliminate the competition.
Capitalists do not only compete with the laboring class for control of the laboring class’ output; they also compete among each other for shares of control of that output. And, right now, the richest of the rich are winning that competition, accumulating not just wealth but also the chance at even trying to accumulate wealth in the future.
As the rich get richer, in other words, it’s harder for anyone else to get rich. Inequality diminishes social mobility, even among our wealthy elites….
Ai
It’s been my suspicion that trying to fight AI corporations on copyright grounds wouldn’t be a good strategy, because ultimately what would happen is they’d end up in a situation that just entrenches them and media megacorps as monopolists. And, well…
https://deadline.com/2025/12/disney-openai-deal-sora-1236645728/
Add on top of that how centralization of the web has lead to almost all art being published being under a ToS that can sell the data to OpenAI and ultimately indies get squeezed out of the fight.
Mozilla
Mozilla have decided their browser, Firefox, will havea new CEO who wants everything to be all AI.
Mozilla right now.
Do It Alone
I am far more terrified of wasting precious years than I am of being alone.
NEW blog: Do the thing. Do it scared. Do it on your own.
Music
I made a new noises with a spring, a couple of filters and some echoes, downbeat, dubby, electro stuff.
Link to a video….
Happy New New War
The story of US relations with Venezuela the past 15 years is that we want their oil, and they sell it to “our enemies” instead, so we have sanctioned the country into the ground and created starving people. We have then repeatedly pointed to those starving people as evidence that Maduro is the new Saddam while manufacturing consent for a war to take their oil. Trump tried to pull the trigger once already but the stew wasn’t ready. Biden furthered the project during his term and now here we are.