2025 retrospective
At 2:39am I skipped the second half of credits of UNBEATABLE and I thought, well, shit, here comes the part of the New Year where I try to pick up the blog post.
I started using bearblog at the start of 2025, because I wanted to rant about something, but didn't feel like figuring out a static blog, and I thought this would allow me to focus on writing instead of HTML design.
You can kinda tell from the number of posts on here (4) how well that went. I have, probably, another 5 drafts in there somewhere, in a very poor state. And I don't feel like I'm a good writer either. But I think it might still be better to just try to type things out and hit Publish, especially in the zeitgeist we're in.
If you find the post structure here suspiciously reminiscent of the Google SRE postmortem template, shut up, no you don't, I was trying to run away from it.
Things that went according to keikaku
I built a PC for myself
I have a pretty flip-flop history with buying gaming devices. For one, I was a Kickstarter backer of OUYA (hi jamie f u for making me remember). I got lucky again in 2020 and bought a Switch for train travels one month before Covid took away my need for train travels.
I had my last PC built back in 2014 with an AMD FX-6300 and GTX 660 Ti, later upgraded the GPU to RX 580 in Dec 2019 just before the GPU market went to shit. Ignoring fan noise, that gaming machine lasted me surprisingly long, maybe it was just haunted or running on spite, who knows??
During my uni years (starting in 2017) I started turning more towards laptops, between a 2012 Intel Atom netbook and a Pinebook, each of which sucked to use, but with my workarounds and tolerance for pain, I could squeeze up to 8 hours of battery life out of each, so I persevered. I was looking out for an opportunity to upgrade, but 1) last time I bought a new serious laptop in 2015 it was a low-mid-end that cost me 2000 PLN and my expectations from new hardware grew while my perceived budget hasn't, 2) people kept saying like, any moment now AMD will drop the new generation of chips that will be better, faster, more energy efficient.
When the weird laptops started hindering my startup dayjob, domi built me a franken-Thinkpad from X220 and X230 parts for obscenely little money and slapped a fresh Ryzen sticker on it (that my startup boss totally fell for), and this “X225” opened my eyes a bit to how far behind everyone I actually was on computing power. And so, plot twist, I ended up with an M2 MacBook Air in mid-2022. Which to a large extent also solved my portable gaming needs? I discovered that surprisingly many games (ones that aren't brand new, anyway) worked decently on it. Decently, like, 30fps on 80 degrees Celsius. I then played FFXIV for 2 years like this (because I was already used to underpowered laggy).
Mid-2023 though my budget recovered from the MacBook but I was still not feeling ready to invest in a PC. Maybe it was the newness of AM5 and the prices of DDR5, and on the other hand, my unwillingness to buy the presumably “final” AM4 build that would be fundamentally unupgradeable. So I got a PlayStation 5 to play Final Fantasy XVI. And now I'm slightly invested in the ecosystem because I have a few discs with other games, like the factory new FF7 Rebirth, and a second hand Death Stranding 2. Which will have honorable mentions later.
But fundamentally, I already own way too many PC games to not have a gaming PC, so June 2025 I caved in, asked around some friends who built PCs recently, and I ended up with the following build:
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 5 9600X | 909 PLN |
| CPU Cooler | Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE WHITE ARGB 66.17 CFM | 259 PLN |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte X870E AORUS ELITE WIFI7 ATX AM5 | 1199 PLN |
| Memory | Kingston FURY Beast 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR5-6000 CL30 | 909 PLN |
| Storage | WD_Black SN850X 2 TB PCIe 4.0 X4 | 679 PLN |
| Video Card | Sapphire PURE Radeon RX 9070 XT 16 GB | 3299 PLN |
| Case | Fractal Design North ATX Mid Tower Case | 566 PLN |
| Power Supply | be quiet! Pure Power 12 M 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX | 523 PLN |
| More WiFi | some random Chinese card with Intel AX210 from Allegro | ~100 PLN |
I am surprisingly happy with this build!
My main goals here was to maximize power efficiency gains (I recently got an electricity invoice saying their estimates led to me overpaying! excellent news to me!), maximize freshness (I don't want to be due for an upgrade too soon), and minimize noise (which is how I picked an absolute unit of a CPU cooler the size of a child's head).
Minor caveat is that the Realtek wifi on the mobo has terrible Linux support (or the kernel in Bazzite hasn't caught on to a good version (and I have really no clue how to put a newer kernel in Bazzite without major rebuilding recompiling reimaging effort)), so I got a very cheap thing on a PCI-E which 1) has an Intel chip with less suspicious drivers 2) has non-gamer-style antennas that seem to actually penetrate the wall between me and the ISP router.
And I don't know if it was just extreme luck or I have the most amazing intuition for timing, but the RAM I bought for 909 PLN now sells for 1100 USD. Like, 4x increase? I'm so glad I missed that.
I can bite pizza
Late 2024, I had a jaw surgery which aligned my teeth in a straight line, after 3 years of intentionally fucking them up into a cool straight arc with braces. I spent the next few months struggling with eating, but after enough checkups, my braces are finally gone (I'm still wearing retainers though) and I can crunch whatever food I want.
I don't know how to explain how big the difference is except maybe to the potential one mutual who went through similar stuff. For others, imagine biting a pizza and managing to pierce through the dough, but having to slurp up the tomatoes the cheese the pepperoni from the entire slice because they're still attached to the piece of dough you bit off.
In December I got the final confirmation from my surgeon that he doesn't want to see me again (ok he sounded more positive saying that) and the rarer orthodontist appointments should free up more of my time to do things I actually want to do.
Discoveries that surprised me
Andante spianato et grande polonaise brillante in E-flat major, Op. 22
It was the year of Chopin Competition in Warsaw, and I can't say that I was following it closely, but I was following the news coverage and listened to one of the recordings from the second round where I ran into the Andante spianato and I think it's a beautiful piece of music. Forgive me for not expanding on this I don't really have the language. But it was pretty enough that I hunted out an old LP record (by someone else, of course) so I can listen to it.
Ryzen 2400GE miniPCs
Mid-2024 I bought a Lenovo M715q miniPC. The spec is something like, Ryzen Pro 2400GE, 16 GB RAM, some SSD inside, an integrated GPU that can render a desktop environment in 4k, more or less. At 1080p it proves to be a pretty decent machine for old games, though after trying Bazzite I'd say that Steam Deck UI is stuttering as hell on this device. Also technically the GPU can do some hardware transcoding, so y'know, Plex or something. It cost me just below 600 PLN.
HP also had a similar device, 705 G4, with very similar specs, but with a USB-C port that the Lenovo doesn't have. But it has a much more annoying fan that spins up all the time, so I gave it to my dad, where it replaced an old desktop PC with Windows 8. I mean surely that helped the power bills.
I bought two more of these Lenovos, one for a friend who, convinced by my example, wanted an HTPC, and one more for myself. So now I have two, one as a home server type thing (mostly just running Home Assistant these days) and another for Plexamp and occasional movie watching. And frankly I would gladly replace the home server at my parents with this, except for one specific annoyance: due to its size it only has one 2.5 inch drive slot, and for a family home server I need a 3.5 inch spinning rust HDD, I think. I still haven't figured out how to do family backups properly and this is something TODO for next year, more or less.
The Murderbot Diaries
The Apple TV adaptation was fantastic and as my luck would have it, there was a Humble Bundle with all the Murderbot books and more. Which I spent more or less the whole year reading. Excellent novels, as Tea would agree now that she's almost caught up to me.
Hobbies with no massive updates
Video games
I spent an afternoon painstakingly categorising games that I own across multiple platforms and bucketing them into ones I still want to play and ones I gave up on long ago. And equipped with that list, I feel more ready to make good progress on my endless backlog.
I said I'd come back to the PlayStation 5 games, and this is a bit of a disappointment to me, because Christmas 2024 I got a physical copy of FF7 Rebirth, because surely I was just about to finish FF7 Remake, and I actually haven't made enough progress in FF7 Remake this year to unpack it. It is for a good reason — Juno told me to play the original FF7 first — but it still hurts. On top of that I recently came back to Death Stranding and already bought Death Stranding 2 on disc ("surely I'll finish it any moment now"), so I'm afraid I'm making the exact same mistake.
In brighter news, I got my shit together and finished Kirby and the Forgotten Land, so at least the Switch backlog is moving forward.
I missed out on all the “major” candidates for that title, but my GOTY is Wanderstop, closely followed by UNBEATABLE. Please feel free to ask me about either or both and I'll be happy to ramble about them.
Things I wish to improve
Fitness
I don't feel like expanding too much jdlskfs but I was trying to get into Ring Fit Adventure on Switch this year and it didn't stick, so I still don't have a good workout routine. It's slightly tempting to ask for a personal trainer at the work gym, but also then I'd have to explain who I am and I do not feel like opening up about that to a stranger at this time.
Coffee
At some point during the year I got fed up with the automatic coffee machine at work, and I did a tiny bit of learning how to use the manual espresso machine. But I still don't feel very confident about what I'm doing. Unfortunately, there is someone on my floor constantly changing the settings on the decaf grinder, so after a few really bad water concoctions I figured its easier to give up.
This is remedied a bit by the pourovers. I realized that I have enough equipment (a spare V60 and a plastic Hario “Air Drip Kettle") to keep them at my work desk and just bring the beans inside the grinder with me. And I could even leave the grinder at home (I'm always interested in reduce the weight of my backpack) once I empty one of the little plastic jars from the advent calendar.
Speaking of: I got myself a coffee advent calendar from HAYB this year. Just one goofy thing though: I kinda gave up brewing it after a few days. That's because, in a way, I stopped trusting myself with coffee that's this expensive.
I got worried that at some point I acquired a taste for the type of careless brew that I was doing (something like, 17 clicks on my Timemore C2, and fairly randomly poured because my electric kettle doesn't have a gooseneck) and started maybe a bit spiralling that I don't know what a good coffee really should taste like. Because I mostly learnt it from whatever I was making. A few days before I got the advent calendar, I found an online calculator for converting the Comandante clicks that most roasters seem to use in their suggested recipes to my grinder's clicks, and it turned 23 Comandante clicks into 20 on mine. I tried it on the coffee that suggested that number and I thought at the time that it was nice how clear the flavour was. But then calendar coffees just have “20-26 Comandante clicks” on them and when I try that new grinder setting I don't really feel the flavour. Like maybe some of it is there, but not that much?
I even came back to the stovetop gooseneck kettle, and started using bottled water that someone recommended, and while I guess that improved my coffee, that could very well be just because I have more fun pouring from the gooseneck kettle. Which is not a bad thing in itself but eh.
I feel like it's a bit of a bummer that I don't know how to learn what is good and what is bad except by making a lot of experiments with different settings and comparing. Which I'm a bit stingy with because coffee is not cheap. But also because even if I'm gonna be intentionally making coffee on weird settings, I think in the parts of the process where I do stuff, I'm very inconsistent. How fast, how warm the water exactly (still haven't bought a thermometer).
I don't know yet what to do with this but I do want to do something with this because I like tasty coffees and the office decaf is ughhh especially as americano (how surprising, I know, but I need some liquid to sip slowly).
On the bright side I got a new thermal mug for Christmas and it's pink.
Photography
Oh boy this will be so funny to think about financially.
While y'all kids (Becca Farsace on YouTube, but also definitely someone on fedi – domi maybe?) were having fun with the Game Boy Camera, I discovered through someone on fedi (I have a hunch that it was Schappi?) that I could kind of have a similar kind of fun with a Nintendo 3DS because its cameras take 3D photos, which you can then view in 3D on the console itself. Or you can turn them into anaglyphs with this tiny Windows app someone made forever ago, it works. Not sure anyone has red-cyan glasses anymore though.
God this is grainy as shit. Kinda works though.
I think it was fun bringing it to the office and keeping it in the lower pocket of my cargo pants, but frankly it's kinda annoying to take good 3D photos with it, the autofocus is maybe struggling a bit, stuff like that. You can't really have a photo at moment's notice. Also the battery doesn't last very long if you're keeping it suspended in your pocket with StreetPass on (speaking of, how is no one on StreetPass anymore, I feel like I missed out).
And I took that with me to Karen's birthday where
I followed a bunch of nerds (🧡) around the town with their cool proper cameras and I started to feel jealous. (Though I still like my photo of Karen taking a photo of the waterfall stairs.)
But I couldn't be normal about it, could I. I'm getting very good at being penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Again, coming back to things that YouTube and news sites like The Verge started to surface for me, I realized that there is a mostly functional silly quirky Fujifilm X Half camera has a ~4 times cheaper competition from Fujifilm itself, the Instax mini Evo. At least it seemed to me this way: both are digital cameras that are getting in the way of you making conventionally good photos, and are very vibe oriented.
And the Evo is also a very good stimtoy with all the knobs and spinnies that do nothing when it's powered off.
There are of course a ton of downsides, the photo resolution is low (though, I mean, it's way higher than that of 3DS), and despite having Bluetooth it won't let you just download photos to your phone, unless you print them first (which costs you real money in cartridges), or unless you put in a microSD card, because then it's all fair game.
I haven't put any new photos on there in a while (I got stuck figuring out how to make them JPEG-XL so they use less space but static site generators seem to hate that idea) but I've had a bunch of really cool cats and flowers on https://snaps.michci.ooo/. And then there are some
Like for sure they are not great photos but I think it's a good tool for vibe capturing. If you can get the photo in time and not too blurry and y'know there is no real zoom on this so it only works at a small range of distances from the subject yadda yadda.
But overall a pretty funny and silly thing to have. Might get a Kodak Charmera next cause now that I have a little Swiss knife on my keychain I might as well have a camera on it too. (Oh no she's spending more money on toys.)
Also I kidnapped my parents' old Lumix DMC-FZ7, which according to this wiki article, actually kinda meant something decent back in 2006. Though it's a very basic, uhh, bridge camera, it says.
I think I haven't done this much because I've spent all year at work and haven't gone out much. That's worth fixing for sure. I made an alumni card with my uni 2 years ago, ostensibly to retain access to its botanical garden, but I never went? That seems like a lost opportunity.
I think between this and the Chopin competition and the stories I'm taking in (hi unbeatable), I'm getting a craving to make something. Very vague feeling. But I should try to learn how to photograph good. And try picking up piano again. IDK if I spell out anything here it will feel as if I've actually done something already and I will never actually do it.
Theme of the year?
2020 was the year of the boundless days in the fog as I accidentally batched some of the most intensive classes in the final semester of my BSc.
2021 I think was the year I started wearing braces, and travelled by airplane the first time. The world was simultaneously opening up and scaring me into shutting in, despite vaccines, or maybe because so many people chose not to use them.
2022 was the year of personal disaster and coming out to myself.
2023 was the year of feeling paralysed by the MSc thesis, and by the surgery looming somewhere vaguely in the future.
2024 was the year of feeling paralysed by the surgery actually materialising in my future, and then the surgery actually happened. It feels weird internalising the risk of not waking up from the general anaesthesia so much and then just, y'know. Waking up from it. And the horizon is clearing up and any moment now you'll be allowed to make plans. What plans did you have for after again?
2025 was the year of internalising that clear horizon. I even made some of the same new year resolutions I want to make now, then gave up at first opportunity, because I was still operating in the mode of “something will screw up my plans again any moment now”. And I went to Brno for a weekend and it was fine. And I went to Berlin for a weekend and it was fine. And my parents went to Amsterdam to bring my brother back from uni for a long weekend and I had to catsit but that's just a thing that will, presumably, not happen much again. It feels fucking stupid to say it out loud but I am taking in the small bits of feelings of agency. I'm still not there yet, and I'm overplanning for everything that can fall apart falling apart. But, if you'll excuse the pun, the future is agentic. No not in their way.
The new year resolution is 4k
I keep semi-joking that I want to retire from full time work at age of 35, and that's like 7 years away. That sounds like a perfect time to try getting and paying down a mortgage for an apartment (I'm still assuming I can stay relevant as a salaried programmer for that time somehow), if I can find a decent one I like in one of the parts of Warsaw that I like. Which, by the way. Yeah I will probably stay in Warsaw.
Sometime between taking out the mortgage and retiring would be a good moment to heck up my gender marker and legal name. And probably the sooner I start the better. Though for my personal well-feeling that's probably less important than starting voice training. And I need to start doing something to stay in shape.
All of which are just refurbished last year resolutions. But maybe this time with more agency. And with the other side goals mentioned about coffees and photos. I'll count on y'all to make me accountable (you will come here, those of you who promised to, and you will drink my coffee).
Ohh and I need to get me a 88x31px button