Napa is beautiful this time of year. Julie and I are orbiting around to restaurants in close proximity to our house, trying new spots to test out for ourselves and future guests. Some losers, a few winners. Everything pricey but that's expected.

1. 🚘 Where I've Been Traveling

Julie and I did a date night out to the big city. I played an afternoon 9 holes at Golden Gate Park with some of The Fried Egg crowd, including the young man that shaped the greens (and did much of the bunker work at Pasatiempo). We used a free Hyatt night to stay right next to Oracle Park and had an amazing dinner at Teakwood. Getting to and from dinner was a fun treat and a side quest I've wanted to do in San Fran for a while: robotaxi with Waymo. Given the option I would never go back to Uber/Lyft/Taxi. Fred Wilson shared his recent experiences and has similar conclusions. This is a tech that just gets better with scale - more reps and iteration for the self-driving, and the more of them there are on the road the safer it will be get.

For Thanksgiving week Julie and I drove the campervan east to Las Vegas, taking a few days on the return to revisit Death Valley and the Sierras.

2. 📖 What I've Been Reading

Articles:

1. Yes, there's significant enshittification going on at LinkedIn. I'm less inclined to urge my graduating seniors to create a profile there.
2. How ancient humans bred and traded the first domestic dogs.
3. We keep killing all the vultures, often times as side effects of trying to do good in other ways (such as painkillers for cows).
4. I haven't even tried to get to first base with anyone but Julie for over 35 years, but still enjoyed Brangus's 10 Rules for Sleeping with Women. Maybe you know someone that could use this advice?
5. HBO's "remastering" of Mad Men has been a hilarious life lesson in giving a shit about your work.
6. Kevin Rose's 2-2-2 rule for alcohol is appealing to me. My main goal this past year has been weekends only for alcohol, but even a Friday/Saturday duo has ill effects for me. Following the 2-2-2 rule would mean Thursday/Saturday or Friday/Sunday only.
7. A case for rapid iteration and experimentation: Why speed matters.
8. Speaking of Las Vegas, there was much conversation with locals / natives about the decline in tourism and casino spend. Here's one author's take on what's going on: Las Vegas is in trouble Everyone has a theory about why. Now I do, too..
9. Typography in ten minutes, partially in response to US State Department banning the woke font Calibri. Also, Do Dyslexia Fonts Actually Work? Perhaps not.
10. Humans made fire 350,000 years earlier than previously thought, discovery in Suffolk suggests. Well, maybe not our species but human-related for sure. Good to remember that when we find the earliest evidence of something (humans in the Americas for example) that just sets a lower bound on how long ago something happened. Very different from event history, such as the last ice age or the meteor extinction event.

Books:

1. Finished London Rules, the book for the latest Slow Horses season. Inferior to the priors I think, and felt more like an interlude.
2. Working my way through Tiny Experiments. This might be yet another book-that-coulda-been-a-blog-post but I'll report back next month.
3. I've got two books on my nightstand to support wargames I'm playing: Patton Versus the Panzers (for BCS Arracourt) and Naples 1944 (for Salerno '43 and Italy '43). Very much enjoying the Patton book as it is rich with photos and technical details on the armor and artillery.

3. 🍿 What I've Been Watching

TV Shows:

1. I have to mention the re-release of The Beatles Anthology (2025) first. This 30-year-old documentary is much better than I remembered, and the remastering of the older film scenes is exceptionally good. They truly standout vs. the sometimes video recorded capture of modern (as of 1995) interviews with George, Paul, and Ringo. I did not recall how much Neil Aspinall was featured in this documentary and it was a treat to see him.
2. The Diplomat remains our favorite modern TV series.
3. I think I like Pluribus more than Julie, but we are still engaged and enjoying it.
4. Slow Horses season 5 was fine, not great.
5. Task was very good crime drama.
6. We are nearly done with Say Nothing. Julie and I both read the book, and I think the TV mini-series is better.

Movies:

1. I wrote a post consolidating picks from the Roger Ebert site for 2025; so far Julie and I have just seen the first two (see below). It Was Just an Accident is probably my next pick to watch.
2. One Battle After Another is as good as most folks are claiming.
3. K-Pop Demon Hunters was fun but not groundbreaking.
4. We picked The Shop Around the Corner off a holiday movie list and thought it was just OK. Definitely of its time.
5. Sinners is the best vampire movie you will see this year. With bonus Irish music!
6. If Merry Christmas, Ted Cooper is the best Christmas movie of 2025, then we need to stick to the classics. Very blah and unbelievable. Live broadcast segments from a Buffalo-area hospital fundraiser back to Corning NY? Come on!
7. I picked up A Walk in the Sun from the library to supplement my Italian front wargaming. Not done with it yet.

4. 🎶 What I've Been Listening To

Music:

1. I will of course pick through Steven Hyden's Favorite Albums Of 2025 for new fodder. This article is massive and impressive!
2. Many re-listens to The Velvet Underground & Nico for the album club. I love it more than Jim does.
3. Jim's latest pick was Selling England By the Pound by Genesis, a very good showing but lacking fully developed songs (with one or two exceptions).

5. 🎮 What I've Been Playing

Boardgames

1. Wargames on Vassal every week: BCS Arracourt and Holland '44. I wrote a bit about them.

Videogames

1. Hades II, all the time.

6. 🏗️ What I'm Attempting

1. I write almost exclusively in Markdown (meaning I pretty much never live in Google Docs or Microsoft Word) so often rely on tools to transform Markdown back into HTML: for my blog this is Jekyll, otherwise usually the Marked app. This newsletter you are reading natively supports composing in Markdown. The author of the Marked app recently released a new command-line processor (Apex) that supports a number of Markdown extensions that I care about, primarily callouts. This is clearly a prelude to a soon-to-be-released new version of Marked.
2. My workstation in Napa is pretty much complete and I'm very happy with it: an LG ultrawide curved monitor, Logitech MX. Keys mini keyboard, and a Logitech G305 mouse. One issue: if I want audio to go through the monitor, MacOS has no native way of controlling the volume. MonitorControl to the rescue.
3. I finished my playlist generator app. Glad to have this for personal use. It helped me create a playlist of Rolling Stones Top 250 Songs of the Century (so far).

I hope you have an amazing holiday season with friends and family and can enjoy some time away from the usual routine.

-Chris