This post is a continuation of my series of monthly review posts - what I've been doing and all that kind of good stuff. Other entries in the 2025 series:

March flew by, Daylight has been Saved and spring is now definitely here. It's nice having that touch extra light and warmth. I'm surprised every year at how uplifting it is.

Home

So, last year we discovered that the front door to the house had a huge gap at the bottom, between the floorboards and the frame. It was installed about five years ago and clearly not fitted correctly. So much in fact that the door itself had also warped. Composite doors shouldn't do that! As to be expected from dodgy fitters, the company's closed down and reopened under a new name so there's obviously zero recompense. Didn't like it anyway.

The patio doors at the back of the house had also passed their shelf life and similarly had problems with leaking cold air in. Time for new windows and doors then! Quite the expense but honestly, it's amazing how much warmer the house feels. Coming downstairs on a morning and not feeling a waft of cold air from outside. Of course, the season change has helped, don't get me wrong, but there's still been cold and windy days to put it all to the test.

New front door, colour: deep saxe blue

Out in the back garden there's some early signs of growth in the wildflower patch. A few forget-me-nots and pansies have emerged with a hint of more to come. Onto the next project then, which is to pull up the artificial turf!

Work

Job's the job, nothing major to call out. Getting stuff done. Not getting some other stuff done. Waiting to see what happens. Taking opportunities where I can to push the conversation forward on topics I can influence.

Side Project 1 - The Co-Operative Company

The team and I working on this have made some decent progress, mostly in the background. The company is established and we're all directors! We've had some productive discussions about the mechanics of the service we're building, and I've put just enough infrastructure in place so that we can begin iterating towards our MVP.

Side Project 2 - I Made a Game!

In both my job and on Side Project #1 I've been so caught up in cloud infrastructure and DevOps and all that stuff, it just becomes a bit too much, you know? So I needed a break from the break and decided to do something completely different. It's been a long while since I've touched games development - university in fact. I have the Halloween sub-site which hosts all the pictures from past displays, but I also thought it's a good area to do some other stuff to augment the experience. Putting two and two together, I created an idler game themed around decorating your home for Halloween. Bit out of season, sure, but you can give it a go on the Gitlab Pages site.

I'll write properly about how I made it. As it stands it's entirely DOM elements and emoji in the place of proper artwork. That's been enough of a skeleton to build the game logic and play around with how to balance it. If I need to return to it in the future, I'll probably look at proper graphics and object placement, rather than just appending items to a grid. But hey, good fun.

A really cute and life-affirming moment, too. I gave the game to my eldest to test, who happily sat and played what is (admittedly) a rather basic game.

Books

Reading took a bit of a back seat this month, mainly because of the above, but also I just couldn't really be that arsed.

Cut & Thirst: A Short Story by Margaret Atwood

Cut and Thirst is an enjoyable short story about three retired ladies who meet and plot the demise of a group of poets, who many years ago had destroyed the career of their friend, Fern. But, now that Fern is of ill health, Leonie, Chrissy and Myrna rather excitedly plot about the mechanics of the deed. This is a quick and tight story, in and done in thirty pages. It leaves you wanting more, but it makes its primary point perfectly.

The City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchiakovsky

In-depth worldbuilding, politics, supernatural elements and Eldritch horror. You'd think this would be right up my street. Maybe it just didn't catch me the way it should have, but I struggled through this one. I don't know if I just wasn't in the mood and would have been better off putting it down for a while. I got through it though, and it's not a bad book.

The city of Ilmar is occupied by the Pallesan government, who pursue 'perfection' through enforcing language, thinking and culture. In the academies and industries, seeds of revolution are sown. I found the city itself to be the main character here, with a breathtaking depth. The narrative flits between characters with diverse perspectives and the story builds towards everything coming together.

The supernatural aspects were the more interesting to me - the binding of demons into servitude at the mills, the dark and mysterious woods, and the city's curse. In particular, the latter was done really well, reminiscient of the miasma of the Black Death and the Dancing Plagues. Proper creepy stuff.

TV

Last One Laughing (UK Edition)

Last One Laughing has been getting lots of praise recently, and rightly so. The premise is rather simple, a bunch of comedians are stuck in a room for six hours and the winner is the one who lasts the longest without laughing. I'm not going to spoil anything about it, just watch it, it's class. Bob Mortimer's in it. Unfortunately, the Irish one is shit.

Adolescence

Adolescence has also been getting lots of praise recently, but for entirely different reasons, and again rightly so. The performances are breathtaking, even more so considering each of the four episodes were filmed in one take. The story revolves around a teenage boy who is arrested on suspicion of murdering a girl at his school. From there, it descends into a scathing critique of the online lives of teenagers, and the threat they face from so-called influencers. In the UK it's opened up space for a wider debate about phones in schools, the use of smartphones and social media in under 16s, with reviews underway and whatnot.

It's a little hard not to feel like a hypocrite here, given folks my age all used Myspace, MSN Messenger and then eventually Facebook and Instagram. To a certain extent, even though that early teenage life was online, it was in a slower world and a lot of that stuff has just been lost to the aether. But not with the planetary-scale services, high-quality media and effective immediate distribution speeds of today's technology. Growing up with all of this must be a nightmare. And at such an impressionable age too.

My wife and I remain very guarded with our children's usage of technology. They're allowed to play games and watch programs that we approve of, and they're still young enough that we haven't had any real challenges to that position. But this is the easy stage, it's when the social lives and peer groups start to develop that the real insidious tech stuff emerges. And it's something I do worry about.

Come to think of it, this month I uninstalled Instagram from my phone. Don't miss it.