Club Admiralty Blog

A blog about life in general, in as many languages as I can manage. Ενα ιστολόγιο περι ζωής, πολυγλωσσο - σε όσες γλωσσες εχω μεράκι να γράψω.

TV - Automan

%PM, %b %America/Chicago %2026, %R1980s, ABC, Entertainment, review, Sci-Fi, SciFi, Television, Tron

Over the last few years, I've been looking for older sci-fi shows to watch. This is was a short (13 episode) quirky buddy-cop/sidekick series.

Automan is short for "Automatic Man." One of the series protagonists, Walter Nebicher, creates an artificially intelligent crimefighting computer program that generates a hologram (Automan) able to leave the computer world at night and fight crime. The "night" part is important here because the show explains that Automan (and his sidekick "Cursor") draw so much energy, that they can really manifest themselves only when the demand on the grid is low (funny how today the response is "build more power plants" for AI datacenter needs...). Anyway, Cursor is a floating, shifting polyhedron which can "draw" and generate physical objects as needed. The most common forms taken are an automobile (the Autocar), an airplane, and a helicopter (the Autochopper), all of which can defy the laws of physics.

The show is interesting, but Automan's personality is a bit off-putting at times, and the portrayal of certain characters is certainly "of its time."

It seems to me that the graphics inspired by Tron (or at least were limited in the same ways as Tron was). It's interesting to see a "holodeck" without the "deck" part and also before Star Trek TNG. The "Cursor" companion could manifest holograms IRL.

Funny how a cop is relegated as the computer geek into the server room, but these days these geeks also have badges and go out in the field lol.

I think this got cancelled quickly, so it's hard to know what could have been, but the premise is interesting.

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Reddit Year In Review

%AM, %b %America/Chicago %2026, %Rreddit, Social Media, Social Networks, YearInReview

Alright, so it seems like Reddit isn't doing a recapped this year or at least nothing has been announced. Someone has created a Reddit Wrapped where you provide your public username and they produce something with Generative AI, so you know it's all made up, but what the hey - let's have a laugh!

I almost spit my coffee out with this roast 😂: You own a 23-year collection of obsolete mobile phones and a triple-knob macro pad, yet you still haven't found a button that helps you get over a pizza place leaving the plastic on your salami twenty years ago."

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Bluesky Year In Review

%AM, %b %America/Chicago %2026, %RBluesky, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Networks, YearInReview

Bluesky hasn't done an official wrap-up this year (did they last year?), but - as one might predict - someone on the internet has. So, plugging in my public profile information, here's what I got from

I am not sure how accurate this is, but I don't know what to make of these stats... 🧐

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Xbox Year In Review

%AM, %b %America/Chicago %2026, %REntertainment, trueAchievements, video games, VideoGames, XBOX, YearInReview

Next up in my 2025 Year In Review roundup, is xbox. Again, this year, Microsoft didn't do anything official (boooo!!!), but we've got True Achievements to the rescue.

Most notable here is that casual games are less prominent on my account this year since I stopped playing Casual games on my pixel tablet while watching television, so the games here represent just xbox gaming. The totally not surprising thing is that my gaming totally tanked in the fall semester. Last fall was super duper busy and that shows in the stats. Also not surprising, my most active was the winter break (basically this time last year) when I had vacation and nothing else on my plate.

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Google Photos year in review

%AM, %b %America/Chicago %2026, %RGoogle, photography, Photos, YearInReview

I don't recall if Google Photos did a Year In Review last year (I suppose I could look that up), but this past December I was greeted with a "here are all the photos you took in 2025" short movie. I think this year I started naming some of the personalities in my photos (mostly my dog and my cats), so....very predictably, I ended up taking a lot of photos of my cats and dog. It's interesting that in the "setting sail" category (around 45 seconds in) the person that Google's creator zoomed in on was a total random person on the Ferry to work. I think this was one of my favorite lookbacks to 2025. I wish Flickr did something to match or exceed this.

AF1QipNgIHhg6R2RBTpGKIFDQsFvitP_2RAgFl18tGw2qA1764751209229-ExportedMemoryVideo

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GoodReads Year In Review

%PM, %b %America/Chicago %2026, %RBooks, goodreads, Social Media, Social Networks, YearInReview

GoodReads went all out this year (at least when compared to previous years), and gave me not only my large catalog of books read in 2025, but it also provided me with some summary cards in December about the books I read, and various comparisons with others users in the system. This year I guess I managed to read something that was popular with other people too (Careless People). And yes, the trend continued - I read a lot of coming books. Here is the "traditional" GoodReads banner version (which is too tall for this blog post).

space to add the full list

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Flickr Year in Review

%PM, %b %America/Chicago %2026, %Rflickr, Photos, Social Media, Social Networks, YearInReview

My Flickr Year In Review isn't a lot to phone home about. I am actually surprised that I had over 1800 views of my photos. I basically use Flickr as another backup for my phone's photo roll. Maybe next year I should spend a bit more time seeing what friends and acquaintances post on Flickr and what else exists on this platform. I think the initial concept of a photo-based social network has been co-opted by Instagram (which now, I guess, tried to be more like Snapchat or TikTok).

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ChatGPT Year In Review

%PM, %b %America/Chicago %2026, %RAI, Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, LLM, YearInReview

OK, so no one asked OpenAI for a Year In Review, but I guess now is as good of a time as any for a guessing machine to take past prompts to see if it can guess something new. I played a bit with OpenAI's Year In Review because it's about as much fun as reading my horoscope or discussing my MBTI style 😅.

I have two free accounts on OpenAI, on one of them I am one of the 0.1% of early adopters. Both accounts gave me the em-dash deprecating humor (you know, the running gag is that ChatGPT loves the em-dash). My original account is where most of my experiments got for LLM-based training, whereas my second account uses my university email and I have it in case I run out of freebies on my main account.

My main account gave me the Patchwork Polymath title, which I guess I earned by asking ChatGPT a variety of non-connected things, from science fiction lore mashups, to playing around with it to see what it could do (or not) for an educational environment.

My secondary account earned me the title Crossover Commander,because I was messing around with image creation across cinematic and video game universes. Most of the stuff produced was meh, but I will admit that it was good enough to take an image of worn our cereal box gift (and iron on decal from the late 80s) and made is somewhat passable to make it in to a patch.

The two different accounts gave a different pixelated paintings for the year, the account that I messed around with for work purposes seems to have knowledge as a core component...

Whereas my backup image generating account (which also generated some action figures which were the fad this past summer) was more about sci-fi, brand names, and digital moments.

Only enough, my archetype (is this like an INTJ sort of thing?) was the same across both accounts.

Does any of this really mean anything? Most likely not, but it was an interesting diversion at the end of the year.

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Discord Year In Review

%AM, %b %America/Chicago %2026, %RCommunity, discord, Social Media, Social Networking, YearInReview

I think this was the first year I really dove into Discord. I've had an account for ages, but it wasn't really until the exodus from Twitter when I started looking at different spaces. I don't remember how much Discording I did in 2024, but I must have done enough to pique my interest to use it for class.

While I've joined many communities, my top three were no surprise. I think the fact that I used Discord as my class discussion space, instead of the Canvas discussion forums, really threw off my stats in terms of who I communicated with the most (so in the video I've skipped those "besties on Discord" bit. The feature that I wanted to use more this year was the voice communication capabilities on Discord, but things got a it hectic and I ended up not using those features as an impromptu voice discussions space for class. The two minutes I spent on voice were probably me joining the SSMAP D&D channel when I happened upon it (but had no time to actual sit and watch the entire game that the community was playing). I am wondering if I should connect my xbox to Discord to gather some game data...

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Swarm Year In Review

%AM, %b %America/Chicago %2026, %RSocial Media, Social Networks, swarm, travel, YearInReview

My Swarm Year In Review is rather bland and uninteresting. I didn't really travel all that much in 2025, so my major destinations were the dog park (at least my dog isn't unhappy 😂), super markets, work, and places that I went to for walks, runs, and just to touch grass. I think the farthest I went was to Maine to drop off a laptop to a colleague who couldn't make it to campus... Maybe 2026 will have more trips in store.