The Changelog – February 2025

February was a pleasant month, but perhaps not a very memorable one. This blade cuts in both directions: you can be memorably good months, and memorably bad ones. It started with a nice lunch on the seaside, then Gioia got a lingering flu that knocked her out for a couple of weeks. And there are only a few weeks in February (about 3, considering that I need to write about one week before the end of the month).

On the other hand, it has been a happy month for our home volleyball team, who reached the post-season playoff one round in advance. So there is that. We have to find moments of excitement and joy wherever we can. At least I know March will be interesting, sport-wise.

And I am aware the world burns around us. I’d lie if I say that this is not taking a toll on my energy and overall happiness. But, it is especially when the world burn that we need to focus on ourselves and our local community. In his latest newsletter, Oliver Burkeman wrote that we need to treat “the world of national and international events as a place that you visit – to campaign or persuade, donate or volunteer, to do whatever you feel is demanded of you – and that you then return from, in order to gain perspective, and to spend time doing some of the other things a meaningful life is about.”

I think it is absolutely true. We are running a marathon, or even better, one of those insane where people run through mud for hundreds of kilometers. We need to pace ourselves, recharge, and we should not ignore our close surrounding because that is the place where we can make a difference (a difference that can move things far away, like in an unintelligible Goldberg machine).

And what a better way to talk about recharging than describing my February entertainment activity? But first, the usual housekeeping.

Housekeeping

I got a short story in a podcast

My writing group is particularly active in promoting our micro-stories. I am really glad for that because, if there is one thing I suck the most, is advertising myself and thinking that what I write is worth reading. All this movement bears some small fruits. And one of my micro-story got selected for a podcast (in Italian, sorry). It feels weird to hear something you wrote read by someone else.

JJ and Git

I am sitting on an article about Jujutsu and Git, but I need to find a nice way to draw git branch diagrams. I know mermaid.js offers them, but mermaid is a beast and they do not look great out of the box. I may end up with some mermaid-adjacent solution, if I cannot find a better one.

Reading

Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow – It is significantly better than The Lost Cause. This time, at least, I’ve found the story interesting enough to be worth reading. However, it is a bit fragmented, and I liked the first part much more than the second. The resolution was a bit underwhelming (but, most probably, realistic). Unfortunately, like with all the Doctorow’s novels I read, every character looks like Doctorow with a wig. I don’t know if you understand what I mean. They all speak the same and, when they speak differently, they look like an imitation of something different.
I am slowing continuing my revisitation The Lord of the Rings. This February I started The Two Towers, and it is great as usual. Even if, more than the first, there are places in this one that will let you scream “WHY THE HELL SHOULD I CARE”. I really appreciate all the things they did not include in the movie.

Watchlist

This month I finally finished with the Fast and Furious franchise and… what can I say? Fast X is a damn joke of a movie that still fills me with rage and disgust at the think of it. Other than that, though, I am happy to have ultimately filled this gap in my popular knowledge.

But while I watched some pretty fine movie (Clue, Rope, Wolfs, The Banker), this February has been dedicated to catching up with some TV series I was behind.

Of course, many of those series are ongoing. Severance season 2 just reached the midpoint, and it is getting tense (not like the last episode of season 1… those were really INTENSE ~40 minutes of TV). Reacher season 3 just started (I wasn’t aware, it has been a big surprise). Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man looks great so far. Invincible is back as well. We will talk about them better next month, probably.

For now, let’s check the two I completed.

Silo (Season 2)

If you have watched the end of season 1, you saw things just started to get interesting. Season 2 is back, and it is as good as the first one. However, it is slightly slower paced than the first season. Probably because there are two story-arcs in one: one focused on Juliette Nichols exploring the other silo while the second one centered on the event in the original silo and the rebellion caused by Juliette refusal to clean.

It is a good season, and the ending reconnects the two storylines, open way more questions, and–unfortunately–it closes with a terrible cliffhanger. Thankfully, we don’t have to wait multiple years for Season 3.

Mythic Quest (Season 1 to 4)

Mythic Quest is one of those shows that would be much more popular and successful if it wasn’t on Apple TV+ (that has an incredible quality ratio, imho, especially in the sci-fi genre). MQ is a classic comedy show based on the stories of a video game company developing a MMORPG called, you guessed it, Mythic Quest.

The first two seasons are excellent. In my opinion, I’d dare to say better than the average Ted Lasso. Then 2020 came. They made some fantastic pandemic episodes, but then something broke. Season 3 is confusing and not as charming. Season 4 is actually still going on and I think it is better than 3 (with one great episode so far) but something is missing.

My gut feeling is that it lost coherence. Character development went all over the place and the characters seems to act without a real motivation and inconsistently. It is still fun, but this layer of disbeliefs lingers upon you and block you from having a true attachment for the protagonists.

All the Rest

And, of course, I watched movies!

Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw (2019), F9 (2021) and Fast X (2023) were my last effort with the Fast & Furious franchise. Hobbs & Shaw is probably the best of the three because it is totally stupid and it doesn’t hide it.
Red Notice (2021). A dumb movie with Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot that tries to be smart and fun and utterly fails in both regards.
Clue (1985). A movie inspired by the board game. The fun thing is that, originally, the theatrical release had with three different random endings. The streaming version offers all three endings in sequence. And, somehow, I feel robbed of the experience.
Rope (1948). Classic Hitchcock movie. The gayest of all. Very cool.
Wolfs (2024). Maybe I was in the mood, but I liked it a lot. Clooney and Pitt make a pretty nice duo here. And the boy (Austin Abrams) did a fantastic job!
The Gorge (2025). A quite useless streaming film that remembered me “Bloodborne with Machineguns.” It offers a terrible first 30 minutes though and I don’t know is worth the effort.
The Banker (2020). The story of the first black banker in the United States. Unfortunately, it starts great, and it loses steam toward the midpoint. But I think it was more than fine.
The Trouble with Henry (1955). The first Hitchcock movie that I really didn’t like.
Fly Me to the Moon (2024). It is not a terrible movie by any means. On the contrary, it is quite charming and quite fun, but it speaks volumes I was not moved, or excited by a film about space exploration. Space exploration is my kind of shit! A pure “6/10” show.

Music

Because I delivered little recommendations in the previous months, this time I’ll give you three beautiful albums, all from 2025.

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First, Choke Enough by Oklou. Oklou (pronounced okay lou) is the pseudonym of Marylou Vanina Mayniel, a French musician and producer that does something in between alternative pop and ambient trance electronic music. Choke Enough is a dreamy entrancing experience, made even more whimsical by Mayniel’s whispered vocal performance.

There are few black American artists into punk and noise rock (the only one that comes to my mind is KennyHoopla), at least in comparison with other, more popular genres. This already makes this album somewhat interesting. Luckily, it is also quite good. Benjamin Booker is a musician from Virginia Beach. Its new album, LOWER comes eight years after his previous work. It is a dissonant harsh work, in the first part, and then it goes back to a more blues sound.

Michael Jordan Bonema, known on the musical scene as just MIKE, is a 26-year-old hip hop producer that has in his backlog 11 albums in the last 10 years. With such a great production, rivaling Prince’s one, you may wonder if they are all over the place quality-wise. According to the critic, though, they are mostly all hits. I say according to the critic because I lack experience (especially on hip hop). However, if his last album Showbiz! is indicative of his average production, I’d say this young artist is worth exploring.

Gaming

While I was slowing advancing with Hades 2 and getting the hang of it, Supergiants dropped a new big updated. This is the first consistent update of 2025 for this early access game. It adds a final confrontation, new boons, Ares, and a lot of stuff that would be too long to list.

From my first experience, I think it is also harder (at least in the immediate pre/post patch comparison; I am getting my ass kicked way more than usual).

Therefore, it is time to go deep into it again; I suppose.

Other Interesting Things

📝 Not only is Substack right-wing broligarchy garbage, it’s way more expensive than Ghost – Micah Lee, coder and journalist, nails it. Substack is the next rope journalists and writers use that will be used to hang themselves.
📝 Why Personal Websites Matter More Than Ever – On the same theme, I suggest to you this brief article by Joan Westenberg, a passionate writer that it is worth following. This stresses up my point: do not rent a piece of land from a rich feoffee, own your own land. It is slightly harder, but it is your. And all those rich landlords can go fuck themselves.
📝 The Sudoku Affair – This is a beautiful writing about a famous story in the development community (a story that I didn’t know though). It talks about Ron Jeffries and Peter Norvig and their wildly different approach to software design. It is long to explain here, but go read it, it is worth it and fun! I promise.
📹 Terence Tao on how we measure the cosmos (and Part 2) – Do you know the Cosmic Distance Ladder? It is the way we learned, through the history, how to measure our Universe, step after step, by measuring the earth, the moon, our solar system and so on. It is a very fascinating topic (and a tribute to human ingenuity!). In these two-part videos, Terence Tao (super famous mathematician) and 1blue3brown (super famous YouTube math channel) do an excellent job in guiding you through the ladder. I only wish they went much deeper!

Conclusions

That’s all for February. A short month, but not a short ChangeLog.

Now it is time for March. It is time to step into spring with that sense of rebirth that is characteristic of this season. I’ll be able to do that? It doesn’t matter. Intention matter. For now, I am enjoying the still-fresh days and the increasingly longer days. Vernation is over. Now we have to live and grow in according to Nature once again.

As usual, we will see each other next month.