And here we are with another year done so it’s time for the annual posts of the year.
Three Most Popular / Viewed Posts
Ugh, I love Andor. I don’t know where Star Wars is heading next (2026’s The Mandalorian and Grogu looks like a lot of fun), but I hope there’s not going to be an attempt to make a new Andor since Star Wars is often at its best when it’s trying different things. But let’s keep that anti-fascist heart alive.
As we spiral headfirst into the future™, there are more than a few parts of it that I find quite worrying. One of them is how reliant we are on the internet to do everything, from verifying that the copy of Adobe Premiere I pay a subscription for(!?) is valid to being able to update that buggy game I bought. What happens when it goes offline? Problems. Problems happen.
I was not expecting a post on Karate Kid: Legends to be the most viewed of this year. That said, I stand by this one. The movie’s a fun time and a huge part of that is because it knows exactly what it is. When so much out there is trying to elevate or deconstruct a genre, there’s something so wonderful about sitting down for a movie that knows exactly the sort of story it’s telling. Of course, it helps that it’s a load of fun.
Josh’s Pick of Three Four
I watched Wake Up Dead Man again this week and it is so very good and the list is four this year because I want to make sure it gets its mention.
Ah, politics. All too familiar were many of the attack lobbied against the leftist front-runner of this year’s New York mayoral race. Race and ethnicity are tricky things — even tricker when trying to fit it into a box. Mamdani’s struggle and the ensuing brouhaha was something I recognized in my own life, and I’m sure it resonated with many others too. A shared sense of camaraderie probably wasn’t the goal of the engineered controversy, and yet here we are.
I wanted one post about Death Stranding 2, the excellent hiking game that’s one of my favorite pieces of media of 2025, to make it on this list. The social aspect of Death Stranding 2 is something that makes playing it so special, something that reminds me that, man, the internet still has the power to connect people even as it brings all this awful into the world.
Oh, let’s get meta with it. I’m keeping a personal blog in 2025, something positively archaic when the digital world has pivoted to video (multiple times over) and the real social media sphere is on TikTok or Instagram or whatever app I don’t care about. And now we’ve got LLM’s making bespoke slop for anyone who wants it. So why blog?
Because I want to. And I’ll keep going next year too for that exact same reason.
Essays, Not Rants! 