- 07 Dec, 2025 *
The winter brainfog sets in. The Traitors Canada S03 continues, The Traitors Australia S02 sucked, the Raptors are meh, a lot of Traitors podcasts, more FLi, some FFXIV, and links.
I’ve been trying more earbuds, still. The newest headphones I’ve tried might finally be The Ones and after trying them a bit more I’ll do another post about them too. Why write so many reviews? Because, as with the time I was looking for a new mouse and the time I was looking for a new controller, none of the reviews I’ve read actually address any of the things I care about. So maybe I am the only person ever with my particular set of criteria, but I doubt it, I’m not that special. I know people get fatigued of commercialism around this time of year, but I simply don’t buy things that …
- 07 Dec, 2025 *
The winter brainfog sets in. The Traitors Canada S03 continues, The Traitors Australia S02 sucked, the Raptors are meh, a lot of Traitors podcasts, more FLi, some FFXIV, and links.
I’ve been trying more earbuds, still. The newest headphones I’ve tried might finally be The Ones and after trying them a bit more I’ll do another post about them too. Why write so many reviews? Because, as with the time I was looking for a new mouse and the time I was looking for a new controller, none of the reviews I’ve read actually address any of the things I care about. So maybe I am the only person ever with my particular set of criteria, but I doubt it, I’m not that special. I know people get fatigued of commercialism around this time of year, but I simply don’t buy things that aren’t basic household necessities that often so you’ll only have to put up with it for a bit longer.
This week I have been trying to keep up with chores, go to appointments, return Amazon packages to the UPS store, and apply for jobs. Even though I know the holiday season has quite the reputation I am still applying for those hated seasonal retail jobs. 28 applications in the past two weeks. Which is probably not very many compared to what I should be doing. The plan for next week is probably more of the same. I will never understand people who say "You must be bored being unemployed, you must have so much free time". I never have "nothing to do", there is always something I should be doing but am not. If you’re bored and feel like you have too much free time I’ll give you a list of things to do no problem.
That said, I’ve felt the winter brain fog hit real hard this week. Time seems to slip through my fingers, I find myself more and more socially isolated because putting in the effort required to reach out to people slips down my to do list, and I don’t feel like I’m achieving anything or making any progress, just treading water. I find myself listening to podcasts constantly to keep my brain from ruminating. Very much in powersaving mode until after the holidays, assuming I can get through them without any crises.
I miss having a cat. It’s very grounding when no matter what else is going on you still need to feed them and clean their litter box and adhere to their routines.
Reading
Weird Women: Classic supernatural fiction by groundbreaking female writers: 1852-1923 by Leslie Klinger & Lisa Morton, eds. (2020)
I’m still slowly working on this anthology and still enjoying it. I have a Lovecraft anthology from the library next. I’ve never really dove into horror literature, so this is all new to me.
Watching
The Traitors Canada S03E07
This season has been so freaking entertaining and innovative. I thought Episode 7 was a bit lukewarm, the mission was a bit repetitive/boring/typical, but then the real meat of the episode was the twist at the end. I’m going to have to see how it plays out, but it’s such a clever idea from the producers to really make chaos happen. The main goal of this season seems to have been to make the Traitors lives much harder so they actually make mistakes and try to make the Faithful act more strategically instead of just being sheep milling around aimlessly. We might actually get a Faithful win this season, despite the fact that there are really good Traitors playing what would ordinarily be pretty good games. But every time they get past one hurdle another is thrown at them. Great television.
The Traitors Australia S02
This season made me sooooo angry I am going to anti-recommend it. I am even going to spoil it because I don’t think anybody, even a die-hard fan, should bother wasting 9-odd hours on this. This season was poorly managed in a lot of different ways and the series got cancelled after this so clearly somebody agreed with me. (It’s back in 2026 tho and being made by the NZ production team so hopefully it will be better.)
We’ve had seasons where the faithful never seem to catch a clue and the Traitors win handily and it’s still very entertaining to watch. But what happened here was several Faithful caught a clue, tried to build up a vote against the Traitor, tried to play a smart game, and then nobody believed them and they were either banished or murdered immediately. First, two people team up and say "Person A is 100% a traitor for x, y, and z reasons and I am literally staking my game on it". Everyone says "Um, that seems mean actually?" and votes them out, other person gets murdered. Next week, one person takes up the torch and says "I totally see it now, it’s obvious Person A is a traitor!" and then they get voted out or murdered. And then again the next week!! All of the smart women who took leadership roles were banished by their teammates!! Meanwhile the Person A Traitor in question is the most arrogant, annoying cishet white male jock in existence who is convinced he is the smartest person on the planet. He is constantly doing finger guns. I hope he was the most hated man in Australia for at least a year after this aired.
I wanted to throw my entire laptop out the window when we got to the finale and there was one hopeless Faithful and three Traitors, none of whom trust each other an iota, and it ends in a split or steal where everyone obviously tries to steal and loses all the money. The only satisfaction is knowing the Asshole didn’t actually win anything. How could the production team even let it reach a point where the traitors outnumbered the faithful, no other series ever lets that happen. Very low budget missions, not a very entertaining host, zero ambience, definitely the least entertaining season I’ve seen so far by a mile. Justice for Annabel and Luke!
Toronto Raptors
We’re back riding the waves of a largely immature team. Play poorly and lose v. Knicks. Entertaining game and win v. Trailblazers. Entertaining game and lose v. Lakers. Awful game and blowout loss v. Hornets. Who knows which version of the Raptors we will get next week. They better get some rest on Saturday and Monday because they looked wiped here tonight on Friday.
Listening
The Traitors Podcasts
I started with five different reality tv related podcasts, and have winnowed it down to three. I’d like to get rid of one but haven’t decided which yet. One I wanted to like because it was actually hosted by women, but the audio quality was so poor that I couldn’t stick with it. One dropped because I thought the hosts also didn’t have anything interesting to say. So I am now unfortunately listening to the two with the greatest number of ads and all hosted by men. I guess it’s a catch-22 of production quality and money. You need to get popular to justify ads, you need ads to make money, you need money to increase audio quality and to justify spending time on the podcast vs other jobs, but you need quality to get popular. And, as in most industries, white men have an easier time getting started.
Anyway, I’ve been working through, for the current Canadian series: The Traidar podcast/youtube channel and We Know The Traitors from the "We Know Reality TV" podcast… network? The latter has exit interviews with the Canadian contestants. Faithful to... The Traitors might be the one that gets cut.
Playing
Fantasy Life i
I said I was done and they dragged me back in. I compiled the inventory of the NPC vendors in the monster villages, but I can’t get the recipe prices because I’ve already bought them all. There is another site that has them, but some of their prices don’t match up with what I have, so I’m not sure if it’s accurate or not. I’m also compiling the inventory of The Don, which is slower because it’s randomized, but again I can’t see the recipes I already bought, which is most of them. So I might put a call out on mastodon and reddit for somebody with a newer/less complete game than mine to check the prices for me and maybe start noting down any recipes they see in the Don’s inventory.
FFXIV
I’m close to finishing the Vanu Vanu, I’m on the last rank now. It’s a nice story but it’s still quite simplistic. And I’m picking away at the questline required to unlock the moogles in between GATEs and ocean fishing. 5 of 20 quests complete so far. Close to getting enough mogtomes to get the expensive orchestrion roll and the Porxie Earrings. Then I’ll just have the cheap stuff and the Buuz Earrings. Anything bonus will go into MGP Platinum cards. I’ve been buying the most expensive mounts from the MGP vendor in reverse order, so I got the Blackjack last time I hit 4 mil and I’m pretty close to hitting 2 mil for the giant Sabotender. If I really want to accumulate MGP faster I’ll have to remember to do my weekly fashion reports (60k) and the Verminion challenge log (12k) though.
Bookmarking
I updated some of the links because they were piling up a bit and I didn’t want to put them all in here.
Colophon by Fran (What The Fran)
One specific one though: I like Fran’s use of the "link out" icons after links to indicate where a link is going, it’s something I’ve wanted to implement for a while. Instead I’ve just been typing it out, which is annoying. But I do think it’s worthwhile because when you’re on mobile you might want to know where a link is going before clicking on it. I hate accidentally clicking on a youtube or spotify link and then it tries to get me to launch the app or audio starts playing when I don’t want it to.
Science e-Books by NASA Science
Free ebooks published by various NASA departments, including a bunch of colouring books at the bottom.
Spotify Wrapped and our obsession with how we’re perceived by keetokatto
The fandom attitude that you have to have a stream or video or song playing constantly in order to "prove" how good a fan you are drives me absolutely up the wall. I saw it first coming out of stan culture, where fans buy 100s of magazines with their fave’s face on it to show off online, or buy huge amounts of merch, or say things like "Remember to just have the song streaming in the background while you’re doing other things, we have to make it trend to number 1!" as if that kind of thing is… meaningful? At all? To anybody other than the people making money off of the celebrity in question?
Like, people have always used buying things as clout in social circles, just look at collector-based fandoms like comics, but it used to be a tiny fraction of fans becoming roadies, getting a tattoo of their favourite celeb, and buying used hairbrushes off of ebay. The social pressure to do these kinds of things in order to be allowed to participate in certain fandoms has never felt stronger. Manga fans who bought one copy to keep pristine in shrinkwrap and one copy to read were weirdos even among other weirdos. And the fact that the commercialism of it isn’t questioned at all drives me crazy. It has given me a knee-jerk dislike of the term "support" when it’s used to refer to any kind of media or creator, it has become borderline guilt-tripping. If you don’t spend enough money on this thing you like, it’s your fault if it isn’t successful! If you don’t buy the correct things, you’re a bad person! Fuck off. My identity isn’t defined by how I spend money.
Horses is Tame by Chris Person (Aftermath)
CW for discussion and screenshots from the game Horses which is intentionally disturbing and contains sexual violence and torture. I think Chris really hits the nail on the head here. If Horses is too much, why do other games which also contain similar themes but not interrogated in the same way get a free pass? If Horses is going to be condemned as too disturbing for Steam to retail when it isn’t even that outré, Steam has too much control over the worldwide PC/Linux gaming market for anybody to make games-as-art and be financially viable. Like, sure, tell people to go buy more indie games off of itch or whatever. They’re not going to. You don’t have to go to a hole in the wall bookstore to buy 120 Days of Sodom. But hey, maybe we will in future, if the internet is sufficiently censored it will inevitably trickle down to brick and mortar retail as well. People forget Canada still has obscenity laws.
One Very Important Thought (youtube) by Boards of Canada (Music Has a Right to Children)
Since we’re on a theme I guess.
Dark Auction music team adds Tsukasa Masuko; Special Trailer by Sal Romano (Gematsu)
Info about this game has been trickling out and more and more big names are being officially attached. Masuko worked on the original Megami Tensei games and Shin Megami Tensei 1 & 2 and this is now an excuse for me to talk about the SMT1 OST. This OST absolutely stands up today as incredibly cool with a variety of genres. One of the (rightly) most famous tracks is the theme for Ginza, where you inevitably spend a shitload of time because it takes forever to get to and has a save point. The Jakyou/Cathedral of Shadows where you do summons (and also therefore spend a lot of time) has this incredible organ theme – and every SMT game since has had an organ theme for the fusion room. No shade on Komiyama, she probably did most of the actual scoring because I imagine Masuko isn’t cheap after nearly 50 years in the business, but very much a wow announcement. The JP VAs are very recognizable names (including both the P3 protag and P4 protag), the artist is from the GANGSTA. manga (who draws really good sexy oji-san characters), and it looks like a mystery/heist type game? Sign me up!
De-bloating and de-Googling an Android device using Canta
An interesting how to on using an app to basically emulate adb commands and remove packages that otherwise can’t be removed via the user interface in Android. Found via mastodon in a thread about using a firewall app to prevent telemetry which clearly I did not RT because I can’t find it. But it seems like an interesting alternative if you can’t, for whatever reason, install a third party Android OS, but still want to remove manufacturer bullshit. I might try it just to see what’s on there.
What Others Have Seen by rootCompute (read-only.net)
It’s an analysis of a video about how we should be more considerate of people who find AI useful that I’m not going to watch, but I felt it’s points were valid and echoed a lot of my feelings. Which is that public shaming and emotional knee-jerk reactions about AI are counter-productive and unhelpful, but also a lot of the perceived or advertised benefits of it are simply not true. And also youtube videos are not a useful format for conveying and processing complex ideas. Like rootCompute, I simply have yet to see an argument for AI chatbots that has convinced me this would be a worthwhile tool to use. Everything it does I can already do better and more reliably. Except maybe writing cover letters for jobs that I don’t even really want to apply to.
TTC Delay Insights by Asha Asvathaman
A tool for visualizing TTC data on subway service delays, goes into granular detail on causes of delays (people & mechanical issues) and which stations are the worst offenders (Sheppard West, Bloor-Yonge, & Kennedy). Usefully provides an estimate of how much time you should add as a buffer for your trip depending on time of day and what line you’re taking based on the average delay. Would be great if she could do the streetcars though, they’ve gotten so so bad and I rely on them much more than the subway. By personal experience I need to add at least 15 minutes extra to the travel time to be sure I’ll get somewhere on time.
Posty by oliphant
A web application for converting your mastodon archive into a static website you could theoretically host anywhere. I’ve already used MARL before and I’m not really sure what advantage posty has over MARL if you just want to look at your own archive locally. It has a similar flaw to MARL in not being able to ingest large archives, MARL due to browser cache limitations, posty due to java RAM allocations. My previous mstdn.games archive is 2.6GB, so I guess it needs to allocate at least that much RAM to hold the archive in? Not ideal. However posty seems more designed to be able to be run as a hosting service, so you could archive multiple people’s posts or a whole server once it has been shut down, and I can see how that would be useful.
Posting
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- 06 Dec, 2025 * Tea Thermos Review: Simple Modern Voyager Signature Tumbler
A review of an insulated tumbler for tea with a push-top lid and ceramic lining.
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- 04 Dec, 2025 * Headphone Reviews Continued: Earbuds, Buttons, & Wires
Unsatisfied with the JLab Go Pop earbuds, I have gone full Comparison Shopping Mode and not had a lot of luck. Cheap earbuds with physical buttons and earbuds with neck cords are options?
First impressions of the game after 2.5 hours of play, spoiler-free.
#2025 #2025-12 #digest [#fantasy life i](https://anarchaeopteryx.bearblog.dev/index/?q=fantasy life i) #ffxiv #journal #podcasts #reading #sports [#the traitors](https://anarchaeopteryx.bearblog.dev/index/?q=the traitors) [#toronto raptors](https://anarchaeopteryx.bearblog.dev/index/?q=toronto raptors) #tv [#video games](https://anarchaeopteryx.bearblog.dev/index/?q=video games)