2025: Hello, Dear My Friends

I’m not even going to acknowledge it.

No.

Well, okay, maybe I need to. This is the first time in the history of Everything is Oll Korrect! that I’ve gone an entire year without publishing anything. I have one draft that I was never happy with and a few ideas, but that’s it.

So, what happened? Ultimately, I suppose, it’s as simple as: I didn’t make time for it. Yes, I’ve been very busy and had other things going on, but I could probably have squeezed in a few posts over the course of twelve months. Instead, I prioritised other projects.

One thing that’s discouraged me is that, as much as I hate to admit it after all the fanfare of migrating from WordPress to Hugo, is that I find Hugo a pain in the neck to work with. WordPress was bloated, unstable, and insecure, but on those occasions when it did feel like working, it was easy to open up the post editor, do some writing (or paste in something I’d already written), select a few categories, and click “Publish.” With Hugo, I have to write the post in an external editor, add some front matter in YAML, rebuild the whole darn site, and upload the new and updated pages via FTP. That’s also true if I just need to, say, fix a typo. Adding images, especially with captions and formatting, sucks. Editing themes and such also require editing configuration files, rather than just clicking a few buttons in a GUI interface.

Now, these aren’t exactly the labours of Hercules, but they are a nuisance, especially when it’s hard enough to make time just to write a post in the first place. If I had more free time or was getting paid for this, it may be worthwhile. Ultimately, though, I spend enough time at work trying to get computers to do what I want, and I dislike the idea of doing that some more at home. I enjoy tinkering with computers a little, but when I want to write an article, I want that to be as close to 100% of my focus as possible.

Of course, I will not, under any circumstances, return to WordPress. Screw WordPress. I’d rather do everything in raw HTML/CSS than deal with their garbage ever again. What I need is either a static site generator that’s more streamlined than Hugo, or a lightweight CMS. I have a few candidates, but if anyone has a recommendation, I’m all ears.

Anyway, let’s move away from the meta blogging for a moment and look at the reading I’ve done this year. Looking at my LibraryThing catalogue, I see that I completed thirteen books in 2025. Five of those were volumes of Mushishi, which is excellent and well worth reading if you missed it when it was new or revisiting if you haven’t read it in a while.

Near the beginning of the year, I completed Nicholas Orme’s Medieval Children, which was just as good as I’d been told (by the great Wrath of Gnon on Twitter), as well as the very practical How Your House Works, by Charlie Wing.

Mushishi wasn’t the only old favourite I revisited. I also read Jurassic Park for the first time since the ’90s. Michael Crichton was a very effective author in his genre, and though I wouldn’t rate it as a must-read, it’s a lot of fun and more thoughtful than the average thriller.

I received a copy of the Word on Fire Bible: The Gospels, and read through Matthew. My expectations were high, but honestly, I came away disappointed - it’s a fine physical volume, but the translation they used is a bit insipid, and the ancillary material (anecdotes about the saints, explanations of works of art depicting events in the Gospel) didn’t add much. The commentary was pretty good overall, enough so to justify reading, but I’m reluctant to say it’s good enough to justify paying full price.

Education has been a topic very much on my mind, so I read Elizabeth Hainstock’s Teaching Montessori in the Home: The Pre-School Years, which is a short, practical introduction to the Montessori Method. I followed that up with Maria Montessori’s first book, published here in 1916 as The Montessori Method. I shared many excerpts from it and received several thoughtful comments on my fediverse account. Now, my wife and I don’t plan to follow the Montessori Method, but her book does have a lot of very interesting advice and observations, so the book is worth reading and reflecting on even if you don’t plan to follow her plan exactly.

My daughter is a fan of Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge series, and I enjoy it as well, so when A Visit to Brambly Hedge, an illustrated companion to the books, came out earlier this year, I decided to give it a read. It’s rather less substantial than I’d hoped, but there’s still some interesting “behind-the-scenes” information in there. I’d only recommend it to devoted fans.

Finally, I read an excellent collection of essays by C. S. Lewis, Of This and Other Worlds. It’s one of those books where you come across a popular quotation you’ve seen many times floating around social media, and it’s an easy one to recommend to anyone even slightly interested in essays on literature and writing.

As for my personal life, things have gone well this year. The children are all healthy and growing, I’m becoming more established in my career as a librarian, and we’ve settled into a new house.

Oh, and I’ve started watching a (new) anime for the first time in… well, some number of years. I’m several episodes into City: The Animation, which aired earlier this year. It’s based on a manga by the same artist, Arawi Keiichi, as Nichijou, which is an old favourite of mine. The adaptation is even by the same studio as Nichijou, Kyoto Animation, though I haven’t looked into how many of the same personnel are involved. So, there’s a very low but not quite zero percent chance that Everything will RETVRN to being an aniblog next year.

What for next year? I have some ideas, but I learned my lesson about making bold predictions in 2024’s year-in-review post. For now, I’ll just thank you all for reading, and wish you a happy new year.