I wanted to catalogue much of the art I have engaged with in the past year. I tried to keep this brief but then I started writing about Neon White and suddenly words starting flowing and here we are!

Movies

I don’t remember when exactly I watched them but I saw a few movies in theatres after moving. The first was Avatar: the Way of Water, which sucked, and then Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, which was deeply moving and probably the best film I saw last year, and Marty Supreme, an extraordinarily well-made fever dream that was, unfortunately, still a mostly empty film in the end.

For Christmas in 2025 my roommates and I watched The Muppets Christmas Carol, which was delightful, Happiest Season, the Kristen Stewart Lesbian Christmas Movie that was suprisingly good, and Die Hard, an excellent crowd-pleaser of an action film that is a classic for good reason.

We eventually started watching movies every Friday. The movies we have watched, loosely in the order we saw them, were:

• Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul, a criminially underrated dramatic dark comedy about the church, as well the women who both benefit from and are subjugated by it,
• Sonic the Hedgehog 3, a movie I liked when I first saw it, but enjoyed much less the second time around,
• Whisper of the Heart, one of my favorite movies ever made, a quiet, plodding film about the pain of being an artist. One of Studio Ghibli’s absolute best,
• Tampopo, a zany fever dream about food. An overarching narrative about a woman creating a ramen shop that is interspersed with vignettes exploring every which way that humans relate to food. And it is also maybe a western? This was very enjoyable, but you might want to skip this if you are sensitive to animal violence, as there is a scene that frankly depicts the animal violence required in the consumption of meat. Historically, this film is interesting for inventing the version of omurice that is typically served in Japanese restaurants,
• Nosferatu (2024), a Robert Eggers film. I liked it fine, which was quite disappointing given the caliber of his previous films,
• Red Cliff, the Chinese war epic released in two parts that was a box office smash in China. A perfectly enjoyable film with one scene in particular that was delightfully schlocky,
• Ne Zha, a Chinese animated children’s movie based on the mythological character Nezha. A very effective animated film with some impressive action set pieces and emotional beats that land much more effectively than I expected,
• Labyrinth, the wonderful and surreal Jim Henson cult classic with impressive practical effects and equally impressive David Bowie bulge,
• National Treasure and Independence Day, movies we watched for the Fourth of July, both works of patriotic schlock that were too competent to be as funny as I was hoping.

We then chose to watch all of the Wachowski films, since we had already watched Bound in a discord call a year prior (outstanding film by the way) and their filmography is not that excessive:

• The Matrix a fantastic movie that actually is that good,
• V for Vendetta, which was an enjoyable work of transmaskuline fiction,
• The Matrix 2, which was equally as enjoyable as the first, has some of the best action sequences in any movie I have watched, and is equally as thematically-interesting as the first Matrix,
• The Matrix 3, which is certainly a movie that exists,
• Cloud Atlas, a movie so good I can’t believe nobody talks about it, an invigorating dramatic thrill ride of six stories from different time periods all occuring simultaneously and intersecting with each other in beautiful ways. What a delight of film, and a new favorite of mine.
• Speed Racer, the haters were wrong this one was good as hell. Some of the juvenile antics with the monkey don’t work for me but man if this isn’t a good time and some explicitly, one-the-nose, I-know-writers-who-use-subtext-and-they’re-all-cowards level anti-captilist filmmaking.
• Jupiter Ascending, which was unfortunately not very good. Mila Kunis doesn’t do a good job as the leading role here, and it felt very sprawling and unfocused in a way that surprised me given how impeccably-edited their films were up to this point. I loved the shameless fandom bait with Mila Kunis’s wolf boy with angel wings dark past edgy sadboy love interest, that was good. And the bees were funny, I liked that.

Some movies I watched recently outside of me and my roommate’s regular movie nights was Nolan’s Odyssey which was quite dour and disappointing. Days before I was about to watch it theatres, a mutual showed Obsession in a Discord watch party, and WOW what a picture that was! Equal parts sickeningly disturbing and darkly funny (seriously this movie was hilarious), it immediately became a beloved film of mine and I will force my roommates to watch it with me soon.

Games

I was in the middle of playing Hollow Knight during the process of moving. I had already gotten the normal ending and was in the process of completing the Hall of Gods (I completed the bottom row of bosses without taking any damage). I continued playing the game for a time after moving to a new home but lost interest and decided to put the game away. Ultimately I liked Hollow Knight well enough. From what I gather Hollow Knight really shines on repeated playthroughs because there are innumerable different pathways to complete the game and tons of unique builds you can make with badge system. I tend not to replay games that often, and instead play a game in one pass with a lot indulgence and curiosity. So I think Hollow Knight’s strengths aren’t going to shine in the hands of a player like myself. It was also too easy.

I also played Fallout: New Vegas which I enjoyed. I wish I enjoyed the game’s combat, but I don’t, and that does take away quite a bit from the game. Much like Baldur’s Gate 3, which another game praised for allowing many opportunities for player choice, I was surprised to find just how many forced combat encounters there were in New Vegas. I made a low constitution, low strength, low gun ability build, played on hard difficulty, and turned on the survival mechanics, and the combination of all these things made the early game combat encounters extraordinarily difficult. The section in the hotel was simply arduous. I had to hide around corners and confuse the AI to buy enough time between VATS usages, which I would use to kill a single enemy at a time by firing headshots with the double barrel shotgun. It was miserable.

This is a case of bad luck and incorrect player expectations significantly diminishing the experience of a game. If I ever visit New Vegas, which could happen some day, I will probably enjoy it more on a second playthrough.

That being said the narrative of New Vegas is as brilliant as advertised. Yes Man, in particular, absolutely delighted me. I have never seen such a clever and hilarious narrative device in any work of art, what a wonderful character he is. The complicated political alliances that exist between all the various factions in the game world is fascinating to untangle, and the opening five minutes of the game are some of the best I have ever seen. The one bunker full of plants, which I stumbled across simply by exploring the map, is one of my favorite dungeons in any videogame. There is a lot to love here, so I wish that I ended up loving the game instead of simply liking it.

I played some sessions of Peak with some friends, and it was fun! I appreciated how challenging and punishing the game was. Reaching the peak for the first time is a genuinely impressive achievement.

I then played Neon White which was simply outstanding. The simple movement mechanics are polished to a shine, and is a game that simply feels incredible to play. While the platinum medals are far too easy to acquire, there are some deviously challenging secret medals for every level in the game. I went and collected them all, which was a massive undertaking, and it was an absolute joy to do.

I had heard many complaints about Neon White’s story, so I was suprised to find that the story was… actually quite good? The game is a pastiche of poor English anime dubs (It is not dubbed though!) and unashamed of its embarrassing, early-2000s anime cringe. For the player who is able to roll with what the game is trying to do, the sheer earnestness of the story-telling style makes the attempts at pathos in the final third of the game suprisingly effective. The game has a lot to say about the role of forgiveness for those who have been abused, and it make me think a lot differently about how I should handle the fractured relationship I have with my parents. I couldn’t have ever predicted that such an embarassingly horny cornball story would speak to my own life experience in a meaningful way.

I think the YouTuber Power Pak in his video said it best.:

Yeah, its like a web comic from the mid-to-late 2000s written by completely dorky anime videogame fans, yeah, I know. The game knows, too, it evens knows you know, but it doesn’t care. It’s moving… with absolute confidence in what its doing, and I like that… It’s presenting itself earnestly. It just knows that what its saying is dumb as hell, and saying it anyway… This game isn’t cringe, it’s post-cringe.

The term “post-cringe” is a brilliant one and I hope it catches on, and I really do believe that Neon White’s story will get a critical reappraisal ten years from now.

While experiencing a depressive episode late last year, my roommate lent me their copy of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and I had an absolute blast playing it. It was my first Fire Emblem game, and it is a good starting point for players like myself with little experience in this particular genre of strategy game. The game splits its time between exploration-focused gameplay where the player talks to the enormous cast of characters and explores the monastery and the strategic combat the series is known for, and I was suprisied at just how enjoyable the monastery exploration was. The game enacts a lot of subtle storytelling through the character interactions you have, and players who blitz past it to play the strategic gameplay will miss out on the intended experience.

The story is also quite good, although it is a slow burn and turn quite a few hours to grab me. The foreshadowing in the early chapters in very subtle and the player simply does not have enough context with the game’s world and characters to fully comprehend what is happening (actually, you won’t fully understand what happened after a single playthrough, either, unless you studiously peruse through a fan wiki while playing). However, the story gets really good once the climax of the first half comes closer and closer. However, I played the Edelgard route, and I was disappointing to find that the second act of the her story is considerably less interesting than the first half. Regardless, the sandboxy tactical gameplay, endlessly compelling lore, and excellent first half more than made up for this. Also, Edelgard and Dorothea and Manuela and Yuri my beloved.

My roommate also lent me Hades, which I ended up liking quite a bit. The curious thing about Hades is the actual roguelike gameplay itself is… fine. Not exceptional, not bad, perfectly serviceable. The truly compelling aspect of the game is all of the content surrounding the action–the incredibly dense amount of upgrades and progression the player can achieve between runs, the terrifying amount of fully voice-acted dialogue that responds to what the player does to such a level of detail that I can’t believe the game exists at all? Really impressive stuff. While the ending of the game was a bit disappointing and anti-climactic, the strong character writing more than makes the experience worth playing.

I also ended up revisiting Balatro. Balatro is a game I already played to death about a year ago, but after watching drspectred’s YouTube channel and learning how to play the game at a higher level, I revisted the game and gained a brand new appreciation for it. Balatro is an extraordinarily well-balanced game with a humongous skill ceiling, and I wasn’t able to see that until I started consistently playing gold stake which is what the game is actually balanced around. I really do believe that Completionist++ is the best way to experience Balatro and the experience of getting Completionist++ turned it from a game I liked into a game I absolutely love. Also, Mail-In Rebate and Burgular and Pants my beloved.

A game I wish I could like more than I do is Hypnospace Outlaw, a very interesting game where you use a fictional OS to browse a late 90s/early 2000 alternate universe version of the internet. The game is deeply nostalgic for this era, although its nostalgia goggles are noticeably not rose-tinted: the game does explore some of the more lurid aspects of this era of the internet. Unfortunately, I find the game deeply overstimulating because of the constant music that autoplays on the various “web pages” you can explore (I generally struggle to read while noises are playing. In fact, I struggle with reading comprehension if read aloud any text in front of me! I will never beat the autism allegations.) Maybe I will give this game another go, but I might have to mute it.

A game I would like to revist is In Stars and Time, an interesting “subversive” RPG in the veign of Mother/Undertale/etc where you play bratty gay wizard thing with an anxiety disorder who is [SPOILERS REDACTED]. I played the first hour or so and the game seemed extremely promising. The art is really spectacular and the writing was very sweet and funny, but I was in a bit a of depressive rut at the time and I couldn’t get myself to keep playing it. I do plan to return to this one eventually.

After finding a YouTube channel that showed what the modern Civilization VI meta looked like, I suddenly got an inkling to revisit Civ 6 and lost many hours of sleep to this damn game all over again. Incidentally, learning the multiplayer meta required understanding some facets of the game that also made me much, much, much better at the single player, and I was able to finally win a damn game on Deity difficulty after only a few tries. I managed to win quite a few more since then, too. The incredibly dense mechanical systems in Civ 6 are just so deeply addictive to seek your teeth into, and even after EIGHT HUNDRED HOURS OF PLAY I still don’t feel like I have a deep understanding of the game. There are few things in life that have brought me more joy than building a canal which causes an Industrial Zone to get a +8 adjacency bonus. Also, Cleopatra my beloved.

A game I somehow almost forgot to mention is the of the Devil free demo, which contains the entirety of the game’s first chapter. This game seems like a spectacular successor to Danganronpa and the Ace Attorney series, and even rivals Danganronpa is terms of visual flair. Seriously, what a cool game. The game is a cyberpunk game and seemed like it was exploring the panopticon that technology is steadily pushing us towards (if its not already here), but then derails these themes as story revelations push the narrative to the game’s true interest: toxic yuri. Perhaps I am selling the game short, and it manages to explore both of these things in intersting ways, but I will admit that I was a bit disappointed to see the direction the story was taking. But with a visual style this realized, I would happily take a messy story. I do fully intend to play the full game sometime in the future. Seriously, I can’t stress how much the visual style kicks ass in this game.

Another game I tried was Pronoun Palace, a cheeky word-themed Balatro-like/Slay-the-Spire-like with a trans aesthetic and edgy sense of humor. There’s a lot of fun to be had here, although I found it too easy and it was going to take too much repetition to unlock the harder difficulty modes for it to be fun. This is probably a lot more fun if you are less prone to opimization than I am (I took 2 hours on my first completion which is a very long time for this game), so this might just be an issue of player habits interfering with the fun inside a game. Give this one a shot.

The most recent game I have played, and just recently finished, is Read Dead Redemption 2. What a beautiful mess of a game that was! The storytelling here is simply sublime. Arthur Morgan is a character that will stick with me for the rest of my life, and the final few chapters of the game were so emotionally arresting.

However, The mechanical systems attached to this narrative are much less refined than the story. The open world here is simply gorgeous to explore, and is the most immersive verisimilitudinous game world I have experienced since The Long Dark’s. But there is not as much to do as you would expect in this open world. While major points of interest have little minigames to play, and simply walking around populated cities and enjoying the suprisingly believable simulation of a social space is a worthwhile activity, there are vast empty stretches of map where this isn’t much to do other than complete EXTREMELY TEDIOUS FETCH QUESTS THAT NO HUMAN ALIVE WILL EVER COMPLETE ON THEIR OWN WITHOUT LOOKING FOR HELP ONLINE. Seriously, I can’t overstate how arduous the completionist content is, and it will take up the majority of your time if you go for 100% completion.

At the same time, I am not giving the mechanical systems enough credit because it is not fair to treat them independently from the story the game wants to tell. Read Dead Redemption 2 is interested in what it means to live a meaningful life, what it can mean to do good when we have done many bad things in our past, and how important the little things are in light of easily and quickly our lives can be snuffed out. Mechanically speaking, the most impressive thing Red Dead Redemption 2 does is make the act of slowing down and avoiding missions, taking a breather, simply admiring the gorgeous world, simply observing the friendly NPCs which populate the camps, more enjoyable than beelining the story. And this really complements the story the game wants to tell, and these are accomplished with through the flawed open world the story takes place in.

I really can’t do better than NakeyJakey in critiquing how the mechanical systems in Red Dead Redemption 2 could have done more to make the act of role-playing as an outlaw more interesting and effective, so I won’t. Instead, please watch his excellent video on the topic, as well as his second excellent video on the topic. However, I do think Noah Caldwell-Gervais’ absolutely spectacular video about videogame westerns, of which half of the four-hour runtime is an analysis of Red Dead Redemption 2, acknowledges many of the ways Red Dead Redemption 2 uses the mechanics it provides to tell its story, and is an extremely valuable yin to the yang that is NakeyJakey’s critique. Also, the soundtrack to this game my beloved.

Music

I have listened the absolute shit out of slayr’s outstanding Half Blood(Bloodluxe) this year, which is an orgastic concoction of chiptune and rage rap that feels to me like the next great leap forward for rap music. We’ll see. But seriously, this album’s production is just heaven to me. Be it the haunting vocalizations in Brand New, or the celestial build at the beginning of Demigod, the blissful swirling chiptune of Holding, the album is an endless stream of maximalist ear candy. This is made even better by the presence of smooth transitions between EVERY SINGLE SONG, making it so difficult for me to put the album down after starting any song. I just get trapped.

Other albums I have listend to this year are

• REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE by Genesis Owusu, which is an excellent hip hop record angrily rallying against the worst of the current American culture while also being surprisingly funny and poignant at times.
• Music, Fashion, Film by charli xcx. charli xcx’s confessional and raw songwriting is one of my favorite things about her work, and this is her most introspective album since 2020’s “how im feeling now”, and even more experimental to boot. While this is unlikely to be the cultural phenomenon that “Brat” was, I still fuck with it heavy. Also, how is Camera not charting at all? (Actually, I just looked at the Billboard Top 100 and Camera actually entered the charts this week lol)
• trinket by tsubi club. A delightful, short-and-sweet collection of underground maximalist emo alt-pop from an artist that previously had, like, two songs? I am so glad this didn’t fly under my radar.
• you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love by Olivia Rodrigo. Not my cup of tea, exactly, a bit too slow-paced for my stimulation-starved ADHD brain, but I have to acknowledge a well-crafted work of art when I see one. What starts as a deeply earnest, very teenage-coded collection of manic love songs sours as the relationship falls apart. Very well made, even though I will probably never listen to this again.
• U by underscores. While this project overall gets a “Fine/10” from me, there are some really excellent singles here. I particularly love the closer “Wish U Well”.
• I Love My Computer by Ninajirachi. A spectacular electronic music album and a love letter to Y2K aesthetics. If you have any remote interest in electronic music then I can’t recommend this one enough. Also, “sing sood” is a beautiful little ditty that tends to fly under the radar in the discussion for this album.
• Astroworld by Travis Scott. A very solid collection of hypnotic hip-hop.

Other notable artists and songs are Sophie Hunter and her neurotic fusion of pop and New York hip-hop, Tiffany Day’s underground electronic pop, the single Cruel by the Australian pop duo The Veronicas, and ZIP and putaprincesa by Latin hyperpop artist Rakky Ripper.

Anime

In addition to movie nights my roommates and I have TV Show nights, which so far has consisted entirely of anime (we will watch Andor eventually!). It began with Chihayafuru, an absolutely wonderful sports anime about an obscure Japanese sport called “kurata” and the extremely autistic girl named Chihaya who plays it. As someone who deeply invested themselves in Super Smash Bros. Brawl back when the competitive smash community was even more niche than it is now, I have never seen the beauty of giving yourself so completely to a competitive hobby depicted so accurately in anything before. There’s so much of myself that I see in this show and the deep love the main characters have towards the sport of kurata speaks to me so dearly. It’s also just an excellent sports anime.

We are currently making our way through Kill la Kill, a work of art that is precious to me and one I have been trying to get my sister to watch for years now and have finally forced her to watch. I recently infodumped the show on a poor unsuspecting friend of mine on Mastodon, and I don’t think there is any need to repeat myself, so I will simply quote what I wrote to my friend:

Your mileage will vary with Kill la Kill, it is one of my absolute favorite things ever but I can also understand watching the first episode and being bothered enough to decide to not watch another episode.

As to why I love it so much, it is a visual feast. Most anime praised for their animation have extremely static, flat presentation during scenes without any action, but Kill la Kill tries to make both scenes with exposition, character interactions, and action have equal amounts of visual flair. This is, in general, something very important to me in the media I watch, and most things I end up loving (Cowboy Bebop, Space Dandy, Evangelion, Mononoke, Tár, all of the Wachowski films) have this quality.

It is also a deeply earnest show, and it does this while being extremely over-the-top and campy. It is often silly on purpose, and much more interesting in the emotional and thematic truth of a scene than whether it adheres to internal logic (or the laws of physics). For this reason it can disarm viewers people who have trouble genuinely engaging with something silly that isn’t parody or satire.

The show is a coming-of-age tale and is interested in female sexuality and not all of this is presented in good taste. Presenting sexuality as something scary that happens to you, something that is suddenly forced upon you during your formative years, something that are forced to reckon with, is an worthwhile thing to depict in a work of art, and something I find deeply relatable… But presenting this with a female character who is filmed in a highly-eroticed way that is meant to be eye candy for the audience is deeply uncomfortable to watch. This is a frustrating thing to me, as the show is deeply interested in fascism, power, and the various ways that revolutionary actions are co-opted by the state, and the show understands that unashamed ownership of one’s own body and sexuality will be critical for any revolution that matters. And it muddies this message, one that is often beautifully presented in the show, by pairing it with frequent gross appeals to the male gaze. (This is complicated thing about all of Studio Trigger projects from this era, (Gurren Lagann, Dead Leaves, Panty & Stocking.))

And despite these issues it is a show that makes me giddy to watch. It is just so stylish and indulgent, and it will slide effortlessly from a thrilling action moment that fills me with hype to an absurd joke that cracks me up and then to an emotional beat occurs that lands with such intensity that I want to cry.

It also has a canonical lesbian main character and it gets pretty gay