2025 in Review

You can find full reviews for all the books here in my #books tag! As usual, an asterisk (*) means I especially recommend them.

1. The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (*)
2. Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within by Jane Jensen (*)
3. Mario and the Magician and Other Stories by Thomas Mann
4. Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come by TJ Clark (*)
5. The Saucerian by Gabriel McKee (*)
6. Comedy Against Work by Madeline Lane-McKinley
7. A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes
8. The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov
9. Sleep Has His House by Anna Kavan (*)
10. We Always Treat Women Too Well by Raymond Queneau (*)
11. A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
12. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost by Ismail Kadare (*)
13. Nosferatu The Vampyre by Paul Monette
14. Swann's Way by Marcel Proust (*)
15. Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser (*)
16. Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel (*)
17. Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed (*)
18. A Pictorial Tour of Unarius by the Unarius Educational Foundation
19. Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss
20. The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume I by Peter Weiss (*)
21. Women's Rites by Jeanne de Berg
22. Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard
23. Vineland by Thomas Pynchon (*)
24. Inland Empire by Melissa Anderson
25. Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon (*)
26. The Planetarium by Nathalie Sarraute (*)
27. The National Telepathy by Roque Larraquy (*)
28. A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector
29. The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada
30. Please Kill Me by Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil (*)
31. Berlin Stories by Robert Walser
32. Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust

That's a lot of stars... and even then I had to be pretty strict on enjoyment criteria to not just like... star everything haha. It was a really good year for reading (my thirst for large modernist tomes remains voluminous) and the only book that didn't really work for me as much as I wanted it to was Comedy Against Work.

I read a combination of fiction and nonfiction that I thought would get me in the stylistic and thematic headspace for novel 3 (the Mann short story collection, Beyond Black, The Saucerian, A Pictorial Tour of Unarius, Heaven on Earth and A Lover's Discourse... phew!) with other books that just kind of caught my fancy. I cracked three massive modernist projects: The Man Without Qualities, The Aesthetics of Resistance and In Search of Lost Time, and finished one of them. I also read a lot of stuff in translation. Roque Larraquy's The National Telepathy was a total surprise that lived up to the crazy pitch, and my main rec from this year if anyone asks me for a random read. It was, of course, an uncharacteristically lively year for Pynchonians and I found the two relevant works of his I read, Vineland, loosely adapted to film, and Shadow Ticket, his new one, to be vivid, hilarious, and politically relatable books for "the current moment" (or forever), whether they're set in 1985 or 1932.

I have a feeling Lanark is going to be the next big book I try to conquer, but I also have The House on Via Gemito as well as Doctor Faustus, as loath as I am to deplete the number of "major" Mann works I have left. I'll continue on to Volume 2 of The Aesthetics of Resistance and Volume 3 of In Search of Lost Time eventually, but I kind of need a break from serial works that require you to remember a ton of people lol. I have some Bernhard novellas and the reprint of Robert Gluck's Jack the Modernist that I got from my partner lying around for immediate reading.

The full list of gigs I went to this year with sample tracks of the music is in my #gigs tag. But here are some highlights:

It was amazing to start off the year with a Spirit of the Beehive gig, a longterm fav band of mine. Erotic Secrets of Pompeii was one of those bands I went to go see on the strength of the name and a single, but it was an amazing night. Their latest full album is also out now and worth checking out! DITZ was the highlight of the core. festival billing for me. OSEES over the summer was also a great night and fantastic way to check off a bucket list band. Bikini Body, Negative Blast and Party Dozen were all new-to-me bands that blew me away.

As for new music I didn't get to go see, Guerilla Toss returned with a new album, and I'm praying for UK tour dates next year. The incredible P.E. (featuring ex-members of Pill), also returned with a new one, but since it's their "last" I'm not sure they're touring (RIP). I have been listening to Media Puzzle, Greg Wheeler and the Poly Mall Cops, Selfish Teammate, Segundos Auxilios, Self Improvement and Good Ramen nonstop thanks to recs from the see/saw newsletter. I'm also looking forward to Earth Tongue and Together Pangea (who I will forever regret skipping a UK gig back in 2015) putting out new stuff in the new year.

I still love watching movies in Zone every week. It's crazy it's been running for over five years now, basically uninterrupted. This year I had a pretty clear list of top 10 new watches that came together in my mind, plus 5 I wanted to give an honorable mention. You can see the list here. It's pretty evenly split between ones I first watched in Zone and watched on my own or with Stephen.

I've been thinking a lot about Slacker for how it presents a world where almost everyone has their own intellectual or creative project going on, but also the sense in which that is a world of precarity and threat at the same time, Excalibur in terms of theatricality and melodrama, and To Live and Die in LA for just... well... going for it. Alligator meanwhile is just a huge winner in terms of giving you exactly what you want from a film about a giant alligator eating people. I also really loved the intensity and unconventional animation style of 100 Meters. And like I would be remiss not to mention the new Pynchon novel, it was also exciting to see another master return to full length films with Koji Shiraishi's Kinki.

In April, Domino: Declassified dropped. For this jam, I worked with Freya on IT CAME FROM THE ORGONE CHAMBER, a dual-perspective visual novel that was influenced by the look of old PC-88 text games like Mirrors and gave me the chance to use the cool retro text game-y engine Freya develops, Videotome. Given the theme of aliens and the unknown, plus having the music video for Cloudbusting on my mind, we decided the plot would be something like, how weird would it be to go meet someone you were dating's parents and one of them is like, a hardcore orgone believer or something. I don't want to give away much more of the plot from there except to say that I wrote the hapless girlfriend who's embarrassed by her weirdo father side of things. It was really fun! I liked passing scenes back and forth with Freya and figuring out what was going to happen, plus I think Videotome is a really great looking and easy to use engine too.

And then in October the games for the appropriately-spooky Boneyard Jam were revealed. For this one I tried making a ridiculously ambitious combination visual novel and janky powerwashing simulator parody that was exploring some ideas about utopia and the role of culture that had been kicking around in my head, especially with being exposed to the joyously bonkers work of Charles Fourier. The result is ECART ABSOLU: Domino X: A New Soap. Stephen helped me a lot with Godot dev and programming since this was my first time working in 3D. We also both got sick towards the end of it which explains a lot of the slapdash elements in the final product that might have been quick fixes had we had a little more time or been less foggybrained. I think it's cool how it turned out, but I also totally wore myself out in the process, and unlike the Videotome game I made with Freya, I think it has some clear limitations and bugs. Still, I put a lot of personal passion and interest into it. I might make a cleaned up and web-embeddable version in the new year. Please give it a shot!

My resolutions for 2025 were to refurbish my website by changing up the formatting and adding RSS, practice skating more, practice drawing more, and do a collab for at least one Domino Club project, since I always felt a little jealous of what other people could accomplish and the fun they seemed to have collabing.

For the first one, I didn't do a ton of work on my main website, but I did totally revamp this blog with Strawberry Starter and made it RSS compatible. I've taken the slightly lazy solution of linking to this site as a RSS feed for my work, since whenever I add something new there I'm likely to post about it here, and I'm thinking of transitioning that site to more of a static writing portfolio than blog.

I'm still not, like, good at skating lol. I got to practice a bit when it was nice out this summer but I think I need a place that is both smoother and has less foot traffic than the street in front of our flat to really improve. It's hard because I also don't really want to practice when it's rainy or cold, which, well, Scotland, lol. But I did give it a good try.

Regular drawing nites with Stephen (and then we go out to a pub after!), really helped me to start getting a handle back on my drawing skills this year. I enjoy doodling a lot more, feel like I've visibly improved a bit, and also was able to draw all the sprites for our Domino X project. We're going to try to keep this up in 2026 as well!

And I exceeded my final goal, both of my Domino Club games were collabs! But still, they kind of felt in both cases that they got away from me a bit with the scope of the writing and came down to the wire anyways. Ha Ha. Oh well, it was still a fun experience even if it wasn't like, yay half the work, or I don't have to do the tricky parts.

So what are my resolutions for the new year?

For one, I'd like to try to post something in the #zines tag I added at least once every other week. While I love slinging zines as Plaintext Distro and volunteering at the Zine library, I have a growing stack of zines I've acquired in purchases or trades at events, and I want to highlight some of the cooler things that are out there.

And second, a big one for my long-term sanity, is to set aside time to look for and apply to new jobs once a week. I gotta do it, because I think it's wearing down my ability to do anything else to stay in my current job.

Third, and this may be a risky one to make, but I do want to try to get to a beginning-to-end draft of Novel 3 by the end of the year. I've been dreaming and researching a lot, but I still don't have a complete throughline yet. I feel like this will require making sure I set aside regular time for writing and thinking of writing. Which leads into the next one...

Finally, kind of a counter-intuitive goal, but I want to skip a Domino Club jam this year. Or at least skip making something new for one, since I still love playing what everyone makes and participating in the awards show. But there have now been 10 jams and I've made something for every single one! I always talk about how I love the flexibility of the group, how people can make stuff as they feel or not, and now it's time for me to put my money where my mouth is, I think, since I really want to make serious headway on Novel 3 this year.