Geekdom

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.

Recent Media Round-Up

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Hey Folks! I have been more or less taking the last several days off because I am technically on vacation. Due to the less-than-opportune placement of July 4th, I took off today and also largely checked out of doing blog posts late last week giving myself a bit of a vacation. This morning however I had to do some work really quickly and make sure that timecards were approved. So I thought that I might as well bang out a blog post because I have some things to talk about. More specifically I have watched quite a bit of movies and series of late, and thought I would give a bit of a round-up of some of my thoughts regarding them.

Nimona

I feel like all of you need to stop what you are doing right now and watch Nimona. It is available on Netflix, and if you don’t have access to Netflix… then pirate the fuck out of it because it is very good. If you are/were a fan of Lumberjanes or the most modern incarnation of She-Ra or pretty much anything else from ND Stevenson, then you are probably going to love this. If not… then you will probably still love this because it is exceptionally well-written. It is a story about trying to find your place in the world when that world often is diametrically opposed to your existence. It has a lot of things to say, but also… I want Nimona to be my sidekick. I had not been following the production mess that surrounded this property, but it sounds like it is a sheer miracle that this came out at all.

Very much a good film for the entire family as well. I highly suggest you check it out.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

First I feel like I have to say that I don’t hate Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The movie had problems and I feel like the whole aliens thing was pretty divisive, but for me most of the problems with that movie came from the fact that it looked wrong. We were still in the era of CGI “all the things”, and it looked it… and now I feel like we realize what we lost during the CGI boom years… and folks go out of their way to make things feel like practical effects even when they may not be. Dial of Destiny harkens back to the era of Last Crusade, and while it is still maybe a bit busy and a little bit less about bringing the audience along for the hunt, it feels more grounded in at least imagined reality.

I think what I like the most about this movie is that it serves as a nice bookend for the entire series. Indy is still punching Nazis and still chasing objects of tremendous power but is very much a man out of time. He doesn’t really fit into the world of the moon landing, but no longer has the vim and vigor to really keep chasing forbidden treasure. Dial of Destiny serves as a great last hurrah for Indiana Jones and hopefully can put the character to bed on a good note. If this series continues, it needs to continue in the hands of someone other than Indy, and at most him serving as a supporting character. He has had his curtain call, and I feel satisfied with this movie being the last stanza.

The Flash

I am not going to spend much time talking about what a seeming shithole of a human being Ezra Miller has turned out to be. I don’t really care much about the current state of the DC Universe. I’ve watched the various movies, and enjoyed them enough to keep watching them… but also never really felt the love for them that I have in the MCU. I was mostly interested in this film as it serves to give a last hurrah to “my Batman” aka Michael Keaton. What I was not expecting was to enjoy the film as a whole anywhere near as much as I did. I’ve always sort of hated Ezra Miller’s version of Barry Allen. I found the character annoying as shit and extremely abrasive… and this movie goes a long way to resolving that problem and shows reach growth of the character.

Michael Keaton as Batman and Sasha Calle as Kara Zor-El were both phenomenal. The two different Barry Allens though… felt almost like watching two different actors in the same way as you do when Tatiana Maslany plays dozens of unique characters in Orphan Black. The only disappointment in the movie though is the fact that I expected something that just simply was not there. Knowing that the DCU is being rebooted… I expected this movie to play more into that fact. There were a lot of deep cuts showing alternate timelines like the Nick Cage Superman… but the entire thing wraps up in a very weird note that makes me question what this means for everything that comes forward. It doesn’t so much give the current DCU one last send-off as much as it just deeply muddies the waters. It is still a good film but I would probably suggest waiting for it to release on streaming before you watch it.

The Witcher Season 3 Part 1

Unfortunately, Netflix has realized the error of its ways when it comes to releasing episodes… and has begun awkwardly cleaving a series in half so that they can have two different epic premiere dates. This weekend the first part of The Witcher Season 3 dropped, and with it comes the first five episodes that end on a bit of a cliffhanger. I have a lot of issues with this show… not the least of which is the fact that Henry Cavil will be moving on from the series after this season. I get WHY he would want to leave however because the showrunners and writers are needlessly fucking with details constantly. The Witcher is one of those shows that is good… so long as you know nothing about the supporting material. It reminds me of my early experience with the Harry Dresden series prior to reading the novels. I thought it was pretty good… until I actually read the books and then suddenly got annoyed at the weird inconsistencies.

I think what bothers me the most about The Witcher series, is the fact that entire scenes have been lifted from whole cloth from either the books or the games… but little details have been fucked with for no apparent reason. The worst of this is the way that they are suddenly changing the entire personality and motivation of different characters. I am sorry folks… but they did Eskel dirty last season… and this season they are making some truly bizarre fucking choices with Radovid. The series version of Djikstra is fucking heinous as well and is nowhere near as compelling of a character. Basically, the show feels sloppy, and that is maybe the worst thing a show based off course material can be. The only reason why I kept watching is that they’ve at least nailed the pivotal characters of Geralt, Ciri, Yennifer, and Dandelion/Jaskier. The source material is so fucking strong… that it just infuriates me that the folks writing this show seem determined to sloppily copy the original homework.

Final Thoughts

I cannot understate how much I enjoyed seeing the Keaton Batman ride again. Have you seen any of the media that I talked about? What were your thoughts? What things did I completely miss? I’ve tried to keep everything spoiler free because I do think that everything was worth watching at least once. Again I highly suggest that everyone stream Nimona because it was so freaking good.

Twelve Bleaks out of Ten

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Hey Friends! Like all weekends this one went way the heck too fast. I ended up taking off Friday but a good chunk of that was spent taking my dad to the doctor and running errands. As far as activities this weekend they fall into three distinct buckets. Firstly I managed to finish leveling my Bow Nightblade which is the last of the characters that I was planning on leveling while the buff was active. I am contemplating maybe putting a few of the easily levels on the new Sorcerer Tank experiment, but I am absolutely not going to do the grind all the way to level 50. What I really need to spend the next few weeks doing is burning through all of the treasure maps that I have clogging my inventory and bank from doing the Dark Anchor grind.

I need to spend some time evaluating pricing on the guild store so that I can maybe move some of this stuff more quickly. Right now I have my 30 slots filled and I wish there was a way to be able to sell more items without joining additional trade guilds. I guess it makes sense why folks have more trade guilds than pretty much anything else. On the radar is a return to running content on my main because I still would love to be caught up to the point of being able to start the new expansion fresh in June when it lands. I don’t think there is a shot in hell of that happening however, which again is a me thing… because anyone can start the new content day one. I just have this hang up about wanting to complete content in the order it was released.

Another thing that I spent some of the weekend doing was working on my nonsense playlist. At the time of writing this I am up to 894 songs for a grand total of 59 hours and 47 minutes of play time. Considering that I am using shuffle and spotify doesn’t seem to play through everything once before repeating… it is highly likely I will actually listen to everything on it but it makes a good radio that brings me joy. I am still periodically adding things to it as I think about them, but I am probably going to start creating some focused “mixtape” playlists and sharing them with you as well. I am not sure if this brand of nonsense is down anyone’s alley, but I am enjoying it.

Another thing that I spent some of the weekend doing was catching up on Outriders. I attempted to play a bit when it launched but have been otherwise occupied, first with the Diablo 3 Season 23 and later with grinding my Nightblade in Elder Scrolls. The first thing that I did was turn off the thing that keeps increasing your world level because this felt a little weird. My power gained from dropped items was just not keeping up with the difficulty increase and it sorta felt like being dropped into Torment 1 in Diablo 3 before being fully geared. I’ve now set the world level to 3 aka what they call “Normal” and am back to enjoying myself.

I am sure at some point I will write a general review of the game, but one of the bigger takeaways is just how bleak it is. Like I have played some bleak games… but this one is on a whole new level. It seems like so often you meet a character that seems interesting, and then in a very Walking Dead fashion… they callously kill them off with a stray bullet or something else that feels meaningless. I think this is absolutely on purpose to illustrate just how bad of shape the world is, but it does grate on you a bit as you continue to play. I hope that as I keep moving forward I will eventually start to see a glimmer of hope, because right now the straights are much dire.

That is all folks. I hope you have a great week. I seem to have jacked up my sleep patterns and am personally hoping that settles out.

Rediscovering Playlists

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Morning Friends! Now that I have finished the Diablo 3 Season 23 grind, that means I have more or less defaulted back to trying to finish my Nightblade off in Elder Scrolls Online. There are still several more days of the Anniversary Festival and with that the double experience buff that comes from eating cake. I personally find this pretty chill and relaxing to just hop in and join one of the auto groups and grind away until my bags fill. While doing this I have been spending quite a bit of time recently listening to music, which is odd to say that I have not done in a very long time. I have no clue what happened because music used to be such a critical part of my life, but over the years I gravitated more and more towards instrumental music… and then just stopped listening to something in the background all together.

This most recent foray has been thanks to my good friend Bells, which I realize is somewhat confusing given that I go by Bel with one L. She has created a handful of really good playlists that are theme based with the most recent one being centered around the music of Generation X, or at least those of us growing up at a very particular age. Listening to this feels like I transported back to being seventeen again and cruising around in my beat up 1977 Honda Civic Hatchback. If you are interested then I highly suggest this playlist, and I also really enjoy her punk playlist as well.

I admittedly am pretty new to using Spotify, which I know sounds weird given how ubiquitous it has become. I am by no means a stranger to streaming audio, I just went down a different path to arrive here. Originally I was a huge proponent of Pandora, because with the closing of Oink’s Pink Palace I was looking for a new discovery engine more than anything else. I was no longer listening to the radio and with it I needed a new vehicle for discovering new music that I might like. From there I shifted over to Google Music and was there until they started screwing with it and trying to turn it into YouTube Music. After that I had a brief stint with Amazon Music but kept running into gaps in their inventory of songs which lead me to finally subscribe to Spotify.

One of the things that I didn’t love about Google Music was the lack of a way to publicly share a playlist with someone else… and actually allow them to listen to it. This is something that is solved with Spotify and recently I have been working on my own stupidly large playlist. It is far from complete and likely never will be… but if you are so inclined I give you Bel’s Confusing Blend. I highly suggest listening to it on shuffle given that there are large blocks of the same artist right now in a row. It is intended more as a radio station style experience and shuffle mostly does that. I sorta wish I had the ability to pre-shuffle the list and at some point I might actually sort it by hand to make it flow a little better but for now it is what it is.

One of the things that I used to love as a kid is creating mix tapes and I might start doing that again. A mix tape was a specific vehicle where the songs flowed in a specific way as to invoke a particular feeling. I miss doing this and if I can find some of the ones I created in the past for friends, I might port them over, but I have no clue if I saved any of that. I lost most of my musical archives at one point which is ultimately what lead me to embrace streaming. Today is going to be a bit of a busy day, but at least I will have a personal soundtrack to nurture me.