something's got to give

welp, here we are, in the new year.

2025 was something. near the end of 2024, I stumbled across permacomputing, and that mindset and the community around it defined this year for me. it's been a lot of disillusionment with the economic forces of high technology. in trying to articulate this, I wrote an absolute banger of a blogpost, laying out some thoughts and the no-new rule I have been following since.

in february, I performed the complicated migration of my personal email system from a single server to a multiple-server architecture, letting me handle delivery in my sorry excuse for a homelab (lol). this has remained stable for the duration of the year, and I'm super happy with how it went

I spent a chunk of the start of the year playing citizen sleeper 2, which was great. I periodically throw the soundtrack into rotation, and I am super happy amos roddy (the composer for CS and CS2:SV) is being recognized for his talents, even getting his music into minecraft

in april, I took a greyhound to new jersey, and attended VCF east. it was pretty entertaining, and I got some neat shit at the flea market. sadly I was not able to get some of the larger kit, due to my not having a car. I met some interesting people, and had an odd conversation with a rideshare driver

in may, I attended pycon US, as it was being held here in pittsburgh. it was neat, probably not worth the price of admission for someone like me (crazy). I won't be attending this year, especially as it's not in pittsburgh

in july, I went to tekko. as is tradition, I didn't post about it. it was pretty good. I had ribbons to trade, for once, and that went very well, but I missed some critical ribbon game meetups. there were some domestic issues with people I attended with, that led to a lot of the con just being us chilling on the floor. I'm not really complaining it was a good time lol

also in july, I went from my main machine being a framework 16 to being a lenovo N23 chromebook running debian. an absolute trash machine that I love, who I affectionately refer to as The Goob. I really do prefer running a small laptop.

in september, a handful of irc #uxn people, myself included, started playing with a little messaging protocol d_m put together. a nano chat, if you will. it's been a lot of fun! it's really inspired me to just fuck around with networking

in october, partially venting frustration about using rust on The Goob, partially articulating something I'd been thinking about, I wrote a blog post with an inflammatory title. I am not proud in the slightest of the conclusion, I routinely consider editing the post, and I keep forgetting to. it was a lesson to me to not post anything I write at 2 AM without re-reading it in daylight hours.

I've also spent a lot of time lately thinking about what I want from a mobile computer. I came across, in my endless hoard of computers, a Next Thing Co CHIP. it's running an allwinner R8, and I think it will be good as the heart of whatever I end up making. I'm getting pretty attached to the thought of a portable smalltalk environment

and in december, I did december adventure. I kind of fell off for a bit of it, and decided to call it when the holidays came around, but I still had a good time. I mostly worked on a plan9 uxn emulator, but near the end of the month I threw together a simple job-server and have been using it to re-encode my media library without babysitting ffmpeg.

here's the thing: the first half of this post is just me piecing together shit from the year's blogposts. my memory is not great. there are months omitted here because I just didn't blog during them (but hey, at least I averaged more than 1 post a month!). so, new year's resolution: amity is gonna start journalling!

I have tried and failed repeatedly to start, but doing decadv was proof that I can keep it up if I really try. so, that's what we're doing. some people I orbit like to write bi-weekly internet journal posts, keeping a more thorough journal private. this sounds like a good plan, and I'm gonna try and do that. this place is gonna stay a log for my more well-thought-out long-form writings. weekly stuff will probably end up on my site

this year has seen me grow a lot. I'm a lot less stupid than I was at the start, in a lot of ways. I look forward to hopefully saying the same thing, in a year.

~aleteoryx, till next time

this one's gonna be a bit bleak; contrary to what you may guess from the title, it is not about Current Events in US Politics. I have 3 years to entirely reorganize my life, for entirely different reasons.

see also: solderpunk's The Standard Salvaged Computing Platform.

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