
Cool Links Vol. 17: November, 2025
5 min read
Links to the best stuff I've read or watched during the month of November, 2025
A chronological view of *everything* I've posted here, since the beginning of time (or the blog's inception, whichever comes first).

Cool Links Vol. 17: November, 2025
5 min read
Links to the best stuff I've read or watched during the month of November, 2025
The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring (Extended Edition)
Reviewed on Nov 29, 2025
Can’t believe I’d never watched the extended editions before. This movie is just timeless, a perfect introduction to a wonderful world, amazing pacing, acting, environments and practical effects.
It’s almost 4 hours long but I wanted to start the next one immediately after it finished.
Brand New Layouts with CSS Subgrid
This is the first article that made me actually understand the use cases for CSS subgrid. I’m still not fully convinced I’m gonna use them often, but it’s nice to understand what problems they solve.
Lies of P
Reviewed on Nov 27, 2025
Amazing game, probably the best souslike that’s not made by From Software.
Lies of P is a dark retelling of Pinocchio, and the Belle Epoque with Puppets setting really grows on you. At some point it goes bonkers with that and it’s awesome. The Bloodborne inspiration is obvious and very welcome.
The final third of the game suffers from a steep difficulty wall, but doesn’t ruin it. There’s a difficulty setting that can help if a boss gets too difficult.

My Default Apps: 2025
2 min read
Updated list of my apps of choice for daily activities!
First snow of the season
The snow made the Resegone Mountain even more picturesque than usual.
LLMs are bullshitters. But that doesn't mean they're not useful
… wow. This is an amazing article that goes a bit into how LLMs work (is an easy-to-understand way), how flawed they are, and how useful they can be. Or dangerous.
Plus, the nurse and surgeon examples are hilarious.
The birth & death of search engine optimization
This article walks through how the concept of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was born, how it inevitably became broken and how easy it is to “win” it, as long as your content is made up and not actual real information.
The perils of doors in gamedev
This Mastodon thread is an amazing tale about game development, physics and time-traveling bugs.
Swan in Lake Como
This swan was kind enough to pose around for a bit, even with the (very) cold wind.
Conditional Border Radius In CSS
This is a really cool trick. Turns out that it’s possible, with pure CSS, to have border-radius be applied conditionally.
The given example is a perfect one: sometimes we have cards with rounded corners that look good on their own, but if you’re on mobile and have less space and want the cards to take up the full page width, the rounded corners look awful. You can technically write breakpoints for that, but with clamp you can make the border-radius disappear if the card is too close to the viewport edges!
Solved By Modern CSS: Section Layout
In this awesome post, Ahmad walks through all the possibilities modern CSS offers when building a section layout.
I knew about and have used some of those in the past, but that tip about display: contents was amazing! Never thought of using it like that.
Is software getting worse? - Stack Overflow
This article has been sitting in my “Read Later” queue for almost 2 years 😳
It is an interesting article for sure, speaking about why speed and optimization has become such a rare thing in software development.
The second part of it, though, has kinda aged like milk, sadly. Developers no longer have a lot of leverage on their jobs, and we now live in a world where the thought of having no human developers involved at all in the code I’m running is real and frankly terrifying.
I’m hopeful companies will eventually figure out that AI-generated crap is still crap when the bubble bursts, but until then, there’s a lot of damage to be done.
Great and to-the-point article with practical examples of when to use (or not use) animations properly in UIs.
I love me some whooshy animations, but they can be a pain in the ass when overused or when used in the wrong moment.
Introducing SlopStop: Community-driven AI slop detection
This is a really cool initiative! Kagi has been my search engine of choice for over a year and I’m really happy with how they’re aiming to stop AI slop from taking over their (still great) search results.
In my experience, their results are miles ahead of Google’s, Bing’s or whatever other search engine out there, partly because of their algorithm prioritizes good sites, partly because they allow you to prioritize/deprioritize/block the sites you want.
But a good algorithm only goes so far and with the amount of AI slop hitting the web every day, it’s gonna be harder and harder to avoid them. Now Kagi users can report certain articles as AI-generated so other users can know that beforehand and not click on them, or even block their domains.
Pinocchio
Reviewed on Nov 16, 2025
Cute with a hint of sadness, I love the combination. The art style and character designs are amazing!