50 random things we've learned or observed in 2025

It is the time of year for clickbait videos with lists of things, so we decided to do our own version.

So, here's 50 random things we've learned or observed over the past 12 months. Maybe some of them will be interesting or useful to someone, and you'll probably see more of some of these when we do our annual review.

Not all of these are new-new. But they're things we've thought about in new lights, at least. Or that we'd forgotten about and rediscovered.

As a production note, we basically wrote these out and then randomized their order, just to guarantee no sense of flow!

As someone that list the Bubsy games as a significant influence on how we present online, it's interesting having one where the problems are completely the opposite of anything before. (Specifically, too much camera control)
There are Blender plugins to help generate cities, which might be a big help for some artists we know.
Github Actions and Workflows are a thing we need to be better at in 2026, with a project that interacts with a lot of things on them.
More of a reminder, but with consent, spend hours cuddling the friends you rarely get to see.
Video editing (more than basic trims and crops) is a fun thing to try every now and then.
Trying barefoot shoes again does seem to have helped with our bad leg, at least some of the time
We still haven't found the 100% right VR avatar for me. Wolke's Dragon is close, but a little too... aggressive to completely match my vibe. The Vulper has most of the right shapes but is also not a dragon, and it feels like it'd need a lot of kitbashing.
There's a Pokémon Go equivalent for Archipelago - but unfortunately Android only, which limits our ability to engage with it.
The Boox Palma is a really neat device for being able to read portably, but we've ended up using our iPad Mini more.
If you as a software or hardware vendor have decided that despite your perfectly functional service desk system, the only way for anyone to log tickets now is to go through your chatbot, I wish the executive that came up with that decision to be cursed with having to do the same thing for every basic task.
Post-Self is a fantastic book series that we need to read more of, but the only time we make time for it is on long plane journeys to and from furry cons...
One of the fantastic things about seeing impressionists live is seeing how their mannerisms change as they go into each voice. One of the worst things is that they still have a tendency to do "hello, I'm (name)" for setup, because you won't remember what Tony Blair sounds like without that.
Kubernetes was an interesting thing to learn about but then it turned out that at least for the moment work doesn't need us doing that, so another skill to maybe be picked back up later.
We intermingle our notes too much to do the whole digital garden approach, but we're glad for those it works for.
We do have the capability to finish a notebook rather than leaving it half finished and moving onto the next one.
No ADHD mitigation strategy is perfect. The brain will get bored of it eventually.
The Linux initramfs component is exactly what it says on the tin - the initial RAM filesystem.
The Donkey Kong 64 Randomizer is neat for how much effort has gone into it (as someone that enjoys hearing music in the style of other games, there's a vast amount that's been converted)... but it isn't great for Archipelago given just how much of the game can get locked out if someone can't find your Coconut Gun.
Even hotly anticipated PC games can have that enthusiasm melt away if they don't work on Steam Deck.
The best microphone cannot save an anxious voice going 300 miles an hour.
The idea of making numbers into words to remember them is one that we read about years ago and wished we'd put into practice earlier.
There's a lot of power in the thought of going fully infrastructure as code and installing NixOS, but I don't think the juice would necessarily be worth the squeeze for us.
Tim Hortons (UK and Ireland) isn't a patch on the real thing.
It turns out Glass Onion is pretty good. We're still not paying for Netflix.
Ansible PowerShell modules have a few gotchas if you're not used to writing them.
If you don't have Substance Painter and/or refuse to learn how to use an Adobe product, Ucupaint is a great alternative (article still coming at some point!)
More critters than we thought live closer than we think.
There are still companies announcing their upcoming NFT integration in 2025 (who unsurprisingly, we decided not to purchase from)
There's a terminal based web browser called browsh which might have been nice for focus, but unfortunately when we tried it, it got blocked by search engines - making the idea of using it for research a problem.
Obsidian's Bases are very handy for keeping track of things, and a lot more performant than Dataview was.
If there was an Amphimorpho avatar base available for VRChat, I think that'd be a neat form for a bit.
SKU stands for Stock Keeping Unit - one of those acronyms where we just heard the acronym and never questioned it further.
The experience of getting a convention badge laminated at a business is very different between Canada and the UK (or the UK chain we tried just no longer did same day laminations)
Writing down plans on paper can help a lot with not letting things slip through the cracks, though we're still struggling a bit when it comes to longer term planning.
It's fun and (was?) easy to jailbreak that old Kindle you have laying around.
DataDog and other OpenTelemetry consumers have a lot more granularity than some monitoring solutions we're used to.
Sometimes a USB-C adapter can be all you need to revive an old laptop.
Oversized "borrowercore" items are delightful and something we want to make space for around the house; a couple of quid on AliExpress results in an extra cheap AirPod shaped Bluetooth speaker that is never getting connected to anything.
The 1980s Robin of Sherwood series is a chill thing to watch with friends and teaches that far more Satanic wizards were involved in Robin Hood's story than we thought. (Also the whole thing is on archive.org!)
Speedrunner practice ROMs can be very useful for getting to grips with situations that aren't logically possible in the normal game.
We've moved over to using vim motions in most editors that will allow them, but it's only every so often that we feel like that's making us faster. With normally having a split window with multiple tabs... it's often easier to reach for the mouse when we need to scroll or select things, or still fall back on the arrow keys (or option + arrows for moving between words) rather than their vim equivalents. But things like ci" or cw can still be useful... aside from when we mix up c with r. (Also the default Visual Studio Code vim extension feels really bad to use compared to other editors, but it's what we're stuck with at work)
Labelling your SD cards and getting a wallet for holding them is a great idea - but might want better labelling method than a Sharpie, given that it can't right well on the surface of the lot of them.
Sometimes when you try to visit a place you haven't been to in decades, you end up lost deep in the woods.
The Peak District is beautiful even if there are some problems with public transport in terms of getting out of it...
If you buy a security camera that primarily records to SD card, make sure to set up some sort of backup method in case someone nicks the camera.
MacOS Tahoe solved the problem with it being difficult to boot headless machines protected by FileVault encryption, which is nice for our Mac mini/music server.
There are few greater privileges as a dragon than another dragon^[1] showing you their hoard.
Ripping 3D Blu-Rays for display on head mounted displays is neat but also not getting enough storage space on the Mac for caching while transcoding is a problem.
We've been over budget on mutual aid donations for most months this year. And I'm glad that we can do that, but I hate that we have to.
Sometimes you can create something which you believe to be flawed and imperfect but that the friend who requested it loves with their whole fucking heart.

At the time. ↩︎