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Title:       2025 Highlights
Date:        2025-12-18
Tags:        
Link:        https://spool-five.com/posts/2025-12-18_2025_review/
Word Count:  333
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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[1]
=>[1] https://eoin.site/pq_rag_eval/

Played around with the new clojure 'flow' libary.

Clojure Flow Blog Post[2]
=>[2] https://spool-five.com/posts/2025-07-07-flow_first_impressions/
Clojure Flow project[3]
=>[3] https://eoin.site/fl

I started a webscraping project that is trying to map Irish-language
content on the .ie domain.

Irish language webscraping project[4]
=>[4] https://eoin.site/ie/

I also enjoyed this year's advent of code.

Advent of Code (clojure)[5]
=>[5] https://git.sr.ht/~loopdreams/aoc-clj-2025