My Favorite Things I Posted Here in 2025
- “WRITING FACTS: Afterword”
I was pretty disappointed in how this turned out initially. I had so much fun, so much desperately needed fun, writing the first one that I was sure I could get the same catharsis from a second one, forgetting that part of what made the first one work is I had no idea what I was doing. Trying to force that same alchemy a second time around was bound to fail.
But re-reading it, I don’t think it’s that bad. Obviously drags a bit at the beginning when the randomizer refused to give me a text block, and justifies its title even less than the first one, but as a more bloggy, “here’s the shit I went through” piece I think it works pretty well.
I have, since writing this, had yet another health crisis, which I’m currently recovering from. At the moment, I don’t think it’s interesting enough to write about. I hope it stays that way. - “Office Hours #6: Let’s Exchange the Experience (Would’ve Also Been a Fun Title for This Paper But I Hadn’t Heard “Runnin’ Up That Hill” Yet)”
I did not cancel those plans, and I’m very happy about it. - “The Body Poem”
I’d had a conversation with my friend in college about how it seemed like a lot of our peers were writing poems about their bodies, you know, the kind of poem where the poet sort takes a frank look at their physical manifestation with a lot of references to gross bodily functions and whatnot but then kind of romanticizes it at the end. And we were both a little snooty about them, finding them kind of trite and overdone.
A while later I decided to write a satirical body poem, but as I was writing it and thinking through what the defining features of body poems were, I was also having to think about why someone might write a body poem and who tended to write them and I realized that there were maybe reasons why I had never felt the need to write one but why someone who was, say, a woman, or trans, or queer, or POC, or disabled, or in anyway not the presumed normative body in a heteropatriarchal white supremacist society might in fact have some things to say on the subject.
So that shifted things a bit. The end result still has remnants of that original satirical approach (because “The Body Poem does not shower, but it does pee / in the shower.” is a great line and there was no way I was gonna get rid of that) but I hope they’re recontextualized by the ending. - “Blue Prince,” “Baldur’s Gate 3,” “Wolfenstein II,” and “Bloodborne”
I spent a lot of time this year thinking about video games, and more specifically thinking about how to have fun playing games as I move into my 30s and my body starts failing. Each of these reviews is dealing with that theme in some form or another, and I think they’re all interesting, but my Bloodborne essay is one of the best things I’ve ever written.
* * *
It has, as (apparently) always, been A Year. Didn’t get much done in the 4 months that I wasn’t dealing with some sort of health issue. Spent a lot of time thinking about video games because I spent a lot of time playing video games because I didn’t want to / couldn’t do much else. I have been doing some more Logo stuff which should get a write up soon. I’ve made some progress on my Secret Project. I wrote a song that may or may not ever see the light of day. Oh, and I got to write about a show that I sort of don’t think you should watch in Exploits (Issue#88: Gore), that was very cool. Had some very joyful developments in my personal life. Ended the year watching Wallace & Gromit. So I guess it somehow ended up being a good year?
Not gonna make any promises or predictions for the coming year. Hope everyone’s doing as well as they can be.
Certain of Eventual Failure 