I took all of last week off from work to clean my apartment and prepare food for a Thanksgiving feast of about 20 people. All this in spite of both my spouse and I having parents with extra medical needs these last few weeks.

This time of year is always its own animal, a distinct phase from the time before and after it. At work, somehow things both slow down and speed up with the sinking realization that there is only so much a team can accomplish in the next three weeks while not having your full staff. In my personal projects, including this website, it’s when I reflect on what I hoped to accomplish this year and re-evaluate what I might work in around the holidays.

This year is different. I declare 2025 over right now. With everything going on with multiple family medical emergencies and an active toddler, I know that I’m not accomplishing anything more of note this year. And that’s fine. It’s not my job right now to satisfy my interests and hobbies. It’s my job to facilitate things for my family and make sure things go as smoothly as they can.

That said, I’ve tried to keep a bi-weekly publishing cadence for this website. Nobody is imposing that on me, but I’ve found that two weeks is a sweet spot to take something I want to write about and polish it into something to publish. If you look back at the dates on previous posts, you’ll see that there may be months between them. And that’s what happens when I don’t have a schedule and rather wait until I think a piece is a pretty enough flower to pick.

Since 2025 is over for me, my posts from now until whenever I run out of things to say will be retrospectives on the last year. What went well, my favorite things, and thoughts for the next year.

Related

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Brent Simmons, Why NetNewsWire Is Not a Web App:

What I want to see happen is for Apple to allow iPhone and iPad users to load — not sideload, a term I detest, because it assumes Apple’s side of things — whatever apps they want to. Because those devices are computers.

I’ve been calling it sideloading all along, but of course installing software is not sideloading! Words matter. The way things are framed affects how we think about them. We’re so used to locked down systems that installing software from anywhere other than Apple’s blessed App Store feels practically like a hack. Our expectations have been manipulated and now there’s no accountability for it. I think most about these low consumer expectations and lack of corporate accountability in the context of e-waste.

Smartphones are computers. They have an open-ended purpose. We expect to be able to use them for things in the future that we don’t use them for today. If you’ve ever downloaded an app in a pinch, like for hailing a cab or presenting your ticket for an event, then you’ve seen this in action. Despite smartphones’ open-ended purpose, they’re locked down like appliances. And based on how we talk about “sideloading” of software, that’s what we expect as consumers.

It’s refreshing to come across a re-framing of loading (formerly sideloading) because it’s something I’ve taken for granted for so long. And I can feel that I’ve grown quite cynical. I wouldn’t have re-examined this framing of loading software without someone else pointing it out. When I learn about most any of today’s products, I just think Well, what do you expect?, I get to feel smug, and then I move on. I think that cynicism has ironically caused me to give a pass for some consumer-hostile practices. So this is a gentle reminder to expect better because when we expect less and less, corporations get away with giving us just that.