This one was just… depressing? There were some good ideas here and there, but the central conceit of the MC never changed over the course of the story, leaving each episode fundamentally repetitive. No amount of world building can overcome a character that just doesn’t want to be there.
6/10
Season 2 continued to ooze all the vibes – I absolutely adore the aesthetics of the show (including the fantastic OST, complete with another OP banger from Creepy Nuts). We finally got to dive into the stories behind extended cast and they didn’t disappoint. Highly recommend if you caught Season 1 and doubling down on the entire series if you haven’t started.
9/10
The news that Ubisoft is canceling the Prince of Persia - Sands of Time remake amid more layoffs just plain sucks. I’ve been a huge fan of the franchise, going all the way back to the original I played on my Apple IIgs. I have fond memories of core trilogy reboot (The Sands of Time, Warrior Within, & The Two Thrones) – I especially loved the way they incorporated the different voice actors from the first two into the third installment. I was looking forward to being able to play SoT on modern hardware… Ugh.
macOS 26 (Tahoe) was forcibly installed on my work laptop and I have to say… it’s just not great. I knew that would probably be my reaction, but to have it confirmed is another thing entirely.
The menus are particularly awful — Everything looks misaligned with smatterings of poorly conceived icons. The floating/nested sidebar concept should have been a style option for developers, not something forced upon every, single, app. It’s a bit ironic that many apps I need for work are electron-based, and are not beholden to the design whims of Apple.
It is very likely that I’ll keep Sequoia on my personal laptop and skip Tahoe entirely.
The music in shows like this (Bocchi the Rock, Ya Boy Kongming, etc) really elevate them far beyond the original source material. These are made to be anime, and the fact that they gained a successful audience as a manga speaks to the quality of the writing and characters. Loved the conceit and the CG for the performances was excellent.
8/10
I used the React TUI library ink for the first time to build a simple TUI for cross posting these micro posts to Mastodon and Bluesky and loved the experience. The one gap in the framework is the lack of a multi-line editor (a vim-like experience is probably too much to ask for). I might try forking to nvim as the editor (similar to how git launches $EDITOR for editing the commit message)
I’ve taken some time over the holiday break get my last 2025 update of anilime out to the store. There was quite a bit of scope creep in this one:
@react-navigation’s “native” implementations of stack and bottom tabsOverall, a worth while update. I don’t collect any analytics in the app and I’ve never bothered to dive too deeply into the store analytics that Apple provides. I have no idea how many people still use the app – it’s mainly an app for me that I happen to share. That being said, I do want to invest in it a bit more in 2026. I’m not exactly sure what that will look like, but I have a few ideas.
Once again, a musical theater masterpiece with spectacular animation and character designs. Loved every second.
10/10
PS. Gravity is an absolute fucking banger.
