2025 Year in Review
With apologies to Robb Knight, from whomst I stole the format.
General
Continuing and, indeed, accelerating the trend of the previous year, 2025 was marked by a significant amount of travel. Short trips, long trips. At times it felt like I was gone more than I was home, although the statistics don’t bear that out.
My blog is read almost exclusively by the friends who I directly link to it (thank you!) although it looks like one sentence on each place in Europe that I’ve been broke containment, for an extremely small definition of “broke containment.”
Writing
Speaking of my blog, I wrote a total of 55 posts on The Wizardly, and 7 on The Game Mage, which is more than I would have guessed before I looked. Yes, I’m counting quote-posts and unhinged one-liners. Knowing me is accepting the risk that at some point I might try to convince you that moths are butterflies of the night and that consciousness is a soup.
Also, and I mean this quite literally. Everything is a sandwich.
Travel
I took 9 trips complex enough to warrant tracking in Tripsy, which implies usually at least a hotel room was involved. Three were for work, two were to Disney World, one each to PAX Unplugged and Europe. This was the first year in a decade where PAX West happened and I wasn’t there, which I had big feelings about at the time, but change is good and life moves on.
It’s interesting to me that I only tracked 9 trips, because I think I would have estimated more. It felt like I was always traveling, though I suspect a lot of that can be accounted for by weekend trips within driving distance. I went to a lot of estate sales, which doesn’t feel like it should count, but does eat up an entire Saturday with my propensity for turning it into an excuse to visit several other stores on my way.
Media
TV
Top of mind because the series finale was less than a week ago, Stranger Things takes my top spot for the year. It’s a good show, Bront. If you’re at all nostalgic for the 80s, and haven’t seen it, you should.
The only other shows I remember watching this year were Severance, Silo, and Good Eats. Technically my fiancé and I have also been watching That 70s Show at dinner, but at roughly one or two episodes a week it’s taken all year and we’re still not through.
I’ve instituted a new policy of not watching any episodes of a show until the show has completed its finale with good reviews. This is a complicated way of having an excuse to not watch anything, because I’m not a TV person, but I’ve found over the years that if I tell people “I don’t like watching TV” they look at me like I’ve just insulted their grandmother’s gravy recipe, but if I say “I have a complicated and somewhat unreasonable rule for what TV I can watch that basically results in not watching any TV” they smile and nod and say something vaguely like “that’s interesting.”
I think because it reads more like I’m a weirdo and not like I’m making a value judgment about the amount of TV they (presumably) watch.
Movies
Pretty sure I only saw two movies in the theater last year, which is two more than my goal of zero. Companion, and The Matrix in Extended Reality.
Companion was fine. The Matrix I probably should have done a blog post about, because it was pretty cool.
It took me many years to realize that the reason I don’t like going to the movie theater is that the movies are, almost to a fault, too loud, and I do not like going loud places.
Sometimes people will try to make the case for the movie theater as an experience that a person might enjoy, and what that tells me is that we are very different people. I can think of almost nothing I would enjoy less.
Games
I’m still playing World of Warcraft weekly on Wednesdays with my old guild master, even though we’re not even the same faction anymore. Years of improvements to WoW’s cross-faction play mean that I can be Horde and he can be Alliance and it almost never matters, which is a huge improvement. Say what you will about lore, an MMO lives or dies by my ability to have fun with my friends.
WoW aside, the only other game I put a significant amount of time into was Dune Awakening, which I posted about over on The Game Mage. 150 hours, and I still don’t think I recommend it.
My lack of progress on video games came down to Dune Awakening sucking up a vast number of available hours, and getting real serious about how I spend my leisure time in ways that look a lot less like leisure. I shipped more projects than I ever have before in my life, thanks in large part to AI automating the boring parts. Which necessitated getting way more serious about intentional leisure heading into the new year.
Music
According to Apple Music my top artists of 2025 were:
- The Weeknd
- The Dear Hunter
- Marianas Trench
- Daft Punk
- Ferry Corsten
- Coheed and Cambria
- Above & Beyond
- Christopher Tin
- New Kids on the Block
- Taylor Swift
Over the next two years my goal is to be completely off all streaming services, and Apple Music is the last bastion. I’ve started collecting physical CDs again, originally planning to listen to them in that format, but I’ve come to realize that being able to cast them to various devices is too useful. So over the last few weeks I’ve used a spare iMac to rip all my physical media to FLAC.
It’s been fun digging through the music bins at Half Price Books, and I recently ordered the Stranger Things soundtracks from Bull Moose with the intention of making some period-appropriate MiniDiscs to listen to when I travel.
Books
For all that I don’t watch TV or movies, I do still manage to get quite a bit read. Not as many books as some people I know, more than many others, and countless blogs, essays, and papers that I don’t track in any way that would generate statistics.
I try to keep my bookshelf as accurate and up to date as I can, limited only by books that aren’t in the database that I’m too lazy to add.
The broad trend of my reading for the year can be described as two very different themes.
- Theme #1 – Trashy omegaverse shifter smut.
- Theme #2 – Mid-century office worker praxis.
If that doesn’t fully describe my tastes I don’t know what would.
Projects
The first third of the year was given over to WizardHQ, a project that took up significant time but mostly didn’t work out. I’ve started drafting a postmortem about that, but the TL;DR is that I eventually realized it would need a level of time investment that I couldn’t provide while also continuing on with other projects, so I’ve let it quietly fade. I still stand by everything I was trying to do there, and I think it was a good idea. But it needs a continual investment of energy that I don’t think I can provide.
The second third of the year was given over to LimeTools, an experiment in letting Claude Code build a SaaS, which I used to run Line Entertainment stuff at PAX Unplugged. It worked amazingly well! And Claude Code has only gotten more capable since I built it. I’m not entirely sure what the next step for this project is. Even under ideal circumstances it’s never going to pay for itself. I have other ideas for things to try as a Line Entertainer. But it’s cool, so I might keep it around for another year and see what happens.
The third third of the year was half me traveling so much that I didn’t do any projects, and half starting to lay the foundation for next year’s projects. I’ve been learning Godot, something I probably should be talking more about over on The Game Mage. I completed simple clones of both Flappy Bird and Angry Birds as part of a Udemy training course on 2D game design, and hope to finish the overall course in the first third of 2026.
Miscellanea
- I started to crochet again, especially on meetings where I need to focus and keep my hands busy. My goal is to complete one (1) gift-worthy blanket in 2026.
- I’ve gotten out of Lorcana. It was cool, and I enjoyed my time with it, but it became the dominant consumer of my dedicated hobby time to the exclusion of all else, and is probably the main reason I didn’t hit any of my Warhammer goals.
- I’m not entirely out of MTG, but I’ve strictly curtailed it to the cultivation of a limited number of sets in a limited number of ways, and anticipate time spent on MTG driving towards zero by roughly the second third of 2026.