Year in Review on fournm

2023 - A way late year in review post!

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Alright! Let’s just get these all out of the way in one big post, shall we? No need to create a bunch of backdated entries for a few years ago, and by setting that precedent now I won’t feel the need to for the OTHER years I want to backdate as well.

books

I am ashamed to say I don’t have anything recorded? I know I was reading my usual webcomics, but most other series I had been following all ended and I hadn’t picked up new ones yet. I don’t think that it’s actually possible I went through the year without reading anything of note, even if it was only one or two books, but… I guess maybe?

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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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2024 review: part 1, games

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I still do these! I’ve actually been keeping the records still, more or less, so I do intend to backdate the posts for the missing gap years. What missing gap years, future reader? Exactly. Concern yourself not. These are the games I played in 2024, ordered roughly by date of first play, except for when my notes sucked.

2024! Well, you sure weren’t a 2023 in terms of gaming. That’s not a slight against you–Armored Core 6 was rough competition. That’s probably one of my favorite games of all time now, and for something to reach that list these days is pretty imp-no, no, Fields of Mistria, wait your turn, I’m writing over here-ahem, difficult. Now for some brief thoughts!

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2024 review: part 2, books

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I should probably rename this section to “literature” or something, since it’s usually included webcomics and … ah well. Not changing it now.

It’s probably obvious, more than most of these lists, that I’ve been on a reading slump for a while. I still enjoy a good paper book, but I don’t like storing them, I don’t like carrying them, I don’t particularly love the lighting levels required to comfortably read them, etc. My Kindle Paperwhite, a first generation, hasn’t exactly kept up with the times either – micro charging instead of USB-C, gestures, etc. Comixology was a pretty big help, but then capitalism.

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2024 review: part 3, shows

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Moving right along! Shows. As a note, I did not reliably finish many! I could have absolutely done better about that, normally I did get at least a season or two.

One Piece is a delightful long running anime that I have already gushed about as a manga. I will elaborate a little bit on the filler – G-8 in particular is an arc that is so delightful I could have sworn it was canon on first watch. Not all of it is that quality, but One Piece’s structure (island to island, no direct power scaling) means that early in the series it was incredibly capable of just adding a few episodes of made up content here or there with few-to-no problems on overall pacing. As the series moves on, that stops and the more traditional “we slow down dialog and overextend run cycles” kicks in, but I still think it’s an enjoyable watch on a week-to-week basis. Megumi Ishitani, and anything she touched in regards to the show, are incredible. One Piece Fan Letter is probably my single favorite episode of anything that I saw this year, and that had some incredible competition. As far as which audio track to watch, it’s really hard to pick my favorite version of the Straw Hats. No disrespect to the incredible Yao (first Straw Hat to retire), but Franky’s English rendition is incredible, and Ian Sinclair as Brooke (or any other role he’s ever done for that matter) is unmatched. Jinbei’s Japanese voice carries more weight to it, adding to some of his already coolest scenes in the series. I really don’t think you can go wrong, but seeing as the English dub isn’t caught up, prepare to have to switch at some point.

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2024 review: part 4, movies

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Going to be honest, something had to give, and it was movies. I’m still not doing theaters (it’s not like there’s an Alamo Drafthouse around here) for a variety of reasons, and honestly, I don’t think anything came out to really make me feel like it anyway. Mostly rewatches abound.

The Clan’s Heir is a Trans Woman was … incredible. If you don’t mind some ~~well meaning~~ slurs in a very “his pronouns are she/her!” way, you’ll have a ton of fun with it.

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2024 review: part 5, music

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Last but not least, music! Since I’m actually scrobbling again (or whatever you’d like to call it for ListenBrainz instead) the list actually has SOME data. I don’t do spotify, this is what you get.

Notable callouts: City Girl’s new album dropped in December, and so did a new people you meet outside of bars. One of them had enough time to make the top 10, the other did not, and that’s tragic, but both are great.

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music, in review

Fri, 25 Dec 2020 14:14:22 -0800

Okay, so–I’ve been a Google Play Music user for the past 7 years or so, which has meant that unlike most people, I’ve not had a Spotify Wrapped. I’ve tried to use Last.fm reliably over the years, but it just takes one “I reset my phone and forgot to scrobble” to leave my trends messed up for most of the year.

But someone put together a script that builds a list based on your play music activity! This is really neat! That only goes back so far, and the 2020 numbers are just fucked (technical term) between the GPM shutdown and the pandemic. However, I’ve got a working ListenBrainz setup (and mostly local playback) going so I should be able to get good numbers for next year. I might switch to Maloja instead, since it looks pretty cool and I’m into the self-hosting thing, but finding some easy ways to make a python server accessible for as little cost as possible is… not trivial. Sigh.

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2019 books

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 10:54:22 -0800

So… Die is absolutely amazing and the end of the Wicked and the Divine was perfect and I couldn’t have pictured anything better.

Reading Homestuck again to introduce Elle to it was bizarre. Not complaining, but wow that was weird.

The Ravnica book wasn’t terrible, but ugh, the follow ups certainly were and I’m so disappointed in the direction Magic story has taken.

Going through this list though just reminds me of how many things I was reading last year have ended, which is part of why my 2020 list is looking to be so sparse so far. I’ve picked up a few books I’m really excited about, so I’ll get the opportunity to fill it out a bit more, but there’s some bittersweet feelings about it.

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2019 games

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 10:43:22 -0800

Like most years, gaming kind of was one of the main things I went through this year. In particular, though, I got on a great kick for visual novels that I found through Itch and that was a blast. Angela He’s work in particular stood out over and over, but I have to give credit for Heaven Will Be Mine starting the trend in the first place.

I do not honestly know why I was playing Pac Land. I must have lost a dare while setting up MAME. I can think of no other explanation.

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2019 movies

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 10:14:22 -0800

Similarly delayed, oh well.

Despite watching basically every other Star Wars movie during 2019 and that the end of the Skywalker Trilogy released, we’ve actually still not seen it. Last Jedi currently remains my favorite, followed by Rogue One, so from what I hear I’m very unlikely to enjoy the ending – I know Last Jedi has its problems, but I’m not up for the idea of effectively unwriting the movie out.

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2019 shows

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 10:10:22 -0800

Oops. There’s just been a lot going on so I haven’t gotten around to these, and I know they only mean much to me, but I like having them shared.

Not a whole lot of anything to comment on here, we re-watched a lot of things with the kids primarily, but Dragon Prince (which had some of the same backing as Avatar) was a delight. I’m really looking forward to seeing more of it as the story continues to develop. The new Carmen Sandiego was also fairly enjoyable, as someone who loved the old show as a kid, though our kids got a bit bored of it?

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2018 shows

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 14:01:19 -0800

Shows!

Lego Elves was surprisingly good. Little Witch Academia was adorable. She-Ra was AMAZING AMAZING AMAZING, Noelle Stevenson worked absolute magic with that reboot. Hilda was fantastic and full of Gravity Falls feelings. The Dragon Prince was a great spiritual successor to Avatar?

Look, we all know I’m lying if I say that I mostly started watching any of those with the kids. I did not.

I didn’t track web series this year, but if I had, they would have mostly been Katherine of Sky’s let plays.

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2018 movies

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 14:01:08 -0800

I want to say I didn’t watch much in the way of new movies this year, and I suppose that’s mostly true, but the year just felt so long that most of the first time watch or new movies … well, they stopped feeling that way.

Black Panther was incredible. I can’t believe it took me this long to see Only Lovers Left Alive. Oops.

terry pratchett’s going postal
partly cloudy
jak jak attack
piper
pirates of the caribbean dead men tell no tales
star wars a new hope
mulan
black panther
kiki’s delivery service
star wars the last jedi
kingsman the secret service
kingsman the golden circle
atlantis
deadpool
only lovers left alive
the forbidden kingdom
crouching tiger, hidden dragon
space jam
moana
dirty computer
hercules
pacific rim
teenage mutant ninja turtles
thor ragnarok
muppet treasure island
sherlock holmes
ponyo
porco rosso
howl’s moving castle
the sword in the stone
the foreigner
mary and the witch’s flower
castle in the sky
muppet christmas carol

2018 games

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 14:01:03 -0800

Next up, we have games. Whew, there were some really good releases in this year in addition to all the older games I finally made it around to playing (and sometimes even finishing!).

Disgaea 5 is hands down my favorite entry in the series now, at least from a mechanical standpoint. The story and characters.. well, they’ve grown on me. I did complete basically all of it other than the Baal fight, so I’m counting it as complete.

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2018 books

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 14:01:00 -0800

Here we go! To kick off the series this time, we’ve got books.

It’s a fairly short list, but also, in the past week I’ve picked up about 30 more things that I would like to read after my first trip to Powell’s City of Books.

Yes, I’m disappointed that it took me three years of living in Portland to make it there as well, but here we are.

Tales from Earthsea was my introduction to Le Guin outside of her blog, which was perhaps a strange choice. We’re entering the final year of Wicked and the Divine, and there were a lot of other good comics that I didn’t entirely get to as well.

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2017 books