Internet Highlights - 2025-12-31
Last Updated: 2025-12-31 00:00:00 -0600
As is increasingly our tradition around here, I wanted to take one final opportunity this year to round up the fun and interesting things I found this month and share them with you! But first, a more important message: If you’re on the Gregorian Calendar, let me extend to you my warmest wishes for the upcoming year. I don’t think there are many adults whose impression of 2025 was overwhelmingly positive, so, quite seriously, All the Best.
The first highlight of the month was finding a new mastodon/fediverse hashtag game, #MakersHour. It’s a one-hour run every Thursday, a set of five questions with 10 minutes for everyone to respond to them. Big hoot, and I’m finding some cool new people that way too.
NASA has open-libraried a large number of e-pub and PDF books on astronomy and aeronautical science. On a similar vein, I also learned about DokuWiki, a database-free wiki software package which might allow for an even simpler setup and management workflow than MediaWiki, which is our current standard. Sticking with books, I’ve also learned of an upcoming new book on the internet of my childhood, meaning I’m now “sing you the song of my people” years old, I suppose. On the topic of the Oldternet, Neocities is a whole thing. To my immediate pleasure, there’s been no end of progress made in terms of advancing the return to tradition of our internet prime - including this special backend for having a static, but periodically updating, site.
As the oldheads around the lab know, I’m something of an information security and privacy nerd. Some folks have expressed some concern that I primarily use the fediverse for online social media, because the fediverse, broadly speaking, cannot handle end-to-end encryption. That may soon change. Frequent flyer on these aggregation posts, Soatok Dreamseaker, has introduced a prospective implementation of a standard for key transparency. This is a major step toward solving that problem, which of course makes it a major step toward a freer, more equitable, and abuse-resistant internet. To the immediate contrary, Quebec is doing Quebec Shit, proving once again that the Notwithstanding Clause was a mistake and that we really need to amend some basic law around here.
In “Lies to Children” news, your brain is less of a computer than you think it is. I gotta be honest, if I could just learn for a living instead of having to farm computers, I’d probably dive a lot deeper into that strange edge of science between neurology, psychology, and Theory of Mind, because this is definitely a field where the more you know, the less you understand.
I like to play a little game, and this month’s big hits have been Space Haven and (since I’m such a sucker for Zachtronics games)TIS-100.
And, because I just can’t ween myself off the platform (in fact, I’ve been thinking about creating some videos for it directly), a brief roundup of youtube videos worth watching.
- SAD: Frontier, a channel where someone has created their own hard sci-fi setting that I’m absolutely fascinated by.
- MsMadLemon mods an Amiga to take USB-C Power
- My Favourite Book Binder, Four Keys Bindery, has a special project for Andy Weir
Finally, since it’s the year end and there’s no point in doing a separate announcement for it, I’m excited to say that I will be returning to Twitch starting next year. The times included below are Atlantic Time, which is currently UTC -4.
- Tuesdays at 7PM - Lab Nights with much tinkering and poking. Effectively, anything to do with creating or modifying software and hardware. Think PETI, but also think perhaps kit assembly projects, creating household helper software or libraries for the same, etc etc.
- Thursdays at 7PM - Office Hours, which’ll be writing and journalling streams or things that are close cousins. RPG session prep, planning and curruculae, maybe even literary analysis stuff.
- Saturdays at 3 PM - Free Play. I’ve always got some game or other under my skin worth showing to people. Possibly also RPG Liveplays, but I think those will be fewer and further between. Either way, we’ll crack some beverages and play in some sandboxes.