2025 February Retrospective

I really don’t now, why don’t we just adjust all months to be 30 days long, instead of having this 28 versus 29 days nonsense. I know, I know – the math just wouldn’t work out. And while at it, let’s also can this so called daylight saving time.

Let’s take a look at a very short-list of important events that occurred on February 28th – pre-1600 of course, according to the codex of absolute truth and wisdom, also known as the mighty biaspedia itself.

• 202 BC – Liu Bang is enthroned as the Emperor of China, beginning four centuries of rule by the Han dynasty.
• 870 – The Fourth Council of Constantinople closes.
• 1525 – Aztec king Cuauhtémoc is executed on the order of conquistador Hernán Cortés.

Thank you very much for coming to my lightning X-TED talk.

Command and Conquer

EA dropped the source code of several entries of the Command and Conquer series. This most definitely wasn’t on my bingo card for 2025. Very based, as the gen-z would say.

We don’t see a lot of this happening, especially now that id is under M$ control. id Tech5, and later will never see the light of day. Mark my words on this one.

More often than not such source code drops are never picked up by the community, due to one of the following reasons:

• Reliance on old C/C++ compilers
• Reliance on old and non-standard C/C++ extensions
• Reliance on non-portable assembly (for fast blit-ing, etc.)
• Reliance on closed source libraries (usually for playing or sound and music)
• Reliance on patented techniques which have to be ripped out before release (see Carmack’s Reverse for an example)

This got me thinking a wee bit about the fact that now with most people relying on the likes of Unity or Unreal for building their games, releasing any of the source code is going to be an even bigger mess than it was before.

Imagine trying to recreate tens-of-thousands of lines gnarly uber-shader code. It’s a fool mans’ errand; no more, and no less. You’d have much easier time rewriting hand optimized assembly.

On the other hand, do we really want to preserve all the sub-par Unity slop anyway? That’s not a question that I am going to lose any sleep on to be perfectly honest with you.

I almost forgot to mention that I never was a huge fan of Command and Conquer. But then again, I generally don’t play modern-army-style RTS games at all. With the only exception being Army Men, of course. Shocking, I know.

The state of Linux

As if the drama around Rust on the Linux kernel mailing list wasn’t already bad enough, libc pulled the rug out of under all of us yet again; the grand year of the mythical Linux desktop can’t come soon enough, I am right?

Where does all this leave us, or rather where does it leave me? Well, I can tell you that I am at around 69% percent right now towards jumping ship to one of the BSD flavors, and I’ve been using Linux since around 1998. What a total and utter shit-show.

Makes me wonder what will be the final straw that will break the proverbial camel’s back, and make me finally do it. Perhaps, when the absolute utter-crap-ware-fest that is Wayland will be showed straight down my throat, with slogans about unity and world peace, under the guise of all being for my very own well being of course.

I haven’t played around with any of the BSD distributions in quite some time now, but I’ll have to do a few test installs pronto, and figure out how my .dotfiles fare in comparison to Linux. Quite honestly, I do not expect there to be any need for more than a handful of well intentioned tweaks, but we shall live and see.

Bill Murray

It was quite an unexpected twist to see Bill Murray show up on Joe Rogan. Two bingo-card moments in a single month, what’s up with that?

I think anybody reading this blog might have an inkling by now that I am kind of a movie buff. Yeah, I totally do not like to use any words that end with -phile to describe myself. What can I say? Sue me!

With that said, I’d like to call out two of my all time favorite movies starring Bill Murray.

Broken Flowers

I feel like this is one of the lesser known ones, directed by the great Jim Jarmusch. Even I, only have stumbled upon it several years later, must have been 2009 or so, and totally by accident.

Sharon Stone also makes a rather short appearance, but I am not going to spoil it for those who haven’t had the opportunity to watch it yet. It’s most definitely a must watch at least once, as far as I am concerned.

The soundtrack alone should be more than enough to convince anyone to watch it.

Lost in Translation

This one is one of my all time favorites, and most definitely part of my top ten. It must have been late 2004 as a late-teenager when I’ve watched it for the very first time; and then Scarlett Johansson strolling around in her hotel room might also have had something to do with this classification bias, but I better shut up before Sofia Coppola has me whacked. She’s a tremendous director – if you have seen the movie, then it’s patently clear how she knew very well when, and how to let Bill just do his thing, and shine. Not many directors are capable of relinquishing control like that.

Dare-ni mukatte mono itten-dayo! Huh? Huh?

Until next time, please remember that for relaxing times, make it Suntory time.