De-Googled

Over the course of the last year, I have slowly been taking steps to pull myself out of actively using the Google ecosystem. It’s hard sometimes – they feel almost ubiquitous – but when Gemini came around and it became clear that active enshittification was the name of the game for the big G, I had to start finding ways to get free.

The other inspiration was just what a fucking miserable experience searching the web had become. So my first de-googlefication was stopping use of Google, and starting to instead use Kagi. This has been a delightful experience, and I’ve talked a number of folks into coming along with me (enough that I have a family plan!), as changing your browser to search somewhere else is fairly low effort.

1000xRESIST

Sometimes you play a game, and maybe that game is fun for a while, but when you’re done, nothing really sticks with you. You bring nothing to the table, you take nothing away, and you’re finished with it, done and dusted. I find this to be a pretty common experience with AAA games these days, to be honest.

A weekend full of games

Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred

Back in my post about Transistor I mentioned that the second game I finished in 2025 was probably going to be Helen’s Mysterious Castle; instead, it turned out to be Diablo 4’s expansion pack, Vessel of Hatred. It was… okay.

First, about Diablo 4 as a game: it’s actually really good, although it took some time to get there. The Diablo 4 team seemed entirely determined to learn absolutely nothing from the Diablo 3 team’s mistakes and recoveries early on, and honestly that’s still kind of a recurring theme across Blizzard as a whole (I suspect inter-team communication basically doesn’t exist), but Diablo 4 got really good – the game is fun to play, the classes are varied and have a lot of viable endgame builds for what is now a large variety of endgame content, it’s really everything you could want out of an action RPG. The seasonal content is hit or miss, but the current Season of the Witch is probably my favorite since the Season of Blood’s vampire-based content back in Season 2. So my comments on Vessel of Hatred do not reflect on how fun the game itself actually is to play.

Transistor

I decided at some point (probably after surveying my enormous Steam backlog) that I was going to start keeping track of games when I finish them, so that I remember to talk about them. Anyway, the first game of the year finished in 2025 was Supergiant Games’ Transistor. I actually own Transistor twice; once on the PS3, which I bought, and once on Steam, where my friend Maxine was kind enough to gift it to me for Christmas and thus remind me that I never really got too far into it. On the PS3, I both found the text size on screen infuriatingly small, and also found the combat system just way too hard for some reason, so I abandoned it not far into the game – which is a problem, because there is such a good game under the surface here.

The annual "dude retreat" and the perils of Mastodon administration

This past weekend was one of my favorite recurring events, now going on three years in a row: several of my college friends and I rent out an AirBNB and spend the weekend making food together, eating, drinking, and playing card, board and video games. It’s just like a weekend-long taste of dorm life again, except we’ve all moved from takeout to chili cookoffs and cheap beer to a bar full of nice bourbons and whiskeys. It’s always a good time catching up with people; as a bonus this time we managed to get a couple of folks we hadn’t talked with in maybe 17 years to join us as well. It felt just like old times again. We’re all the same, just older and greyer.

Dataview in Obsidian, and 100%ing I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

New year, new really nerdy way to apply Obsidian. Ever since I bought I Was a Teenage Exocolonist in November I’ve been really obsessed with exploring every little corner of this beautiful little narrative deckbuilding RPG. I recently decided I wanted to get 100% completion of the game, but doing that requires two things that take some extensive tracking: getting every ending at least once (there are 29), and getting every card at least once (there are…. tons). Obviously I can just make checklists in Obsidian, but then I figured out I could use Dataview to query over those files as well, and show myself a nice table of my progress.

Re-learning Godot, and also publishing this site

Opened Godot today and discovered it had been so long since I used it that my skills had pretty much atrophied away to nothing (in fact, I think it’s had a full version update – I’d never touched Godot 4!). Luckily, I still had one of Ben Anderson’s excellent Godot courses and it’d been updated to Godot 4, so I started over from scratch. Trying something this time that I usually don’t do for video lectures and besides coding along, I’m taking notes – besides giving me yet another reason to use Obsidian, I thought it might be a nice way to actually remember some things in a more general sense.