The more holiday seasons I see coming and going, the less enthused I am by the forced celebration that tastes an awful lot like capitalism. I put up my gift guide anyway, just in case anyone is willing to buy me that dough mixer, otherwise I’ll have to do it in January as an early expense for the upcoming year. Thanks in advance! There isn’t a lot of mental space left to prepare for celebrations anyway, with the second kid giving us an equally hard time as the first. Anyway. Welcome, last month of the year, I guess. The first one who plays Last Christmas is out.
Previous month: September 2025.
Book I’ve read
Lots!
Not really. …
The more holiday seasons I see coming and going, the less enthused I am by the forced celebration that tastes an awful lot like capitalism. I put up my gift guide anyway, just in case anyone is willing to buy me that dough mixer, otherwise I’ll have to do it in January as an early expense for the upcoming year. Thanks in advance! There isn’t a lot of mental space left to prepare for celebrations anyway, with the second kid giving us an equally hard time as the first. Anyway. Welcome, last month of the year, I guess. The first one who plays Last Christmas is out.
Previous month: September 2025.
Book I’ve read
Lots!
Not really. None, to be very precise. But I did buy yet another one: Mara van der Lugt’s Hopeful Pessimism, which sounded like it was written for me. I expect equally great and miserable things from this work.
Games I’ve played
I’ve only had the time to write the review for Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition (ROTT) that I ended up buying for the Nintendo Switch thanks to Limited Run Games’ stock overflow. It felt wonderfully weird to be playing a 1994 DOS cult classic on the Switch. And yes, the Ludicrous Edition is ludicrous. I finally made it past the third map! I’m still feeling the retro shooter vibe and bought the Turok Trilogy on a whim after learning it was also done by Nightdive Studios.
Another smaller game I played in-between the ROTT sessions was Shotgun King that somehow manages to combine chess with shotguns, and very successfully so. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a bare bones roguelike, difficult as hell, and therefore not really my forte. I have yet to unlock all the shotguns. Don’t buy the game on MacOS: GOG ended up refunding my purchase because it kept on crashing in the introduction cutscene. The Switch edition is fine.
Slightly game related: my wife sent me this YouTube video where Ghostfeeder explains how he uses the Game Boy to make music that I think is worth sharing here:
Making Music With A Game Boy
Selected (blog) posts
- Charlie Theel put up a post called Philosophy and Board Games on Player Elimination where I learned about Mara’s Hopeful Pessimism.
- On a slightly more morbid topic, Wesley thought about How Websites Die and shared his notes.
- Lina’s map of the internet functions as a beautiful pixelated website map that inspires me to do something similar.
- Kelson Vibber reviews web browsers. The sad state of Mozilla made me look elsewhere, and I’m currently using both Firefox and Vivaldi.
- According to Hypercombogamer the Game Boy Advance is Nintendo’s Most Underrated Handheld. I don’t know if I agree, but I do agree that both the GBA and its huge library are awesome.
- Eurogamer regularly criticises Microsoft and their dumb Xbox moves. The last piece was the ridiculous Game Pass advent.
- Matt Bee’s retro gaming site is loaded with cool looking game badges that act as links to small opinion pieces. It’s a fun guessing game as I’m not familiar with some of the pixel art.
- Astrid Poot writes about lessons learned about making and happiness. Making is the route to creativity. Making is balance.
- Alyssa Rosenzweig proves that AAA gaming on Asahi Linux is totally possible.
- Patrick Dubroy has thoughts on ways to do applied research. His conclusion? Aim for practical utility first, by “building something that addresses an actual need that you have”. Eat your own dog shit, publish later?
- Here’s another way to block LLM crawlers without JavaScript by Uggla.
- Wolfgang Ziegler programs on the Game Boy using Turbo Rascal, something I hadn’t encountered before.
- Wes Fenlon wrote a lengthy document over at PC Gamer on how to design a metroidvania map.
- Jan Ouwens claims there are no good Java code formatters out there.
- Seb shared A Road to Common Lisp after I spotted his cool “warning: made with Lisp” badge. A lot of ideas are taking form, to be continued…
- Speaking of Lisp: Colin Woodbury is drawn to Lisp because of its simplicity and beauty.
- Robert Lützner wrote an honest report on the duality of being a parent. As a parent myself, I found myself sobbing and nodding in agreement as I read the piece.
- Michael Klamerus shares his thoughts on Crystal Caves HD. The added chiptune music just feels misplaced in my opinion. I’m looking forward to the Bio Menace remaster as well!
- Felienne Hermans criticizes the AI Delta Plan (in Dutch). We should stop proclaiming build, build, build! as the slogan of the future and start thinking about reduce & re-use.
- Hamilton shares his 2025 programming language tier list. The funny thing is that number one on the list suddenly got replaced by a more conventional alternative. I don’t agree with his reasoning at all (spoiler: it contains AI), but it’s an interesting read nonetheless.
- Mikko Saari published his 2025 edition of the top 100 board game list a little earlier this year. There are a bunch of interesting changes in the top 10! SETI also pops up quite high on my list, but I haven’t had the chance to create it yet.
Other random links
- If you live near The Netherlands, consider visiting The Home Computer Museum. They also have a ton of retro magazines lying around to flip through!
- Wait, there’s a Heroes of Might & Magic card game? That box looks huge! (So does the backing price…)
- Death Code is an entirely self-hosted web application that utilizes Shamir’s Secret Sharing to share secrets after you die.
- tttool is a reverse-engineering effort to inspect how the Tip Toi educational pens work.
- I was somehow featured at https://twostopbits.com/ and now I know why: it’s Hacker News for retro nerds.
- Apparently things like WhatsApp bridges for Matrix exist, which got me thinking: can I run bridges for WhatsApp and Signal to merge all messaging into The One Ring?
- Emulate Windows 95 right in the browser. Crazy to see what you can do nowadays with WASM/JS/Whatever.
- It looks like LDtk is the best 2D game map editor ever created.
- Wild Weasel created a retro looking Golf video game shrine in their little corner of the internet, and the result is lovely. I should really start playing my GBC Mario Golf cart.