Jujutsu Kaisen: Shimetsu Kaiyuu - Zenpen

The joy for me with this show was watching it every week with my kids. Both are huge fans of JJK and their excitement made it all the more hype. (The actual show was also incredible).

9/10

Now that I have this channel, the natural extension is really just writing my own app. I’m really never going to post on my phone (I prefer using a keyboard way to much), so I’m always stuck with the unpolished side of the equation.

I have a few apps I’m trying: Indigo is my app of choice on my phone, but the macOS version requires Tahoe (and I’m still refusing to upgrade). I’ve tried Ivory, Croisant, and Tusks. This post is using Tusks, and I think it might be my favorite so far.

Will be on rotation for the foreseeable future

Ikoku Nikki

This story was such an interesting take on grief, loss, and what it means to be family. There was only enough time to focus on the two main characters, but I wish they had a bit more time to dedicate to the side characters in their orbit (and even then, the ending felt rushed).

I truly appreciate that that anime allows you to tell these smaller, one-off stories – No need to franchise everything to find the next lucrative sequel. Check this one out!

8/10

Watashi wo Tabetai, Hitodenashi

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

Yofukashi no Uta Season 2

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 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.

Rock wa Lady no Tashinami Deshite

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

• Expo Upgrade with a bunch of iOS 26 updates
• Moving the navigation stack to @react-navigation’s “native” implementations of stack and bottom tabs
• A whole host of screen refactoring, mostly due to the new iOS 26 primitives, including support for the iPad’s new window management

Overall, 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.

checks calendar

we all see how that turned out.

Happy New Years! Catch you on the flip side.

Hazbin Hotel - Season 2

Once again, a musical theater masterpiece with spectacular animation and character designs. Loved every second.

10/10

PS. Gravity is an absolute fucking banger.

Having to use a custom build of your static blogging engine always has me eyeing the greener grass on the other side of the fence. If I were to start from scratch at this point, eleventy would probably be my first choice, but that requires a huge amount of work at this point. It would be less daunting if I was starting something from square one, but having a back catalog using at least three different file structures and frontmatter conventions… just, ugh.

And if I’m being honest, if I truly was starting from square one I would probably go with a self-hosted ghost setup, so I could keep using Ulysses for writing.

Look Back

How bad do you want it? Will you do what it takes? What does art mean to you?

This film is a love letter to what it means to create. The animation is raw, visceral, and incredibly moving. Highly recommended, but give yourself some extra time to sit with the experience after it’s over (you will definitely need it).

9/10

Seishun Buta Yarou wa Santa Claus no Yume wo Minai

After a quick detour through three movies, Bunny Girl Senpai is back for a cour (before diving right back into another movie). I enjoyed the mysteries in this season, as well as the new university setting. The links back to Sakuta’s elementary school days felt a bit tenuous (let’s explore new friends and relationships) but the formula works for me.

8/10

Ruri no Houseki

The folks at Studio Bind are just flexing at this point — this show felt like an animation showcase. Ernest and interesting, this quintessential slice-of-life story was a fantastic show for the summer season.

8/10

DanMachi - Season 5

Not quite as good as Season 4, but entertaining nonetheless. It’s not often you zag away from your harem troupes to explicitly reject one of the interests. The events of Season 5 is about where I exhaust my hazy knowledge of the source material, so I’m going in blind from here on out.

7/10

Lycoris Recoil: Friends are thieves of time

All the charm of the first season in an appetizer form to hold us over until they hopefully announce Season 2. Waiting with bated breath.

9/10

Re:ZERO Season 3

More excellent villains, but a little less character growth than we saw last season. Unfortunately, it will probably be another year or two before we get Season 4, so nothing to do but wait patiently.

9/10

KPop Demon Hunters

Unbelievable amounts of fun! Great music and dance choreography that I’m sure will be replicated all year. Perfect summer faire.

10/10

On a whim, I installed it before my recent vacation and assigned it to my camera button, and so far I’ve been pleasantly impressed by the results. The computational “Night Mode” is the one thing that’s neigh impossible to get with an SLR unless you’re sporting a tripod (and I didn’t bring mine on this trip to save weight). I was able to get some nice shots casually walking around Paris and Amsterdam at night that I just couldn’t have shot otherwise.

I still prefer shooting with a dedicated camera — the ergonomics are far superior — but following the adage of “the best camera is the one you have with you” getting more satisfying results from my phone means I can get shots I just would have passed on before.

The app shoots RAW+JPG, and it’s easy to get photos into Lightroom for processing. One thing I’ve noticed is that the collection of presets I’ve created and collected behave differently with images from Indigo. I don’t know yet if that’s because I’ve mostly shot night photos, or if the tone mapping is different enough that it’s worth creating a set of dedicated presets for photos shot with Indigo.

The app has received a few updates since it’s initial release, so it doesn’t seem like it’s a one-off proof of concept. I don’t know what future Adobe envisions for this project, but I hope they keep it alive and iterate on it.

Clair Obscur - Expedition 33

Game of the Year - 10/10 - No Notes

Holy Shit

Zen

My personal daily driver. I had been a fan of Arc, but the pace of development came to a screeching halt when they essentially pivoted their company to a new (and as yet unreleased) AI-first browser. Zen uses Firefox for the underlying engine and Arc as the UX inspiration. With Arc fading, I’m so delighted Zen has come in to take its place.

The main caveat that you should be aware of before diving in is that Zen doesn’t yet support Widevine DRM playback. I wouldn’t call this a dealbreaker unless you are actively trying to live the “only one browser lifestyle”.

Arc

All that being said, I still use Arc as my work daily driver. It helps to have work and personal in different browsers from a syncing perspective. Do I think this will hold up in the long term? Probably not — I expect I will consolidate into Zen at some point, but the fact that Zen and Arc essentially speak the same UX language, I can continue to use them interchangeably.

Vivaldi

The Chrome dev tooling is IMO far superior to Firefox or Safari, and so I use Vivaldi as my dedicated web development browser. With the built-in ad-blocking, I don’t need to use any additional extensions.

Ironically, the one feature I wish it had was ⌘⇧C shortcut to copy the current url.

Chrome

Chrome itself is a glorified Google Meet client. I reach for Chrome when I need maximum compatibility or need to watch or listen to a DRM video or audio stream.

Firefox

While I adore Zen, I don’t really care for Firefox out of the box. I had it installed when I was actively developing web extensions, but rarely open it outside that context.

Orion

My daily driver for an extended period of time last year — the promise of Chrome/Firefox extensions with a Webkit engine is a great story to tell, but there were too many compatibility issues (both with the engine itself and extensions). For the longest time it was a struggle since 1Password didn’t support any alternative browsers with their extension (and you couldn’t use 1Password for Safari with Orion). They finally added support which is part of the reason for the wide variety of browsers on this list. The developer of Orion also runs Kagi which is my search engine of choice. The development team was probably too small to try to run a desktop browser, a mobile browser, and a search engine all at once.

Safari

It’s installed, but frankly I never use it. Engine compatibility is just poor, and they have knee-capped their extension ecosystem by tying it to apps in the App Store for delivery.

Min

My bespoke Chromium browser for situations I just need a tiny one-off web window.

This game is amazing! The prologue is a masterclass in narrative story telling and world building. Combining Souls-like dodge/parry mechanics with turn based combat feels like a very natural match. Not having a map combined with the dungeon design makes things harder to navigate but I’m slowly getting used to it. Highly, highly recommend!

The same spirit is there, but in moving over to blowfish theme as the foundation hopefully means a theme stack that’s a bit more up to date (and as a bonus still actively maintained). I’ll have to figure out how to manage upgrading the core theme while maintaining my tweaks, but that is a project for another day. So far I’ve been impressed with the stack – it’s well organized and doesn’t feel like a spaghetti project. There are a few shortcodes that need updating, so I’ll have to go back through old posts to make sure things still work (should be fairly manageable).

I’m still working on my POSSE extensions, so expect a longer post on that soon (hopefully)

Horizon Zero Dawn (w/ Frozen Wilds)

I know I’m a little late to the party with this one, but this game was magnificent. The story and world building were especially on point. I tried really hard to take a stealth approach to combat but it only get’s you so far before it’s an all out melee. I can’t wait to dive into Forbidden West

9/10

Quick test case for the video short code.

Kekkon Suru tte, Hontou desu ka: 365 Days To The Wedding

Cute little story about two incredibly shy and awkward people. Enjoyed the fact that it was workplace romance.

6/10

I finally got a keyboard stand so I could move my nice midi controller under my desk upstairs and create little things like this. Hopefully just making it easier to noodle I can spin out a bunch of one-takes like this. Maybe it will inspire me to work on some larger Logic projects again.

A visual novel style horror “sequence” very much in the vein of “The Stanley Parable” (with a bit of “Doki Doki” thrown in). The art by Abby Howard steals the show, in what is more a non-linear experience, rather than a story. I kept trying to find hidden loops, but as far as I can tell, the story is a straight fanout with narrative building on iterations through the story. Solid game if you’re a fan of the prior art.

6/10

Despite the production issues, I’m so glad we got this adaptation. The manga is one of my favorites and the anime feels like a complete story (and there is still lots of great story left for the manga to tell). The middle third suffers a bit from the production crunch, but the final third ultimately delivers on the promise.

8/10

A Fate production not done by ufotable? Call me skeptical but A1 is probably one of the studios that might be able to do it justice. This is just “Episode 0” and very much a shotgun-style introduction of everything rather than the beginning of the story. The full show is airing now for Winter 2025.

7/10

Neva

Neva lets you pet, play, scratch, cuddle, and fight with the dog (and tears were definitely shed in the process). Gris is a better game and I prefer the puzzle platforming versus the combat in Neva, but the mechanics are tight and ultimately satisfying.

8/10

Improved Persona-esque mechanics with a more complex and flexible combat/upgrade system. The story didn’t quite resonate with me (felt very one note) and while the OST is good, it’s not Persona.

7/10

Arcane - Season 2

An immense visual spectacle, banger OST, and a story that felt like it could have used two more episodes. I’m not complaining! They took their time and delivered on the promise of season 1.

10/10