Review: Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson I like that this book has more connections to the original Mistborn series than The Alloy of Law. I also enjoyed that we got a little more of Wayne in this one; he is hilarious. Otherwise, it still had everything I liked from the first book. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I trophied a Secrets of Strixhaven pick-two draft on #MTGArena with a streamlined Silverquill deck! I got lucky to consistently draw Stirring Hopesinger, which is one of the best Repartee payoffs. The incidental damage from Melancholic Poet also mattered.

Review: The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H. G. Parry This is a good version of a dark academia story. I'll always be a fan of this kind of story because, even though I am something of a failed academic, I still think real universities, learning and research are magical ✨ ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Review: The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow I don't know how to write a spoiler-free review of this book that includes any detail. There are a number of twists throughout that feel both surprising and satisfying the way they were set up earlier in the story. I enjoyed reading it. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

7 wins with a Prismari deck on #MTGArena ! Magmablood Archaic is a great card even in a strictly two colour deck. The two incidental damage from Heated Argument was also relevant in a few games. Secrets of Strixhaven has been a fun format so far!

Review: To Ride a Rising Storm by Moniquill Blackgoose I liked the first book in this series, but I might have liked this one even more. Not much goes on (until the very end) but Anequs's relationships with the other characters and her philosophy are engaging enough for me. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Review: The Problem with Plastic by Adam Mahoney, Judith Enck and Beyond Plastics I agree with the core of the book: reduce plastic production + consumption, protect communities harmed by plastics processing, regulation preferred to individual action. But I have some gripes in the presentation ⭐⭐⭐

I went 3-0 for the first time at a MTG prerelease event! Lorehold aggro seems like it will be a good archetype in Secrets of Strixhaven limited.

I built another small game! This is a remake of a puzzle game I have enjoyed playing in the past. I also included an algorithm for finding the optimal number of moves. Trying to find the optimal sequence as a human is an additional challenge to the game. birchmd.github.io/water-sort/

Review: Once Upon a Prime by Sarah Hart The new-to-me content was sparse; I was already familiar with all the mathematical ideas and many of the historical anecdotes. The literary examples where these things appear are interesting though. It's not the book's fault that I love math so much! ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Review: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell I didn't enjoy the first 2/3s because it looked like a typical liar revealed trope. I never like that one and I was dreading how it would resolve. But, without giving anything away, the last third of this book included my favourite parts. ⭐⭐⭐

I made an incremental/idle game! It's in the style of classics like Kittens Game and Universal Paperclips. The central element is a plot that visualizes how quantities in the game are changing (with respect to time and each other). You can check it out here: birchmd.github.io/de-idle/

Review: The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake I liked the opening of this book; recruiting powerful magical individuals to compete for spots in a secret society is very fun. I feel like the book drags in the middle though relative to this opening. It is more character-focused than I would prefer. ⭐⭐⭐

Review: The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson It's been a long time since I read the original Mistborn trilogy and I remember quite enjoying those books. I think I liked this even more though - in a guilty pleasure sort of way. I'm a sucker for high action, witty remarks and powerful magic. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Review: A Grim Reaper's Guide to Cheating Death by Maxie Dara I didn't like this one as much as the first book. The parrot was funny and the additional world-building was interesting. But overall I didn't find the mystery as engaging and it didn't have as many touching emotional scenes. ⭐⭐⭐

@3blue1brown.com always produces incredible math explainers, but this one is particularly excellent. I love the overlap between math and art in it.

Review: Play Nice by Jason Schreier I'm not much of a gamer (I haven't played any of Blizzard's games), but I am a programmer that has worked at startups so I could sympathize with some of the grind culture. This is an engaging non-fiction book that I quite enjoyed! ⭐⭐⭐⭐

In set-theoretic foundations, the statement “every fully faithful and essentially surjective functor is an equivalence of categories” is equivalent to the axiom of choice. But with the univalence axiom, it is just _true_ -The HoTT Book

Review: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer The book as a whole is a little repetitive, but in fairness the message of gratitude towards the life-sustaining earth and humanity being a productive part of ecosystems rather than apart from (or worse destroyers of) them deserves repeating. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Review: Saint Death's Daughter by C. S. E. Cooney I enjoyed the world building in this most of all. I love stories that include footnotes! Some of my favourite aspects include necromancers being allergic to violence, the pantheon of gods and how they manifest in different kinds of magic. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

My Lean code just got real horny for some reason ```lean do let d ← d let t ← t let f ← f pure ⟨d, t, f⟩ ``` I promise this is a real snippet that makes perfect sense in context.

Master of none no longer, I have now completed all the color mastery achievements!

Review: The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen This non-fiction book about the 5 mass extinctions in earth's history is well written with many colourful descriptions of the extreme conditions involved. The parallels to human caused climate change are relevant even 9 years after being published. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I'm starting to learn Lean because (a) math is fun, (b) programming is fun and (c) knowing your program is correct because math is amazing. I am very impressed with the quality of the Lean docs and tutorials. I have finished the natural numbers game and it was great! adam.math.hhu.de#/g/leanprove...

7 wins on #MTGArena in a #MTGLorwyn Premier Draft with a sweet elves deck! Having good rares helped of course, but Moon-Vigil Adherents was still the main win condition.

#MTGArenaStats during Avatar: The Last Airbender

Review: Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine I always hate the third act breakup trope, but otherwise this was a nice, whimsical story with a surprising amount of philosophical depth. I also like that the relationship between Ella and the prince is fleshed out before the Cinderella retelling. ⭐⭐⭐

Review: Race the Sands by Sarah Beth Durst Wow this book was good! The author follows some tropes while subverting others and all the choices aligned perfectly with my preferences. I'll keep this spoiler-free and just say the ending is epic. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Izzet Elementals in the top 8 at the pro tour with the full play set of Roaming Throne, you love to see it! I'm definitely rooting for Eduardo Sajgalik now. And he's Canadian too which is extra awesome!

7 wins with a Kithkin deck in a Lorwyn Eclipsed quick draft on #MTG Arena!

Review: The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien I think some of the scenes in Minas Tirith are done better in the film adaptation, but I did enjoy the ending of the book more than the movie (the extra stuff that happens in the Shire). ⭐⭐⭐

Seems like there is a bug in the @mtgarena.com midweek magic Jump In event. I got a deck with 3 plains in the mana base even though there are no white pips in the whole deck! Worse still there are only 4 forests when the green spells, like the 2 mana druid, are supposed to be color fixing.

I was thinking about how much gold I'm missing out on in #MTGA by obsessively completing daily quests instead of leaving some 500s to try to re-roll into 750s on other days. The answer is summarized in the figure below. Details in alt text. I had fun working this out! Markov chains are a good time.

I had fun doing a play through of Pokémon FireRed! I played a lot of original Pokémon Yellow as a kid, but not the Gen I remakes. It was nostalgic good times and I thought it was funny that I still remembered which tiles to use in the Silph Co. building.

Review: Uprooted by Naomi Novik This is my least favourite Novik of those that I have read, but I still liked it overall. No spoilers-I found the ending satisfying since it resolved a small gripe I had with the story from the beginning. Even if this one isn't for me I would still recommend it! ⭐⭐⭐

I don't think this is a particularly good deck, but hey 7 wins is 7 wins!

I just finished The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I know the cultural impact this book has and I wanted to experience it myself. It was a fun, short read; sort of sci-fi Monty Python. I like how well the humour holds up even though it was published in 1979. ⭐⭐⭐⭐ #booksky

For 2026 I plan on posting short reviews here of the books I read. Mostly this is just for future me to look back on and remember what I read this year. I'm not using Good Reads because f*ck Amazon.

My December holiday was successful 🙂

The other day we had some friends over for board games and offered them some apple pie as a snack. @lynnesargent.bsky.social asked how large of pieces they would like and I made a joke they could give their answers in radians. 1/2

I had a lot of fun doing the Scroggs advent calendar this year! It was my first year participating and I will look forward to it again next year! Thanks @mscroggs.co.uk for putting it together! www.mscroggs.co.uk

I just completed all 12 days of Advent of Code 2025! #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com I always have fun with these puzzle! Thanks to @was.tl for putting them together!

I just completed "Reactor" - Day 11 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/11 I used a recursive function with memoization, which isn't particularly Rusty, but it does work. Maybe I should try to refactor it as a loop with explicit stack instead of a recursive call 🤔

I just completed "Factory" - Day 10 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/10 For part 2 today I had to break my streak of only using the Rust standard library and pull in a linear programming solver.

I just completed "Movie Theater" - Day 9 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/9 I thought part 2 was pretty hard today! I'm sure there is a clever algorithm that I don't know about to make a very fast solution, but my kind of brute force one still finishes in about 1s.

I just completed "Playground" - Day 8 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/8 I do appreciate having a good excuse to use a min-heap 😄

I just completed "Laboratories" - Day 7 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/7 Dynamic programming remains one of my weak spots, so part 2 took me longer than it should have. But I got there eventually!

I just completed "Trash Compactor" - Day 6 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/6 This was a fun one (obviously; they're all fun)! Was it secretly a 2D grid problem? There are probably other ways to solve it, but this approach was my first thought and it worked out.

I've completed "Cafeteria" - Day 5 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/5 I was worried when I saw overlapping ranges that I was going to need to use a special algorithm that I definitely do not remember. But fortunately a simple approach worked!