Happy New Year! Hopefully 2024 will bring the needed peace and solace to everyone. 2023 was a very difficult year for us, with lots of what you might call "low lows" and a few "high highs". We usually make fun of that saying, but this seems like the first time it's appropriate to use it.

As far as blogging goes, 2023 was a great year. See the Brain Baking blog post archive for 2023: with 90 posts last year, that's on average 7.5 a month or 1.875 a week. The best part about 2023 in blogging was the feedback I got, and the new friends and e-mail pen pals I made. As frequently mentioned before, blogging keeps on giving. If there's one thing I never ever intend to give up, it's blogging.

The following posts turned out to be the most popular of 2023:

1. FPGAs And The Renaissance of Retro Hardware
2. Overlooked Reasons To Still Buy Physical Media
3. Goodbye, ProtonMail
4. Phomemo Thermal Printing On MacOS
5. DOOM Turned Thirty

As for Jefklak's Codex, the most popular article was the one on Freaky Trip, a bizarre (and very buggy) single-screen adventure/puzzle game. That one got a few hits simply because I couldn't find any reviews online myself! As far as visitor counts go, the Codex gets almost none, but I still have a lot of fun filling it. It's my own thing, and I've pondered on that subject recently in On Writing For Yourself In Public.

Previous month: October 2023.

Books I've read

Not much this month. Read my 2023 in books overview post to find out about the 22 books I managed to finish last year.

The Malloreon chronicles by David Eddings continues to be my go-to bed-time material. Books 1 and 2 are done and although the tension doesn't exactly build up, I don't mind to keep on reading as it's a light read and entertaining enough.

Games I've played

After finishing Super Mario Bros. Wonder, I continued with the 2D Mario strike with the Mario Land Game Boy series that evolved into Wario Land and Wario Land II. The best is yet to come, though, as Wario Land 3 is on my 25 Best Games of All Time list! I know them all by heart but still breeze through these platformers once every few years.

My wife discovered a cheap Switch eShop code for Mario + Rabids: Kingdom Battle and since I love tactical turn-based games, I eagerly dove in. It's okay so far: the core gameplay is very solid, but everything slathered on top is not my cup of tea. I'm nearing the end and will have a review up shortly. Meanwhile, Kristien insists on playing Railbound, a cosy railway puzzle game with sometimes devilishly difficult levels! Most of the time, I just don't "see it", but we're having fun together nonetheless.

Selected (blog) posts

• Gibru writes several interesting articles on AI and LLM generation, including Contextualizing the Artistic Process.
• Jonas Downey is convinced that having side projects is essential for creatives, and I agree. This could grow into a powerful manifesto.
• Cory Zue provides an overview on his side projects and why building publicly in private works for him.
• Keith McNulty explains why the MBTI tests are corporate astrology (Medum link).
• Michael Klamerus explains his process on finding small indie games.
• This sobering article at Eurogamer reminds us that in the video game industry, 2023 was also the year of low lows and high highs: You Can't Talk About Games Without Talking About The Layoffs.
• Glyph explains how to set up the best possible Phython development environment for MacOS. Don't use brew install like I did.
• Speaking of Python, why is Python so slow? Jake VanderPlas deciphers the Python internals to figure out why.
• Vlad-Stefan Harbuz's blog is great: it's a combination between computing and philosophical work. Here's his overview on resources on the philosophy of work I still have to dig into.
• Here's an interesting piece on Mickey Mouse and the Public Domain. As of today, one of the earliest versions of Mickey hits public domain in USA.
• You Don't Need Statistics On Your Blog says William Woodruff. Perhaps I should take on the challenge and ditch GoatCounter in favor of a few grep scripts in access logs, if that?

Other random links

• Déjà Dup Backups is a Gnome-powered UI-friendly backup tool for Unix.
• Did you know you can Scheme in Scheme on WASM in the browser? wait what now? The Spritely Institute also has cool info on Lisp hackatons if that's your jam.
• If you want to follow physical video game releases, look no further than https://www.physicalreleases.com/
• The Into The Aether Podcast released a six-hour long episode on the 2023 Game of the Year. It's great, but I have been slogging through it on and off all week and I'm still just over 03:21:00 hours/minutes in! Who decided that three-plus hours of jabbering about video games is a good thing? Because it totally is!

I hope to keep up the blogging rhythm in 2024. That's everything I wish for in 2024 besides the obvious ones.