I've been a music stats junkie ever since I heard about last.fm in 2006. And every year I look forward to the end of year review. Unlike Spotify with their 'Wrapped', last.fm actually do this correctly by acknowledging that December is a month in which people still listen to music.

So how did it shake out? 20,493 scrobbles – a slight increase over 2021 – but I'm still listening to less music than I used to. Podcasts are 100% to blame here. And there are only so many hours in the day for competing media attention in my ears.

No surprise Depeche were the top band. Fletch's passing meant I went on a bit of a nostalgic re-listen to their body of work. A decent year for synth acts overall and I'm really loving Korine at the moment. Kinda funny that stalwarts Rammstein still make an appearance in every one of my end of year lists. And I really really really loved Suede's new album and played that a lot.

Here's to 2023 in my ears!

tl;dr you had one job.

Facepalm: LastPass, one of the most popular password manager services out there, was breached this past August. The company is now saying that the damage done by the unknown hackers is much worse than was initially assessed. Users should change their passwords asap

Yeah having the actual vault stolen is unforgivable. I tweeted last week when I read the news.

Oh lastpass. Spending the day changing every password I ever had in the history of ever, moving to bitwarden, and setting my lastpass account on fire. How's your day going?

With every single password from my lastpass vault now changed (not updated in lastpass obviously) and added to Bitwarden, time to nuke the account from orbit. This was a satisfying confirmation to read:

Your LastPass account has been permanently deleted and all of your data has been purged from our systems.

Tiny wine place, friends, and an owner my age with a hoodie barely covering the Dead Kennedys t-shirt.

And so began the not insignificant time sink binge re-watch of the entire six seasons of Lost.

Arguably where the era of prestige TV began. Arguably one of the best TV shows of all time. It's been hovering around my own personal top three since it ended in 2010. Mind blowing to spend six years on the once a week release of a story that captured the internet of the era. So many fan theories on message forums and it was just so fun to trade ideas and have people point out easter eggs in scenes.

Look, here's a still capture of that Shark with the Dharma logo on it – what does it all mean wtfomgbbq!!!

So how did it hold up on a binge watch? Let's just say Lost has cemented itself as my favorite TV show of all time hands down. I did wonder how it would feel knowing the plot twists in advance. And it was ok. I must say though I do envy anyone watching this for the first time. You're going "wait, did Kate know Jack before the Island? I'm so confused." followed by the record needle scratch of Jack going "we have to go back" (mind explodes).

What I realized this time around was that even though they didn't (couldn't) answer every possible fan question, they still did a pretty damned good job. But the real thing that stood out on a binge was that Mystery Island wasn't even important at the end of the day. What really mattered were the characters, their stories, their interaction. This show has some of the best well written characters of any show I've watched and I just love them all. Locke, Sawyer, Kate, Jack, Desmond, Ben.

You know you've watched something special when you've got that sinking feeling of no more episodes. I can't recommend this enough. If you're one of the few people left on the planet who hasn't watched it, go do that immediately.

With Elon buying Twitter and offering a masterclass of clusterfuck management, predictions of its demise were abound. Some people I follow abandoned ship and fled to Mastodon. Some hedged their bets and started posting on both services.

I like Mastodon and its decentralized nature is very cool technology. I created an account back in 2017 presumably the last time there was a Twitter kerfuffle. And I posted a couple things there during this latest one. Very quickly it became apparent that keeping track of both services was going to be tricky. On my best days I find it hard to keep up with just Twitter.

So a bit of a fork in the road has occurred. A social media service lives and dies by where the people you follow are. And for right now, that's still Twitter. So for the time being my focus will be there. But at least Mastodon is a thing that we could get into the Twitter lifeboat and sail to if the need arises.

To that end I'm at @kevinspencer@mastodon.cloud.

I mean, these should have probably been tweets.

How can you be from England and not drink Tea? I was asked. And it's true – I'm on team Coffee 100%. But a funny thing happened, I actually had a cup of tea today and it was pretty great.

I've been running 4 miles about 3 or 4 times a week pretty consistently. But thanks to the great Phoenix desert summer, it's been indoors on a treadmill. It's the time of year where I can start doing that outside again.

I've been listening to a lot of Korine this week. Synthwave goodness.

If you go looking in this fair City of ours, there's a lot of fantastic street art.

We live across the street from a mountain. That I've not hiked in the 4 years we've been here. What the hell?

I haven't read any books since the great reading re-awakening of Dec 2021, Jan 2022. What the hell?

In about a month I will be 49 years old. Turning 50 next year. What the hell?

After 147 continuous months of Summer, it's finally nice enough in the mornings to open the windows again. I have missed the fresh air blowing around the house. There's just something about that brewing coffee smell with the sounds of birds singing.

What happened was, I read an article about Reeder and remembered how much I loved it. You may recall a couple years ago I decided to go solo with Tiny Tiny RSS. And it was mostly fine, just not great.

So I changed things up today. I'm back to using Reeder full time, with iCloud sync, and it really is great.

Except for one thing. Where is everybody?

It's only when you import your ancient OPML file from the olden times that you realize just how many great bloggers there were. And how few still remain. Man, I really miss blogging. I hope independent publishing comes back in fashion some day.

I guess I'm just old.

What happened was, I learned Sam Neill owns a winery. And not just that, a purveyor of Pinot Noir, my favorite tipple.

The vines at actor Sam Neill’s original, organically farmed vineyard in Gibbston Valley are now over 25 years old, and the resulting wines are better than ever. The color of raspberry juice, this vintage is, to put it bluntly, sexy as hell.

I do like wines that are sexy as hell.

I've not been able to find it sold locally but they ship worldwide. I priced out a single bottle; $225 to ship to the USA from New Zealand 😳

The adventure continues then. Look for anywhere in the US that imports it. Or the real answer, take a holiday to New Zealand and pick up a couple bottles in person.

What happened was, inspired by the recent watching of Prey, we were talking about Predator movies at work. And so begins the team watch of all of them in order. I'm this far in:

Predator
Predator 2
Alien vs Predator
Aliens vs Predator Requiem

Thus far they have gotten progressively less good as they go. But still all entertaining nonetheless.

Three left to go, one I've not seen before (Predators), the likely worst one of them all (The Predator), and then ending on a high note with Prey.