2025 in Review

2025 has been quite the year, with its own league of ups and downs. I feel like it's been a really turbulent year for me personally and professionally, though I won't go into either of those here. All of those things have been quite a big drain on my bandwidth to consume and produce media.

Thankfully, 2025 has also been a year with some highlights. I started some really cool projects (most notably, my newsletter and Snakedown), made some amazing progress in others (the blog redesign and Project Lascaux) and in which I found some new all time favourite pieces of media. So as with most years, it's a bit of a mixed bag.

As I now finally have a record of some of the things I've been up to in this year I thought it would be fun to have a look at some of the highlights of the past year, both in terms of things I worked on and the media I consumed that really stood out to me. These are not going to be balanced reviews, but rather a victory lap for the things I loved most this year. I'm going to only touch on each of the entries rather briefly, especially when talking about media I consumed since I talked about all of those in much more detail in their respective news letters. I'll link to those in case you'd like to read more.

Things consumed

Books

Man's search for meaning

Read in June

Viktor E. Frankl's incredible book about the meaning of life in the face of suffering has been quite well known in some circles. It is both a harrowing description of life in the concentration camps, and an exploration of the philosophy that came out of it which is gone on to spawn an entire branch of psychology called Existential therapy.

This book is special to me not just because it spoke to thoughts and anxieties I had, but also because it gave me answers I needed to embark on a few journeys that I'd been on the fence about for a long time. I've found that this book is very well known in some circles and not at all in others which is always funny to see. I think I'd recommend this book to anyone, especially if like me, you are prone to existential dread.

Fahrenheit 451 (F451)

read in October

Fahrenheit 451 doesn't need me to sing it's praises, and yet I will. As I said when I talked about it in my newsletter, I was quite apprehensive about this book because of it's reputation. I am so thankful that that turned out to be unfounded. Fahrenheit 451 is an amazingly written book that is nonetheless easy to follow. It is a poignant and spirited defence of depth and human connection, something that we need in today's world more than ever.

The Beautiful Decay (TBD)

Read in April

I've been a fan of Veo Corva's writing for a long time now. And by golly, they did it again. The Beautiful Decay is the sequel to their first book Books & Bone. Books & Bone being their first book was much more subdued in terms of queer representation, because at that time they were still trying to traditionally publish if I remember correctly.

Bare with me for a moment, but I'm glad that they never managed to traditionally publish that book. Because you can clearly see that with every new book they write and self-publish/crowdfund they are more and more authentic about their experience, and that sort of things shows (in a good way). I think that had they trad published their first book, we might not have gotten amazing, authentic and open books like TBD.

TBD is a beautiful tale that includes grief, openly queer relationships and characters, good worldbuilding and Corva's telltale lovable characters. Corva is agender themselves rather than transfem, but god dammit did they nail the portrayal of a trans feminine character in Persephone.

I genuinely could not put TBD down because of it's great characters, open and honest story telling and beautiful portrayal of characters that I can actually identify with, in stark contrast to most mainstream media. I think we need this type of fiction now more than ever, and I wish Corva the best in the future for both our sakes.

Sorcery and Small Magics (SASM)

read in October

Like TBD, SASM is a queer fantasy novel, and it is just exquisite. It is an absolutely delightful gay romance with some great neurodivergent and trans representation. The characters don't explicitly labelled as having ADHD and Autism respectively, and I actually like that, but I will eat my hat if they weren't written that way. The writing is beautiful, the characters are three dimensional, side characters have their own wants, desires and agency beyond what they mean to the main characters and the worldbuilding is magnificently well thought out. This is the Doocy's first book and it just blows many "veterans" out of the water. I honestly cannot wait what they produce next, or recommend this book highly enough.

Movies & TV

Game Changer (GC) & Make Some Noise (MSN)

Discussed in June

I'm lumping GC and MSN into the same section because they are both Dropout.tv shows that I've come to love for very similar reasons this year. Both GC and MSN are very improvisational in nature, and while improv can be somewhat hit or miss usually, I think the folks at dropout somehow manage to knock it out of the park almost every single time.

The conceit of Game Changer is that the rules of the game change every episode. The hose Sam Reich is just incredibly charismatic. I love seeing how he really highlights the contestants on his show and how he clearly tries to help them shine instead of trying to hog the spotlight.

But what really elevates the Dropout shows for me above others, is that they very clearly love and take care of the people on the show. Even though GC has a bit of a reputation for basically being Sam Reich's torture play ground, I think it is very obvious that all the fun had on camera is in good nature.

In a world where nothing feels safe to enjoy because any kind of scandal can come out at any time ruining my enjoyment of something, it feels so refreshing to have something where a lot of care and attention gets put not just into the production, but also the people running the production.

Game Changer and Make some Noise have quickly become some of my favourite comfort shows and I hope they continue doing what they are doing for a long time yet.

12 Angry Men

Discussed in May

I am not a film nerd, so I have no idea how well known this film is, but my god, did I love it. TAM is a 1957 black and white film about 12 jurors discussing whether to convict or acquit a boy accused of murder. The film starts out with all but one of them wanting to convict, and since the vote has to be unanimous this turns into much deliberation and rehashing of the evidence.

The film is shot almost (if not entirely) exclusively in 2 rooms: the room where the jurors deliberate and the adjoining lavatories. By today's standards it really moves at a snail's pace. The shots are much longer, there are much fewer camera angles there are barely if any special effects. All of this puts all of the focus of the movie on the dialogue and it does excellent with that spotlight.

What I love most of all about this movie, is that it convinced me that being old or new isn't a good criticism. I think 12 angry men holds up incredibly well even my more modern standards, and I love it for that. It is a piece of timeless cinema I'd happily recommend to anyone.

Games

I've played plenty of games this year, however thinking back to them, there were only a few that really stood out to me. There are the odd replays here and there like Celeste and CrossCode, a few demos here and there, and mechanical bite sized games like BALL X PIT and Balatro for the odd dead moment, but I had honestly forgotten about them until I looked at my steam wrapped for the year. However, there were definitely also some highlights. They were, in no particular order: Slay the Princess (StP), Expedition 33 (E33) , and Baldur's Gate 3 (BG3).

Slay the Princess

Discussed in June

I'm not usually one for horror, which is why I originally left StP by the wayside when it came out. However, when the YouTuber SulMatul did a live stream of the game I got completely sucked into the game. In fact I liked it so much that my first ever atrsy-fartsy media analysis was on that game. The writing of it was just so... dripping with atmosphere (as well as several other icky liquids).

I feel like I've seen most of what StP has to offer for the time being, but I still love it dearly. It is one of those things that I might go back to from time to time when I want writing inspiration. The game is subtle when it wants to be, and gorey and bombastic when it matters. The characters, descriptions and dialogue are written with such a deft touch and the performances are some of the best I've ever seen. I feel like there is so much to learn from. I feel like many people, myself included could find much worse works to draw inspiration from.

Expedition 33

Discussed in May

E33 has certainly been this year's darling in terms of gaming, and for good reason. It's art and graphics are stunning, the music is so beautiful that it's entered my regular rotation for writing music (quite a high bar for me) and the gameplay is an almost flawless execution of the JRPG tropes it chooses to indulge in.

E33 is just damn fun to play. It's that kind of rare game with a low floor (you can absolutely drop the difficulty and just bulldoze your way through the game if you don't care about the combat), as well as a very high skill ceiling (you can do some truly ridiculous things if you know the right buffs to rub together and learn the parry timings). People have remarked before me that E33 did not invent any of the mechanics it uses, but does execute them nearly flawlessly. I think it is one of the best examples about how originality can come from execution instead of "new ideas" as I discussed in Originality not required.

But those are all the things that merely make E33 a good game. What truly stets it apart from the rest, is, as it is so often in my opinion, the writing. The writing in E33 is unlike anything we've seen in a game of it's magnitude. I honestly can't name another piece of audiovisual media that has been this widely enjoyed while at the same time being this open and honest about being emotional.

E33 tackles themes of grief, death, legacy and family and does all of those expertly and with compassion for it's characters from the word go. I especially want to give it props for extending that emotionality to it's male protagonists as well. All too often the only emotions male protagonists are allowed to feel on screen are some linear combination of anger and stoic heroism, whereas E33 really lets it's characters feel fear, loss, anxiety and grief and gives those emotions the space they deserve.

E33 is one of those games that I think you can best enter knowing nothing about it, so I won't go into more detail here, but seriously, it is not cut from the same cloth as many other mainstream pieces of media.

Baldur's Gate 3

Discussed in November

This year I finally joined the rest of civilisation and played Baldur's Gate 3. I think it took me this long precisely because I expected to love it as much as I did. I have a nasty habit of putting off consuming media I think I'll really like because I "want to have the bandwidth to really appreciate it" which often leads to me putting off things I love.

BG3 is something that I knew I'd love. I've loved similar games in the past from Larian Studios, I love a good cRPG, and the praise for BG3 from the start of it's release has been quite positive to say the least. For example, this is the game that was so universally loved after it's release that a AAA game industry bozo went on twitter to tell the world not to expect this level of quality from other studios. So much for market competition being the driver of quality I guess.

In any case, BG3 is massive. It is the only game I know that I think deserves it 100+ GB install size. It's fully voice acted, the writing is deep and varied, the performances are great, and the amount of choices you can make in the game mean that I feel like I've barely scratched the surface with my one playthrough (which clocked in at 70+ hours).

The game is so large that I don't feel very qualified to talk about it in more detail, there is just so much stuff there. I waited a long time to go through it, and I wish I hadn't. All I can say is well done to Larian, god speed on the next journey, and go play it to anyone that might be vaguely interested in it and hasn't yet. It is truly something special.

Things made

Project Lascaux

Looking back, I think Project Lascaux (PL) is the thing I worked on the most this year. Sadly, it still isn't finished, which means that I still don't want to talk about it in too much detail. Like I talked about in my October newsletter this year talking in too much detail about creative works in progress tends to kill my motivation somewhat. I realise this is a bit of a pity, but sometimes these are the things that the muses demand of us, and I don't want to lose steam so close to the end. I will definitely do a big retrospective on it when it is finished, but you will have to wait until then. If that really bothers you please send any complaints to apollo@olympus.gr, I don't make the rules.

That said, PL has seen a tremendous amount of progress this year, as well as evolving in scope some what. I think it is the better for it. I'm incredibly happy with where it is at right now. PL has been a hard but incredibly rewarding journey. It's been the biggest writing project I've undertaken to date, and in that it has helped me grow as a writer. It has also given me the opportunity to work with incredibly talented people, such as editors, translators and artists, and I am so thankful for that privilege.

Even though the creative part of PL is starting to near the finish line, there is still plenty to do and figure out. Unfortunately I am now having to start wading into the boring and tedious parts of creative projects, mostly to do with various kinds of administration, but I'm trying not to let that deter me. I'm telling myself that the hard part is already done. That might turn out not to be the case, but I'm choosing to remain wilfully ignorant on that subject for now to keep my motivation up.

Snakedown

Snakedown, for those who might need a reminder, is the python API documentation tool I'm building so that I can use zola to build my Python documentation because I get very frustrated with the current solutions. The idea is that almost all documentation hosted online is just a static website and that modern static site generators like Zola (which I also use to host this site) have a much better user experience than for example Sphinx. However, one of the major reasons I can't use Zola for hosting my documentation is that it doesn't do API docs generation, which is quite important for software documentation.

So the idea currently for snakedown is to use the rust based Python Parser used by for example ruff to be able to parse the Python code and generate the API docs in a format that Zola can work with. From there you should just be able to use Zola (at least, that's the idea!)

I started this back June of this year, and I'm honestly quite pleased with the state it's in after just 6 months. It is a hobby project that I have to work on in my free time, so the progress is a bit stop and start. In the time that I've been sitting on the idea there have been months that I haven't been able to work on it. That's just kinda how it goes with small open source projects like this.

I originally thought that doing the parsing would be the most difficult but so far that's actually not been the case. Even though the API can be a bit gnarly (mostly because of how Python is defined) but once I was able to wrap my head around that I was able to work with it all fairly efficiently.

Things like doing the linking so far, have been harder, because I have to do more original work. Finding a good way to store the data in a way that makes everything accessible when the engine needs it. Originally I tried to keep everything in the same structure as the package we were parsing, but I realised that that would add so much complexity in terms of being able to find things when rendering and verifying links that I decided to backpedal on that.

Instead I've moved towards a more flat structure of just giving each individual object it's own page and path so that searching for things becomes much easier. This is actually how Sphinx (the thing I'm trying to replace) also does things and I guess now I know why! That just goes to show again that even if you're trying to build "A better X" it's still useful and important to learn from the things that X does. There may be reasons for why it does things the way it does than you were aware of!

I wouldn't call it really ready for use yet, as the internal linking doesn't work yet, (although we're getting pretty close!) and I definitely want to make a usable theme for zola to go with it. As I like to say, make sure to nail the basics first!

I've also started to really appreciate using snakedown as a playground for dev practices. At work, under the pressure of deadlines, it's easy to let best practices fall by the wayside, especially if you're working with colleagues that disagree what the best practices should look like.

As I'm starting to become more and more senior in my career, people are starting to look towards me more and more for opinions on the right way to do things. It can be hard to remember what things are supposed to look like and what the pros and cons of a particular way or working is especially under the pressure of said deadlines and colleagues.

I must say I've been surprised by how much I've started to appreciate this way of working. I know that working with others will always require a degree of compromise, and that's fine, but there is also a very particular pleasure in being able to work the way you like it, and experiment with different ways of doing things. I'd say it's somewhat similar to the pros and cons of living by yourself. You get to do everything the way you like it, but on the flip side, if you don't do it, then it doesn't happen.

Snakedown has helped me grow as a maintainer I think, and I'm quite happy with that, whether I get to a usable product or not. Of course I hope so, because it is a project I started because I wanted to solve a particular problem, and I hope it will, but even just as a learning project I've very much enjoyed it.

This blog

This blog has been a little neglected over the past few years. Even though it wasn't quite the nearly-year-long hiatus that 2024 was, I still only wrote one blog post: the Slay the Princess post. While I do still really like that post, it is a bit of a shame that the blog hasn't seen that much action.

This has various reasons. One one being that 2025 was simply a very chaotic year for me, both personally and professionally. It pulled me in many different directions at times, leaving me with limited bandwidth overall. I don't really think this is avoidable while I have my day job to contend with, and that isn't changing any time soon.

What is a genuine achievement in that regard is that I haven't started resenting the blog yet. That might sound like a silly thing to call an achievement, but as someone that has a real tendency to invent stress and pressure out of thin air, that's always a danger lurking around the corner with projects like this. It means that I've been able to give myself enough space to not get stressed about writing for the blog. WHile it does mean that the blog might not see updates as often as I'd like, it does mean that the blog will continue to keep existing, so in the long run, it's definitely a plus point!

Another reason that the blog has not seen many updates is that I've just felt very burnt out on the stuff I usually talk about here: tech, work, advice, etc. etc. I've had many frustrations at work both technical and non-technical and I don't find that to be a good headspace for writing. I don't want to write blogs here in anger, because while it might feel good at the moment, its never something I'm happy with looking back.

Similarly, (and this has been the case both at and off work) the state of AI and tech at the moment is the most exhausting I have ever experienced it, which is really saying something. I just so resent the way that "AI" taints absolutely everything at the moment, more than undoing pretty much all the advances we've collectively made in the last few decades to combat climate challenge, and all for no tangible benefit besides soothing the C-suite's FOMO. I don't want to turn this into an AI rant post, so I'll leave it at that, but this really has put a damper on my motivation to write about anything tech adjacent.

This is probably at least part of why I turned to other topics to write about, like media and my newsletter (which I'll talk about in the next section). I'm not sure where I'll focus my efforts going forward with the blog. Perhaps after this whole AI shitstorm dies down a little bit and I finish other projects I'll get back to the regular kind of content. I do definitely intend to return to the blog more consistently at some point.

The final reason that I've also been working very hard this year on other projects, such a Project Lascaux and Snakedown, and I only have so much creative energy. It's easy to forget (at least for me), but time and energy aren't the only limited resource that go into making something like this. I like having multiple projects to work on, so that I can pick and choose a bit what to work on as my fancy strikes me, even if it means that the individual projects progress slower.

The upside of it being something independent that I don't earn money on, is that I can just leave it until the fancy strikes me again. My interest in things always comes in waves so I'm sure there will be something again in the future that will make me come back. Hopefully you're looking forward to that as much as I am.

The media newsletter

In case you didn't know yet, this year I started a monthly newsletter on my Ko-Fi page, where I talk about all the media I've consumed (mostly books, games, movies and TV shows), as well as some of the projects I've been working on. It is also free and available for anyone, so you don't have to donate to read it ;)

I must say that I've come to love it much more than I originally expected. Usually I really struggle to keep a consistent schedule with stuff like this, and once a month certainly isn't high output compared to some full time content creators, but I've found it to be about the most that is sustainable for me.

I'd personally rather think twice and speak once, which means that I often struggle to keep a consistent output. I'd rather just say nothing if I'm not sure, instead of just running my mouth, and that means that the blog output can be sparse. Even when I've already figured out my stance, it can still be a lot of work to polish it to the degree that I'm happy to put it out there. The newsletter has been a nice break from that attitude without having to abandon it completely.

I am also surprised at how much I've come to enjoy media analysis and criticism over all. Sometimes when I talk about this letter I joke about how much I hated doing book reports while I was in school, while now I'm basically doing them just for fun.

It has also really enhanced my enjoyment of the media that I consume. I think that in a similar way that photography used to help me appreciate the beauty in the everyday environments around me, doing this newsletter has given me an incentive to pay much closer attention to the media I interact with. Trying to articulate what I do and don't like about something has helped me cultivate much more of my aesthetic taste as well.

Just as with photography, I don't have any aspirations of becoming a very serious critic that people need to pay attention to, but I do really enjoy doing it for its own sake. It's an opportunity to slow down, which, if you hadn't noticed from the title of the blog yet, I think is quite a good thing.

Speaking of the blog, I think in a certain way the newsletter is quite similar to the blog in that I just do it for myself. Of course I want other people to read and enjoy it, but I'm taking it at my own pace, and doing in a way that I enjoy, and that is the most important.

And that's it! 2025 has been one hell of a year, and while it did have some good highlights, I'm personally glad to see it go. I'm hoping that 2026 will be a bit calmer for all of us. For myself in particular I'd love to use that calm to focus on finishing (and probably starting) projects. Here's to a creative and fulfilling 2026!