2025 In Review

Looking Forward

Personal transformation doesn't happen with a moment of resolution, rather a continuing practice of recommitting to one's principles. Like a garden, we are mostly the result of many small choices made repeatedly over time. The beginning of a new year is one time that prompts me to self examination and to recommit. There are three lessons I feel like I've been learning my whole adult life and in 2026 I wish to continue the work of cultivating them.

  1. Consistency in the things I know are good for me. Exercise, enough sleep, nourishing food, etc. These things are obvious and boring but support a healthier me.

  2. Love for my whole self. One of the books I read last year was Robert Bly's A Little Book on the Human Shadow. The core idea was that when we reject parts of ourselves (as we do from an early age when we're told those parts are evil or uncouth) they become our shadow and hold us back. The work of middle age (says Bly) is to reintegrate, to "eat our shadow". This idea resonated for me. I know from experience that self loathing leads to insecurity and brittleness. Confidence and strength from acceptance and self compassion. The more doors in my soul I open and let the light into the more whole I feel.

  3. Accept my feelings. This is hard for me but it's been the obvious theme of every therapy session this year. When I feel anger, grief, or sadness, I try to stuff, deny, or push it away. None of these work and they cause harm. I need to learn to sit with my feelings, observe, and ask questions. It's hard to hold space for this in my very full life but what I'm doing now, isn't doing anyone any favors and I'm slowly realizing that.

Some Books, in Brief

Blood River Blues, Cursed Saint Caper, Star Train Tango, and Rogue Wind Rumble - Jessie Kwak. As sci-fi it's more than a bit contrived but the characters are great fun. I enjoyed it.

Pellucidar - Edgar Rice Burroughs. I've found the Pellucidar and Barsoom series entertaining light reading. I've since learned that Burroughs was an outspoken supporter of eugenics and scientific rascism, which doesn't surprise me. His MC is always an ubermensch. What does surprise me is how often he has characters who are women or people of color that are intelligent, capable, and compassionate. A weird juxtaposition.

The Willows - Algernon Blackwood. A canoe trip down the Danube runs afoul of otherworldly beings.

The Wendigo - Algernon Blackwood. 19th century (with all its faults) weird fiction novella set in the Canandian wilderness.

The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells. Second read-through. If you haven't discovered Wells work, run, don't walk, to your nearest library and check them out!

A Little Book on the Human Shadow - Robert Bly. Short but dense due to assumed knowledge of poetry. Some profound ideas. All that we suppress in ourselves he calls our shadow and the path to reintegration involves "eating your shadow". The shadow is not evil, evil comes from outside. Reintegration of your shadow involves profound but most often subtle, life changes.

Blue Mars - Turns out, it was a trilogy not a duology and woof, it's looooong. A brilliant view of everything human society could be.

Just Stab Me Now - Jill Bearup. Fun and light Romantasy romp. Wouldn't normally be my cup of tea but the metanarrative adds a fun dimension.

Rapport - Murderbot short story.

Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke - DNF but would like to finish it. My life doesn't have enough space for poetry.

Use of Weapons - Ian Banks again but for some reason I just couldn't engage with this one. The narrative jumps around in time too much.

Wheel of the Infinite - Martha Wells fantasy with a middle aged female protagonist who happens to be an immensely powerful soceress.

Braiding Sweetgrass - A view into the indigenous way of being. We need more of this.

The Player of Games - Another of Banks' Culture stories. Again grappling with ideas that are kind of far out with nuance. It felt like more of a complete thought than Consider Phlebas. A lot more insight into what exactly the Culture is.

Falling Free - Lois McMaster Bujold. A lot of fun to read a realistic portrayal of being in an engineer's head. And just a good story.

77 Fragments of a Familiar Ruin - a re-read for me. It's short but good enough to bear repeats.

Rocannon's World / Planet of Exile / City of Illusions - The last of Le Guin's Hainish cycle stories. Grappling with very existential themes.

Consider Phlebas - Banks' first book in the Culture series is fun and engaging but also confusing. Who/what is Phlebas? What was the book trying to say? I think it was trying for a level of nuance that's very hard to achieve and didn't quite make it. But good enough that I'm interested to see if further books tell a more complete story.

Green Mars - Continues the story from Red Mars. This duology is mainly about love of place. The love for Mars that many of the characters have in many different ways is probably the stongest theme to come through. I think it's also about how history is made of people. Even the people involved in a monumental undertaking (building a new society, terraforming a planet, etc) are just people and many of the impactful choices were mostly uncoordinated and done on a whim.

The Word for the World is Forest - A lot of the same themes as Five Ways to Foregiveness but from a more alien perspective. A depiction of a society living in perfect harmony with the ecology and itself.

Five Ways to Forgiveness - Ursula Le Guin. This has been the hardest of the Hainish cycle to read, so far. Slavery, racism, sexism, and a set of stories that weave together with no satisfactory ending. So much mundane brutality.

Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson. I dunno how to categorize this one. Lots of hard-ish science and politics. LOTS of descriptions of the landscape of Mars. Some interesting characters but never presented in a way that I could really start to care about them.

Aurora - Kim Stanley Robinson. Heartbreaking examination of the (possible) realities of interstellar travel. Relatively hard science considering the topics at hand.

The Angel of the Crows - A fun reinterpretation of Sherlock Holmes with plenty of supernatural elements.

The Telling - Le Guin shows the dangers of fanaticism from both religious and athiest societies contrasted with her own take on Taoism.

Take us to your Chief - Anthology of Scifi by indigenous authors. So refreshing to get a new perspective.

The Witness for the Dead - Katherine Addison. Fantasy with good world building and fun main character, just too many made up words and names.

The Dispossessed - Le Guin's anarchist vision is a nuanced utopia that calls into question many of the West's cultural assumptions.

2312 - Really interesting Sci-fi without (much) magic tech. Discussion and extrapolation from current trends in longevity, gender, terraforming, AI, and space flight. Plus interesting and fairly unique characters.

Shaman - Paleolithic hummans living in the Pacific Northwest alongside neandethals, wooly rhinos and mammoths.

Personal Dev

I wrote a new version of my language grammar (now lang5) with syntax for a much more robust type system and worked on (in parallel because I can't decide) both c++ and python versions of the parser, compiler, and type checker. I've also been writing a lot of c, improving my grasp of memory management, composite data structures, and the curses library. Including ideas for FFI and a new VM. Very little of this work has gone far enough to publish. I'd like to write and post more about what I've learned.

Other Projects

I bought a 2006 E-150 cargo van. It actually started life as a passenger van so it has lots of windows and the mount points for bench seats. This is good for me because I want to turn it into a camper and more windows helps make the cargo space feel bigger than it is. So far I've gutted and cleaned the cargo area and painted the floor. Some minor electrical work and new windshield and brakes. Next up, installing a passenger bench seat and finished floor.

Outdoor Adventures

510 total running and hiking miles this year is up 40% from last year. I made second summits of both MSH and Adams and snowshoed into Indian Heaven Wilderness for an overnight. My big Olympics trip had to be modified to avoid wildfire smoke but I still got two nights in the aptly named Grand Valley and three in the Third Beach area. Two night trips to both Alpine Lakes and Mt Margaret Wilderness just reaffirmed that the mountains are my favorite place to be.

Some highlights