2025 on fournm

2025 - Year in Review, Books

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I hinted at this one, but for as much fun as I’ve had reading things this past year, the idea of writing about everything is… daunting, to say the least. It isn’t like I didn’t read a lot, once you factor in manga, in 2024. Like, I read the 107ish volumes of One Piece that were out at the time, I read all of Naruto, My Hero Academia, Frieren, The Case Study of Vanitas, and so on. On top of it, I got in the entire Imperial Radch main trilogy, The Locked Tomb series, started on The Expanse and Terra Ignota, and a few standalone novels. I mean, while the “list” only had 70 entries on it or so, those 70 entries represented like 200 books! I still wrote a lot about almost all of it, which was a great exercise in just parsing out my thoughts about all of those various books and making sure I still know how to retain anything, you know?

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2025 - Year in Review, Shows

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m bad at movies, but shows? I can watch an episode of a show while falling asleep, or while eating dinner, or … any number of other smaller tasks. Much easier! Even if you watch a movie-length number of episodes at once, well, that’s still easier to start and stop than pausing a movie and trying to not lose your place. I’m going to be a lot more loose with spoilers here than anywhere else, so if you see a series mentioned at the start of a paragraph and DO NOT WANT SPOILERS for it, skip that one.

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2025 - Year in Review, Movies

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t normally go super heavy on movies, and 2025 was no exception in that regard. The last time I was a regular in theaters was when Alamo Drafthouse was only a block or two away from my apartment back in Austin, which meant that it was a great date spot for dinner. As it is, I don’t really think many movies are coming out that justify current theater prices or putting up with audiences that tend to do a lot of loud phone use. Anyway, most of this was all rewatch instead of branching out into too many new films.

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2025 - Year in Review, Music

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I mostly had scrobbling working again this year! Mostly. It wasn’t perfect (like me actually remembering to upload this on the date I wrote it, cough cough), and my kids’ music tastes dramatically shifted what shows up here thanks to car listening (guess why there’s so many musicals on my list!), but yeah, I like having music stats again. I’ve been trying to make sure that I don’t get set into only listening to things from when I was a teenager, and according to ListenBrainz at least, the majority of what I went through this year was less than five years old.

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2025 - Year in Review, Games

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Alright! First post of the year in review, and it’s one of the easiest ones. I’ve also made a change to how I track things this year, which is that I broke it down by month. I like how it let me see a better idea of how my play habits changed over the year, but, well…

I didn’t play that much?

Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of fun with what I did play! I did a post about Necese, I did a post about Silksong, and I really should have done one about Monster Hunter Wilds. Short version? I legitimately think it might be the best game in the series. Is it a little easy? Sure, but at this point I’ve been playing games in the series for two decades and this isn’t the G-rank release yet. It has some of the best monster variety at launch that we’ve ever seen, some of the smoothest controls, and its gimmicks (unlike with Rise) don’t hurt the fundamentals of the series. Bringing back Little Miss Forge and Gore Magala? Fantastic. The story is a bit cheesy, but the experience of playing through it in multiplayer was incredibly smooth. Maybe the squad lobby system could be a bit more intuitive, but overall the connection and ability to drop in-and-out of hunts with friends has never been better.

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