Month: January 2026

2025 In Review: The Series

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Good Morning Folks! This morning I am continuing my series of talking about things that I liked in 2025 and this time moving on to series based content. Some of this is traditional television series, and others are anime… but it felt right to sort of split a line between this kind of content and one off experiences like a movie. I consume an awful lot of my content on Plex, and as a result it was very easy for me to go back and look at what I had actually watched during the Calendar year of 2025. This morning I am going to talk about some of the high points, and some of the low points, much like I did the other day with books. In truth I really did not consume anywhere near as much content as I normally would… 2025 was a rough year for so many reasons.

Pantheon

This lives in that realm of Anime but not-Anime that so many properties like Avatar do these days. I was tipped off to this series by my friend Sita who begged both me and Ammo to watch this, and I have to say I am very glad that I did. This is a very William Gibson-esc transhuman masterpiece that has some really awkward bits in the third act. Effectively this series SHOULD have gone on for longer, but only got two seasons… and there is a clear point in the middle of Season Two where they realized that they were not going to get a Third Season. So they very quickly had to rush to the ultimate conclusion of everything that they were working towards… so that in itself feels a bit jarring. However this is so well worth the watch if you have never seen it… or like me did not even know it existed.

Dan Da Dan

This quite literally might be the highlight of my year when it comes to media viewing experiences. I fell in love with this series in a massive way, and I will probably always have the opening for season one by Creepy Nuts living rent free in my head. Season One was fucking amazing, and Season Two just kept things up as the friendship and the will they or won’t they nature of Momo and Okarun continues to deliver. The show is fucking wild honestly, and I admit it probably takes about three episodes to hook you. The plotlines are among the more outrageous when they come to anime, and I would relate it to something akin the lines of FLCL. If you stick with it though, I think you will end up a convert. It is just plain fun on so many levels and I am anxiously looking forward to season three whenever it drops.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

Growing up in the era of The Goonies and Flight of the Navigator… both movies that I love deeply still even as an adult… I really wanted this to be amazing. I am not sure why it was not. On paper everything about this seemed like it was going to be a homerun. I think maybe the problem that I had with this was the fact that the weakest bit… were the adults. Specifically I feel like there was some exec somewhere who would not greenlight this project without an established adult actor playing a character in it. As a result it sort of felt like Jude Law stole way too much screen time, and was not actually worthy of it. Anytime it was just the kids doing shenaningans and adventures it was cute and fun… but when you looped him into the mix it got weird quickly. I think there could have been something really good here, and it did have moments of magic but collectively it just didn’t really work.

Murderbot

One of the series that I talked about in my book post was Murderbot and chaining through the entire series of books prior to the start of the television series. I was so glad that I did this, and I was even happier that for the most part… every single character in this series felt spot on for their book counterpart. That is… except the titular character of Murderbot. I had trouble adjusting to this for a bit, because Alexander Skarsgard will on some level be Eric Northman from True Blood for me. That said… as the series continued on by about episode three he had won me over completely and now I am not sure I could picture another actor playing Murderbot. I am so amped for this to continue because that first book is far from the best of the Murderbot adventures. We haven’t even encountered my favorite characters yet. We will be eating well with this one I hope, pending it continues getting good reception and more seasons.

The Witcher: Season 4

Something that I absolutely did not expect to be posting… is that The Witcher seires might have won me back. Season 3 was fucking awful. They did my boy Eskel so damned dirty, and them playing fast and loose with some of the lore… in the worst possible ways… made it all just feel awful. I was not planning on watching this season, but only did so because a friend of mine was talking about it. I can’t believe I am saying this… but I think Liam Hemsworth might be a better Geralt than Henry Cavil was. Things are starting to veer closer to the normal lore of the books/games as well which is a massive improvement. More importantly than that I got to hang out with some of my favorite characters a lot this season… Dandelion, Yarpin, and Zoltan. Massive improvement over the shitshow that was season three and I am hoping it keeps this upward trajectory.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

I will be honest… this is one of those series that I only watched because my friend Ammo was talking about it. I am not normally into elves even in the least, so the fact that this series is not only about an Elf… but also a damned dirty finger wiggler (Mage)… would have originally pushed it out of my normal scope of interests. This is legitimately one of the best Anime and or Series in general that I have ever watched. The way the story is told is so interesting and unique, and the whole perspective of someone who lives for thousands of years…. and how they might view short lived races is fascinating. Not to mention the story has an awful lot of heart to it. Season two will be dropping pretty soon and I am hoping I can find it in dual language version because I greatly prefer watching television as to reading it.

Delicious in Dungeon / Dungeon Meshi

Have you ever said to yourself that you really wanted a cooking show with the central conceit of it being played out through the lens of a D&D style adventuring party? No? Well I had not either until Tumblr sold me on this show by constantly pushing cute images into my feed. This is a show that I started with subs, and then rewatched the entire damned thing dubbed because I just like the characterization of the individual characters a bit better. Japanese voice actors can sometimes be a bit over the top for me, especially since I am not culturized to that being normal. Marcille especially just FEELS better in the Dubbed version to me and is way less annoying than the Japanese counterpart was. Super charming and cute show, but please note… it is ABSOLUTELY a cooking show. The fact it is happening in a Dungeon and has occasional combat is just a side effect of the settting.

Honorable Mentions

To Be Hero X gets a bit of an honorable mention for me. Really good show, but I did not finish it during 2025 so I don’t quite feel right giving it its own spot on the list. Additionally I really enjoyed the Ironheart series and Daredevil: Born again and hope we see more of those in the future. Marvel really is in this awkward spot right now and I am hoping they can pull their shit together and start producing amazing stuff in the way it was during the first decade of the Avengers Saga. I still fucking love Shoresy and Season 4 was pretty great, and I know that I have Season 5 queued up to watch in the coming weeks. I would prefer for it to finish so that I can watch it all in one setting, and it is just starting to release episodes.

Tomorrow I will be talking about the movies that I watched and either enjoyed or disliked enough to talk about in 2025. What were some of the highlights for you last year when it came to serialized content? Drop me a line below and let me know.

I Resolve to Live

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Good Morning Folks. I don’t normally write to you fine folks on a Sunday, other than to syndicate the weekly AggroChat Podcast. We did not record one of those for various holiday related reasons, and in truth the next big show we have… requires all seven of us. In theory we should return next week with our big two-parter Games of the Year show. This morning instead I am going to write a fairly personal an introspective post, the sort that I don’t normally syndicate widely and are just for the “real ones” who check my blog regardless of what fancy pictures might get posted on social media. So sit back and let me tell you a story.

Yesterday one of my friends asked me a very simple question, and I gave them quite possibly the heaviest answer that I have ever given to something so simple. Normally you say things like that you would like to lose some weight or exercise more, and both of those things are true… but I have a much more simple goal this year. Essentially it is my goal to start living life again. Since then death of my spouse I have been in a bit of a holding pattern, not entirely certain what to do with my life. Sure I went through the anguish and heartbreak… and still do from time to time, but replaced it more than anything was a growing sense of numbness. I have felt like I have been effectively sitting here waiting to die. Sure I did a few things to make that wait more comfortable… bought a new TV, organized the garage and set up a 3d printer out there, and even upgraded my gaming desktop. However in all cases they were more things to pass the time until I died myself, than anything resembling trying to do something specific with my life.

There is a kind of pain that no one will ever fully understand unless they have lost a spouse. You build this life with a person, and then they are suddenly gone… and it feels like most of you went along with them. I’ve told people that I died on July 2nd, 2025 and that is not necessarily hyperbole. The me that I was at that moment in time… did in fact die when my spouse passed away. I had a good life, and I got thirty years of it… but it felt like everything about that life was suddenly crashing down around me. In many ways I was wiped with a clean slate… not even really knowing who I was anymore. The me that existed before my wife… was such a fledgling thing. I think I was not really sure where to go from here. So much of what drove me, so much of what I did with myself… was in service of the life that I built with this other person and that is a life that is now gone.

There is something like a 90% increase in mortality for men who lose a spouse. In many cases this is exacerbated because in traditional relationships the woman is the caregiver, and the man… just does not have the survival skills to keep going. That was not the case for me, because in most ways I was the primary caregiver and I still technically have the skills required to keep going. The problem is… most of the time I didn’t really want to. I felt like I was a robot who had completed its task and was awaiting new orders, and as a result I just sat dusty in the back of some cabinet as my battery slowly drained. It is so easy to just give up. I did… for effectively the remainder of this year. I did not really care about much of anything other than the occasional bursts of phantom joy that I would get playing a game or talking to one of my friends.

I am not certain the exact moment… but in the time between Christmas and New Years I have decided that I am going to live. That seems like an odd statement, but it is something that I have had to consciously make. I am going to live my life and more importantly… I am going to move forward and move on past the death of my spouse. I’ve felt like on many levels the friends and family of my spouse have needed me to spend my life in contrite grief pining away for her… that somehow my wasting slowly as my battery runs out, helped them recover from the death more easily. I can’t be that person for them anymore. I am too fucking young and I have too much of my life in front of me. Best guess based on the how others in my family have gone, I probably have about forty years in front of me… and that is too long to slowly die. My grandfather died in his mid 90s and my Dad is still spry and kicking, so I can’t see that I will likely be much different. I need to make those forty years mean something.

One of the ways in which I have taken action, rather than letting actions happen… is I finally met up with my friend Aigie/Saracell for a meal. She has lived in Oklahoma for almost a decade at this point, but was always far enough way and the timing never seemed right… so we never actually met up. This is weird given, that this was a person that I used to talk to every single day without fail. Hell you can look at the first posts on this blog, and it was her commenting on them. We were great friends that time happened to… and we stopped playing the same games… and sort of faded apart. Thing is… someday never comes unless you make it happen. I always expected that eventually we would meet in person, but neither of us were making it happen so I did.

We met up for dinner yesterday and it was a lot of fun reminiscing about old times. The most hillarious thing is that prior to the meeting I was talking with my friend Tam, who was also in Late Night Raiders… and apparently he had zero clue that “Saracell” and “Aigie” were the same person. It makes sense, because really she did not come into her own until she became a healer and there was a massive boost in confidence that happened at the same time. Saracell the Warlock was somewhat quiet and composed and almost sheepish, but Aigie the braid twirling Dwarven Priest was a force to be reckoned with. I am not so certain about the place we met up to eat, but I am sure we will repeat the act of sharing a meal at some point in the future. It will take will and purpose to make that happen, and I will take that extra step to ensure that it does.

I’ve also been talking with someone new… that I met in the least likely of possible places. I’ve talked before by the thoroughly unlikely meeting of my wife and I and our introduction from a man in Belgium when we grew up 30 minutes apart… this one is almost as uncanny but only so because of the current state of the internet and how toxic it can be. I met a new friend on Reddit. I’ve hung out on Reddit for years, making random comments on random threads… and the algorithm fed me a thread and in that thread was a random person who made a sassy comment… and I responded. That led to chatting back and forth through the Reddit direct messaging system, and that sort of carried on for days… and then weeks. More recently we have transitioned to talking on Discord, removing another layer of anonymity from it. I don’t know where it is going, but it has been really nice… and I have spent an awful lot of the last couple of weeks watching the typing indicator with baited breath.

This may go nowhere… and that is okay. The important thing that happened though… is it taught me that I could in fact develop feelings for another person. I am not entirely certain what those feelings entail… but it isn’t the bleak numbness that I have felt since July. I can move on. I can potentially love again. I legitimately thought that side of me was dead. That I had lost the ability to feel anything anymore, and would effectively just sort of fumble through life from this point on like the shambling dead. The fact that I CAN feel anything… is a fucking miracle at this point. I am not going to push any pressure on this however, because things need to develop in their own course. They have asked nothing of me, and I am attempting to ask nothing of them. It is just really refreshing to have someone that I am nervous in the best possible ways to talk with each day.

I honestly was not sure if I would say anything here about it. We are going to call her “Ren” for the sake of this blog. She does not have the breadth of gaming experience that most of us do, and as such has never really had a fixed gaming handle to fall back upon. Nor does she really have much of a social media footprint either. She has used the name Ren before and it seems good enough for the sake of keeping things nice and anonymous. That is one thing I have always tried with my blog… is to boil a situation to the real elements but not share any of the hard details. I did this for decades as a safety mechanism to keep anything I did from blowing back on my teacher spouse. I will likely continue to do this thing, because it feels more comfortable to share the real emotions and thoughts of a moment, without necessarily all of the specific people.

This is a pretty heavy post I know. If you have made it to this point I applaud you. You are in fact one of the “real ones” as it were. I am going to live. Hopefully if I am lucky, I will love again. Regardless I am going to figure out who the hell I am, and how best to support that fledgling person left in the aftermath of my life. I appreciate all of you and how you have supported me over the years. Be gentle with me as I figure this out.

2025 in Review: The Books

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Good Morning Folks. As I often do, the start of a new year is a time for reflection back upon the previous one. While I never can seem to keep exactly the same rhythms anymore, I figured I might branch out and start what are hopefully a new series of yearly “in review” posts. 2025 was one of those years where I had to lean on distractions heavily, and those distractions came in many forms. Some of them were comfort gaming, others experiencing new anime, and an awful lot were the books that I read. This morning I am going to talk about some of the more significant books that I enjoyed. I set my goal for 30 books and ended up reading 38. For those curious, I use both Bookwyrm and Storygraph to track my reading journey. Bookwyrm is a federated client so it is very easy to share on Mastodon if the mood strikes me and I want to write a proper review of a book. Storygraph I mostly use because it has a really good recommendation algorithm, that has fed me a few books that I otherwise would not have paid attention to.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism

Probably my favorite single book of the year was My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix. This was my entry into this author’s work and at some point I want to check out more books. I read Witchcraft for Wayward Girls and it did not quite land the same for me. I think that might be in part because so much of this is my adolescent years bottled and packaged up into a novel form. It takes place in the 80s that I remember so vividly, and the pair remind me a bit of two of my friends who were always together but similarly somewhat mismatched. There is a made for amazon movie for this book… but I could not get through it. It just did not capture any of the magic of this book for me about demon possession and undying friendship.

Dungeon Crawler Carl

If we are not talking about single books, then my highlight of the year is reading the entirety of what has been published so far in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. This was my first foray into RPGLit and while I loved it… I am not sure if the larger genre is really my thing. In truth it takes a few books for this series to really reach its stride, and I think part of that is Matt Dinniman shuffling off the normal constraints of the genre and leaning into the best aspects of this cast of amazing characters. Specifically I LOVE the voice acting of Jeff Hayes, and if you have read these in text form, you owe it to yourself to listen to the audio books as well. Right now A Parade of Horribles is supposedly slotted for release in May and I am literally almost thrumming with excitement for it.

Murderbot Series

Another series that I fell in love with this year is Murderbot. In the months ahead of the release of the television series, I burned through these books and they are really comfortable reads. Each of them is very short and very focused, with a fast moving narrative that is just a delight. This will be another one of those series that I consume happily whenever a new book comes out, and at some point I should really dive out into the other things Martha Wells has written. Reading these books has made me realize that I might be slightly on the spectrum, just because the running internal monologue of Murderbot feels so god damned familiar to me.

News Flesh Series

In the column of… I should have read this decades ago… we have the Newsflesh series. Legitimately I remember seeing Feed at borders so many times and almost picking it up. I love Seanan McGuire, and I had no clue that Mira Grant was a pen name until earlier this year when I dove down this rabbit hole. This series is so damned good that it is almost painful that I did not read it before now. So many great characters delivered with only the level of sass that Seanan can. At some point I am going to start the October Daye series, because I am fully on board with anything crafted by this author I think. If you like zombies and honestly a kind of fresh spin on them, or at least fresh for the time in which these books came out. I highly suggest giving these a read. They go pretty quickly.

In the biggest disappointment or the year… we have Space Oddity by Catherynne M. Valente. I loved the adventures of Decibel Jones in Space Opera last year so freaking much, that I was rather excited to read this sequel. The problem is… this book is a bit of a meandering mess. It eventually does find its heart and lands the plane safely… but holy shit are you going to have to wade through a lot of nonsense to get there. More than anything it feels like this author was pressured to write a sequel and had zero fucking clue how they wanted to do this thing. The entire first half of the book could essentially be removed and you would still have a reasonable plot. It just sort of feels like stalling until inspiration hit and then rushing to the finish line.

Camp Damascus

Camp Damascus from Chuck Tingle is the book that almost broke me. I had never read a Chuck Tingle book before, but this is very much not the usual “pounded in the butt by” book. This book is bleak… really fucking bleak. It is extremely well crafted and does a phenomenal job of exploring the themes of “gay conversion” camps through the lens of horror. Sure this is horror and sure there are fantastical elements, but the core of this narrative is all too real. It is well worth a read but it was a bit of a suckerpunch that left me reeling for awhile. I finished the book on March 27th, and it was not until July 23rd that I even attempted to read another book. Sure I had a really fucking bad July… for reasons I have gone into at length in so many posts… but this book drained me of the will to keep reading for awhile.

Sworn Soldier Series

Another series that I really enjoyed last year was the Sworn Soldier series by T. Kingfisher. Essentially this is the Gothic horror of Poe, Shelly and Stoker for a modern audience. Each of these books is pretty short, similar to the Murderbot books and are extremely easy reads. What Moves the Dead is effectively a re-imagining of the Fall of the House of Usher, and from there we get more interesting snippets of nature gone wrong, and eldritch horror in the other two novels. Alex Easton is an immediately likeable protagonist, and the books are just enjoyable. Well worth your time if you enjoy unknowable horrors.

Cerulean Chronicles

At least for me, as I have found out what a regressive shitbag that J.K. Rowling has turned out to be… I struggle with the Harry Potter series. I will always love the characters because those books meant so much to me as I was reading them, but I want zero of my dollars to ever go toward supporting her quite frankly evil causes. I’ve read that TJ Klune set out to write the Cerulean Sea series as an unabashedly clear wizarding tale, and one of love and warmth and acceptance. They succeeded in this and the two books are a joy to read. I happened to be turned onto this series just as the sequel was coming out, so I was able to read them back to back. The first novel is really tight and clearly focused, but the second one takes a little bit to get started but has a rousing finish. If you crave some intentionally queer friendly wizarding worlds… I suggest you also dive into this series.

You can always see the full list of everything that I read in 2025 over on my Bookwyrm goals page, as that is probably the easiest and most concise way to see it. You can also follow me on Storygraph to see what I am actively reading there. I occasionally write reviews there, but fairly rarely as most of my content ends up here on the blog. What were some of your favorite books that you read in 2025? Would love to hear of anything that you think I should read so I can add it to my 2026 list.

New Year, Hopefully New Me

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Hey Folks. I am doing a bit of a weird post because generally I take off holidays, and generally I blog in the morning. Neither of those are happening in this case. I went up to see my Dad this morning because it was his birthday and he had afternoon plans, so I am back at home and sitting down to write. Often times my blog doubles as my diary… just one that I happen to publish so the world can see it. There are days when I widely syndicate my posts, and other days where they are more private and only meant for the “real ones” as it were. This is one of those days.

It is not so much that I had a bad Christmas, but more a situation that I have been numb for most of this year. I’ve been going through the motions and doing the right things, things which should bring me joy… but they have not been. I get that a lot of this is the normal pathways of grieving. I took a major blow… and while not a physical blow… it still takes time for the emotions and mental state to heal. I am not sure if I will ever be fully healed if I am being brutally honest. I lost a critical part of who I was, that had been built up over thirty years. In many ways it feels like I have been restored to an earlier backup of who I was. Like once you took away the material that I had accumulated in my life, and the default reactions that were baked in for being part of something larger than myself… I am left with a me that sort of feels like the me that existed in college before my life 1.0 started.

It is a really weird reset. I am digging back into things that used to give me joy when I was in college. I am figuring out new things that I want to try now that I have effectively unlimited time and zero constraints upon me to accommodate another human being. I’ve gotten into the path of 3D printing, and I have a bunch of model paints on order which will let me start painting my Warhammer army. I completely reworked the garage and installed shelving in basically every place that I could install shelving. I replaced the downstairs entertainment setup, and at some point will attempt to use the PC that I have hooked up down there. I think I might need to resolve some residual wifi issues first, but I have a router and at some point that will be a project to try and do that and apply some repeaters so that the connection downstairs is faster.

I’ve also been able to lean on so many friends. There are my adopted siblings of Ace and Cyl that have meant so much to me during this time. There is an old friend that I have reconciled with and even have plans to meet for dinner on Saturday. There is my Librarian friend who keeps me engaged in things and the new group of people that i have met in the pen and paper game that we all play together on a semi-monthly basis. Then there is a new friend that I have been talking constantly that has been fun and interesting to get to know someone completely out of my depth. All of these have helped to rekindle a bit of a spark in me, and I am feeling joyful about things again.

A lot of this year has also been trying to make sure my health is doing okay. I had a few scares and have a few upcoming medical procedures. I am hoping I get a clean bill of health, but kind of my ongoing new years resolution is to eat better and force myself to get some more exercise. I am bigger than I have ever been at this point, and it is not comfortable. For me and for my general future I need to change that. I also really desperately want to travel and meet some of the friends that I have known for years around the country. In order to do that… I am going to have to make it to a point where flight is no longer as painful as it currently is. I will always have trouble ramming my lets under the seats, but once you combine that with being generally larger than I should be… it is just a recipe for disaster. Sure I can drive to a lot of my friends, but there will be some that have to be arrived at by plane or it just isn’t feasible.

I turn 50 in June, and it feels like that is a bit of a deadline. There are a lot of things that I have said to myself “I will do that in time”. The time is now. I need to stop waiting and stalling and just do things. It isn’t so much that I am running out of time… but I feel like I am running out of time. I need to make significant changes in my life because I am not happy with the null void that I have been feeling, and want to do things to fix that.I am feeling really good today, and have been feeling really good about the last several days, and I am going to start enacting more changes that keep me moving in the right direction.

Happy New Years All. Please let 2026 be a better one.