2023 year review

It's a new year, and - as is tradition for many people - that means I take the time to look at the one that just went and try to reflect a bit. This is by no means an obligation or bragging: it helps me in particular because I'm quick to forget what I did get done and feel as if I am spinning my wheels. If all you achieved was stay alive and mostly-well as we enter year 5 of a catastrophically mismanaged pandemic, that's plenty enough.

Life and stuff

Speaking of which, I started 2023 finally testing negative on rapid tests after catching covid for (AFAIK) the first time, most likely from an unmasked coughing teacher. Fuck that guy, fuck everyone who told him it was okay to ever stop masking in class, fuck the entire system that made this whole thing such a colossal, avoidable bloodbath. I spent the second half of the year making contacts in the grassroots covid prevention community and while I fully believe we'll eventually get somewhere again, we could save a lot of time and energy if the left started giving a fuck again, notably LGBTQ+ communities which I frankly expected a lot better from.

Now that that's out of the way. I was in school to begin with because I was studying scientific glassblowing, which meant spending more time in Paris than I ever hoped. The training was a challenge for human reasons much more than technical reasons: the daily reminders of how brutally unaccomodating people can be when you're autistic were tremendously unpleasant on top of covid negligence. I am however very glad for the skills I learned, the practice weeks I did went well, and while I have decided to go back to a programming job I don't regret spending the time. We wrapped up the year with a neon demo, which was extremely cool and also terrifying I am never doing that no thank you.

A dark cloud over the early part of the year was that Pixie, a lovely tuxedo cat that I left behind me when I moved out of Sweden, passed away. My ex did his best - tragically, I suspect the first veterinarians he saw did not - but eventually he had to take the hard decision. She was a good cat and deserved an easier and longer life than she got. That said, she led to a lot of learning about idiopathic feline epilepsy: it can be managed, it is not at all a death sentence, and decent life quality can absolutely be achieved. I'm thankful for that much and having been able to help people somewhat on the topic.

So much room for activities

Andean weaving (during the first half of the year) and khaitu spinning were constant companions. They make good fidgets during meetings and good "wind-down" activities while I binge on my favorite Let's Play channel (PlayFrame) or tune into a very good streamer (Intelligame). You can read a bit about all that yarny stuff in a dedicated article on the joy of having tons of yarn colors.

On the TV series / movie front, the year's discoveries (via my family's excellent projector setup and habit of dinnertime cinéclub) that I can recall especially enjoying are:

• Knives Out / Glass Onion / Pokerface;
• A bunch of Star Trek, notably Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks (and the brilliant crossover episode);
• Scavengers Reign;
• Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.

I made it into theaters for exactly two movies, because it was a short walk away and I could catch daytime screenings that I knew would be near-empty (with a P3 respirator on my face). The first one was the new Spiderverse, which is very good but has suprisingly little staying power for me outside of the exquisite choreography of the Guggenheim sequence. The second was Les grandes vacances de Cowboy et Indien, which is a pair of Panique au Village TV specials. Panique au Village is a oh-so-Belgian stop-motion rollercoaster of absolute nonsense. I went in knowing exactly what to expect and had a grand time. The old ladies that brought young children obviously did not and planned to complain to management for daring to advertise such absurdity as suitable for innocent souls. I walked home cackling: it's not not for kids, there is nothing there that will shock a young audience. It just is not the type of absurdist humor you will typically enjoy at a young age.

Music-wise, I was lucky to catch both Soilwork and Kamelot in Lille (with a P3 respirator on my face, second). Myrath was opening for Kamelot and was a fun discovery. Control (yes, the game) also made me fall headfirst into Poets of the Fall by way of "My Dark Disquiet", I was then lucky to catch them live in Paris (with a P3 respirator on my face, third).

Games-wise, I kept nibbling at Returnal on the aforementioned really nice projector setup and eventually got the last weapon trait unlocked after many many hours. I'm still nowhere near databank completion. I think those numbers might be a bit excessive, Housemarque. New or new-to-me games this year were:

• Return of the Obra Dinn, which I had not gotten around to. It was good but I found it so coldly mechanical and uninterested in its themes compared to Outer Wilds that it left a strange taste.
• We, The Refugees, a nakedly political visual novel about refugees coming to Europe via the maritime route. I'm still not sure what to think of it: it does not fall into the easy white savior narrative that its setup could allow for, but it also gives entirely too much room to truly gross opinions.
• Hi-Fi Rush, the stealth-dropped action rhythm game from Tango Gameworks, was a blast through and through. It's gorgeous, it sounds amazing (if you like rock), it plays beautifully. But it is also genuinely funny in a way that is truly rare and a masterclass of accessible design.

February 2023 in particular finally saw me to the end of Baten Kaitos Origins, 17 years after its original release and 2 years after I started playing it on emulator. This lined up hilariously with the announcement of a Baten Kaitos I & II HD Remaster on Switch that all twelve of us in the microfandom were pretty much convinced would forever remain a pipe dream. I of course failed to actually play said remaster, and I suspect I might remain partial to the Gamecube version, but I am very glad it exists and can introduce a whole lot more people to this bizarre, fascinating series.

I made it to one exhibit, Au bout de mes rêves at the Tripostal. While my opinions on private art collectors are what you'd expect and contemporary art is very hit or miss for me, the exhibit was well-curated, superbly laid out, with a real effort made to showcase artists that aren't cishet white dudes from Western countries, with well-written accessible info snippets.

Books-wise, the highlight of the year is absolutely The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera. I would be hard-pressed to put into words what is so incredible about it, beyond the fact that it has exquisite prose and a truly sharp approach to its grim topics. Highly recommended if the blurb's intro sounds intriguing to you: "Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy."

Code projects

Unexpectedly, nearly all the code I wrote this year was for websites. The first project was to move the Fibraquarelle website (my currently-on-hiatus handweaving business name) off the website builder I'd been using. I am fairly proud of how slim the result is, without a single line of Javascript. It'll need a second pass to apply my more recent CSS learning - see below - and merge in / harmonize the Fibraquarelle blog.

Finishing Baten Kaitos Origins also meant finishing my live-tweet of those gameplay sessions, and the ongoing collapse of Twitter meant archiving all of that in a form that can still be read without being logged in. The resulting tweets archive turned out pretty neat! This required getting semi-fluent in Python to wrangle the source data easily, which was fun. I am a firm believer in bringing back the era of handwritten websites by people being entirely on their bullshit, and this is my contribution to the cause.

Deciding to go back to coding work meant freshening up the portfolio. I wanted to split it somewhat from the personal blog, and so it got a new domain name. Nothing too fancy there. I then took much of that work and revamped the personal blog which you're reading now, removing a lot of complexity and nuking the old articles in the process. This was all helped by learning CSS methodologies that do not make me want to break my computer in half.

There was also one coding test but I am not allowed to discuss that in details, obviously. For something I had to do on a short deadline while extremely rusty on C++ I'm mostly happy with the result I achieved, but also holy crap I really need to learn Rust and see first-hand that things do not have to be this way.

On the loom

I'd had a sample inspired by Klässbols Linneväveri's Norrland Spår on the loom for over a year and finally cut that down. I also wove up two four-color iridescent linen samples, aiming for an oil spill kind of effect. I don't think they're quite there yet, I need to iterate a bit more on the colors.

At long last I wove up the green washclothes warp which I'd wound on the second warp beam when I rebuilt the loom after the move in late 2021. Half of the length will be washclothes (that fabric is excellent to scrub your face with), the other half will go to a bookbinder I previously sent spare green linen to, because apparently "this stuff tolerates paste like nothing else". It's fun to see my cloth become notebooks!

I'm not sure what to put on there next. We'll see. It'll probably be linen because I need to start using up those cones: I'm pondering a taffetas caméléon of some sort.

Onto 2024

My main goal for 2024 is to secure a job again. Luckily, I am in a position where I can take my sweet time landing the perfect gig, but since that's a prerequisite to having my own place again I would very much like it not to take too long either. Unless there's any last minute change, I'll also be getting major surgery of the gender-affirming kind fairly soon. Which I am extremely not looking forward to, but apparently you can't just teleport six months into the future when it's done and over with? Rude.

My big code project is to actually get into reverse-engineering at long last. It's the next perfectly-logical step of my fixation on Baten Kaitos: it'd be fantastic to give the speedrunners some hard facts to verify their impressive statistical work with, and maybe finally figure out how the actual everliving fuck Magnus trading in Origins actually functions. I also want to do a bunch more website work, mostly to bring things together (Fibraquarelle) and make them easier to work with (shared theme between blog and portfolio). I should probably learn Rust or something too. We'll see!

In the textile realm, I'm hoping to actually relaunch Fibraquarelle and get back to small-scale production weaving. The practicalities of that are a major headache in France so I am waiting to be absolutely sure that I want to go down that path before I register anything. My andean weaving has also been gathering dust because I've been stash-building, but I'm feeling the itch. Maybe I am getting close to having enough yarn colors.

The world changed so much in 2023, I trust it will shift again in unforeseen ways in 2024. Let's all do what we can so it's for the better.