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As promised last month, this issue is just oyster meat. It's a new year and as good a time as any to hit reset and get this monthly newsletter back on its preordained beginning-of-the-month-ish delivery cadence. That makes this a quick turnaround after our last issue, so there's not much new to report. Good thing I asked you all to lower your expectations!

Let's see, since we last corresponded:

• Mike McQuaid wrote that he's joined the POSSE Party, so I pulled a quote and recruited him to help deal with maintenance and triage. Another early adopter posted an architectural review of my codebase to Reddit
• I spent a few afternoons tweaking a ChatGPT-powered Shortcut for Japanese study and was impressed to find Shortcuts is sneakily more functional than one might assume. Its new Use Model action allows users to tap into cloud-based Private Cloud Compute and ChatGPT for free, which is a total game changer. Native app developers can only access on-device models, which makes Shortcuts a uniquely powerful tool in its own right
• Aaron & I kept the streak alive by executing the 2nd Annual Punsort algorithm. I think his puns got less terrible or I got better at ranking them—either way, things seemed far less contentious than in our first go-round
• I did all four Disney parks in one day and live-wisped the ordeal over 12 hours, 16 rides, and 30,000 steps. If you missed my photos and videos, you'll just have to get in the habit of checking my homepage or Instagram every day, I guess! I got a couple remorseful emails from people looking to find my auto-deleting wisps/stories after they were, in fact, deleted. 💨
• Becky gave me a Steam gift card for Christmas, and this humorous trailer immediately sold me on Ball x Pit. I've since played it and can confirm it to be a Good Game: part Vampire Survivors, part Plants vs. Zombies, part Breakout.
• A few assorted takes:
  • If you or a loved one are worried about losing your job to AI, this essay is what I've been pointing people to lately
  • Macs have FileVault encryption enabled by default, which has always diminished their utility as home servers—if the power goes out, there goes your remote login access! They finally addressed this in macOS 26 Tahoe: inbound SSH connections following a cold boot will now unlock and finish booting my FileVault-protected Mac Studio
  • What populist candidates promise and what they prioritize once elected are rarely in agreement. So it goes in Japan, as an anti-foreigner platform gives way to a policy agenda that will attract more foreigners by further weakening the yen
  • If you're running modern Apple hardware, I recently learned there's a setting to make sure Safari actually renders content at a "ProMotion" 120Hz refresh rate

For the second year in a row, us kids paid a visit to dad's second-favorite spot in Walt Disney World on Christmas Day:

Fortunately, gallows humor has always played in the Searls family.

Stay tuned for next month's note, as I'll have just gotten back from the storied land of Shizuoka following the next chapter of our condo purchase journey. We're still on track to close in July, but in mid-January I have the not-technically-mandatory opportunity to pick out the curtains and the drapes at a sort of mini trade show event held by the developer. Well, curtains, yes, but also air conditioners. And tile. And how to finish the balcony. And how many mirrors we want, and where, and whether to tint them in sepia tones. And which LED mood lighting package should line the toilet. Should I pay for them to seal a brand new Japanese wood floor or is that a scammy upsell?

Reply and tell me what to do, please—the decision overload is truly overwhelming.

Anyway, the next week of my life is going to be spent poring over a dozen product catalogs. Bridging the language and cultural divide is extremely slow going. It's a good thing I failed to predict how much work this condo would turn out to be, or I'd never have gone through it. If you catch me having any fun this month, yell at me and tell me to get back to work.

Speaking of bridging language and culture, keep reading for one more stupid thing.

Fun fact that I got wrong every time when we actually lived in Japan, and which might come in handy if you ever find yourself there around New Year's:

Before the new year, the conventional anticipatory set phrase is 良いお年を ("yoi otoshi o"), which more or less translates to "Have a good new year".

After the dawn of the new year, people no longer say 良いお年を—and I can confirm that doing so will elicit a confused reaction from your local postal worker, next door neighbor, and favorite convenience store worker. Instead, the hot new thing to say is 明けましておめでとう ("akemashite omedetou"), which is yet another set phrase celebrating the year's dawn.

Last night, while visiting a Mexican-American friend's open house, the other guests taught me that "Feliz Año Nuevo" means "Happy New Year" in Spanish. Fourteen attempts and 3 mezcals later, I finally nailed that one—before promptly forgetting it. Language is hard.