Monthly Roundup: October 2025

01 Nov, 2025

What I Did

I'm now a doctor (don't ask me for medical advice though; I'm not going to lose a licence I hardly have)!
More like what happened to me, but my entire Downloads folder cleared itself (or I deleted the whole thing, but I don't remember doing that). This probably means that I need to get a new hard drive, but that's not happening for now. So I'm just going to back up my important documents and hope everything is fine.
I've been looking into todo.txt, which is basically having all your todos and tasks in one text file instead of using a special todo app. I'm going to try using only a text file to manage my tasks in November and see how that works out for me.

What I Read

Necessary Fiction by Eloghosa Osunde cover

Necessary Fiction by Eloghosa Osunde: 3/5. Should have been a short story anthology instead of a novel. Dealt well with grief and the queer experience of wealthy/middle-class people in Nigeria. Will not re-read.
Miro in Memory

What I Played

I've finally stepped into the world of print-and-play puzzles. Itch.io has a nice selection of free puzzle games that can be printed or drawn on as PDFs, but I've been trying to spend less time with my phone so I printed some out. It was fun, although I'm incredibly frustrated by some, and stuck on some.
- First up, LOK: this couldn't be printed but with the help of Firefox on my laptop I can draw over the puzzle and solve it. The aim here is to black out all squares on the grid. Sounds easy, right?
- Bobograms: This is said to be inspired by nonograms, which interests me, but I have to figure out the rules on my own, which makes me despair. I'm up for the challenge though!
- 12 Word Searches: This pissed me off because even without the hints I was doing fine, although some puzzles weren't so easy without them. I was also racking my brain furiously to figure out the puzzles, and when I eventually found the answer from the discussion page it irritated me because it was so easy that if I had thought about it for more than a second I might have got it. I can't rate this because I'm still annoyed about it, but I was having fun up until it got ruined.
- 10 Puzzles: Another puzzle by the maker of 12 word searches, Playcebo, but I haven't progressed much.
- The Domino Lockpicking Company: Haven't tried this out, but it looks interesting.
- Counterfill: Same as above.

What I Listened To

ODUMODUBLVCK's Industry Machine album. 5/10. Favourites from the album: TIFFANY, CANDY MUSIC, BANZA BOY.
Afrobeats To The World (ATTW) is a podcast that started from a Twitter Space where people discuss recent afrobeats releases. It still is a Twitter Space, but distilled into a more listenable form of sorts. I'm only mentioning this because of episode 77, where they discuss the Industry Machine album and Odumodu himself was on the space.
- Odumodublvck joins the space at 00:48:36, goes on a rant at 00:52:45, and then the album discussion (which is incredibly funny after Huncho comes on) is from 00:57:58 to 01:38:20, so you don't have to listen to the whole thing if you don't want to.
Papillon, NMIXX
Eddie Quansa, Peacock Guitar Band
Lil Nas X's DAYS BEFORE DREAMBOY EP. Standouts: need that boy, LIGHT AGAIN!, RIGHT THERE!, SWISH
I haven't finished listening to Adekunle Gold's Fuji album, but I already have my standouts: Big Fish, Don Corleone, Many People
Lexie Liu released a new EP this month and like I said at the start of the year, she'll probably be in my top artists list for 2025. Standouts: LIKE U, X (my fave), ADRENALINE, FFFFF.
I judged Doja Cat's album a bit too harshly on first listen, but after subsequent listens I really like it. My favourite from the album is Happy, purely because of the repeating French lines.

What I Watched

A bunch of Lucky Star episodes. It got less funny when Konata's father was introduced—as an old pervert taking pictures of school girls doing sports. Of course, he got escorted out by security, but I'm still wondering if it was supposed to be funny. Japan is never beating the allegations any time soon.
To Kill a Monkey: Started well, crashed and burned towards the end. I don't know why we had to get so many scenes of Efe and Sparkles' relationship, neither do I know why we had to get so many scenes of Inspector Mo's trauma. I mean, it was emotional, but after a while it dragged on and I used the fast-forward button a lot.
- The cast did well. William Benson and Bucci Franklin did great in their roles as Efe and Oboz, especially Franklin. It was also nice to see our Akanchawa Baddie, Lilian Afegbai, in the role of Idia. All the actors did well, tbh, but they were held down by the poor script writing.
- The soundtrack album also gets full marks for me. Apparently, it was written and produced by Kemi Adetiba's husband.
- The story: started well, but Episode 1 annoyed me incredibly because of how much suffering we saw Efe go through. We get it, he's suffering; no need to show us over and over. I think this was another issue with the series: they showed us when they should have told us and told us when they should have showed us e.g. Teacher's end. The end of the series also was not entirely predictable, but felt rushed. They spent all that time meandering around and never getting to the point only to do things in a flash at the end. I also didn't like not getting to see Efe's app at work. The monkey calling card was also silly; since when do Yahoo boys leave calling cards? It's not like this is a heist movie.
- The characters: were done well, in spite of the story. They were all flawed in some way, especially Efe and Nosa, who were incredibly hypocritical. At least Idia and Oboz didn't pretend to be good people. I would like an explanation for Oboz's seemingly undying 'brotherly' love for Efe though, to the point where he alienated his own men and protected him at the cost of his own life. It really didn't make sense; if it was because of the money Efe was making him, there was no need to keep treating Ozzy boy and the rest of his inner circle like rubbish just to make Efe feel good, especially since Efe didn't ask for it. Inspector Mo also annoyed me incredibly, making silly decisions and antagonizing her boss at every turn.
- In short: it was nice to watch, but don't expect it to change your life.
The Party: 3-part murder mystery that had all the right elements but didn't do much with them. Part of the fun of watching or reading murder mysteries is trying to solve the mystery. There was no such fun to be found here. Instead we got drama on the part of the detectives that I really could have done without.
Beauty in Black: Tyler Perry strikes again. This is interesting, though I feel like knocking Kimmie on her head.

Interesting Links

Being a dabbler in some tech-related areas and following techy people, of course I've stumbled on self-hosted apps, some of which would be great to use, but of course, have the requirement of self-hosting your own server and storage to use. This article explains why self-hosting for all individuals isn't very feasible.
Some people think AI is horrible and should never ever be used, while some go to the extreme and use AI for everything. Some others have found interesting use cases for AI, and one of these people is David Bauer. Personally I use AI as a search engine, when I don't want to read tens of Reddit/Github/StackOverflow posts just to find a solution for whatever problem I encounter, but it's not perfect. Maybe I have to refine my prompt better. I've also adapted mogwai's Claude prompt to fit my own use case, and using Claude is now much smoother, although I still get the urge to tear out my hair when Claude doesn't seem to have much sense.
Minute Cryptic is a site that helps beginners such as me to learn how to play cryptic crosswords.¹ Sometimes the puzzles are incredibly unfair, and sometimes they're pretty easy, if you know what you're looking for. The site has a tutorial to put you through the basics of cryptic crosswords, and this site goes further in on cryptic crosswords.
The World In Which We Live

If you use Linux, tldr is a better, shorter alternative to man for help with commands.
I was shocked to discover AI chatbots in Firefox. I don't mind using AI, but I don't want AI in my browser. Does this mean I have to start using the other forks/variants of Firefox with uglier logos? Thankfully, a quick search brought up this option to disable it, summarized by DuckDuckGo's Search Assist:

To remove AI features from Firefox, you can disable the AI chatbot in the sidebar by going to the sidebar settings and unchecking the AI option. For a more comprehensive removal, type about:config in the address bar, search for browser.ml.chat.enabled, and set it to false.
- I'm starting to distrust Firefox though, so if you know any Firefox forks/variants with beautiful logos and proper extension support, let me know.