I was looking through the folder with the older ChangeLog drafts. The first one dates back to May 2022. It is kinda surprising that I am closing to the third year of doing this. On one hand, it feels I just started; on the other, it feels a lifetime ago. For example, Bird by Bird is a book I think I quoted a billion times and yet… I only read it a bit over two years ago?

This series has been my public journal, and it helped me be accountable, prevented me from spiraling out of control, and helped me avoid throwing months of my life into a memory black hole.

It has also been a broken record, though. Re-reading old entries and looking at past me struggling always with the same problems has been off-putting. If there is something I wish for this year, something I would focus on as a yearly theme, is positive change (never wish for just change; the Universe has a perverse sense of humor).

By “positive” I don’t mean materially. I mean value-wise. Because I don’t lack happy moments; I lack meaningful ones.

Housekeeping

As January tradition, here it is the usual roundup of all the books I read in 2024. If you read The ChangeLog, you already know them all. But it is a convenient summary (and, once again, I feel like the books I read in January were from years ago; time is weird).

I also updated a bit the theme of my blog with a better “credit” widget (for the attribution of the header photos). Moreover, I would like to change the color scheme but, so far, I do not know how. I need to think about it.

Finally, Wikipedia is awesome! This month I celebrate my 2500 edits on the Italian Wiki and almost 3000 overall. Let’s keep care of Wikipedia because it is the only remaining good place on the internet.

Reading

Speaking of books, I started the year with the bare minimum to reach this year’s goal. One non-fiction book, and a fiction one.

• How to Think Like Socrates by Donald J. Robertson – Donald’s books goes directly to my pre-order list. Therefore, when this popped up on my Kobo, I didn’t lose time. It is the second book about Socrates I read in the last few months. While the other (The Socratic Method) was more technical, this one is more “fictionalized.” It is a wonderful biography that reads like a novel. I really enjoyed it, and, I have to say, Robertson knows how to write.
• Star Trek: Destiny: Gods of Night by David Mack – I am a fan of Mack’s work. He is one of my favorite author in the Star Trek novels domain. Gods of Night is the first book of a trilogy, so it is hard to evaluate. I liked and there are a lot of interesting plot points. But, as usual, creating interesting plots is easy; the hard part is closing them. So I will optimistically look forward, hoping to not be disappointed (as in the Vanguard’s last book).

Watchlist

New year, new movies. Destiny, though, prepared for me a huge chunk of awful movies. It doesn’t matter. As long as I have two gems to suggest, I am happy.

The Holdovers (2023)

The Holdovers was the Christmas movie of 2023. It got 5 Academy Award nominations, won 1 (Best Supporting Actress to Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and it got frequently cited among the “Best Christmas movie of the 20s”. So, you know, you don’t have to trust my judgment.

Of course, I miss my spot at the time and I had to wait for 2024’s holiday season to catch up.

The Holdovers is set in 1971 and tells the story of a classicist professor that has to chaperon a student that has nowhere to go during the Christmas break. It is the classic movie that has everything: fun, drama, happiness, sadness, and bitter sweetness. All perfectly mixed. I also particularly liked that it is a modern movie that feels “classic.” I really lack the cinematographic vocabulary to express my feeling, but I hope I gave you an idea.

Nosferatu (2024)

One of the rare films I had the chance to go see to the movie theater. And I am happy I did. I am a sucker for good gothic horrors, and this one checked all the boxes. Wonderful cinematography, amazing costumes, super use of light.

I also liked a lot that it is very dry. No modernist extravaganza. No useless backstories. No attempts to justify villains with trauma or whatever things modern narrative always does to justify evildoers. It starts when it must; it ends when it should. This leaves a lot of space for allegory, as it was the use of Victorian and gothic tales. For this alone, it is a favorite of mine.

I know somebody wanted “more” from it. That’s the beauty of the world: we all have different preferences and tastes. But personally, I wanted nothing more.

Spotlight (2015)

I always discover new things about myself. After a year and 200 movies, I discovered I adore movies about good journalism.

This one tells the story of The Boston Globe investigation on the child abuse of Catholic Church in Boston. The story is horrifying, and the movie is absolutely great. I loved everybody in it and I strongly recommend it if you haven’t watched it.

It is such a shame we don’t have journalism anymore.

All the rest

• Io sono Babbo Natale (2021) – I am Santa Claus it is an Italian Christmas Movie. Not great, not bad. What makes it special is that it was the last work Gigi Proietti.
• Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom (2018) – How this movie is not a joke?
• Spellbound (1945) – Like many 40s movies, it is overdramatic. However, it is a great Hitchcock’s mystery movie. And Ingrid Bergman is usually enough to carry a movie through te finish line.
• Orion and the Dark (2024) – It is like Inside Out for psychotic people. It started fine but, for me, it totally lost steam after the mid-point.
• Il Bi e il Ba (1986) – An Italian surrealist comedy movie from the 80s. This movie is a wild trip. Unfortunately, surrealist comedy never got traction in Italy.
• Sly (2023) – A good documentary on Sylvester Stallone. I’d say it is less auto-celebratory than the Arnold one.
• All the Fast and Furious movies from 1 to 8. – This month I watched all the Fast and Furious franchise (the only remaining ones are 9 and 10). And has been… a trip. My quick review is as follows. From 1 to 4 they are trash; maybe the 2 is passable. From 5 to 7 they lean on being crazy and dumb, and they are really dumb but in a surprisingly enjoyable–almost awesome–way. Unfortunately, 8 is jumping the shark. It has some of the best scenes of the franchise, but other than them, it is boring, confusing and inconsistent.
• La La Land (2016) – I cannot fathom how this is one of the highest rated musical there is. I’ve found it incredibly bland and there is not a single memorable good song in it. I love musicals, damn it! (Insert the “You were the chosen one” meme).

Music

The history of album rock (commonly AOR) starts as a radio format. Beginning in early 70s, many AOR radio stations began to emerge in the United States. Their peculiarity was that they were dedicated to playing songs longer than usual and those included even not-particularly-hard-rock artists such as Bob Dylan.

In later years, these album-rock radio stations were fundamental to popularize underground music into the mainstream. It is on the frontier of this period, between ‘76 and ‘86, that the AOR radio stations were used to define the genre of the artists they played: Toto, Journey, Rush, Boston.

Nowadays, AOR is exclusively the name of the genre: a rock that is hard enough to get close to hard rock and heavy metal, but with a melodic, harmonic and lyrical structure that is easy enough (someone would say cheesy enough) to be considered pop.

In the 2020s, AOR – a quintessential 80s genre – benefited from the 80s revival mood and there are now many groups that try to match on purpose the sounds and the general vibes of the 80s.

And here we arrive at the album of the month. Teenage Rebel by Nestor, a Swedish AOR group active from 89 to 95 and that recently reunite (2021) on the crest of AOR renewed interest.

This album is pure AOR. Cheesy as hell, good simple melodies, ballads, basic lyrics. I admit it is my guilty pleasure. Whenever I am overwhelmed by tons of microtonal orchestral progressive albums with metric structures impossible to comprehend, I take a mental break with this.

And here we go with all the rest. Still a lot of progressives and weird stuff, but also some good classic. Another album I’d like to recommend is The Wolf Changes Its Fur But Not Its Nature by Crippled Black Phoenix. It is another magnificent piece of music if you are into dark/doom progressive rock.

Gaming

As I anticipated last month, I was targeting Hades 2 as my next gaming purchase. The game is still in early access but, from what I had experienced, it is totally playable. Maybe the end-game still lacks content? I don’t know, yet.

In any case, Hades was one of my favorite action roguelike game from 2020 and Hades 2 follows closely its basic structure. Yet, it is different enough to be considered a good sequel and not just a re-run of the previous chapter.

I only played 20 hours, and they are not much for these kinds of play and repeat games. In fact, I still have not beat it the first time (both in the Kronos direction and the Olympus one). But, so far, I am happy to be back in this world.

Other Interesting Things

• 📝 Chinese researchers just built an open-source rival to ChatGPT in 2 months. Silicon Valley is freaked out. (archive) – It is always an exciting time if you work in AI. DeepSeek-R1 is positioning itself to be the next asteroid. The fun thing is that this is going to mess with both the Silicon-Valley AI group and the AI-skeptic crowd. DeepSeek-R1 is an open model that costs a fraction of the energy to train and a tiny fraction of the energy to use. And yet, it looks on part with GPT-4o. Now, there are good reasons to not want a Chinese-owned model, but this confirms the claim I did more than a year ago. We are going to have LLM in more places (but in less visible and less annoying places), that will be marginally more capable but way more energy efficient. So much so that they will easily run locally on-device.
• 📹 Switch 2 Announcement Trailer – At this point you already know that. But, in case you lived January under a rock, this is the announcement trailer for the long-awaited Switch 2. We know little other than it will be bigger and that we will have a new Mario Kart. It will probably be a day one purchase for me. 🥲😆

Conclusions

And here we are. January wasn’t as exciting as I wanted. It never is. But I lived through it with a good amount of intentionality, and this is already a win.

I don’t have many plans for February, but if I could achieve something, it will be to write more. I hope you too will reach your February goals.

See you as usual, next month. Hopefully, with some meaningful change to tell you.