Here is the schedule for the upcoming year

Last week in August - Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut,

Last week in September - Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

Last week in October - The Poisoners Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine by Deborah Blum,

Last week in November - We are Legion (We are Bob) by Dennis Taylor,

December break for the holidays.

Last week in January - Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bissen,

Last week in February - The Truth by Terry Pratchett

Last week in March - The Metamorphosis by Kafka,

Last week in April - The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See,

Last week in May - Pnin by Nabokov,

Last week in June - How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Wexler,

Last week in July - A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers,

Last week in August - Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

Last week in September - Dr. No by Ian Fleming

His Christmas present is going to be a custom-built arcade cabinet. The internals are simply a Nintendo Switch, an 8bitdo arcade controller, a computer monitor, and some speakers. Pretty simple stuff!

He has next to zero experience playing video games and I haven't really exposed him to my games either (screen time and all). So, he's probably got about zero coordination when it comes to using controllers or playing platformers, etc. Also, he tends to get very frustrated with himself if he can't do something, causing him to want to give up.

What are some recommendations for Nintendo Switch (1, not 2) games that will ease him into gaming?

Thanks!

With Advent of Code upon us, I wanted to check out how everyone is planning on participating. If you hadn't heard, this year has been shortened to 12 days along with the removal of the global leaderboard.

• Any changes to how you'll approach this year based on the updated format?
• Are you using an interesting language/approach?
• Any goals you're setting for yourself?

I'm a sucker for puzzles in general, but I also love hearing about everyone else's experiences, so I'm excited to hear what y'all are looking forward to!

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/2

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

'Tis the season, and it's nice to sit down and listen to some traditional Christmas carols in a cozy candle-lit room with plenty of biscuits. And sometimes it's nice to hear more modern takes on these ancient (and not so ancient) classics.

Unfortunately, whenever I look for this sort of thing, what I usually find is really bland CCM — some woman breathily singing "O Come All Ye Faithful" so slowly I can feel my life draining from me with every beat, a completely unnecessary modern bridge replete with painful key change, and so on. I know this stuff can be done right — Annie Lennox's Christmas album is a great example of taking classic carols and setting them to new music in such a way that it can completely change how you hear them. But finding more stuff in that vein is surprisingly hard.

So does anyone here have any suggestions or ideas for modern takes on classic carols that actually try and do something interesting?

I have about a week of funemployment left before I start my new job, and one of the things I picked up this month was FL Studio to see if I can make a song. Does any have any tips/tricks or any recommended video tutorials? If it helps, I have some background in music theory and I play a couple of instruments and have a preamp setup with line in's and stuff.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

https://www.powercomposer.net/

I am not affiliated with this project, I just think it's awesome and deserves more publicity.

Power Composer is a piano-reel-style MIDI editor built in the Godot game engine (though it is a tool, not a game). It's intended to be lighter and more accessible than a DAW, but still quite powerful. The dev has been quietly working on it for a while now and just recently made a free early-access Windows build available!

I've been keeping an eye on it ever since it was featured in the Godot 2024 showreel, as I've wanted something like it for a while. Several years ago, I was playing around with Chrome Music Lab's "Song Maker" so I could use it in my classroom. I ended up having such a great time that I got incredibly sidetracked and spent a while just writing stuff. I know the grid-based sequencer isn't a novel concept, but something about that particular configuration just clicked with me.

Ever since then, I've been searching for something similar but more capable that still clicks in the same way. I tried Bosca Ceoil, LMMS, and a couple DAWs' MIDI editors, but nothing quite did it. Then I saw Power Composer. Now that I can actually try it, it's just as comfortable as I hoped! I'm a classically-trained music teacher and have been writing/arranging with software like Dorico for years, but something about sequencers (and Power Composer in particular) just feels more freeing to me than traditional notation.

It is not open-source nor is it planned to be, which is a bummer because I'd love to contribute, but I get it - being paid for your work is nice. No word on the release price or timeline yet.

The dev seems like a good guy. In addition to the website above, Power Composer has a Youtube channel and a Discord server, and he is actively taking feature requests and bug reports on the latter.

I've been exploring it a bit and I'd be happy to answer any questions people have about it! Really enjoying it so far.

Hoping this fits, because... well, it is about eating.

I swear my mouth is more sensitive to physically hot temperatures than other people's. I burn the roof of my mouth with pizza multiple times a year while others with me can eat it just fine, and I have burnt my tongue on metal spoons just as often. Just last week my mom asked if I was going to eat my soup because I'd been sitting at the table for 5-10 minutes, and I was waiting for it to cool down because the spoon had already burnt my tongue. I even use a disposable plastic spoon for eating ramen, but obviously that's not good for the long-term.

So we tried to look for silicone spoons to use for eating... except apparently they might not exist? I can find silicone cooking ware, baby spoons, and some really hideous spoons that have a weird shape I automatically loathe, but not a single regular-shaped spoon for eating. Cursory research suggests some other non-metal silverware sets exist made of materials besides silicone, but I have no idea where to begin.

So, can anyone recommend some spoons that aren't metal and made for dining?

Looking to buy a new laptop, and of the model I'd like (thinkpad carbon x1), it seems like I can choose one with or without an NPU.

My surface-level understanding is they make built in AI processing and a couple other niche uses more efficient. Flip side, they're maybe a marketing gimmick?

Price aside (price difference doesn't seem too great), I'm wondering: should I buy a model with an NPU to help potentially future proof? Are there potential downsides to an npu model? Upsides?

I know there are lots of technical people here, I'd love to hear your thoughts or experiences!

So there used to be this vibrant community on macjams.com where DIY musicians congregated to share their music, collaborate, offer advice and constructive criticism, etc., but the site shut down in 2019 with nothing to take its place. Every couple of years, I'll start the search again, but I haven't found anything that scratches the same itch anywhere on the web. There are a few subreddits that attempt to create the same atmosphere and scope, but the overwhelming majority of content I've found is spammed out with self-promotion and endless empty threads.

Has anyone found a community similar to Macjams that I've missed or overlooked?