Happy new year! I’m writing this on a train speeding towards London, where I’m going to see out 2025 with some dear friends.

This has been a good year for me. My theme for the year was “Year of the Heart” – spending time with friends, family, and loved ones, and putting more energy into those relationships. I did that, yeah.

2025 will be the year I went to New York with friends for a once-in-a-lifetime trip; the year I went to Heybridge with my partner for our first holiday together; a year in which I spent more time with family than years prior. There’s always more to do, but I’m pretty happy with where I landed.

I’ll think more about the year tomorrow, with a mug of steaming hot chocolate. I traditionally do my annual reflections on New Year’s Day, and that’s when I’ll pick a guiding theme for the year.

December itself has been a microcosm of “the year of the heart”. My heart was thoroughly stolen by Pumpkin, my parents’ adorable new kitten:

I got to spend more time with friends and family, at various dinners and parties and coffee meets to ring out the new year. And I spent Christmas with family, a week of much-appreciated rest from work.

I don’t love the cold weather, but I do like how pretty the world gets in the winter. I was driving through London a few weeks ago, and stopped for a rest by a canal:

My diary for January is currently very quiet, but I’ve already made plans that will turn 2026 upside down – I’ve kicked off the process of moving house. Exciting times!

What have I been writing?

I published over 100,000 words in 2025, and I feel like they’re better words than in previous years. I’m proud of how my writing is improving, not just how much I’m doing.

December in particular has been a prolific month.

The highlight was a three-part series about social media archiving. In The Internet forgets, but I don't want to, I wrote about my new “scrapbook” of social media. Then in Hard problems in social media archiving I described some of the institutional challenges of preserving social media. Finally, Meeting my younger self is some reflections from looking back on my old social media posts.

Social media archiving includes video, and I wrote When square pixels aren't square about pixel aspect ratios and a bug in my code. I also wrote about how to ignore AI upscaled YouTube videos with yt-dlp.

On the lighter side, I wrote about the Palmyrene alphabet and Truchet tiles, two fun ideas I had a lot of fun exploring.

I wrote a quick tip about adding a README to S3 buckets with Terraform.

Finally, I wrote my now-traditional annual book roundup, where I list my favourite books from the year. It’s shorter than previous years, but still has some gems.

What’s making me smile?

💻 I enjoyed Simon Tatham’s Policy of transience, a way to decide what to keep in your digital life. I like the idea that things should only be kept deliberately, not accidentally, and I feel like it applies to more than computers.

🪦 Wake Up Dead Man was another fun Benoit Blanc film, led by Josh O’Connor. We went to the same school, and while I never really knew Josh, his brother was in my class and his father was my English teacher. Both lovely people of whom I have fond school memories; if Josh is anything like them, he deserves this success.

🏳️‍⚧️ I mentioned Zohran Mamdani last month; only post election did I see his explicitly trans-supportive ad. I would love to see more politicians vocally supporting our community in 2026, and not cowering behind bigotry and fear.

🌌 Finally, A Game About Feeding a Black Hole was a fun casual game that released this month, and I enjoyed playing through.

My train is arriving in London, so I’ll wrap up here. I hope you have a wonderful day, however you mark the new year, and I wish you all the best for 2026.

Talk to you in January! ~ Alex (they/she)