We’ve done so many cool things, played so many games and watched so many movies and TV shows during our month off that it’s gonna take a while to recap everything. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to cover all that in posts… Also, getting back online after such an amazing time is difficult, it’s as if I need time to boot my system first. I feel old, lol.

As usual, we’ve spent New Year’s Eve at home in our clean PJs, eating a ton of food prepared by Soforah and watching movies. We first watched Nobody (with Bob Odenkirk) and it was great, then we’ve watched No Time to Die and it was amazing.

At midnight, we logged into our Animal Crossing Islands where we enjoyed the fireworks with the other residents.

We hope that you (the few who have found their way here) had a great evening and we wish you an amazing year 2022.

I’m writing this post as Soforah is courageously doing the grocery shopping while I’m at home with a bit of a cold. I’ve been dragging this bug for a few days now and it has turned into a runny nose with shivers kind of sick (Sing Soft Kitty!). Being sick in December has become some sort of tradition for me and I’d be a bit lost if it wouldn’t happen (as long as it’s not Covid, of course).

Anyway, we’re having an amazing end of 2021. We’re playing many games and, so far, our favourite is Marvel’s Guardians of The Galaxy. That game is incredible and we’ll probably write a lengthy post about it in January. 

We’ve already been through a big chunk of our TV schedule for the end of the year and the movie that we’ve enjoyed the most is Finch with Tom Hanks. As for the TV shows, we’ve watched the final season of Lost in Space and it is definitely at the top of our list.

But December isn’t over yet and we still have many great things in stock for the coming weeks… Oh, I almost forgot, above is a picture of the Lego tribute to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol that we’ve built Wednesday morning. Tis the season!

Edit 1: We don’t have Covid, yay! We just tested ourselves.

Edit 2: In the Christmas Lego above, there’s a secret compartiment that allows you to store super secret stuff. That’s so cool! Now, to find something secret to hide…

Each year, we resist the urge to follow the hype and watch all the movies and TV shows as they are released, so we have a ton of things to watch when our favourite time of the year finally comes.

It’s the second year that we prepare a schedule of what we’ll be watching at lunch, during the dinner and the evenings. Mostly, the plan gets adapted as we go, but you can see our December 2021 schedule by following this link.

One of our greatest pleasures at the end of the year is to build LEGO houses for our Christmas town while watching corny movies. This year, we’ve built Santa’s Visit and it was super fun! It’s the third house from the left on the panoramic. My only regret is that I didn’t take any picture inside the house because it’s really cool and very detailed.

We’ve watched Home Sweet Home Alone and it was much better than what people say, I actually had a few good laughs. Then we watched The Holiday, I had no idea that there was a Christmas movie with Jack Black seducing Kate Winslet, but it was pretty entertaining.

Our Xmas tree is up. We’ve used coloured lights this year and I don’t think that we’ll ever go back to white lights. For us, Christmas isn’t about classic interiors or design decorations, it’s about colours, toys and 80s movies. We both grew up between the 80s and the 90s and our childhood nostalgia has probably something to do with our vision of Christmas. That’s why December will always be a month spent at home, in pyjamas, playing cool games, watching a ton of things on TV and being all dreamy around our Xmas tree.

We didn’t wait for Black Friday, we did all our purchases at the beginning of November, to avoid being victim of the worldwide electronic shortage. I won’t reveal what’s under our tree yet, I’m not even supposed to know. However, we already treated ourselves with some early Xmas presents: 2 new Nintendo Switch Oled and 2 XBOX Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 for our PCs. For the rest, we’ll have to wait the 25th.

December is about to begin… Our PCs are filled with new games, there’s a ton of movies and TV shows to watch on streaming, we even have a lot of books and comic books to read. We’re ready for the greatest time of the year!

I won’t be posting much in the coming weeks, but I’ll make sure to catch back in January. Until then, we wish you all (the only 3 people who visit our blog and the Chinese spam bots), an excellent end of 2021.

During the confinement, we often dreamed of eating junk food.

Last week-end, since we’re now both fully vaccinated, we ordered a Domino pizza and it was so disgusting that we both nearly had to throw up.

Today, after more than 20 months, we ate at McDonalds and it was horrible! It barely qualified as food.

Junk food, were you always this bad or do all these months only eating the delicious cooking of my wife make you taste like crap?

I totally agree with Isabelle, Soforah and I got married in June, 18 years ago. Time flies when you’re having fun! We didn’t have much of a celebration this year, with the Covid and all… But we’re almost fully vaccinated, one more month of patience and we’ll be able to go for one of the things we’ve been missing most: a Whopper. We’ll make it a celebration Whopper!

A quick post to say that we had a lot of fun watching this year’s Eurovision Song Contest (yes, we’re fans!). Even if last year’s movie was great, it didn’t replace the real thing. This year’s contest was amazing, the setting was great, a lot of participants were actually quiet good (Iceland, Israel, Ukraine and Lithuania) and the presenters were better than usual.

However, I don’t know what made me the most happy, to see Italy win, since it was our favorite band of the evening or to see France lose, which is always very satisfying. French people are the worse winners/losers ever and their song was horrible and boring, I couldn’t have hoped for more. Sometimes, the universe goes your way.

A year ago, Soforah and I started to rebuild a collection of our absolute favourite shows on Blu-ray. Streaming services regularly remove shows from their catalogues and I simply couldn’t live without DS9, Voyager or The Next Generation. We just don’t buy any show, only the ones that we often rewatch.

Anyway, here we were, cosily installed in our coach, when the first thing that plays out of our Blu-ray player is an ad for another show, then another one and, finally, a third ad before we can finally access the menu.

This makes me want to go nuts, and I mean Homelander nuts on the people at Universal. Are they fucking kidding?! In a world where people almost don’t buy physical editions anymore, where people prefer to go on Pirate Bay instead of paying, we still purchase your stuff and how do you reward us? With 3 ads before the show. That is the definition of a dick move!

During the last two decades, I’ve been coding all our blog themes. I’ve had them in all shapes and sizes: minimalist, supercharged with scripts, responsive, non-responsive, sidebar, no sidebar, mobile first,… In the end, I got tired of blog themes that confuse simple blogs with “pro” websites.

So, for two years, I’ve been stripping my themes. While it took me months to create the perfect collapsing menu in javascript, it took me less than 5 minutes to remove it. Did the blog became harder to navigate? Then the sidebar disappeared, who cares about “subscribe” buttons anyway or, even worse, a tag cloud. Also gone are the popup search fields, the gravatars and the fixed headers.

But where to draw the line? Why keeping the “load more” and the “back to top” buttons? Well, it’s pretty simple: because we use them ourselves and it doesn’t take our eyes away from what we write. It’s not minimalism, it’s content-oriented design. A blog has to look like a blog to be a blog, happy as a hippo.

And what does a blog look like? Like a man who talks to himself and not like a sales man. We’re not trying to increase our traffic, we’re just keeping a log of the things we do. Believe me or not, there was a time when we had 10 times more comments than posts, but that time almost got us burned out of blogging. So we really don’t need all the bells and whistles required to increase traffic and comment numbers.

No one enjoys post previews, contents hidden behind clicks, self promotions, ads that make you lose the line you were reading because they changed the height of the page,… The only people who benefit from these designs are the web designers and the click baiters. Let’s not encourage them.