2025 in Review

What a godsforsaken shitass dogfuck year. 

Sorry for opening on a downer, but I need to get this out of my system. I will attempt to focus on the positive later but there was very little to go around even when factoring out The Everything.

Previous Years: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024

d12 ways 2025 has fucked me over

1. One of our cats died from a tumor so rare that the vet gave us a discount because it qualified as a teaching experience. Three cats in three years. At this point I feel like it’s either a curse or something in the fucking water, though we don’t even have the benefit of clean correlation because all three of them died in entirely different ways.
2. Partner got a new job she doesn't like.
3. My car died (the transmission was already dying, but then the battery went fucked while I was out driving in fucking January, and I had to be jumped twice just to get back home - was stalling out every time I came to a stop.)
4. My partner’s car died. (Don’t know what happened to this one)
5. Car dealership yanked us around for days, forcing us to make multiple Ubers across the city for no fucking reason. Fucking hate cars so god damn much.
6. Multiple friends in and out of mental health crises, job loss, divorce.
7. Partner had to get her gallbladder removed, then had to be rushed back to the ER a few weeks for an after-effect. (She’s doing okay now)
8. Some chucklehead tried a bit of Western Union fraud as a treat.
9. Our other cat has kidney disease, so now the odds are rising that will have a fourth cat loss in as many years.
10. Database migration plus the holiday season is making work a nightmare, and now they’re getting after me for slipping performance - yeah, no shit my performance is slipping, I am fucking stressed.
11. After a 2152-day clean streak, I get covid two weeks before Christmas.
12. Dealer’s fucking choice.

So that’s been my year.

Leslie Stone transcription project

With the first pass complete on most of the short stories, I’ve got the longer novellas left and that has slowed things a decent amount. Still, it’s been a fun project (as evidenced by my previous posts) and I’m glad I’ve gotten myself into it - it’s a good way to relax when the mind goblins are at their worst and I can’t focus on anything else or do anything productive.

Superman (2025)

Of all the many, many things I adored about this movie, the one that has stuck with me is the bit in the faux-interview  when Lois is grilling him about his previous interference in global politics. Clark’s frustration at her line of questioning reads very strongly to me as “oh, this Superman is on the spectrum” in a very true-to-life way. To Clark, the logic of his moral universe is as simple and as natural as breathing; people were dying, and he needed to stop it. Political ramifications be damned people were fucking dying; that’s enough reason for him to step in, and he genuinely doesn’t understand why anyone would have a problem with that. The thought is alien to him. 

What a good movie.

Bloodywood

Dana Dan gets the coveted "song that got me through the year" slot, for reasons that will be immediately obvious to anyone who has heard that song and also read this blog.

Naked Gun (2025)

It is so nice to watch a movie that understands how to do a proper gag. My dad would have loved it. If a joke doesn’t land for you there’s a new one in a few seconds, it’ll be fine.

Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc

Very glad they did this as a movie, I don’t think it’d be possible to pull it off with TV show pacing and still have it work. Chainsaw go brrrrrrrr indeed.

The year of Lovecraft 

An unintended trend, but it got me writing so that’s a net positive. Probably something to do with The Horrors. Something something, art that’s flawed in interesting ways will get me to engage even when I’m a vocal critic of the art. Always funny how that works.

The Year of PIE

Technically most of last year was this as well. If nothing else, it's been extremely educational.

A great year for video games*

While the greater industry seems rapidly accelerating towards a mass extinction event, anyone who exists on the fringe of that ecosystem is feasting like a king. So long as itch isn’t getting forced into a blind panic by Mastercard and Australian Christofascists. Or Steam doesn’t arbitrarily decide to axe your specific game for vaguely-defined and spurious reasons.

The MiniSalties

• Get in Losers We’re Going to Fight God: Expedition 33
• Greatest Disappointment: Silksong
• Blasting From the Pasting: Binding of Isaac Repentance, Nuclear Throne
• I Played it a Lot in January and Need to Go Back: Caves of Qud

God Damn I Listened to a lot of Elden Ring OST this year

I can only assume that Spotify is extremely confused by my listening habits. Top themes are Bayle, Radahn, Fortissax, Messmer, Maliketh.

My Partner Has Yet To Find A Romantasy that Features a Dwarf

Now, I am getting this second hand from her descriptions of the audiobooks she listens to, nut I still I think it is a fascinating trend. No dwarves have appeared in any context in any of the books she's read (let alone as a leading man), which is fucking wild to me since damn near all of them have elves of some manner and this is a highly-derivative genre. I want to see the red string board. Are they considered too cheesy? Did the authors just not have Tolkien or his imitators as a formative inspiration? Is a short hairy dude just a no-sell in heteronormative mass-market romance? The world may never know, but I wish I did.

A Long, Unpleasant SCP Aside

While my “get back in” phase of a couple years ago has since faded back out, I’ve still been keeping a few tabs on current events: they aren’t good.

To make a long, unpleasant aside as short as I can: in 2022, one of the wiki’s founding admins was banned after revelations of a long history of sexual harassment. Many of the victims were minors, and it became very clear that said admin’s penchant for gross-out sexual content in their stories was not simply being edgy and in bad taste. They had, on top of abusing their admin powers to cover up their behavior, leveraged their reputation as a popular 1st generation author (with a extremely popular “comedic pervert” author avatar character) to facilitate the abuse.

Well, it’s nearly 2026 and despite widespread public outcry to get that shit gone, site staff have been dragging their feet. One tale was deleted through official channels, and the prominent / infamously unfunny List of Things Dr. Bright is Not Allowed to Do at the Foundation was deleted by a moderator who wanted to go out with a bang. Everything else has been nearly four years of angry people, gnashed teeth, talking in circles, and hand-wringing about procedure. It took a moderator going rogue just to get a splash page explaining what had happened.

So yeah. Feels fucking bad. The site's always been dysfunctional to some degree, this isn't the first creep or the first botched response to a crisis, but fuck, man. The bar is on the fucking ground. 

Year-End Correction of Longstanding Oversight

Finally got around to binge-watching Esoterica. Dr. Sledge is a beacon of sanity in an age of madness and not an episode goes by without things to swipe for vague yet certainly nefarious RPG uses.

There are too many fucking games

I do not care about your Kickstarter, your Zinequests, your Mothership months. There are too many fucking games. Stop making new games. Put up a free ashcan rules hack like a civilized human being if you absolutely must. Too many fucking games. I already own too many fucking games, I do not need more fucking games, I'm already busy not playing any fucking games!

I need to play more games

I ran exactly two games this year (one Mothership, one Delta Green) and god I’ve missed it. I desperately want to play more, but I also am burned out enough that I basically need to be forced into doing it by some kind of external circumstance. Playing in person is the easiest way to do this, but actually doing that is easier said than done. I would really like to just be a player for a while, but my in-person DM friends are all just as ADHD and busy and frazzled as I am if not more, and none of the other friends have shown any draw to ttrpgs unless I’m the one running them. Could go out and look in the local group recruitment server, but that’s another couple dice rolls to see if it’s in a convenient location / is of a game I want to play.

Just very tired.

Blogged more than 2024

Not by much, but it’s a trend in the right direction.

Onward

2026 will mark 9 years of this blog. Hard to imagine it. Depression and stress fuck with your memory something fierce (and that’s on top of ADHD crippling that faculty from go), so it feels like I’ve done so little despite that being objectively untrue. There’s this perpetual feeling of “if I could just fucking rest and do nothing for a couple weeks something will snap into place and I’ll be back”, but things never pan out that way. I straight up forgot to spend the second half of my vacation days this year, and even on vacation one still has to cook and clean and do laundry and interact with other human beings. 

Ah well. The Wheel turns, the Turtle moves, and we're all a year older. Keep yourselves safe out there.