Novel Embers and Dec Enders (culture)

It's been a crazy hectic mad end to 2025, lots of major incidents and overtime, lots of travelling and parties, lots of driving up and down and side to side all over the country.

To make the meat worth the bun, we have a special 2x month double feature culture review!!!

When I'm writing these retrospectives I'm still amazed by how much art I am able to regard and "content" I am able to "consume" (disgusting verbiage) in the busiest and least-online times in my life.

Reading

Some WH40k novels

They were uninteresting enough that I've forgotten about them, other than a vague disdain for humanising warp-kin.

The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande

The central tenet is that regardless of experience and ability, complexity leads to basic lapses in simple tasks of analysis, execution, and coordination. Even if you have the right knowledge, you might not apply it properly at all times.

Checklists can either be used to offload the cognitive, temporal, and interpersonal load of simple problems (which complex problems are composed of) or to coordinate communication between specialists to facillitate larger solutions that are cross-domain. You can think of the distinction made as "What and When and How" checklists and "Who and When and Why" checklists.

As is often the case when I read or listen to something from a surgeon or medical doctor, my biggest takeaway was of perspective. Stories about rupturing critical membranes or bursting subcutaneous tissues or manually pumping another guy's heart with your hand in their exposed ribcage. The degree of expertise and the pressure it needs to be applied in for extended, exhausting durations and regularities is unbelievable, it puts things like "software" "engineering" as a discipline on average to shame. I shall endevour to do more, better.

Regarding checklists in general, my profession of "SRE" is familiar with them in the form of operational runbooks, but these are often underutilised and undermaintained. I will see what impact maintaining these better as a focal point of response does for our services.

Not a manifesto btw. Barely an exhortation!

AI Generated Code

Code review isn't getting any better. Code review of things implicated in incidents has me wondering if maybe they're getting worse.

Vidya & Boardgames

Oceans

My D&D group has been playing a few games of Oceans on Tabletop Simulator when 1 or 2 people are unavailable for the main game. Oceans is a boardgame about making species of fish - on each turn you play a card to change or create species or change the balance of resources, collect some resources, and then spend a fixed amount of those resources to increase your final score. But if you need to spend more resources than you have, species will die off.

Delightful game - every turn has interesting game state decisions to make, and there are a number of core tensions that makes a lot of different strategies viable depending on the particulars of what cards have been drawn. With the full base-game ruleset, including the "Deep" cards which have powerful effects but require spending points and can't be "discarded", the game can get really complicated to hold in your head if you want to play optimally, but it's really satisfying to play a good turn or watch one get played. High skill ceiling and fast to get through unless you spend the whole time ogling at the cool deep cards you haven't used before.

One of the expansions makes Shenron a playable card.

7 Wonders

With a different group of board game enthusiasts in Manchester I got to play a game of 7 Wonders with 7 people, and it's one of the coolest boardgames I've ever played.

I was concerned it would be overly complicated because of the number of rules and symbols you have to learn, but you only "have" to pay attention to your and your immediate neighbour's board states and after a couple games the eminent strategies become very clear. There are also a bunch of legends for symbols in the box, and the more involved and unique symbols only appear in the 3rd Age at the end of the game.

Strategy is straightforward, you play cards to build resources to gain points and set up for the late-game where you earn a lot more points. Victory can be swayed a lot by the draw and what's happening on the other side of the table that you have no direct influence on, but every game felt like you had interesting and impactful decisions to make every round. There wasn't a game that felt like a steal which wasn't coordinated well by that player's strategy.

The physical assets are beautifully made with a lot of gorgeous full arts and very readable designs. Another high skill ceiling game that can be resolved pretty quickly due to the players being able to take turns simultaneously. Really impressive game design.

Rabbit Hole

I was watching PovKetz one fine day. Mr Ketz's recommendations have all been eclectic and select, and this game was free.

"Free?", I thought. "That's quite cheap", and I got it.

As with all vidya, the true cost comes after obtaining it.

This little game is Damn Hard, and the most frustrating bit is it's also extremely fair. You can git gud to the point that you breeze through the first couple of levels which once were almost insurmountable, and then get completely shrekt for the 20th time in a row by the exact boss that killed you last time.

Occured to me that I was doing this instead of anything else. I think I will keep playing to complete at least 1 run, currently I can consistently get to the first part of the final boss and just need MORE TIME to keep going. But I want to spend that time on other things I think. t. literal video game player

Final Fantasy VI

I haven't replayed a lot of games, mostly ones that I played in my childhood. I was a big fan as RPGs as a kid, and this was one of my favourite games of all time.

A lot of what I remember standing out still does. That ethereal emotion that permeates the earlygame from the very beginning with the intro sequence of a small band of mech drivers in a snowswept tundra, marching towards the lights of a little village. The quiet and desolate places of the world this game takes place in and the loneliness afforded them are a bottled magic.

About "halfway" through the game, you lose. Many RPG endbosses threaten to end the world, but the weight of their world ending powers is generally not demonstrated in any way more threatening than a posturing, a display of strength. In this game the world actually does end. The world is irrevocably warped, and the hefty plot of war and strife before is wiped aside as the planet is ruined.

The plot for the game isn't a literary masterpiece, but the challenges made to the characters and the ways they develop are a damn sight better than what a lot of RPGs have going for them. Grounded themes and parallels abound and neatly done, there's some subtlety and usually a good sense of pacing, as much as one can have in a game where the player can grind or do 10s of sidequests at most any moment.

The OST for this game is honestly unbelievable. It shouldn't be possible. You can't go to any upload to Dancing Mad without someone saying "For a musician, the SNES sound engine is like a painter using crayons. Nobuo Uematsu used crayons to paint the Sistine Chapel in FFVI". This is nonsense, but the hyperbole has the right attitude, this OST has unbelievable compositions hidden and not-so-hidden in it.

Good game, rate it 6 final fantasies.

Delicious Donut

When a CoolMathGames isometric puzzler and Stephen's Sausage Roll love each other very much...

A second donut-themed puzzle game has hit my Steam library. This is one of the most frustrating games I have ever played in my life. Great puzzle design but feels like playing Stephen's Sausage Roll with a steering wheel input and a concussion.

Eventually, like the sausage game, you learn combinations of inputs to achieve states, but it never feels fully natural and the toroidal shape rotation involved stays difficult the HOLE way through. :v)

Mostly made we want to play Stephen's Sausage Roll again, since I got a big chunk through it but never finished it. Will see how that goes next month.

The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection

I haven't played all the Zachtronics games yet (I've only completed TIS-100 and SpaceChem) but damn do these boys make good solitaire. Steam says I've played this for 20 hours already, which is odd because I only bought it last week.

The sprites are great, the SFX are sublime, and the game design is impeccable. The amount done with such a small ruleset-set and the creativity on display is awesome.

The music is great too, Zachtronics games OSTs are one of the few things I can listen to when doing actual thinking work, very rare to have something both listenable and not distracting unless you've oversaturated it by listening so many time before or ambient that doesn't change a lot.

corru.observer

Made it to the 2nd track in the OST. Don't read the comments on the YT video - it turns out this is the kind of game where there are spoilers foreshadowed in the audio of the 2nd track.

That's the kind of game I like. Really looking forwards to playing it.

November & December Review

In the van I'm more exposed to the weather, these months have been getting familiar with serious wet and serious cold. I've been in the midlands, the northeast, the northwest, the peaks, the lakes, and Scotland. In a turn of fortunes, rain and storm followed me everywhere but the highlands, where I spent the most beautiful Christmas. The Scottish Highlands is surely one of the most wonderful vistas in all the world.

Happy New Year everyone, wishing you a good year.