NYE Party

We had our annual New Year’s Eve party last night. I bartend and it was a great time. I started when I still drank as a way to drink less and prevent a hangover. But now that I’ve been sober for over 6 years I just enjoy the process.

We had new friends, old friends, and I had several really meaningful conversations.

I played with generative AI (specificly Google Gemini) to try to generate a drink menu for NYE. It was an interesting experience. It was very good at coming up with drinks based upon the alcohol I had on hand. It was amazing at drink names. It was very bad at making up drink recipes. And I have no idea why it felt it needed to come up with its own recipes. It was weird. It was also great at garnishes. I tried to create a menu image, and Google’s Nano Banana just will not put the text you want in the image. It was a good exercise for seeing what the state of the art is right now. And I’ll go back to not asking AI questions for a while.

But through all these iterations/failures I came up with this drink based upon an Elderflower Collins. The drink is great spirited or spirit-free:

Midnight Garden

2oz Gin
1 oz Elderflower Liqueur
1/4oz Creme de Violet
1oz lemon
1/2 oz hibiscus simple syrup (steep dried hibiscus blossoms for 3 minutes in 1 cup water, strain, add the liquid + 1 cup sugar and stir over high heat until fully disolved, let cool)
Soda water
Garnish with a sprig of fresh thyme

For the spirit-free I used Belvoir Farm Elderflower Syrup Mixer for the NA elderflower. I used Monin Violet for the Creme de Violet, and Free Spirits Non-Alchoholic Gin for the Gin.

The Year Ahead

In 2002 I wrote a play called Scaping the Goat The play was about the way that cable news had taken the events of 9/11 that had terrorized one city, and repeated the imagery from it over and over until it terrorized the entire world.

Despite having written the play I seemed to have lost the message in my own life. I got sucked into the daily terrorizing by both parties to raise money and hurt people’s health. I got off Twitter, but got on Bluesky. The effect persisted. At some point this year I just got off the train. I’m still aware of what’s going on, but I don’t exist in a state of permanent fight or flight. I’m not terrorized by every single thing Trump says. This is not to downplay the damage he has done, but he has been even more effective at terrorizing us than breaking things.

I wrote a post because despite this administration explicitly targeting me and my family; we had a great year. And I need to celebrate that.

Around this time I started building Fun Old Times as a way to really understand how to effectively use generative AI in programming and to create the social network I always wanted. Through the process I have become more and more worried that we’re going to see an end of affordability for AI tools for home and open-source projects in the coming year and I wanted to get a head start before the tools become much more expensive.

I released new code today that was all built by hand, so I haven’t lost my brain yet.

I built Fun Old Time because I wanted a way to have smaller communities. I wanted something that wasn’t gamified. I had all these ideas for what I wanted social media to become and it never happened. Fun Old Times will import this blog post into my small community automatically via RSS. But it will also exist on the Internet. So I can have my internal conversations inside Fun Old Times and keep a blog running that can have more public reach.

My goal for this year is to continue what I started last year, and that I think was best summed up by Jenn Schiffer. I’m done with:

hating the internet instead of making the internet

This year I want to get back to writing. I want to get back to building. I want my community back. I don’t want to watch 10 second clips of “Community”. I want back-to-school pictures of my friends’ kids, dammit.

My goals for this year:

I want to create and write again
I want to spend more time with you
I want to build new things together
I want to repair and resuscitate relationships
I want to make useless art and useful art
I will not be terrorized
I will add comments back to this blog so it’s not a weird one-way street.
I will build community with Fun Old Times and not just build features.