2025 highlights

I finally made it out to Japan for a long vacation this year.

I could go on for a while about this trip. Reading about other people's vacations is boring to almost everyone (probably everyone everyone). I'll say it was by far the best trip I've ever taken. Everything about Japan, except the summer weather, was perfect. I'd be happy to talk offline to anyone thinking about going. I covered my game shopping experience over here already.

My wife and I also took many day trips over the weekend this year. Our weekends are no longer dedicated to keeping kids entertained. It's both sad and happy to move on from that phase of life. I wrote about one of these trips since it fit the general theme of this site.

The rest of the year was otherwise average.

I don't talk about my real world job online in any degree of detail. Everything is fine on that front though. I'm only noting this because there were so many technology layoffs in 2025 and maybe someone was concerned. The industry situation isn't as bad as 2000-2001 but it's still a very tough time.

As for this site... I posted several impromptu articles which is something I started last year and wanted to continue. Usually I plan articles for weeks or months, often overthinking them in the process. This year I posted something like 7-8 articles that I wrote in 1-4 hours. I wonder if I can break that number in 2026? Will I even try? I also posted 5-6 articles that had been in draft form for too long. My favorite is the Intellivision tribute, which doubled as some reflection on growing up in the 1980s.

I didn't finish any big programming projects this year. The only Sega Genesis demo I posted was at the start of the year. I think I'd like to reverse this in 2026. I also worked on a conversion of the FreeBASIC xm2esf application to Java. It's a very deep cut. It's something I needed to finish before starting another demo.

Festive viewing of xmas ornaments

Let's start with one from last year that I bought on clearance:

I'm not a fan of this one. I think there are better outfits they could have gone with. I must not be alone in this opinion because I waited until this hit 90% off. Even then there was a massive pile of them at my local Hallmark.

The new ornaments at Hallmark this year were kind of meh. Also the prices were comical. Or more comical than usual.

Hallmark sends out their ornament catalogs way too early in the year. There are houses on my street that still have their xmas decorations up when it arrives in my mailbox. In these first catalogs the prices were the same as last year. About a week later they sent some addendum letter explaining that all their ornaments are made in the US but due to tariffs (that hadn't taken effect yet) they were raising prices (on products they just said were made in the US). They later sent updated prices that were absurd. Nothing they said made sense unless you translate it as "we want to raise prices because we want to raise prices".

So we cut back on the number of ornaments we bought quite severely. This is the only new one I bought because I wanted to continue this specific collection:

For lack of a better term, this next one is a Hallmark b-tier ornament. Meaning it is not featured in their catalog and is quite a bit cheaper:

As for the other 2025 Hallmark ornaments... if I do another one of these recaps next year maybe I will have snagged them on extreme clearance.

Here's an old fashioned ornament my wife found:

It's not any specific game but fits well with the other arcade cabinet ornaments. The faux game screen looks like a Flash game, it's a fun addition.

This was from the Nintendo store:

They may have sold it last year too.

Posts I enjoyed reading in 2025

This is a change-up from previous years. I'd like to highlight things I found interesting on other free (with one exception) sites. As the internet grows more garbage-y I feel it's important to promote some non-garbage sites.

Disclaimer - links can break over time. I try to find and fix broken links when I can but no guarantees.

Let's start with technology and gaming articles from 2025, which was the original intent for this section:

• PiMyLifeUp: Hosting your Audiobook and Podcast Library on a Raspberry Pi: This is a tutorial on running Audiobookshelf on a Raspberry Pi, a thing the project itself does not recommend doing. I wanted to note this project because this article introduced me to Audiobookshelf. It's the kind of thing I would setup if I decided to retire in the proverbial cabin in the woods with limited internet access. That plan grows more appealing over time.
• There oughta be a Game Boy Slideshow: I always enjoy projects like this. It's practically useless but a good intellectual challenge to figure out. They would later continue this theme with There oughta be a Game Boy Photo Booth.
• Nicole.Express: A System For The Sixties-and-a-Half: The Toshiba Visicom COM-100: I never heard of this system before. It would be fun to try. Also this is one of my favorite sites and if I repeat this segment next year it will be featured again. There were many other great posts there in 2025, I went with this one because I learned about an entirely new system from it. [cue someone sending me a link to a Midwest Gaming Classic gallery I posted that includes the Toshiba Visicom COM-100]
• Can you complete the Oregon Trail if you wait at a river for 14272 years: A study: Another "practically useless but a good intellectual challenge to figure out". That's like half of what I write about lately. It's so great to see someone wonder if this is possible then prove it is.
• What You Might Miss When Backing Up CDs: Good reading for anyone who likes to make backup images of CD games (as the title implies).
• The dumb reason why flag emojis aren't working on your site in Chrome on Windows: I also enjoy trying to figure out odd browser problems. This one turned out to be a simple explanation. Microsoft is concerned about offending certain governments and won't ship flag emojis because of that. Google could implement their own custom set in Chrome, rather than relying on what ships with the OS, but chose not to.
• Punch-Out's Mike Tyson has been defeated in under two minutes for the first time: I'm happy to see something mainstream-y, at least not focused on gaming, cover speedrunning. I've never defeated Mike Tyson unless heavy save state abuse counts. It doesn't count.
• How does Explorer find the "first" icon in a file: This was a flashback, I was confused by this problem in 1998 while working on my first commercial application. By "commercial" I mean "something sold to people" not "something sold in stores". I literally mean I encountered the exact same thing being described here.
• The best way to beat a hard level is to stop playing it: This is kind of obvious, the same thing works for me when I'm stuck on a tough work problem or difficult decision. It's so obvious yet I've lost way too much sleep over my lifetime trying a level over and over again. RIP Polygon of old.
• The most Microsoft support document of all time: OSNews got rid of ads in August of this year. Hooray! The internet was so much better before ads. And yes, that support article is barely intelligible to anyone outside of Microsoft (and likely most within Microsoft too). Later in the year they posted Living my best Sun Microsystems ecosystem life in 2025 which was a fun read (and a good idea article/lifestyle in general).
• Too many red flags: I actually worked with someone who suggested adding a "Garbage Collection" button to an application. It's also possible that was me in my early days of learning Java.
• A very Dangerous Journey: I was a little surprised I never heard of this.. Since I scan a lot of oddball stuff and am something of a TurboGrafx-16 CD Stan. I mentioned taking a lot of daytrips this year. Lake Geneva is well within daytrip range for me so I should go see the Gary Gygax memorial there.
• How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2: This is the kind of deep dive article I will always geek out over.
• libxml2 Maintainer Ends Embargoed Vulnerability Reports, Citing Unsustainable Burden: The problem of widely used libraries that are maintained by a single person is so much worse than most understand. The xz hack last year would have been catastrophic if not detected at the last minute. There are 1000s of potential Y2K scale incidents hiding out there.
• Batong BT-686: The Famicom Frankenstein We Never Knew We Needed: This is another system I never heard of before. Well, a pirate system but still a system. It's part Famicom and part computer. It includes a pin converter to play American NES games and (of course) a cartridge of bootleg games. It is very cool looking though.
• Tokyo Tourism in Games: Sigh. This was published after I came back from Japan. I visited a number of these locations, and some real world sites from anime series my kids enjoyed. This article doesn't note that it's also possible to visit the town that Shenmue is based on. I really wanted to see that but it was out of the way for our itinerary, maybe next time.
• Nintendo Gives you the Power of Flash - Nintendo Power Rewritable Cartridges: I was unfamiliar with Lawson stores until I visited Japan. They are like a 7-Eleven but cleaner and with way better food. Well, compared to the American 7-Elevens. Compared to a Japanese 7-Eleven, Lawson is about equal. As of 2025 the Lawson chain has machines where you can print artwork from anime and video games. I can 100% picture them having these rewritable cartridge machines. I can visualize exactly where they are in the store too.
• The Microsoft SoftCard for the Apple II: Getting two processors to share the same memory: Oh wow, one of my favorite blogs mentions another of my favorite blogs (both of which appear earlier in this list).
• Retro Raspberry Pi TV Brings Back Channel Surfing: This is from the infinite list of "cool projects I will never have time to try"
• Why P.T. Anderson Gets Away With "Retro" But Games Don't: This was a late addition to the list. It's about how movies and games are treated differently when they are presented in older styles.
• Connect Your Atari 8-Bit Computer to a Live Bulletin Board System or BBS (30-60 mins): I was never into BBSs but always wanted to be. I had an Amiga with a terribly slow modem at one point in life but couldn't afford hours of long distance calls. I like projects that connect classic computers to the internet. I don't think the dial-up part of classic computing is an experience that needs to be preserved.
• Microsoft Open Sources the Zork Trilogy: I thought the Zork source code was already available though? Regardless, it is definitely open source now and under a friendly license.

Next is articles covering other topics posted in 2025:

• How sonic DNA connects generations of music: I don't know much about music, in the sense that I don't understand any technical aspects. I know which songs sound like other songs even if I can't explain why, this article explains why.
• A Mall I Loved Is Going Pitch Black: Sorry for including a paywalled article. I couldn't resist because it's about dead malls which is one of my favorite topics. This mall in particular was largely killed off by Franklin Mills. A mall I used to frequent was also killed off by the Mills brand.

This year I decided to start following more personal blogs. These aren't people I know or have any connection to. These are mostly blogs I found linked on other sites I follow. If someone posted something interesting once I figure they're bound to do it again. I'm always trying to read different perspectives and topics.

Here are some favorites from 2025:

• Your Site Is a Home: I (minimally) drafted an article not too different from this but could not put my thoughts together nearly as well. This is one of the most relatable things I've read in a while.
• 500 Articles Later, Here's What I Learned: Very similar theme to the previous article - and also very relatable, I could have written nearly the same list. Of all the new sites I followed this year, idiallo.com is my favorite. At least once a week the author puts out a concise article about a topic I find interesting.
• The first pirated MP3: This site has a lot of "how did we get here" type articles explaining major technology events of the 1990s. Most of them are topics I'm familiar with and maybe have posted about. The very early days of mp3 piracy was new to me. Probably because I ran out of hard drive space around the time this was all happening.
• Public Domain Day 2026: This is a list I always look forward to. I see a few classic mysteries included, which could lead to some cool projects. There will of course be trashy slasher films made out of some of these.

And now some pre-2025 things I ran across and found interesting enough to share:

• Letters From Henry: The Time Henry Rollins Sent Me His Creepy Fanmail Because I Pissed Him Off: Warning - contains content some will find disturbing. Initially I didn't believe this article because it was too bonkers, after a second reading I'll accept it's real. At worst there is some embellishment which we are all guilty of.
• I Survived the Disney Death March: A random travel blog I found while seeing if anyone else has coined the phrase "Disney Death March". So the answer is "yes, someone else thought of this phrase". This is the oddball stuff I think about when I have too much mental free time.
• Publish Once, Syndicate Nowhere: Related to the previous article, I wondered if anyone beat me to the phrase "Publish Once, Syndicate Nowhere" and was happy to find someone had. If others want to share content from this site on social media that's cool and everything. I'm not going to set up accounts on all the various platforms to repost content. I'm at peace with the possibility that no one reads a lot of the things on this site.

Year-end recaps

I'm going to skip reviewing everything I played this year. I already covered one game in detail and in the future that's what I'll do when something stands out.

As usual I spent a lot of time on Falcom games. It was a mixed bag. Early in the year I played Trails Through Daybreak II. I would rank it last in the Trails series. The story is very weak and nonsensical compared to the rest. The battle system and rogue-like dungeon keep it from being a bad game. It will probably be my most-played game this year because of those two factors. In the summer I played Ys X which I obviously put off for a while. I'd rank it about in the middle of the series. Then in the fall I played Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter which is their best game since Ys VIII. The original game had an outstanding story and soundtrack. Remaking those into the engine & battle system used by the Daybreak games produced the best game in the series. I don't think that's controversial. I hope they remake the original 5 Legend of Heroes games in the same engine.

What game did I actually spend the most time on though? Let's see...

Well this isn't right. Trails Through Daybreak II should definitely be in the top 5. I must have played it when I had my PlayStation 5 disconnected from the internet, which was a few weeks. I got annoyed after an update rebooted my console in the middle of the night and I lost some progress on whatever I was doing. It was probably in the middle of a long cutscene that I paused to finish later. This list is close enough though. Yes, I played through Vice City again. I caught some awful virus that knocked me out for two weeks, during which I played Vice City as some kind of analgesic. Whatever I had, I wouldn't recommend it.

My Spotify recap was roughly average:

I wasn't expecting anything too wild there.

I read somewhere that Nintendo is not releasing their 2025 Switch recap until 2026. Boo. The Nintendo Music app had a mid-December recap. That's not nothing. I have one playlist on the Nintendo Music app. It's for late afternoon napping whenever I am burned out. My top songs and albums are proof of this:

The Wii Channel music was an unexpected and appreciated addition to this app. There are several relaxing songs in it, with the global nighttime weather winning out. I am getting sleepy just thinking about it.

Possibly hopefully thoughts for 2026

Next year is going to be packed with games. I already have 3 Falcom games on preorder due in 2026. Two of them aren't entirely new games but I'll play them too much anyway. Grand Theft Auto VI is likely to be the highlight of the year though. As of right now preorders are not available for it, maybe it won't even have a physical release? Maybe it won't even make the latest planned release date? Even if it does hit that date, there's a chance I won't start it until early 2027.

I renewed the PlayStation+ subscription and will likely try some new games there too. This was the first year I had a subscription and found several games I enjoyed, I should have bought it sooner. I still haven't bought a Switch 2 even though 1 of the 3 aforementioned Falcom preorders is for it. I think I'll buy one in the spring. I was kind of waiting for the first hardware revision, something I often do with Nintendo consoles.

I don't have a ton of website & project plans for 2026. That will change, I posted many things in 2025 on a whim. The Wii turns 20 in 2026 and I have an anniversary tribute (just barely) drafted. That's the only thing in my article queue at the moment. There's a Sega Genesis demo I really want to work on, I need to find time for that too. Maybe I'll try to learn something new, I'm not too old for that.

So that's it for 2025. Thank you for visiting and reading this far.