In 2025, I did, amongst other things:
- Read some books:
- Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights
- Outlaws Inc: a lot of storytelling, not much meat, still interesting.
- Boniments: hard to find anything hiding under so much sarcasm.
- The Assassination Complex: drone-powered war crimes made in USA.
- The Catcher in the Rye: anyone who wants to ban this book didn't read it.
- Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World: fascinating.
- How to Argue With a Meat Eater (and win every time: the amount of bullshit the author had to deal with is impressive.
- Art Crime and its Prevention: A Handbook for Collectors and Art Professionals, equally boring and cocky, gave up around the middle of it.
- Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job, trying to shove everything through a Marxist lens, felt tedious.
- A handful of manga:
- Gantz: didn't age very well.
- Deadman Wonderland, uninteresting, gave up after 6 tomes.
- D.Gray-man: great drawings, everything else is tedious, gave up around book 10.
- Kokō no Hito: great topic, terrible realisation on every level, gave up after 4 tomes.
- Mashle: Magic and Muscles: something like "Harry Potter, but the dude can't do magic and has muscles instead." Refreshingly funny.
- Some Warhammer 40,000:
- Planetkill, nice bunch of novellas.
- Darkness in the Blood: Mephiston-wanking
- Elemental Council: properly written Tau novel.
- Angron: Slave of Nuceria, the birth of Angron's tragedy.
- Khârn: Eater of Worlds, Khârn's post-Heresy comeback.
- Ordo Sinister: short story about the eponymous Ordo Sinister
- No Good Men: great Warhammer Crime short stories anthology
- Steel Tread, a tank commander story wrapping up a planetary war, really nice.
- Day of Ascension: a novel from the point of view of a Genestealer cult, refreshing.
- Leviathan: Space Marines against Tyranids trying to save the day on a dying planet.
- The Oubliette: with a Planetary governor balancing on the edge of heresy, really good.
- Scions of the Emperor: Horus Heresy's Primarchs short stories anthology, pretty great.
- Interceptor City: yet another chef d'œuvre by Dan Abnett featuring the Imperial Navy.
- The Silent King: wrapping up the Dawn of Fire series, nice to read the Imperium lose for once.
- Blood of the Emperor: anthology of small novellas about the Primarchs, some are great, others less so.
- Angron: The Red Angel, about the crushing of a World Eater leader's dreams thanks to Angron's return.
- The King of the Spoil: commoners fomenting a civil war, with nested political and judicial points of view.
- Oaths of Damnation: bolter porn featuring the Exorcists chapter, with a terrific intro and a terrible ending.
- Deathworlder: great Astra Militarum novel, with properly written, badass and charismatic female protagonists.
- Urdesh: The Serpent and the Saint and Urdesh: The Magister and the Martyr, nice to see ocean-themed marines.
- Daemonhammer: a novel about an unsubtle inquisitor, nice but not groundbreaking, characters felt a tad undeveloped.
- Execution Hour, great book about the end of a Planet told by a vessel of the evacuation fleet, too bad the end felt rushed.
- Era of Ruin: an anthology of novellas about what happens after The End and the Death, unfortunately none of them were super-memorable.
- Hand of Abaddon, always nice to see the setting moving forward, even though the novel was a tad too tedious/scattered all around the place for my taste.
- Did a couple of job interviews:
- Synacktiv, for a red team tooling developer position. I passed the (fun) technical challenge, but didn't finish the interview process as I signed elsewhere.
- The Wikimedia Foundation, for a Staff Software Security Engineer position. I got an offer that I declined, as I got a better one by another company 30min after getting this one.
- ███████████, for a Head of Security and IT position, which was remote-but-a-couple-of-days-a-week-in-Paris, managing 1.5 juniors, for around 3 times less than my current salary. The phone call was awkward.
- Zellic, for a security researcher position, but my solidity auditing skills were too weak, and I thus failed the really cool hiring challenge. But they offered me to continue the interview process for a software engineer/sysadmin position instead. I didn't give it a try it, as I already signed elsewhere.
- Played some video games:
- On a computer:
- A bit of Space Marines 2
- Darktide, mostly with the 2 new classes.
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, usually not a big fan of JRPG, but this game is nothing short of amazing.
- Age of Wonders 4: great 4X game, which while not being my favourite genre at all, was a ton of fun.
- Witchfire: hands down the FPS of the year for me. Great setting, great gameplay, visually astonishing, and a complete and utter lack of bullshit DLSS.
- Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, a chill post-apocalyptic variant on XCOM, without the tedious base-building parts and with some neat stealth element.
- Ready or Not: the spiritual successor to SWAT 4, but felt unfortunately a bit clunky and unfinished. Moreover, it unfortunately felt like another "kill the bad guys!" game, instead of playing a law-abiding officer.
- On a glorious steam deck:
- Inscryption, gave up after the first act.
- Balatro, great game, but too much luck involved for my taste.
- The Precinct, I'm usually not a big fan of cops™, but playing GTA2 from the point of view of one, with proper penalties for not following due process is surprisingly nice.
- On a computer:
- Listened to some music.
- Attended some concerts:
- The Svinkels!
- Alcest and BRUIT ≤, with the latter being a really good surprise.
- No One is innocent Fractal Universe Les tambours du bronx (opened with Sepultura's Bloody Roots, and closed with Rob Zombie's American Witch!), and Shaârghot, as the Boksons festival. Oh and we sung along while going back to the car on Early Maggots playing some classic Spliknot tracks in the distance.
- Contributed to a couple of projects:
- metasploit and metasploit-payloads.
- miniflux, with around 200 (!) pull-request merged this year alone.
- harper, a trivial low-hanging things to make debugging easier, and opened a bunch of bugs.
- Alpine Linux, by being a package maintainer, sending a handful of merge-requests, and trying to get rid of python-six.
- Nos oignons, as part of the administration council and the sysadmin team. We're now responsible for a little bit more than 3% of the network's total capacity.
- OpenMW, by maintaining the infrastructure. MediaWiki, that we're using for our wiki, is not only annoying to keep up to date, but also to fight spam: doing SQL by hand isn't really state of the art abuse remediation, sigh. Let's hope that the combination of hCaptcha, DNSBL from spamhaus.org/spamrats.com/0spam.org/z.mailspike.net, keyword-based blocklist, and clownflare will curb the tide. And because morons can't stop externalizing their costs directly into our faces, I deployed Anubis on the forum and the wiki, sigh.
- Kept on writing my book, reaching a bit more than 100.000 words.
- Went to the Grehack, where I saw old friends and made new ones.
- Added possible subtitles to this blog, bringing their total number above 1500.
- Changed the TLS certificates for this website to use elliptic curves for the whole chain: enjoy marginally faster handshakes and equally marginally size reduction in certificates transmission!
- Bought a house in the East of France, feel free to come say hi. As a side-effect I learnt how to do some basic plumbing/electricity/wood-working/gardening/…
- Got a fully-remote job at Casaba Security. The first weeks were a bit odd for everyone, as the switch from from a megacorp to a small(er) structure was a bit rough, but in the end I'm quite happy working there.
- Spent a couple of months without internet at home, hence why this little corner of the internet was unreachable. Things are now back to normal, and I have fiber in my office. A big thank you to everyone who reached out to enquire if everything was alright <3.
- As part of a conscious effort to make the word a better and more welcoming place, I successfully changed my usage of expletives and insults to more inclusive ones. I also think that this provides a positive influence on my friends and family, leading by example. Newly used terms include "sac à merde" ("shitbag"), "va te faire cuire le cul" ("go get your ass cooked"), "va marcher sur des legos" ("go walk on legos"), "bête à bouffer du grillage" and "bête à bêcher de la flotte" ("wire-mesh-eater/water digging level of stupid"), … Do let me know if you have suggestions, I'd love to expand my range of possibility and nuances.