2025 Highlights
Some notes on the year.
Movies/TV
Lots of TV shows this year. These are some of the ones that stood out.
Great
- Andor
- Adolescence
- The Rehearsal - Season 2
- The Pitt (probably my favourite of the year)
- The Chair Company
- Squid Game Season 3 (might be controversial to have this here, but I enjoyed it)
- (movie) Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides”. Deeply moving meditation on time, love, displacement and process.
- Long Story Short
- I also went to a screening of Kwaiden (1964) this year and it was incredible.
Hounorable Mentions
- The Eternaut
- Pachinko - Season 2
- Severance - Season 2
- Foundation - Season 3
- Dept Q.
- Alice in Borderland - Season 3
- Slow Horses
Disappointments
- The Last of Us - Season 2
- (movie) One Battle After Another - had its good points definitely, but I always have very high expectations for PTA and the last two let me down.
- Alien: Earth - I did really enjoy this, but a lot of problems with it too (as an ‘Alien’ installment)
Books
Not too much reading this year, but my favourite was definitely “Every Living Thing” (Jason Roberts).
I also enjoyed:
- Solaris
- Pachinko
- Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead
- Delta V
Travel
Some for work, some for pleasure:
- Japan (I visited many places in this wonderful country! Highlights - Kyoto, Naoshima Island)
- Seattle
- Baku
Programming
Continuing to learn more about clojure. I program purely as a hobby.
I participated in the first Scinoj Lite conference, which had some great talks. My project looked at ways of evaluating LLMs (from a very basic, almost ’naive’, perspective).
Write-up of my LLM evaluation project
Played around with the new clojure ‘flow’ libary.
Clojure Flow Blog Post Clojure Flow project
I started a webscraping project that is trying to map Irish-language content on the .ie domain.
Irish language webscraping project
I also enjoyed this year’s advent of code.
