November 2025 blend of links

Some links don’t call for a full blog post, but sometimes I still want to share some of the good stuff I encounter on the web.

Music of Wellness (From Severance: Season 1) By Theodore Shapiro・Right next to the music from GoldenEye for Nintendo 64 as one of the best music to play while working. (via Kottke)

Random scenes from Tokyo, and some thoughts on online publishing・Reading this post, I kept nodding along in agreement with everything Winnie Lim wrote: What is the point of most of the things we do online? This is not a cynical take, but a real question. My simple, if a little dull, answer is that we do it for ourselves first. If I were living in 1884, would I write a public journal, a diary, letters to a few friends, or books? I don’t know the answer, but a blog is what encourages me to write in 2025, just like it did twenty years ago when I published my first blog posts on Windows Live Spaces. There wasn’t really a point back then either, but an irresistible urge.

Dealgorithmed・Speaking of wondering what the point of what we do on the web is, Manu will launch a new “newsletter about the small web, the poetic web, the quiet web, the web many say we lost years ago, yet it's still here, ready to be rediscovered by those who care” Count me in.

What A.I. is Really For, by Christopher Butler・“I don’t worry about the end of work so much as I worry about what comes after — when the infrastructure that powers A.I. becomes more valuable than the A.I. itself, when the people who control that infrastructure hold more sway over policy and resources than elected governments.”

Citizen Eco-Drive Cal. 0100・If I had the money, this is the watch I would wear and cherish. This video by Hodinkee captures very well what there is to love about this unusual quartz watch; I mean, just look at how the seconds hand moves… Marvellous.

Oncle Bob・The great mind behind my hosting service of choice, xmit, launched a new app called Oncle Bob that aims to make static site deployments a breeze. If I keep using the xmit CLI for now — especially after investing a lot of time learning how to use scripts — this finally makes things so easy for everyone. Excellent tool.

The bird people of Lake Manchar: surviving in a vanishing oasis・Reading this article has sent me into a Wikipedia spiral of links for 90 minutes or so. A very sad story that made me even more curious and fascinated by this part of the world.

Random Mini Dungeons・Dave Rupert shared a video from Odd Artworks’ Random Mini Dungeon video series, and I have to say that I love absolutely everything about these videos. If I knew how to draw isometric perspectives properly (and how to draw at all), this is probably what I would do during rainy weekends.

Screw it, I’m installing Linux・“I do not want to talk to my computer. I do not want to use OneDrive. I’m sure as hell not going to use Recall. I am tired of Windows trying to get me to use Edge, Edge trying to get me to use Bing, and everything trying to get me to use Copilot. I paid for an Office 365 subscription so I could edit Excel files. Then Office 365 turned into Microsoft 365 Copilot, and I tried to use it to open a Word document and it didn’t know how.”

Surely you’re joking, Mr Suleyman・V.H. Belvadi on how people in charge of A.I. are appearing surprised when learning that others are not as in awe of its potential as they would like: “There is a sense of self-serving, faux admiration for a vision of a product intended to gaslight the public into believing in its capabilities. Anthropomorphised, such entities would be called charlatans.”

More “Blend of links” posts here