In my history in December of 2025
December is always a rush, so for once I'm planning ahead: If I'm being honnest, I know that I won't add anything to this list between Xmas and new year's eve, so I might as well publish now. If my findings of the month make the train ride back home less boring, or give you something to do while you wait for some uncle to finish spouting racist nonsense, I'll be delighted!
Enjoy the rest of your year, see you in 2026!
Let's start with my ‘top 10’, the gems you shouldn't miss if you don't have the time to read everything!
#1
Mycelium – Mushroom color atlas represents everything I love about the Internet: a personal project on a niche subject, and a beautifully presented collection of information. What more could you ask for?
#2
Darwin – If you love idle games but always find them too short, Evolve is going to be your next addiction. You start as a DNA strand, and evolve. Resource management, skill tree, linimalistic textual interface, I fell in love at first sight.#3
Recipes – The algorithm ate your grandmothers recipe, or how AI destroys recipe websites and blogs. I hate them.#4
Recipes, bis – On that note, here's a list of my favorite food blogs!#5
Syndication – This summer, I finally took the time to redo my RSS setup and, after testing a few sites and soft that didn't suit me, I settled on Lire, available on iOS and macOS, because it's simple, and it just works. I don't need a fancy tool to read my RSS feeds, I need a tool that is as transparent as possible, and Lire fulfils this role rather well.#6
Microscope – With Size of life, Neal Agarwal treats us to a very cool new mini-site. TIL a raptor was about the size of a turkey.#7
Independance – The world needs social sovereignty, or when Elon Musk gives us yet another reason not to set foot on his platform and to favour the fediverse instead.#8
Decency – Self Censorship Is Actually Good.You should not be an asshole. It's not a big ask.
#9
Definition –« Sometimes people use "respect" to mean "treating someone like a person" and sometimes they use "respect" to mean "treating someone like an authority"
and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say "if you won't respect me I won't respect you" and they mean "if you won't treat me like an authority I won't treat you like a person"
and they think they're being fair but they aren't, and it's not okay. »
#10
Architecture – Do you like brutalism? You're going to love Space play's models!
If you'd rather have a more DIY approach, there's always Zupagrafika's brutal kits:
- Security – If you ever left configuration files on a server thinking, « Oh well, I'll delete them quickly, no harm done », I hope that ‘quickly’ actually meant less than three seconds.
- Emergency services – I listened to the first three episodes ofe Ça décale, a podcast dedicated to out-of-hospital emergency interventions, and it was really great! They will publish a clinical case every month, with three episodes covering everything from arrival of the emergency teams to hospitalisation and treatment. If, like me, you're curious about everything to do with medicine and specifically emergency care, go for it! These are fictional but realistic cases, and all medical aspects are validated by a doctor and the French Red Cross Health Centre. Thank you Julien for the discovery!
- Reading – I really like Margorito's and Marouchka's YouTube channels. They talk about literature in very different styles, but they are both equally interesting.
- Recipes – Tested and approved, Kay Chun's laab noodle salad. As refreshing as it is quick to whip up.
- Tomorrow – Structured procrastination. Guilty as charged.
- Falsification – AI and the American Smile — How AI misrepresents culture through a facial expression. I'm already not a big fan of colourising old photos, but then there's AI 'cleaning' or outright generation… 🤐
- ASCII – the Scrollart museum (via Julien)
- Hormones –
- Detective – the excellent BD Dans la peau de Sherlock Holmes now has a sequel! I hope Le Cauchemar du Loch Leathan will be as good as the first story, which I loved, particularly for its sophisticated layout and the way it plays with the book format.
- Good enough – The Who cares era :
In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care. In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.
- Watch – The celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Casiotron, Casio made a retrospective of every model of their digital watches.
- Trash bandit – In North America, racoons are showing early signs of domestication.
- Theory – You've probably seen it in a movie or TV show: a wall display with dozens of photos, documents and newspaper clippings with red string all over it. Well, The Vault of Culture has listed every instances of the “Narrative String Theory”, and it's really cool to explore. (via Martin)
- Enshitification –
- Copywritting – Uh Oh! The Infantilization of failure
« Would you accept "Oopsie!" from your accountant? Your doctor?
Why do we accept it from companies holding our data and our money? »
- Meh – When I was 14, following some discussion I can no longer remember, I was curious to read Dangerous Liaisons and The Name of the Rose. I went to borrow them from my school library, and I probably would have given up reading them halfway through if the librarian hadn't refused to lend them to me on the grounds that they were reserved for high schoolers and I was too young. I needed a note from my parents AND a note from my French teacher to be able to borrow them. The old hag told me that I wouldn't be able to read them anyway, so I made it a point of honour to read both of them from cover to cover. And I loved them. A year or two later, I discovered Cruel Intentions, which I watched over and over again, because it's an excellent teen movie (in the best sense of the word), but also because I liked seeing a bit of Dangerous Liaisons without it being a carbon copy of the book. I liked that it was modernised, that it kept the spirit of the novel rather than the tangible elements, that it was a little irreverent... In short, that it wasn't a stuffy adaptation. As a result, I never watched Stephen Frears' film, even though I'd only read good things about it.
So when I saw a few weeks ago that a ‘loose’ adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons was coming out as a series, I was delighted. I wasn't expecting a masterpiece, I would have been happy with honest entertainment. It's far from that. Instead of the quirky and sexy adaptation that was promised, we got a Bridgerton knock-off that tries to be steamy but fails miserably.
In short, don't waste your time watching this thing. It's dull, slow, falsely provocative, and it's sad to see actors I like (Julien de Saint Jean in particular) waste their talent in it. - Music – I already raved about The Big Push here when I discovered them in 2021, and I've been listening to them ever since. Covers, original, the solo career of Ren, the lead singer… There's nothing I haven't heard on repeat.
I basically listened to them on repeat for two years, to the point where I considered going on holiday to Brighton in the hope of catching them playing in the street. Then the band took an indefinite hiatus, and I gave up all hope of ever seeing them play live. Until last week, when I stumbled upon the announcement of their first tour in England and Scotland this summer, and I managed to snatch a ticket for their London concert! I am absolutely thrilled to finally have the opportunity to see them live, and I can't wait!
