This March was colder than February. I am writing this post while my right hand is frozen; so much so that I had to go back and take out my gloves. If we ignore some sporadic blooming trees, it didn’t feel like spring at all. And without the “nature is waking up” part, I feel my year is not even waking up. In the cold of March, I too am waiting to defrost.

And the point is that I don’t really know how to open this post. March has been pretty plain. The only thing that keeps coming to my mind is a Buddhist concept that can be translated roughly as “no noise, no life.” We strive for no distractions, no unexpected things, no responsibilities, no challenges, no uncomfortable situations, and in doing so we wash away part, if not all, of life with it. We need to realize that there is no “the life” and everything inconvenient just like there is no “the life” and everything nice and beautiful. They are intertwined, impossible to disentangle. If you remove the wheels from a bike, you don’t have a bike anymore; you have a bike-shaped hunk of metal.

This is also something I am learning about myself. I feel happier when I’m challenged, when I have problems I can solve, and when I look back at the uncomfortable events of my life and see all the things I would have missed if I had chosen the “simple path.”

No idea why I am sharing this. But it was in my mind, and I needed a couple of self-reflection paragraphs to open up the post.

Anyway, this March I read a lot and yet didn’t complete any book; reached the final stretch of my James Bond watch-a-thon but, most importantly, lost myself in the best Pokémon game of all time: Pokopia.

Let’s get started.

Housekeeping

Not much to say about housekeeping. In reworking my blog, I added back some of those 88x31 “badge” or “button” images that were commonplace in forums and blogs in the 2000s. I am seeing that they are having a small renaissance in the indie-blog world. And I like them, so why not?

Reading

This month I have no book for the reading list, and that’s not because I didn’t read. I read every single day-quite a bit. Not massively, but a bit. The problem is that my main book for this month was a gigantic one of one thousand pages. And a pretty complicated one with words that don’t exist in English and are created to give the feeling of a fantastic world. So in one month I read about 600 pages and am at 50%. I have no completed book for this section. Oh well.

We’ll talk about that next month. For now, we’ll keep this action shorter. :)

Watchlist

Tokyo Drifter (1966)

Sometimes around 1966, the Nikkatsu movie studio asked Seijun Suzuki something impossible: he had 25 days to film a Yakuza movie that needed to promote pop singer Tetsuya Watari. So Suzuki had very little budget, very little time, an actor who wasn’t really an actor, and a clear goal.

Those were impossible conditions, a recipe for disaster. Consider also this: in order to save as much of the budget as possible, Suzuki filmed the opening scene with an expired black-and-white film.

Instead, the result is fascinating, and it goes way beyond all the limitations. Even if the acting is sometimes unreal and the editing is jarring because they had no time to make all the takes they needed, this movie became a kind of classic.

In a situation where minimalism was exaggerated, you get everything else. The scenes are surreal, there are bright colors everywhere, and you can see all the criminals in very colorful jackets, a trope that will come back in many other movies and anime.

It is not a movie for everybody, sure. It is not a movie that I would recommend to the casual viewer. But it is a great example that even the harshest limitations cannot stop a determined artist.

All the Rest

• GoldenEye (1995) The first one of the Pierce Brosnan era. I liked the video game more.
• You’ve Got Mail (1998) I mean, I get it. It’s fun, it’s cozy and all. But in the end: fuck you, Joe Fox.
• Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
• The World Is Not Enough (1999) Probably this one is the best of the Pierce Brosnan era.
• The Phoenician Scheme (2025) I liked it more than Asteroid City for sure, but I still cannot make up my mind about it.
• Die Another Day (2002) My hot take is that this is probably the worst one of all. Not only is it as stupid as many other James Bond movies, but it also looks horrible. There is that early-2000s style of really weird slow motion and weird effects that… yuck.

On the TV series front, there is not much news. Season 2 of Daredevil: Rebirth just started, and, as you can see, my free time has only been consumed by gaming. No time for TV series.

Music

I have to admit that even this month there was no musical album that really caught my heart. Not that there wasn’t good music released - I actually listened to a lot of good albums - but there was no work that really stood out, that I put on a loop two or three times because something caught my deeper interest.

I admit that I might be part of the problem. For music to have its full effect you need good music, of course, but you also need a soul that is in a state to receive it. And, honestly, I am not in that state.

However, near the end of March we got a lot of interesting works. We got new albums from the sludge-metal band Neurosis (which has some fiery reviews), hip-hop from Dälek, neo-weird-psychedelia from Holy Fuck, Courtney Barnett, Graces Yves, and more. All this in the span of a week.

We may end up talking about some of them next month (I need some time to actually metabolize them!), but for now, to avoid leaving you without anything for two months in a row, I will suggest something that entered my rotation at the very last minute and allowed for this ChangeLog.

Snail Mail is the solo project of Lindsey Erin Jordan, an American songwriter from Maryland, class of 1999. Her previous two albums (Lush from 2018 and Valentine from 2021) frequently entered my playlists. She plays quite standard indie rock with a gravely, snarling voice that makes even the less original songs kind of unique.

Her latest work, Ricochet, was released on March 27, and, having listened to it only once, and under less-than-ideal (a.k.a. noisy) conditions at that, I am mostly betting on it. I definitely need more time, but I can say that all the things I liked about her previous work are still there, and there is something new and fresh that I hope will stand the test of time.

In any case, take this also as a chance to explore our previous works :).

Gaming

Pokemon Pokopia is ruining my life. Slay the Spire 2 is nailing that coffin. After months when my gaming time was under 10 hours per month, I logged 10 hours in three days in early March. That’s when I thought: oh oh.

Let’s start with Pokopia. Pokopia is a dangerously charming game. It is a mix of Pokémon (of course), Minecraft, and Animal Crossing. It was developed by Game Freak in collaboration with Omega Force, the same developers who made Dragon Quest Builder.

This is the basic concept: you are a Ditto, and you wake up in a post-apocalyptic Kanto. All the humans left the planet, made uninhabitable by some unknown event. It is up to you and a Tangrowth who calls himself Professor Tangrowth to rebuild the world, region by region, creating habitats to make Pokémons return. The hope is, if you do a good job restoring the world, humans will come back at some point.

The first thing you will notice is that, even though it only has four areas, it feels huge. You will probably spend 20 hours fixing, hydrating, and cleaning up the first small area, only to discover a new area with a huge ruined city that waits for your rebuilding effort.

My hot take is that it is probably one of the best Pokémon games ever. While the mainline series fails to capture that feeling of “living in a world of Pokémon” that it had at the beginning, Pokopia nails it. Of course you don’t have the strategic fighting part, but you have actual Pokémon to take care of and a rock-solid presentation.

There is also a nostalgic aspect because the cities you explore and need to rebuild are the same cities you explored in Pokémon Red and Blue. When you see the relic of the S.S. Anna on the horizon of one of the cities, you cannot help but think there’s a relic of your own past.

But that’s not all! While I spent way too many hours on Pokopia, it was not the only game released in March. Another game, one of my all-time favorites, is Slay the Spire, and in early March we got the early release of Slay the Spire 2. The game builds on the already addictive loop of the first game but adds more character, more cards, new enemies, and new things to explore. It feels similar to the first one but more polished and expanded. Some of the new characters are aimed at experienced players. The Regent, for instance, wants you to manage an additional resource other than energy. The Necrobinder, instead, trades a smaller life pool for a 1 life minion that can absorb 1 point of damage (but you can make it stronger). I still have no idea how to play them, but they are a great addition!

The game is only in early access, so I’m sure many more things may still come later.

Anyway, the story is that, between Pokopia and Slay the Spire 2, I did very little else. But sometimes the games that “ruin your life” are the ones that remind you why you loved them in the first place.

“You could make this place beautiful.”

Other Interesting Things

• 📝 AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The Open Web by Mike Masnick – As I discussed some time ago, we are being given a superpower: the ability to change what we don’t like in our digital world, similar to how we could in the early internet era. We have a big opportunity here if we do the right things.
• 📝 The happiest I’ve ever been – The topic of finding what makes you really happy in life is one I feel very close to, in a bittersweet way. There was some resonance here.

Conclusions

And so this was it for March. We are already a trimester into 2026. The next trimester is already scheduled to be more interesting, starting with Easter and a trip to Athens for my yearly company meeting. I will keep you posted, of course. In the meantime, let’s hope for a real spring April.

Have a nice month. See you next time.