#378 — End of 2025 Special

Dec 28, 2025

I bought a house!

Work

Still at GoCardless, for the fourth annual update in a row, though I suppose this will be the last: the news has broken that Mollie will be acquiring GoCardless, so if I’m still around in a year’s time it’ll be my first year at Mollie instead. The deal doesn’t actually complete until around mid 2026, so nothing materially changes with my job until then.

One very welcome bit of news is that, a little while ago, the CEO announced that we’d all have to be in the office three days a week from June 2026—a widely unpopular decision that’s contributed to many people leaving—and with the news of the acquisition, that’s been rolled back as we’re going to adopt Mollie’s policy of leaving it up to individual teams instead. I’m glad that the decision has been changed (I was planning to leave if it didn’t), but a bit put out that it wasn’t changed due to its unpopularity amongst existing staff, it was changed due to money.

GoCardless opened a new office in Lisbon, and my team was the first to get moved over, with new staff hired in Lisbon followed by a transition period of a few months with the existing London staff being gradually rotated out to other teams. I got moved back to my original team. I’m actually supposed to be on a different team to lead a big project, but there have been some timing issues which mean they won’t actually be ready to start that until some time next year, so this is just a temporary assignment. It’s nice to have a change, I’d been doing dashboard stuff for so long.

Finance

The big news this year is that I freed myself from the yoke of rent, by attaching myself to the yoke of mortgage payments instead.

Every year, when it was time to renew my tenancy agreement, I would think “should I just buy somewhere instead?”, well, this year the choice was made for me as the landlord decided to sell the flat. Rather than find somewhere new to rent and keep paying someone else’s mortgage, I decided this was the time to buy.

So I now have a nice two-bedroom house in Peterborough. The commute to work is about two hours, but I only need to go in one day a week. I spent a few months redecorating and furnishing the place, and it’s now very nice. Next year I’m tackling the garden. There are other projects too, but nothing urgent.

However, the downside is that the house deposit wiped out my investments (I put down as large a deposit as I could, £125,000), and everything else took a big chunk out of my cash savings. But I’ve been rebuilding the cash savings this year, and from next tax year I’ll be filling my ISA again. I’m also overpaying the mortgage to clear that a little faster than the 20-year term I took out.

Something I often see in personal finance circles is that homeownership is more expensive than renting, don’t just assume you’ll be saving loads more money by buying a house! This has always struck me as obvious nonsense as, putting aside the costs associated with actually buying a house (stamp duty, legal fees, etc), renting obviously has to cost more than buying as otherwise nobody would buy houses to let them out as they wouldn’t make a profit; rent has to have all the mandatory costs (mortgage, repairs, insurance, the letting agent’s cut, etc) factored in. And having done it myself now for around 6 months, I think it’s only more expensive because there’s more stuff you can (but do not have to) spend money on. While I have spent more per-month than I did on my flat, it’s just because I would never have thought to throw away my money on getting a rental flat painted, or to replace the aging carpet, or to make any of the other small improvements that only add to the property’s value and can’t really be taken with you.

Homeownership is more expensive because you want to improve the place.

Reading

This year bookdb hit 1000 books (it’s 1042 at the time of writing, and I still need to add the books I got for Christmas), which is a pretty big milestone. I would have hit it long ago had I not started to prune my collection in 2024. There’s less need of that now (I have much more space), but there’s still a limit to where you can sensibly fit bookcases in a house, so I expect the absolute size of my collection to continue growing at a slower rate than pre-2024, even if I still acquire new books at the same rate.

This year I read 60 books:

My top three reads of 2025 are:

No RPG book in the top three this year! I’ve just been running Arden Vul all year, so the RPG books I have read have only been for casual interest, not to seriously bring to the table. But I’m pretty confident there’ll be an RPG book here again for 2026.

Tech

A pretty tame year for tech, really.

On the software side the only substantial change is dropping PuTTY as my Windows SSH client of choice for Tabby, which has a much more sleek UI and handles all my fonts (PuTTY refused to show most of them for some reason). As part of that I started using the Uiua font, though my Uiua learning dropped off pretty quickly.

Hardware is a bit more exciting as I rebuilt azathoth, my desktop machine, which was last overhauled in 2020 with components that would have been cutting edge in 2016. I have tweaked it since then—more RAM, a new case—but it was basically the same machine. The straw that broke the camel’s back was trying to read an article about WebGL that had loads of examples, and it just couldn’t render the page. So I’m now using an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D processor with a Gigabyte AORUS MASTER ICE GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card, and 96GB of RAM (with space for two more sticks if I need them). It’s pretty good.

Gaming

Most of this year’s gaming was the weekly Arden Vul campaign on Sundays, today we played session 124: that’s 49 sessions out of 52 weeks! There were a few one shots too, and for a little while there was Troika on Fridays, but it’s mostly been Arden Vul.

The campaign, however, is finally coming to an end. The players feel it’s time to bring it to a close. Through a combination of magic items, the ability to raise the dead, and alliances with powerful factions, there’s not that much challenge any more. They can have most of the party die and shrug it off like it was nothing, and also they’ve achieved most of their big goals. Triv-Lok has left, Kerbog Khan going with her. The racial degradation of the Varumani has been reversed. Lankios healed. The Cult of Set vanquished. The Temple of Thoth restored. What’s left?

Just two things: completing the Trials of Arden, and leading a glorious crusade against the Heqeti and their evil ziggurat at the base of the dungeon. There are more things we could do, like find all the regalia or move into the political game, but those are the two things the players are most interested in. We want to end on a dramatic finale, not drag it out with minutiae.

I expect the game will be over by April; but I had previously predicted the game would be over by the end of this year (when they first got seriously into the Trials and were completing two a week) and then they shifted focus and we’re only just entering the “pre-endgame” now. The real endgame will begin when they complete the 12th trial…

It’ll be sad to leave Arden Vul behind, but it’s been a lot of fun.

Our next campaign will be Ars Magica.