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.
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.
Okay, time to pull the trigger on this thing. It's not 100%, but it's good enough, and if I keep posting to my Wordpress blog, I'll never ship this thing.
Welcome to my new static blog. Built with Eleventy.
I'm still working on it. I'm not happy with how "themes" work in Eleventy. So I don't have one. It means I need to dust off my ancient CSS knowledge.
As well as fixing problems with old posts, I have plans to do more with the site, the idea being to make this the central repository of all my Internet nonsense. I don't know if anyone else cares about this, but I do. I want to have this as an archive. And if you enjoy reading any of it, great!
I'm happy to have my old 2001-2007 blog posts and my 2007-2025 Wordpress blog posts in one place. I've got the comments archived, but you can't see them. Debating if that's a bug or a feature. I love going back over the old comments, but I turned Wordpress comments off ages ago and haven't missed the spam. Comments on a static site is a total faff. But maybe I'll figure out some way to archive mastodon replies.
I've been busy the last few months working on the house. Painting, mostly. We are, amazingly, approaching the end. I'd love to tell you all about it. It's been a journey.
An exhausting journey.
I did eventually get into Cyberpunk 2077. And I finished it. Once I resigned myself to the nihilism, I found myself enjoying it.
At the moment I'm playing Hades. There may be a post about it later. Maybe!
Happy Doctor Who Day! The extent of my celebration was listening to Stranded while I painted.
