Hades
It's New Year's Eve as I write this, so let's take a minute to reflect on videogames this year. (My usual bullet post will come later, probably).
Man, I played a lot of Cyberpunk. But this blog post isn't about that. It's about Hades.
The Further YouTube Adventures of a (Now) Four-Year-Old
I both love and hate YouTube. I originally subscribed to Premium because it's only $2 over a YouTube Music subscription. Now I'm glad I did because it's intolerable otherwise. I'm pretty good at YouTube algorithm curation, crafting a feed that generally give me stuff I want to see, although I remain largely dissatisfied with the algorithm experience.
The little guy would be very happy to just sit and watch YouTube all day. He very much knows his way around smartphones and Chromecast interfaces and can get into YouTube and use the search without assistance. And he will. He has absolutely no interest in YouTube Kids because it doesn't have half of what he wants to see. If you ask him what he wants to watch, he'll still say "Fans!" As we discussed last time, YouTube Kids does not have fans.
I've got to keep on him. He's using a profile on my YouTube Premium account, and even if I'm not with him, it means I can periodically go through his history and nudging him back on a reasonble track. YouTube, thankfully, hadn't tried to show him the worst shit, but it does occasionally try to get him to dip his tow in the garbage sewer to see if he'd like it. Specifically, if you search for fans, you get videos from obsessive fan nerds like you'd hope, but you also get videos of idiots just smashing the crap out of fans for no reason. With millions of views. He thinks that's pretty hilarious. I purge them from his watch history and tell YouTube not to suggest the channel if it shows up on the main page.
There's no way to block a channel on YouTube, frustratingly. And worse, it now knows that the person on the browser on a Linux desktop and the kid on the Chromecast are different people, so it makes different suggestions. This is infuriating. But it's probably making some line go up somewhere.
Anyway, what he ends up watching most of the time is generally pretty wholesome and kid-friendly, but I am not unaware of the dangers of giving a kid free rein on YouTube and I hate that the platform gives you next to no tools to mitigate them.
Fun stuff after the cut.
Christmas Mixtape 2025
Alternatively: YouTube music playlist
I feel like this year's mixtape is a more globally eclectic than previous years, but looking back, not by much, really. I don't think I've put three Japanese tracks on a single mixtape before, but they're all doing very different things and I love all of them. The Eurovision influence is becoming a bit more evident here (although I did spare you DJ BoBo this year. It was a close thing).
I've got this down to a bit of a science by now, but even so I was a bit surprised how quickly this came together this year. I collect a pile of Christmas songs throughout the year and I just kinda listened through them while I was puttering around the house to make the mix. I have a lot of fun doing this. I hope you enjoy it too.
Cover image is Holiday by David Revoy. CC-BY 4.0
Liner notes after the cut: