Some Good Stuff in 2025

posted

I'm trying to get into a habit of reflecting on some good stuff from the past year at the end of the year; I did it last year and the year before, at least. It continues to be hard to get into the mood to think about good things while the world's burning, jack-booted gestapo are shooting fellow citizens, and my entire industry has been brain-rotted by the great "AI" scam, but, you know, gotta try to look on the bright side.

Games

I definitely had a lot less time to play video games this year; alas life happens. Some things I enjoyed:

Avowed

Avowed is a new first-person RPG from Obsidian Entertainment, set in the same universe as Pillars of Eternity (which, fun fact, I Kickstarted... 13 years ago...). It plays a lot more like a Bethesda RPG1 than like any of the other PoE games. It was nice and short and pretty well-designed.

The Outer Worlds 2

The original Outer Worlds was a great game in 2019 that combined classic Obsidian RPG gameplay with the kind of lighthearted retro-futuristic sci-fi that I might associate more with Futurama than anything else. The Outer Worlds 2 is this year's sequel, which plays a lot more like Avowed than the original Outer Worlds. I'm actually still playing it (only get a couple of hours a week), and I'm enjoying it. I'm going to say that Tristan is my favorite shipmate so far.

DOOM: The Dark Ages

DOOM: The Dark Ages is definitely my least favorite of the new "fast Doom" games (I think I'd say Doom Eternal, then Doom 2016, then Doom TDA), but it was still fun. Shooting demons while listening to metal has been a mainstay of gaming for over 30 years now for a reason...

Wolfenstein: The New Order / Wolfenstein II

For some reason, I thought it would be fun to play some video games where you successfully fight Nazis this year. Not sure what in the world would put me in that mood. Anyhow, MachineGames soft-rebooted the Wolfenstein franchise in 2014. These games are each about twice as long as they ought to be, but they do give you the opportunity to shoot lots of Nazis in a "what if the Axis won WW2" alternate history that actually feels frighteningly plausible.

Movies

I did not watch many movies in 2025. Some rapid-fire notes:

The Wild Robot (2024)
Tried to watch this with my son on TV. I thought it was lovely, but he got bored after about 20 minutes. Kids these days!
Thunderbolts (2025)
I guess this is the best new Marvel movie in the last few years, but that's a low bar. Definitely a C movie, and really only tolerable because I like David Harbour.
Fly Me to the Moon (2024)
Watched this romantic comedy (on Apple TV+2) with my wife in November. It's cute, but you can't possibly convince me that Channing Tatum (a.k.a the guy from Magic Mike) is an engineer.
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999)
I watched this for the first time this year. That run of big-budget Shakespeare adaptations in the 90's really was something, huh? This has Michelle Pfeiffer3, Stanley Tucci, Calista Flockheart4, Anna Friel5, a very young Dominic West6, Sophia Marceau, and fucking Christian Bale7 in it. None of them are particularly good Shakespearean actors, but, still, how did this thing get made?

Will 2026 be the year I go back to the movie theater? Time will tell...

Television

Alien: Earth

I'm pretty sure that this show was made just for me. I'm on-record that I think Legion is the only good Marvel TV show, and now you tell me that Noah Hawley is doing a new TV show? Based on Alien (one of the few perfect ★★★★★ films ever made), and starring (among others) Timothy Olyphant? Seriously, I think someone may have been looking at my specific viewing history during this pitch.

The show got lost in the weeds a few times, but was still fantastically weird.

Murderbot

The Murderbot Diaries is an extremely popular series of comedy/science fiction novellas by by Texan author Martha Wells. I read and enjoyed them last year, and this year Apple TV2 did a pretty good adaptation of most of the first book. They change some details, but do a great job of capturing the "vibe" of the books. I'm looking forward to seeing how well they adapt the rest of the books!

Loudermilk

This dramedy starring Ron Livingson came out in 2017, but I never heard anything about it until Netflix randomly recommended it to me this year. I feel like most of the time television examines the after-effects of addiction, it's either a brief montage followed by the afflicted character avoiding all responsibility8, or it's an excuse for some kind of villainy. Loudermilk is a character-driven drama showing where consequences went.

Callout: season 3 features Lissie as a dramatized version of herself, which is pretty cool.

Poker Face

What if you remade Columbo, but instead of Peter Falk, you cast Natasha Lyonne? Well, that's what this show is. I know, everyone got into it a few years ago, but it ended in 2025, so it still counts. A rare show where they ended it at a great place.

Books

A Memory Called Empire / A Desolation Called Peace

This duology by Arkady Martine is set in a very distinct science fiction universe, inspired by the combination of the Aztec Empire, Byzantium, and Armenia, where the most important form of mass communication is... poetry. These books both won Hugo Awards, and obviously deserved it. You probably already read them if you're reading this blog, but if you didn't, you should.

Elizabeth Bear's White Space Series

I read Ancestral Night, Machine, and the Folded Sky all in a row this year, by Elizabeth Bear. Pretty good space opera, although I kind of felt like all three books' narrators were the same character.

Dragon's Egg

Dragon's Egg came out in 1980, but I read it for the first time this year. It's set on the surface of a neutron star, where a two-dimensional civilization develops under the intense gravity and magnetic field conditions. You can definitely tell that it was written by someone with a PhD in physics.

The Revisionaries

I've been a fan of A.R. Moxon's newsletter the Reframe for a few years. It's got some "resistance lib" vibe to it, and obviously you can't Substack your way out of fascism, but he has a good way of framing the terrible times we live in in a very clear way. Anyhow, he wrote a book a few years ago called The Revisionaries. It's a pretty trippy book, jumping across multiple universes and timelines, but I found it fascinating

Consumer Goods

As always, I have mixed feelings about the value of retail therapy, but I'll throw out some things I bought and liked this year.

Fujifilm X-E5

I switched to Fuji for my photography hobby a few years ago, going to an X-T4. The X-T4 is still a great camera, but I've never been a huge fan of the SLR-style body, and it has a lot of things (like a fully-articulated display, and dual card slots) that I never use. The Fujifilm X-E5 came out this year, and it's everything I ever wanted:

  • The same 40MP X-Trans sensor as the X-T5
  • Stabilization at least as good as the X-T4
  • More buttons and controls on the body than an X-E4

So, I sold my X-T4 and bought an X-E5. And I've been super-happy with it! All of my lenses stand up to the 40MP sensor, and the smaller, lighter, simpler camera is a joy to use. My only regret is that it still has a big dumb LCD screen on the back which I never use, but I'm not about to spend the money on an X-Pro 3...

Goodr Sunglasses

I was a backer of the original Sunski Sunglasses Kickstarter Campaign back in 2014, and have worn Sunskis since then. The original Sunskis are fun and were well-made. Unfortunately, in the intervening 11 years, Sunski has become a brand that's... not for me:

  • The designs are boring. Every pair of sunglasses is now brown or black
  • The materials aren't as good. I've had a bunch of mechanical failures on new sunglasses, and the lenses are somehow even worse than the cheap plastic of the original Kickstarter glasses
  • The glasses are mostly too small. They've launched a couple of full-size lines (like Couloir) that fit, but most of the glasses they've released in the last few years are much smaller than the original Wayfarer style.
  • They're so expensive! The original Kickstarter was $309, but the current Wayfarer-style Headlands are $58!

Anyhow, this year on a recommendation from a friend I got some sunglasses from goodr instead. They're great! They come in fun colors and shapes! There are multiple designs that fit larger heads10! They're cheap ($30-$40/pair, typically)! I strongly recommend.

  1. Think Skyrim; Obsidian's biggest commercial success was Fallout: New Vegas, which was a collaboration with Bethesda ↩

  2. Formerly known as Apple TV+ ↩ ↩2

  3. Catwoman ↩

  4. Ally McBeal ↩

  5. Best known in this house as Chuck from Pushing Daisies ↩

  6. Jimmy from The Wire ↩

  7. Batman, but not the same Batman that had Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman ↩

  8. See, for example, Californication. Hank Moody was clearly both an alcoholic and a sex addict; he went to rehab for two episodes and generally any consequences of his many many bad actions were treated as comedic fare. ↩

  9. $40.80 with inflation ↩

  10. I have some Retro-G's which are super-comfy but my wife hates because she thinks they make me look like a 70's porno actor, and some unoffensive BFGs ↩

Want to comment on this? How about we talk on Mastodon instead? mastodon logo Share on Mastodon