Aaron Brady 🍀 🍁

2025 Retrospective

Last year's retrospective.

It was funny to read last year's retrospective before I sat down to write this one. Rarely have my guesses about the future been so wrong so quickly!

Last year I was happily not working and not seeking work: this year I am happily employed and also started a business with a friend. From zero jobs to at least 1.25.

Last year I'd given up on Rust and thought Go would fix me. Now I'm back on Rust for what feels like the fifth time. I still haven't rediscovered my love of Python and confusingly I might have feelings for Ruby.

And most amusing to me: last year I thought I might have visited Ireland for one of the last times, now that my mum passed. This year I've been back twice and I'll be going at least once next year, too.

"I just want recommendations of stuff without the self-indulgence!"

Alright, hypothetical reader, here's some things that were good this year:

Sacred and Terrible Air by Robert Kurvitz. This is a novel set in the same universe as Disco Elysium (but published many years earlier). There's no official translation, but two translations from Estonian to English. I read the older one which (it seems) is the worse one. I am not going to re-read it in a slightly different translation just to be sure, however.

It's cryptic, it's very bleak and at points surreal or at least embodies magic realism. It's a book about being stuck in the past, about the end of everything or about slowly realizing you wasted your whole life waiting for it to start. Maybe.

The Séance of Blake Manor. This was a recommendation from PD and it only came out at the end of October. Helen and I played it on the TV (with the Steamdeck hooked up) for two or three hours at night over the course of two weeks. The events of the game, however, take place over a strict three day timeline.

Basically, it's a fair-play mystery game. It looks a bit like Blue Prince (cel shaded graphics, and it's set in a big house) and it has one mechanic straight out of The Case of the Golden Idol.

Time only progresses when you perform actions (such as interacting with an object to look at it or to use it) or engage in dialog with people. Most interactions have a flat "cost" of 1 minute, out of the approximately 30 hours, so you can do most things — but also the locations of people and availability of rooms is synchronized to the nearest hour, so you find yourself with just a few minutes to check out a room before the guest comes back etc.

It was fun to play and you quickly became very familiar with the geography of the grounds. The writing and voice acting is good, the mysteries are non-obvious and people are not just one dimensional stereotypes (well, most people, I suppose). It has a great treatment of the pre-Saorstát Éireann period and Irish mythology. It took us about 25 hours, although I'd say we fairly juiced the game and you could finish it in much less time handily.

Disco Elysium. I've been banging on about this since 2020, so it's not exactly a new recommendation. I've played it three times: in March 2020, just as lockdowns were starting and the world was becoming really weird. In October 2024 in Chicago at TOWN CON where vil played / we played as a group, but really just for a short while. It reminded me I hadn't played the Director's Cut. And then at the start of this year, I played it with Helen.

I didn't think she'd like it but … she did and we had a great time playing through it. I really, really love this game. The world is detailed (but, as with Sacred and Terrible Air, in a bleak decline) and there's not a lot in the way of good people or even bad people. Everyone's just coping.

There's a lot of politics in the game and, sure, I'd say that the game leans left, but not without making fun of everyone from tankies and trade unionists, to centrists to the ersatz-EU, as well as neoliberals and neocons. You can unironically be a fascist in this game, but it's much more fun to just be completely unhinged from reality.

Department Q. It takes a lot to get me to commit to a whole season. Sometimes I'll watch a trailer and think "yeah, I'd love to see this film" and then I find out it's a 10-part series of one hour episodes: no, thank you. I got two recommendations from two very different people before I gave the first episode a go and then I was immediately hooked.

This is adapted from a Danish book series by Jussi Adler-Olsen, but it's set in Scotland and it has a distinct style. It's been renewed and there's ten books of source material. Over half of the books have already been adapted to film or TV (in Danish), but I don't want to watch the Danish versions of these characters; I've fallen for the Scottish (and Syrian) ones.

Chokeville by Josh Fireland. This appears to only be available on Kindle now, although I previously had it as an ePub and it was also serialized as a web series. I started reading the web series over a decade ago, and basically the story was totally rebooted (at least once!) since then, so I went into reading this version cold.

I only have two books where I say "I really enjoyed this but don't recommend it to other people" (the other is Crooked Little Vein) — this book has an affected style and a particular sense of humor and if you don't immediately like them, well, you're probably not going to like the book. They are a big part of the book. Once you're past that, it's another magical realism crime adventure. I didn't even intend to read this book: I was testing Plato on a Kobo I picked up from a thrift store and it was an ePub I had in my Downloads folder so I put it on there. I flicked through a few pages just to check out the software. Two days later I was finished.

Citizen Sleeper. I bought this when it came out three years ago and played it some, before rapidly heading towards a lose condition and getting stuck and quitting it. I came back to it and restarted this year.

I failed because I didn't really know how to enjoy a role-playing game. I was trying to a) win and b) do everything. There's lots of role-playing videogames where you can do that! But I don't think Citizen Sleeper is one of them and that's actually fucking great.

You can only see some of the game. Your choices matter. You can't exhaust every dialog tree– some paths close to you. Most endings are, at best, okay. Some are pretty bad. Life isn't always what you want.

My stepson introduced me to the term "ludonarrative dissonance":

Ludonarrative dissonance occurs when a player's efficient or optimal behavior in the game world contradicts the story the game is trying to tell or the values its characters espouse

Almost every RPG that I've played has told me to "hurry up, you're in danger" and then allowed me to screw around indefinitely exploring the world. If you actually listened to the narrative of Fallout 3/4/NV and advanced the main plot as fast as you can then you would miss almost all of the game.

Running and participating in TTRPGs has helped me understand. If you're role-playing a character who is barely surviving on a space-station, you will not be seeking out every adventure and trying to see as much of the story as possible. You'll be doing the minimum required to not-die and escape (in whatever form escape takes).

Playing Citizen Sleeper like that made it enjoyable and also stopped me slowly failing the game as a consequence of never committing to a single course of action.

Chrome Tab Groups. Not a book or a game or a film! At some point in the year Firefox redesigned their iOS browser and made it bad. I assumed some of this would be walked back, so I used Safari for a while.

That was also bad (for me) because it breaks a workflow I've adopted: opening tabs on my phone so I can read them on a real computer later. I had been relying on Firefox Sync for this. For years. But I was so unhappy with the iOS redesign and I ended up switching to Chrome on mobile.

Then, because I wanted sync, to Chrome on Desktop. I want to want to use Firefox, because I believe in an open web, but their product decisions feel like a loyalty test sometimes.

I use tab groups as a combination between mental contexts and bookmarks, as well as a kind of queue.

I add things that are interesting to inbox, often on my phone or my work computer, then clear it out by reading things and closing them or moving them to another context.

When I come around to working on Colocataires I open up the colo group; when I'm finished I close it. When I've totally finished with a topic I can delete the group, open or not. I can right-click on the group to grab a single link (or remind myself which tabs are in it).

This has totally replaced Tree-Style-Tabs/Sideberry for me. It's simpler and it's built in. Sometimes I miss the hierarchy you can get with those Firefox extensions but that's usually a sign that I've gone too far. I don't want to be one of those 100+ tab people.

Morphine. The band. Got hooked by "Take Me With You" and "Potion". Bass, saxophone, drums and Mark.

Helix. "A post-modern text editor."

I've been using vi for nearly 30 years (mostly vim, sometimes neovim, sometimes old-school vi on ancient UNIX beasts). It's very clear to me that a modal editor suits my brain. Most of that time I've run a reasonably minimal configuration with few or no plugins. When I started writing Go at work, I wanted to have better editor integration and that kind of set a ball rolling.

vim's architecture makes this kind of integration difficult. I understand some of that is fixed with neovim and I ran that for a while, but making completions work involved installing (several) plugins, some of which have their own big dependencies (like all of NodeJS). I got frustrated and so I trimmed my vim config back and decided if I needed language server support I'd just write in VSCode, which is what happened.

I don't want to rely on VSCode, but I also don't want my nvim session to take a second or more to load, or for it to be a song-and-dance to transfer it to another machine. I don't want to choose between three kinds of plugin manager.

I saw hx recommended on #tildetown and tried it out. It turns out it has the features I actually want in an editor: it's modal, it has a fuzzy matching search (previously I used fzf.vim for this), good/fast syntax highlighting based on tree-sitter, language server support and a gruvbox dark theme. I'm a simple man.

It's been hard to break the muscle memory, both of typing vi file in a terminal but also of vi motions. I've added aliases for some (which feels like giving in) but I'm mostly ported over. I am not even all that sold on the fancy "multiple-cursor" way of making refactors to your code; that feels like pulling off a heist when it works correctly for me. I'm just enjoying it as a faster vim with less legacy.

Framework 13 Laptop. I have the Ultra 5 125H.

My old Thinkpad was showing its age as a main computer and new Thinkpads didn't look that good, so I decided to try out Framework. Maybe I was influenced by fashion; a few townies had them at TOWN CON, vilmibm brought his to Ottawa when we installed tilde.town at Colocataires, and I read Philip Theus' review.

It was eye-wateringly expensive, for someone who typically buys their computer second hand or on a deep-discount, but that's just how it is when you're buying from a company without the scale of Lenovo. All of the hardware works with Linux and the open firmware is cool. This isn't a full review or anything, those are common on Youtube; seek and ye shall find. By default it was hot and it was loud and various tweaks I've made have improved that to a level that I'm happy with. I got the upgraded 2.8K display and it's the nicest non-Macbook I've ever used.

The DIY edition is cute: basically it ships 90% complete and you fit the RAM, SSD, keyboard and display bezel. I am not sure if this is saving significant labour for anyone, or just a way of extending the IKEA effect to your laptop. It worked on me though.

The real test though, was when I accidentally dropped it through a gap in a railing, a two metre fall onto some stairs, which it tumbled down. The electronics all survived (as much a factor of luck, I think, but I'll take it) but the case was badly mangled.

I ordered a new bottom, top and input cover and followed the iFixit-style guides. This wasn't cheap; over C$300 of replacements, but at least I could buy the parts. This was the real measure of how DIY the laptop is: swapping out the hinges from case to another, carefully noting how the cables are routed. Thoughtful things like using one type of screw throughout and making it clear which should be removed and which should not. No glue.

I won't say it was worth the money, objectively, but I'm pretty sure if I dropped an Acer laptop that distance I'd be buying a new laptop. If I dropped a Macbook, I'd be handing it (and my credit card) over to Apple to make it good.

Alan Wake 2. More of what was good from 2010's Alan Wake and everything turned up to 11. This game is one of the most expensive cultural products of Finland in history, and it leans very heavily into it. It also completes the integration of the Control universe into the Alan Wake one (hinted at in Control's main game and then made explicit in the AWE Expansion).

Moby Dick. (Or: The Whale) (New York edition).

Standard Ebooks reckons this is 13 hours of reading. It took me the entire year to read this book, something I had actually planned on, given that it's broken up into 135 chapters and it's quite dense. I literally just finished it days ago. I wanted the whole experience to feel like a year at sea.

After complaining bitterly about Ulysses, I wanted to prove to myself that I'm not just incapable of reading difficult books — more that I want the difficulty to lead somewhere. And, like, I know there are far more difficult books in the world. I enjoyed the writing so much more in Moby Dick than Ulysses. The complexity has a reward.

While it's obviously fiction, two things struck me: it's quite a progressive book for the 1800's. The stereotyping of different cultures and races isn't particularly mean or hateful (but yes, obviously problematic for a 2000's sensibility). Queequeg is initially described as a cannibal and a savage but Ishmael discovers the "reality of his goodness". Importantly: Queequeg doesn't change anything about himself, it's just Ishmael's perception that changes.

Also, the reader is expected to be well educated in the classics to understand various references that are simply never explained. I have some bias that people in the past were less educated than we are today but now I suspect that some few people were far better educated than we are by today's school system, while the vast bulk did not have access to much formal education at all.

IDLES. Hooked by the LCD Soundsystem connection with Dancer, I thought Joe Talbot's vocals were a gimmick but nah. They're part of the whole thing.

Mothership TTRPG. I backed Carson Brown's Emergence module in February because it looked cool, without ever having played Mothership and without knowing how the game system works.

Then, I got hyped watching this Quinn's Quest video and I knew if I wanted to play this system, I was going to have to learn how to run the system. I bought, downloaded, printed and bound into zine form all of the manuals I would need. I was ready to be a warden.

Our first one-shot sucked! We stopped half way through and it was clear no one was having a good time. We were just used to Dungeons & Dragons style where you're the hero, and (like I wrote above) acting against the narrative: in Mothership you should generally be scared that you're going to die or that you're barely going to survive something. And then I was worried that my players would miss some of the most fun or interesting parts of the game so I felt the need to steer them.

After that, I was lucky to join a one-shot game that Carson ran with some ex-Shopifolk and get a feel for the game. It was good to see how another group approached things, and Carson did a minimum of steering us. I later bought the one-shot we played and learned that we barely saw a third of the ship. Then it clicked: that's just how it is sometimes. You shouldn't be like a video game player checking every trash-can in New Vegas for scrap. You're running for your lives.

I ran the exact same module Carson ran, figuring that copying a warden who knew what he was doing was a good start and it was a lot of fun and got people to loosen up about the system. Running a couple more one-shots and (right now) our first proper zine-sized module has gone way better. My players spent the last ~3h session just maintaining and fixing up the ship that they are on on the way to a mission, and they nearly died twice and they had a great time.

Playing TTRPGs but especially running TTRPGs is a lot of fun, fulfilling and educational. I'm learning so much about what is or is not fun for my group, what putting on a good experience for other players involves, etc.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. This is a surreal third person adventure game. I dig the art style (which reminds me of Kentucky Route Zero). Its Wikipedia page is currently missing a plot summary which sounds about right. Figuring out your own personal take on what is going on is part of the experience. I will say, it did drag a little at the end and I leaned on spoilers for some of the last 25% of the game, not because I was especially stuck, but because I wasn't really enjoying it as a game as much.

1899. German mystery science fiction from the folks behind Dark. I loved this, it was so weird. It's not renewed for a second series; now I'm sad.

I Could Live in Hope by Low. Another slow, bass-heavy band that I discovered long after they disbanded (and, like Morphine, due to their vocalist dying). Can't believe this album is 30 years old. I could have been listening to it so much.

Satan's Circus by Death in Vegas. I liked DiV years ago, when they did sample heavy rock music with vocalists, like on The Contino Sessions. This is a very different album: all electric, droning, melodic. "Head" is a masterpiece. Again, it's 20 years old and I just started listening to it this year. There's lots out there to discover.

Some other stuff that was fine, I guess

The Vibes

They're good. I think it's been a good year. There's a lot to be down about, but the future does not seem hopeless.

I have benefitted from resuming full-time work. The pre-defined structure helps. Of course, now I'm busy all the time and I wish I had more leisure time, but that's life. I wonder if I'll ever get a 4-day-week opportunity that isn't just trying to cram 40 hours of work into 32.

Housing? Vacation? idk

I went to Kitchener-Waterloo for vacation. It was fine, a perfectly nice place, but it made me rethink vacations. For one thing: I think I am done with AirBnB rentals, but that's not what I wanted to write about.

When I lived in Stafford, vacations were a chance to go somewhere "better" — a bigger city with more stuff, and stay somewhere nicer than our house.

For practically the whole time that I lived in England our house was a "project". Not only did that mean that there was perpetually something wrong with it that needed fixing or improving, but also that being at home represented, well, "work". If I had time free, why was I not replastering under the bay window or advancing any number of home improvements. Getting away from home meant getting away from that.

When I moved to Canada, vacation was about exploring our new country and visiting the US for the first time. When we had family move back in with us, vacation was a get-away for my wife and I.

None of this is really that relevant any more. We live in a nice house. It's not crowded, only our youngest lives at home and he's an adult.

Ottawa, despite its faults, is actually a pretty big city! It's no Toronto but there's a lot of restaurants I haven't eaten at and theatres I haven't seen performances at. When we go away as a couple our trip mostly comes down to: stay in a luxurious place, eat at nice restaurants, some light shopping.

I'm not saying I never need to leave Ottawa again; I love cities like London (UK), Dublin, Montréal, Toronto, New York. But unless there's an event or we're visiting friends, I don't think vacations in places with less than a million people are for us.

Family

My family is safe and well and I'm on better terms with my eldest.

I went to Ireland for two work-trips and managed to extend the second one with some personal time. That happened to line up perfectly for me to meet with my brother and sister and visit my parents' grave for the annual blessing.

I met two of my nieces for the first time although I didn't really spend any time with them. I met cousins I haven't seen since my father passed away 16 years ago. They've had whole, practically grown, families in the time I was away.

I see my step-son and daughter-in-law every weekend and we have a regular TTRPG campaign going. I love this.

Work: Slice

Like I said above, I think that working is better for me than not-working. Sometimes I'm a little disappointed in how much extrinsic motivation "works" for me — I have more freedom than a lot of people to choose what to do with my life and I've chosen: sit at a computer for 40 hours per week.

It turns out that I enjoy working on things bigger than myself, and one of the main ways to work on something bigger than one person is to join a company. (You can also start a company; doing that one, too).

The people are great and I enjoy working with my immediate team. I have a tonne of complaints about stuff I wish were better, including cultural things, but also it's my job to help fix those, and I feel like I have the opportunity to. Our customers basically use the software to run their whole pizzeria so it's high-stakes, but only at lunch or between ~5PM and ~9PM. Every Friday is Black Friday.

The work is hard enough to be interesting and close enough to my experience that I can feel competent. But it's all definitely possible. No poorly-defined moonshots or being asked to deliver software that defies physics. I consistently feel that tomorrow will be better than yesterday was.

I have learned that I can't work a job where everything is going to stay the same. And I definitely can't work at a place in a managed decline. (You can be making a lot of money and still be in an engineering decline, if your best days are behind you!)

The company is in an interesting place: I joined just after a big re-org and during an executive reshuffle. Since I joined there were a few high-profile departures, but there's also people who've been there a decade or more. I'm interested to see what next year is like once the grace-period for dealing with the fallout of all of this change is over.

Work: Colocataires

PD and I started a company in January (while I wasn't working). I'm going to write a bunch on the origin story of the business over on its blog, so I'll just say how I feel, here.

Mixed!

It's a big source of stress because whatever PD and I don't do just … doesn't get done. And we have plans that are always a bit bigger than we have the time to pull off. Colocataires is a big source of guilt for me: there's an almost unlimited amount of work that I could be doing on it, and so kicking back and watching a film or doing hobbies can have an undercurrent of bad feeling.

Also, while the business is slowly growing, it definitely loses money every month and that's coming out of our pockets.

On the good side: I am very happy that Colocataires exists. I'm proud of what we've done, while both of us have busy lives and full-time jobs. Some of our customers are very happy, I think people are sometimes surprised by good customer service and (depending on your expectations) we're affordable, especially for folks using anything but the smallest VPSes with other providers.

Personally it was a huge deal that Colocataires is the new host for tilde.town. ~town has been a huge presence in my life and always for the better. Now I get to help take care of it. (Also: check out the case). vilmibm came out to Ottawa and tahnok and m455 from ~town came and hung out while we did the install. Just a great time.

Hobbies

These really suffered. Slice and Colocataires ate up a lot of my time. I still want to be a good husband and father. I want to cook for my family. And meet up with friends. That doesn't leave a lot of other time.

I skipped Looptober this year and aimed to do eight oil paintings instead. I only did six but I am very happy with that and I really enjoy oil painting. That said: I haven't done any since the end of October. I should fix that.

The bike I fixed up last Winter has been a lot of fun. I don't ride it fixed, but even flipped over to single-speed it's nice to have a very light, very simple bicycle for quick rides.

Computers

I had a minor crisis about my relationship to computers. Being into computers helped define me and I've always spent a lot of my time learning new things. Computing represented this wide open frontier of knowledge and experience. Sometimes, this year, I've found it hard to be excited about them.

I've achieved a lot of what I wanted in my career. I've also learned a lot and I now have the tools to build … well the kinds of things that I want to build. I'm not intrinsically interested in building databases: I want to use them to solve problems in the real world.

On a personal level, a lot of the software that I might want to write already exists. I found myself thinking "what web framework would I want to use for my personal things?" and then realizing that I don't actually have personal things that I want to build that need a web framework.

For now, I'm channeling this energy into work. That might sound vaguely unhealthy but, due to (waves hands) previous employers and burn-out, I've developed quite strict boundaries between work and life. When I was at S_____y, I even refused to use Ruby for personal projects. I wanted at least a programming language worth of separation between work and personal computing.

Health

Alas. It's the same, but it's not dragging me down as much as it did for the last couple of years. (I get unexplained dizzy spells a few times per week, as well as semi-frequent headaches).

I had my first MRI scan, that was exciting but not conclusive of anything. I've seen an ENT and a vestibular physiotherapist and I'm waiting to see a neurologist. I'm not even holding out for a fix here; I just want to know what's happening and I'd like to know if it's going to get worse.

Conclusion

This ended on a little bit of a downer there, but that's my year wrapped. I'm happy that so much happened in it. It's great to have a landmark year that isn't a landmark because of bad stuff that happened: the events this year were basically all positive?

Here's to another one.

Aaron Brady, December 21st 2025