There’s a rainbow-colored box I keep under my bed that every greeting card I’ve ever been sent lives inside. Most of them are from my godmother, who mails me a card on each birthday, holiday, and sometimes just because she was thinking of me. She hand-writes a short message on the right-hand side of every card; she rarely writes more than a few words, but it’s different every time. She picks the perfect card, grabs an envelope to match, writes my address on the front, and respectfully puts an honorific in front of my name. Within a few days to a week of receiving it, I always get a call making sure it reached its destination. She could simply send a text when I’m on her mind, or wire me money if she wants to send me a gift, but there’s an intentionality to adding those extra steps.

A perfunctory check-in would be fine enough, and even appreciated, but exerting a little more effort to do something you don’t need to do communicates care. Like my godmother, I love to send handwritten cards. I draw pictures, slip handmade bookmarks inside, and write something that reminds the recipient that I’ve been paying attention to what they’re going through. I don’t expect anything in return; I just want my friends to know they’re worth spending a little of my most precious resource—time.

Here again, for the fourth time, I’m inviting some dear friends to participate in my annual tradition where I give them some space on my newsletter to talk about themselves. They can reflect on their year however they choose and provide some lists of things they spent their time on. This thing takes work—contacting everyone, fielding questions, giving feedback, editing their writing, and formatting the post. It’s a little stressful. Some of them push the deadline way too close. It’s a lot more special than just saying “happy new year,” though, isn’t it?

Likewise, I’m grateful that they all take time out of their busy lives for me. First and foremost, it’s a selfish gesture because my friends are brilliant and I want to read their writing. But it’s also a gift to you, dear reader, because there’s so much you get to learn from them. Thanks and enjoy.

—Shy Clara Thompson

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Baxter

2025 has been a year dedicated to the sensation of stasis, even though it wasn’t really at all. No year is. I did plenty (my three lifebloods of fiction and criticism and translation! played around with making a game! played around with making a video! played around with playing around!) and experienced just as much (lots of cooking with my partner; fostering a growing interest in flowers; plenty of less fun or pretty stress causers and sadness flares; losing sight of god and starting to drink energy drinks), but the whole year feels like a ghost to me already. I look back and all I see is empty air.

I did play Unlimited Saga, though.

Unlimited Saga is a game people hate. The world has decided, over the more than two decades since its release, that Unlimited Saga is a dumpster fire, a complete mess, one of the worst games on the PS2 and a startling low point of the RPG genre writ large.

No game in my entire life has ever stuck itself more deeply into my brain.

A radical experiment in pulling at the inherent abstraction of video games (to quote SaGa series mastermind Akitoshi Kawazu, their goal was “putting a knife into the flank of reality”) and exploring the medium as a collection of symbols, Unlimited Saga is aggressively opaque, eschewing traditional design at every turn and resolutely refusing to explain itself. How exactly is the turn order decided? How does the reel battle system work exactly? Where should I go? Who should I use? How does magic work? Everywhere you look is some mechanic-turned-question, purposefully obfuscated to encourage interacting with it on an instinctual level, all wrapped up in static images and unpainted board game pieces. It is a game that worships the eternal push and pull of understanding and not.

But god, how it blossoms. With enough time in its mist of mysteries, enough hours sitting with the frustrations that Things Aren’t Going The Way I Want, Unlimited Saga slowly reveals itself. You realize you’ve been engaging with all sorts of systems you didn’t even know about, that without even noticing you’ve begun to understand how different things work. You start to care about its cast and clock the dense interlocking world and narrative at play, callbacks and moments from different playthroughs constantly returning with renewed importance and poignancy. The abstraction unfurls and you start to see how everything really is—beautiful, in a way you never knew.

I look back at 2025 and think I see empty air. But is air ever really empty? I’m sure one day, weeks or months or years from now, moments from 2025 will return to me. Maybe they’ll be moments I can’t remember right now, maybe they’ll be the ones I can, but either way, they’ll find their way back to me. Until then, I’ll just keep on enjoying this period of not knowing.

Until then, I’ll just keep on enjoying the air.

“Life is like a box(ed copy) of Unlimited Saga” - Forrest Gump if he was cool

A 2025 list (like a SaGa game, I’ll let you figure out what kind)

1. The word “bouquet”

2. Camp de Thiaroye (dir. Ousmane Sembène & Thierno Faty Sow, 1988)

3. Dub Specialist’s “Juk Incorporation”

4. Kimchi nabe

5. Ravens Shouldn’t Wear Kimono by Chisato Abe

6. Guardians of the Harvest (dir. Riko Hiro, 2025)

7. The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr

8. The collected manga of Fumiko Okada

9. Tragic Error (dir. Louis Feuillade, 1913)

10. Making a Wizardry map with pencil and paper

flapricot

2025 was a year spent stuck in the mud. It was another stretch marked mainly by various neuroses, pointless existentialism, confusion, anxiety, self-consciousness, and stagnation—the same mucky cycles and patterns that have defined my last half-decade. My life has materially changed very little since I moved across the US in 2021: same job, same apartment, same basic routines. When I looked back at the start of my annual planner in preparation for writing this, I was crushed to rediscover that almost every little goal or hope or theme I’d written down to work on in 2025 is something I’ve been recently thinking about focusing on in 2026. I spend less time on my creative work than ever: the mid-scale animation project I wanted to have done by last year still basically exists only as a series of notes and just-begun project files. I hit a “milestone” age but in some ways feel like less of a functioning human than the 24-year-old I was at the start of the pandemic. I spiral every time I think about the state of the world and my and my friends’ future in it. And time keeps on accelerating, lately to such a degree that has me freaked out. I’m in a loop and it’s going faster and faster—spinning the tires and never getting traction, or something like that.

But in the interest of leaning away from my inclination towards negativity, I want to acknowledge the little changes that have loosened my stuckness just a bit. In the back half of the year, I started meditating with a degree of intention I haven’t previously allowed myself. I’ve made small but steady progress in my little martial arts practice. I’ve had the chance to dive into worlds of art I always knew I’d love but never taken the time to explore. I got to contribute to a successful and very fun charity event for the second year in a row. I feel ever more love for the world and the people I know. I’m so grateful to my partner and my sister and my friends (Shy is very much included here) who continue to push and encourage me. I’m telling myself 2026 will be better, at least on a personal level. I’m going to make more eye-searing images and learn new things and be more honest with myself and those around me and maybe find a way to get out of the years-old mud, but if I were only to allow myself one concrete goal: I want to live my life in such a way that, by this time next year, I’ll be able to call more people my friend than I do now.

9 things I encountered in 2025 that resonated with me on a subcellular level

• “Good House” as performed live by Deakin — I got to see Panda Bear perform twice this year, and his long-time Animal Collective bandmate Deakin opened the second time. I’ve heard live recordings of “Good House“ probably forty times over the years, even before it was recorded and released on his debut album, but I never imagined just how massive it would be in person. Basically every Deakin song is a masterpiece of directness and earnestness, and those clear and loving lyrics wrapped in such an enormous, thudding wall of sound just about popped my soul.

• Saturn — This first happened in very late 2024 but I’m including it here because it happened a couple more times this year and it continues to floor me: I saw Saturn through my dinky consumer-grade telescope. Saturn is a real place, and the rings really are there. The gap between intellectually understanding those facts and taking in the actual sensory reality of it with your own eyes is pretty enormous, so I recommend seeing it for yourself if you can.

• Creation (dir. Stan Brakhage, 1979) — I got the chance to see over 30 Brakhage films screened this year. Creation might be my favorite of those: like many of his films, it uses concrete imagery to achieve abstract ends (and, maybe, vice versa), and the rhythms and colors in this one are just sublime.

• “Fruit Bowl” jinjunmei tea — My partner and I got really into tea this year. The “Fruit Bowl” jinjunmei from white2tea was maybe not the absolute best tea we drank (it is really delicious, to be clear), but I think its surprising flavor is emblematic of the sheer variety in taste that can come out of this one single kind of leaf without any additives or flavorings, just different processing methods developed and handed down over centuries.

• Kirby Air Riders — Like having my wish granted without ever knowing I had it. They made a sequel to the kinesthetically-greatest piece of software of all time, and it’s even better than the original? C’mon.

• War and War by László Krasznahorkai — War and War changed my brain chemistry just a little. Krasznahorkai has a reputation as a “challenging” writer, but I promise I’m not showing off or anything when I say this couldn’t be a breezier read. The headspace you get into while reading these breathlessly long, mellifluous sentences is so freeing, and the format works so perfectly in service of this strange, sad character study.

• Caves of Qud’s big finale — Caves of Qud is a complex, beautifully-written roleplaying game that I’ve played on and off for years, but I reached its ending for the first time back in February. It wouldn’t be fair to detail any aspect of it here, but I’ll say it is a very beautiful capstone to a very beautiful game.

• April (dir. Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2024) — A film which features, among other things, a vehicle getting stuck in the mud, and later freed with a little help.

• “greaser (panda bear version)” by The Crying Nudes - I guess I can’t help but mention Panda Bear twice. I have periods where I think I’ve outgrown Animal Collective and their various side projects—I’ve been listening to and obsessing over them for half my life at this point—but something in Noah’s voice and words continues to speak to me very deeply and maybe always will. His series of “remixes” (which are basically just new Panda Bear songs that use their source track as sampling material or a backing track) is consistently among his best work, and this one, built off the lovely Dean Blunt-produced original, is another dazzler.

Jai

When I was younger, my teachers loved playing the 2005 movie Coach Carter in school. And I loved watching it! Sam Jack plays a basketball coach who inspires a bunch of kids to not only excel at sports, but also their studies. There’s a great speech in the middle where he says: “our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” Years later, I found out this quote is actually from a dubious self-help book, but the point stands!

I always slightly fear looking back on my year. I think it’s incredibly easy to feel like you haven’t been as productive as you wanted to be. Humans are naturally hardwired to think the least of themselves. But there’s a lesson there! We are more powerful than we think. So we should be kinder to ourselves too.

Here’s some stuff I loved this year:

My favourite YouTube videos I watched in 2025

• The best bald head — A news report by Nippon Television News Japan

  • My favourite quote: “On a night with a full moon, bald men gather to celebrate.”

• xboom by will.i.am — I have long been tracking will.i.am’s tech career because it seems like he releases a new product annually that nobody needs.

  • My favourite quote: “We put the AI in radio.”

• Chick-fil-A Service Crisis - G-Ninge

  • My favourite quote: “Used to be free range / Crazy to see how you’ve changed”

• Ceiling fans at Subway restaurant in Montreal, Canada

  • My favourite quote: “HUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM”

My favourite TV shows I watched for the first time

• True Detective Season 1

• Ikebukuro West Gate Park

• HERO

• Long Vacation

• Pluribus

My favourite manga (and one book on manga) I read for the first time this year

• Eike Exner’s Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics

• Maki Fujiwara’s My Picture Diary

• Tadao Tsuge’s Trash Market

• Kenshin Shinzato’s The Habu Hunter

• Fumiko Takano’s Miss Ruki

• Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Good-Bye

• Moto Hagio’s They Were Eleven

• Nazuna Saito’s Offshore Lightning

• Yoshiharu Tsuge’s Oba Nickelplating Factory

william leonard

2025 has been my first unbroken year as an artist who is employed at not being an artist. College is long over, and I now live back home, quietly saving and enjoying my job, having less to talk about, but more to feel glad about; more of a life to look at. I’ve felt the barrier between my real and virtual lives grow more solid than ever, yet easier to handle; the social halves of myself now perhaps at their most even-handed. I have had a nicely compartmentalised year.

I’ve tried to make the most of my corporate lulls and late-train nights—I’ve read a lot of new books, and heard a lot of old albums (both on my phone). I even watched a film or a show if enough friends begged or dragged me to it—progress! None of the people on my list below are new to me this year, but I have finally been able to give them the undivided presence in my world that each has long deserved.

I don’t see myself changing much next year (at least not for the worse), but I will try to travel more. I also want to give more back to the internet than the odd postcard-to-the-family I feel myself slipping towards by now. I want to talk more about my friends in one group with my friends in another group, and make something cool happen. I want to make things for my friends that they love, and pay them even more to do the same.

This is all to say that getting to draw for Shy’s blog was a joyful little epitome of who I want to be from now on—including when I sent the article to Tomo Takino’s dub VA on Discord and she enjoyed it a lot. (Not sure I ever mentioned that?) Thank you so much!

Artists That Meant a Lot to Me This Year (and the Next)

• William T. Vollmann — The first I heard of this writer was when a friend started reading You Bright and Risen Angels last year and could hardly describe to me how batshit it was. Vollmann has been the greatest literary discovery of my adult life, and I have now read almost everything he’s written (save his short stories). A titan of maximalism in page count, prose theatrics, scrupulous research, and humanity-spanning empathy. He has worn his heart on his sleeve in more parts of this world than I can count, and lived to tell a thousand tales. The Dying Grass was the most grueling book I read this year; The Royal Family was the most disgusting; Carbon Ideologies was the most depressing; all of them are singular masterpieces I would gladly read again. I will try to finish all his books in time for his next novel in March: A Table for Fortune, a four-volume, 3,700-page CIA family-drama epic. Wish me luck!

• Ben Coniguliaro — Home recording artist and transcendent chordsmith. Released two albums this year, Tactile Demons and Correct Irregulars, which together place him among the best musicians of my generation. His one-man-band Wippy Bonstack purveys DIY prog par excellence: there is seemingly nothing he can’t pull off, instrumental pyrotechnics and alchemical popwork alike, with such unerring infectious panache it makes me want to make music more than anything else. I cannot, and may never manage to, recommend him enough.

• Ryan Power — Home recording artist and transcendent chordsmith. One of my favourite songwriters alive; all his tunes have enough quiet magisterial craft and kooky bedroom lovability to fill a curriculum. Released a song every six weeks of (most of) 2025, to almost no one’s fanfare but mine. One of them, “Drunk Yogi,” might be the defining song of his past decade: a dizzying diorama of bizarro-sophisti-pop perfection which you should spin if you haven’t been spun by him yet!

• Ljot Swanhild — If I’m adding a VTuber to this list, I should probably pick one that’s like absolutely no other—and yet embodies the incipient spirit of the medium closest of all. Ljot Swanhild does not livestream, or have a Discord, or even really play games more than twice a year these days (usually either skate games or train sims). What she does is upload tiny fast-paced videos starring herself as an ever-increasing band of alter-ego friends, hanging out on virtual trains across the German Alps, trying out sick skate tricks, playing industrial DJ sets, and sharing quiet, introspective, even loving moments with each other. But these don’t feel like tacky Lore Content in the slightest: Ljot’s work is sincerely (intra?)personal, her editing always free and fun, no audience implied or expected; she is a YouTuber in the purest sense, of a time when nobody knew what a YouTuber (or VTuber) had to be except “yourself.”

• SimCard StyleGAN / Next Year’s Snow / 7FORM — This winter I got to do one of my favourite activities with these very special friends: record some bullshit narration for their insane avant-rap tragicomedies. I feel so lucky to have fallen in with Octa Möbius Sheffner’s merry band of weirdass Bandcampers, and to have witnessed the gang’s relentless immaturation into genuine best-at-what-they-doers year after year. (Also my favourite people on earth to chat about books with.) Just released the aforementioned avant-rap tragicomedy ÆTHERIST III: A Tale of Two Phones, which is 16 hours long and stars my intrepid besties freestyling their way through an alternate-universe Quebec independence war while also trying to kill Moby. (I might be the very first thing you’ll hear on this album and for that I take full responsibility.)

• Lydia MacBride — My best friend from college. Cuneiform enthusiast, Jungist junglist, and multimedia force of nature. I want more people to read the masterpiece of Irish post-Internet art that is An Tionscadal Dromchla so I’m linking that first. This year she dropped some jams, started a hardcore EDM group (watch this space!) and moved from Dublin to within a single train stop’s distance from me, so I’m hyped to hang out with her more! We also just saw the European premiere of Castration Movie II and had a blast.

Joshua Minsoo Kim

Another year in the rearview and I don’t know how to process it all. Lots of travel, lots of shows, lots of film, lots of kissing. Another year well lived.

Favorite Concerts of 2025

1. Aaron Dilloway at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, 3/14

2. Los Kjarkas at the Copernicus Center in Chicago + Billy Woods at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 11/13

3. Michael Rother at the Mill & Mine in Knoxville for Big Ears Festival, 3/29

4. The Saami Brothers at the South Asia Institute in Chicago, 4/6

5. [Ahmed] at Regas Square in Knoxville for Big Ears Festival, 3/28 + 3/29

6. PinkPantheress at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, 11/2

7. Still House Plants at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, 3/25 + The Standard in Knoxville for Big Ears Festival, 3/28

8. Cindy Lee at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, 11/5

9. Hetta at Barlos in Barcelos for SQUARE Fest, 1/30

10. Erika de Casier, Fine at Outset in Chicago, 10/21

11. Yasuaki Shimizu, Macie Stewart/Lia Kohl/Whitney Johnson at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 3/24

12. BBBBBBB, RXM Reality, Anti-Soul Organization, etc. at Tritriangle in Chicago, 2/15

13. Helena Hauff at Into the Woods in Los Angeles, 11/8

14. Maria Chàvez, Mariam Rezaei, and Victoria Shen at The Standard in Knoxville for Big Ears Festival, 3/28

15. Xavi at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, 11/28

16. Mk.gee at the Metro in Chicago, 8/1

17. Ichiko Aoba, Gia Margaret at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 5/6

18. Fareed Ayaz & Abu Muhammad Qawwal at the South Asia Institute in Chicago, 10/26

19. Claire Rousay, Ami Dang at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, 12/6

20. Dijon at the Salt Shed in Chicago, 12/8

21. William Hooker & Alan Braufman at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, 9/19

22. Geese, Racing Mount Pleasant at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 10/15 + Cameron Winter at the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel in Chicago, 12/17

23. Fidju Kitxora at Praça Mercado in Famalicão for SQUARE Fest, 1/31

24. OsamaSon at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, 10/25

25. Autechre at Concord Music Hall in Chicago, 10/20

26. Lia Kohl (with Dorothy Carlos, Zachary Good, Gerrit Hatcher, Riley Leitch, Nick Meryhew, Beth McDonald, Zach Moore, Jason Stein, and Macie Stewart) at Union Station’s Great Hall in Chicago, 5/15 + Macie Stewart at Constellation in Chicago, 4/3

27. Eliana Glass with Luke Bergman at Metrograph in New York, 12/13

28. Taekjoon Kim, Hong Junpyo, Sunjae Lee and Kikanju Baku at Dotolim in Seoul, 9/11

29. Mount Eerie at Thalia Hall in Chicago + Pictoria Vark at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, 4/13

30. Nino Paid, BabyChiefDoIt, VonOff1700, Jorjiana, and Warhol.ss at Schubas Tavern in Chicago, 4/7

31. Asmâa Hamzaoui & Bnat Timbouktou at Theatro Circo in Braga for SQUARE Fest, 2/1

32. Ira Glass at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, 11/17

33. Brìghde Chaimbeul with Shazad Ismaily at the Knoxville Museum of Art for Big Ears Festival, 3/28

34. TWICE at Grant Park in Chicago for Lollapalooza, 8/2

35. Che at the Theatre of the Living Arts in Philadelphia, 9/27

36. De Schuurman at Cinemas Bragashopping in Braga for SQUARE Fest, 1/31

37. OHYUNG, Anne Ishii x Clint Takeda at Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, 4/19

38. Xaviersobased, Ksuuvi at the Bottom Lounge in Chicago, 12/7

39. Matana Roberts at the Stone in New York, 7/9

40. Josephine Foster at Constellation in Chicago, 4/10

mercedes

In retrospect, the word of my year is “impossible”. My year started with the certainty that I was locked in with my circumstances; a restaurant cook in Los Angeles, single, thirties, caretaker for an aging and disabled parent. They could be worse, all-in. There’s a job I’m good at, a place to live in a city I love living in, enough to eat, a bit of time for friends and the people in my care living a good-enough life. Good-enough was my gold standard. My heart, as I age into my thirties, couldn’t really bear any ambitions more complex than the next couple weeks, and there are joys to be found in that kind of doldrums. Visits with friends, the odd creative fulfillment of the rare finished project, the beauty of a sunset, drives in LA’s deeply cinematic nights… but the fact is that the pace of living asked of me by such a hard, big, lonely, competitive city had been wearing me down, slowly, for some time. I was beginning to feel less “locked in” and more “trapped.”

What to do? Aspire for less? Wouldn’t it be greedy to think of something else, some other way to live? Am I just sad because I’m getting old? Wouldn’t it take too much to change it all around? Wouldn’t it all feel like giving up on everything I’ve ever known? Thinking about it at all introduced me to a squall of doubts so severe that imagining myself with my future in my own hands brought tears to my eyes. I could take care of anything but myself. For the first time since my teen years, I felt lost and ineffectual, with the certainty things had to change but no way to know what to do.

My way of getting through involved dusting off an old habit from those teen years: watching a lot of movies. It turns out a lot of the loneliest, loveliest people I know are down for a screening, and the silent presence of someone who cares, joining me in going to another time and place, eased my heart a lot. God help me, I even became a member of the American Cinematheque. Disgusting. As much as I disavow all that the word “escapism” connotes, it’s pretty obvious to me that film’s appeal to me in this passage of life is a way to look at myself again, in other words or another frame of mind. In a movie I can see myself without looking at myself.

Much has happened, and through lots of luck, determination, vulnerability and favor-begging that the blogosphere doesn’t need to learn about, I’m ending this year in a new city, far away from home, but surrounded by love, on a new life/career track, with my caregiving intact and a new lease on life. It’s odd, and terrifying, and exciting. I have an impossible number of people to thank, an impossible ambition to fulfill, an impossible dream coming ever-so-slightly true. I try now to see myself with the sympathy of the cinematographer and the intent of the improviser; let’s see how this all goes! For you, I humbly submit a themed list of recommended viewing.

Top Five Movies I Watched This Year That Feel Like Moving Away from Los Angeles

• Love & Pop (dir. Hideaki Anno, 1998) — When I heard last year that GKIDS had acquired a new 4K restoration of Love & Pop, I figured that my (extremely) longstanding plans to finally watch this one could wait another month or two. It was true serendipity to wait until juuust after my life plans began to completely change, in the company of old friends, friends I no longer get to hang around with quite so casually, at multiple states’ distance. Love & Pop plays like the evil twin of Anno’s masterpiece Kare Kano (don’t @ me); a sublime touch-and-go for the defraying of young social energy in the acid of adult context, and as an extremely non-teenaged woman, it managed to put me in the whip siphon and re-carbonate every ugly precocious emotion in me like a peroxide bath. It’s only uphill from here, right?

• Buffalo ‘66 (dir. Vincent Gallo, 1998) — LMAO, oh boy, oh man, oh goodness. Everything they say about it is true! But: what a bizarre tapestry it weaves in its neurosis, how true it is. So much of this year, I’ve felt like Billy Brown, neurotically stinging at all stimuli like I’ve been shorn of skin, completely histrionic. Full rooms, empty rooms, rooms I’ve been in a million times, rooms I can never revisit; I’ve filled them all with my trembling and tears and my terror at being known. Yet I too have been sunk in the arms of love, slowly dropping my protest, finding my way to stillness. It doesn’t come easy. You can’t ever take it for granted.

• Divine Hammer (dirs. the M. sisters, 2025) — Yeah, yeah, I understand that dropping a movie in this list that you couldn’t have possibly seen if you weren’t in Capitol Hill, Seattle, WA, on the 15th of December has an air of “nyeh-nyeh” to it, but trust me: it’s appointment viewing when it comes to your town. I can’t, I won’t, spoil what makes it such a complete brain-buzz, why and how it’s got my step full of vigor, why I left such a gruesome movie grinning ear-to-ear, why I felt that art with your little cadre of weirdos is a fundamental love in life. All I can say: at your earliest convenience, consider double-featuring with Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans!

• Elevator Girls in Bondage (dir. Michael Kalmen, 1972) — Maybe I’m the problem, thinking about queer cinema every June like it’s homework. Once I get into the swing, it’s typically the most enrichment I have in a single month of viewing, and often the most directly fun. But of course, there’s always the little worry in a modern moment of movement dissolution that yesterday’s queer cohort is today’s crab bucket, and that as a shrill queen, there might be no cinema in my past such as I need, that I might be the bearer of bad optics. Thank god for this burning downhill dumpster of bad taste, so radically unrepentant in its bubbly communistic t-slurdom that it makes Pink Flamingos look like Dallas. It’s not really a fair comparison, I guess; this is literally “pornography” on a technicality. Anyway, this is what hanging out in Seattle feels like.

• Celine and Julie Go Boating (dir. Jacques Rivette, 1974) — It took my dear friends describing Rivette’s film Le Pont du Nord as “French Kamen Rider” to convince me to watch my first Rivette, and it worked on me because I am a simple creature with an easily plied mind. About a year later, I can say that Rivette is one of My Guys, as surely as Yang or Murnau or Weerasthekul or Cheang or Araki, and I’d like Celine and Julie Go Boating in any other year. In this year, to say that I love it, when all its implications of the theatrical, life-changing magic of friendship amongst women in opposition to all narrative gravity have seemed to manifest under me like warm winds… this isn’t a melodrama anymore. Dance a tango out the front door of the cold grey house. Cry if you must; we have a current to row against!

Kei

On August 3rd, 2025 voice actress Asakura Azumi, performing as 765 Production’s Hagiwara Yukiho, struggled through tears singing the solo track “Plumeria Flower” at the second day of THE IDOLM@STER 765PRO ALLSTARS LIVE ～NEVER END IDOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!～. On her Wikipedia page, Asakura, whose frustration with her own tears was evident through the entirety track, is noted with a remark from a DVD release dated back to 2007 as “being often overwhelmed with emotions to the point of crying on stage.” Asakura’s blog posts are often self-derisive and occasionally self-dismissive. None of this is an act for her performing as Yukiho, an idol who cries often and has little in the way of self confidence. A post Asakura made about the 2-day August event details how amazing she feels the cast around her have been, and rarely does she give herself any credit.

When giving her final comment of the performance, she stated that the selection of *Plumeria Flower* as her solo had been her own idea, as she felt the song best represented her feelings that she would not have been able to make it this far on her own. Her voice quivering, obviously welling up with tears, she comments on her performance of the song: “But it turns out I couldn’t sing it. I still have some work to put in.” and, breaking into laughter, states “I guess I can’t quit yet.”

I had a difficult year. I found myself experiencing emergencies and unfortunate news, both personally and professionally, on more occasions than I’d have preferred. Several months felt like an eternity. Several months bled together in what I can only describe as chaos, where my memories of good times several months apart feel as though they all occurred in a single jumbled mess. The good times were ultimately an escape from the processing of thoughts and feelings I felt I did not have time for anyhow. “Just do your best” is what I have always been told, and without guidance that becomes a machine in perpetual motion.

Utilizing that perpetual motion, I drove myself to work on music with more intensity. I spent an ungodly amount of my downtime watching tutorials, learning music theory, and recreating parts of songs that I was inspired by to learn how they work. Listing these out like I just did sounds so productive, but it was really an endlessly frustrating solitary activity that likely reduced the physical capacity of my eyes by a non-negligible degree. After spending months on a particular project, I continue to feel unhappy with the end product, which is equally as depressing as it remains to be motivating. While the project is exactly what I wanted to do, it is impossible to ignore the fact that I tend to rush when the finish line is in sight, and that never results in an output I could call my best. I suppose the only thing left to say is “I still have some work to put in. I guess I can’t quit yet.”

It was during the same period of constantly putting myself through the gauntlet this summer that I found myself drawn to the hybrid sports/romance visual novel Aokana - Four Rhythms Across the Blue. Though Aokana is about a fictional 1 vs. 1 competitive sport played with anti-gravity equipment, developer Sprite manages to use this framing to distill what it means to love doing something in spite of potential negative emotions, and sends that as an emotional force through its unique subcultural medium. The genre descriptor spokon, described as “anime and manga genre that tells about sports achievements made thanks to the desire to win” absolutely fits Aokana, and in my personal opinion, could be applied to a number of media about idols as well, as music can be a competition individually and collectively. Standing above the rest, my favorite route of the game was centered on the themes of acknowledging your own weaknesses, and moving forward on a path that is impossible with ordinary effort. As though it were decided by the hand of fate, the role of Tobisawa Misaki, the heroine of the route in question, is played by none other than Asakura Azumi. Whether her personality or personal history were a factor in her being cast in the role, I do not know. It still speaks to me.

Failure is not an option, and I intend to keep putting in the work. If only because I feel so strongly about the few times I can escape to live performances that can re-light the fire I know is required to keep going. For this year’s list I have 10 live performances I experienced this year that got me through it.

• Tokyo Dennou from. DENONBU @ Cybertokyo — Trying to take in every screen at once might kill me. The wild bass of Yggdranium may as well be giving me a concussion.

• i☆Ris @ Tokyo Idol Festival 2025 — Standing in a parking lot converted to a stage with zero shade in triple digit August heat, I recall another event where a typical otaku crowd comment, summarized as “is the water tasty” was met by another member of the crowd yelling back “OF COURSE IT’S TASTY WHY WOULDN’T IT BE?” I accidentally picked the corralled area where a group of guys were mixing for the group with more arcane and unique chants than I’ve ever heard in my life. This is nowhere near the most strange place I have seen i☆Ris, a friend would remind me. Drying up like Spongebob at Sandy’s house is worth it to see my oshi.

• MyGO!!!!! ZEPP TOUR 2025 @ Zepp Nagoya — I may just never apply for floor tickets again after having what felt like front row seats (upper seating area) to a live performance.

• MyGO!!!!!×Ave Mujica Joint Live “Wakaremichi no, Sono Saki e” (Days 1 & 2) — A two day long duel between two extremely talented bands is best remembered in my head by a friend’s comment that “they’re doing metalcore moves over there”

• LAUGH DiAMOND×Yukimoji Two-man Live “Blazing 1v1?! Match~ (Tentative Title)” — An entire room of people dedicated to media mix idol project thought dead and buried years prior are yelling in excitement at a (yet-to-be released at the time) Nintendo Switch 2, running somewhere behind the curtain during a demo of the game. At one point during a talk segment, an audience member interjects to ask the performers if it’s okay if we all sit down on the floor. This was presented initially as a live performance of vocal synth songs by their voice providers, unrelated to any game of any sort. How did we get here?

• Maebashi Witches Live ~OPEN if you wish~ Chapter 4 (Daytime Performance) — Translation of a comment made to me by a group of guys standing next to me when the performers asked who had come the furthest to see this niche regional setting anime idol media mix group: “(laughing) dude, it’s gotta be you right”

• She is Legend @ Heaven Burns Red Live 3.5th Anniversary Festival — I heard “Goodbye Innocence” live and I’m never going to fail.

• MACROSS F GALAXY LIVE☆FINAL 2025 (Day 1) — Who are “May’n” and “Nakajima Megumi”? As far as I am concerned, I saw Sheryl Nome and Ranka Lee for real on that night.

• THE IDOLM@STER 765PRO ALLSTARS LIVE ～NEVER END IDOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!～ (Day 1) — A man several seats down the row from me spends the entirety of the song “Yakusoku” sobbing into his towel, never once looking up. That night I am discussing my decision to skip Day 2 for another performance, and will regret uttering the words, “God, if they play” (the song that is titled) “MUSIC♪ tomorrow, I’m going to kill myself”

• MACROSS F GALAXY LIVE☆FINAL 2025 (Day 2) — Kanno Yoko, rising through the smoke covered stage floor seated at a grand piano. The guy next to me says “masaka” out loud, the only time I think I’ve heard someone say that out loud in person. The keytar she would don after is about as large as herself.

Ryan Waller

My favorite TikTok this year is deeply peaceful, rather than funny. It’s just a handsome man hitting a series of very clean dougies in beautiful natural environments. The video is therapeutic to me. Every time I watch it, every concern and stress evaporates from my mind for a few seconds.

There’s a lot of those two things to go around lately. General life stress saps my strength every day. Like everyone, I bear witness to the plentiful genocides ripping the planet apart. Like everyone, I see the planetary devastation approaching on the horizon. Despite all that shit though, I try my best to take pleasure in plenty of things; the passion and perseverance of my students, the kindness of the people who are patient enough to tolerate me and keep me around, the continued health of my parents.

Below is a list of newly released things (all stuff that came out this year, specifically) that kept me alive and happy in 2025. Not ranked and necessarily incomplete. Here’s to another year on this burning shithole marble.

• Klein - Thirteen Sense

• MIKE - Showbiz!

• Ealuhri - F*** THE ***** ‘-’, EALUHRI VS. LUHRIRE

• Tiakola & Genezio - FARA FARA GANG

• Shemar - Emerge N’See

• Hester Valentine - I Am the Female Weezy

• Snotnoze Saleem - A River Dies pf Thirst

• ByoNoiseGenerator - Subnormal Dives

• The Residents - Doctor Dark

• Yellow Eyes - Confusion Gate

• KeiyaA - Hooke’s Law

• The Sidepieces - Darkskin Niggas with Lightskin Nigga Problems

• Celestaphone & Dealers of God - Cult Subterranea

• Zayok - In Elsewhere

• billy woods - Golliwog/Gowillog

• Everything is Psychedelic - The Beautiful Malaise

• The Hatch - 333

• Jalen Elk Star - Esin

• KP Skywalka - I Tried to Tell You

• Nuvolascura - How This All Ends

• Ostraca - Eventualities

• Pulciperla - Tatekieto

• Homeskin - Soul Washed Bleach

• Veilburner - Longing for Tragedy, Reeking of Triumph

• Sumac & Moor Mother - The Film

• Tantric Bile - A Medusa on Your House

• Phyllomedusa - The Dark Side of the Amazon

• Ben Bondy - XO Salt Llif3

• All Men Unto Me - Requiem

• JJJJJerome Ellis - Vesper Sparrow

• Makaya McCraven - Off the Record

Patrick Lynn Wilson

2025 is best described in terms of blueberries and blue corn chips eaten while riding shotgun in a car. Allow me to explain.

As a plurality of the USA will tell you, 2025 was a Hell Year. The past decade has been an awful ride, but in 2025 the wheels fully fell off. If the thunder doesn’t catch you, then the lightning will; if the lightning fails to steal you, then the masked secret police will attempt as much of your person. Hunting for solace in pop culture’s past, I assumed the project of watching all 325 episodes of Norman Lear’s offbeat soap opera satire from 1976, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. And as an alternatingly proud and bashful Deadhead for half of my life thus far, I turned to the lasting jam band scene they bequeathed for a welcome distraction from Hell.

Before long, I grasped that the current jam scene in America contains something closer in spirit to that vibe infusing those dank DIY venues dedicated to hardcore, noise, and avant-garde happenings that formed me when I was younger (RIP to The Mopery!) More risk-taking than many assume; more willing to experiment with tradition, with sights set on the outer limits of what rock does when liberated. On July 27^th, the instantly infamous Phish show at Saratoga Springs’ SPAC, where the band played in reverse, launching with a reprise incessantly returned to at least 6 times throughout the evening, coalesced for me the jigsaw pieces of a puzzle where post-motorik psychedelic rock music truly makes sense while never settling for that coherence. If you squint at the right angle during a heady guitar solo, the phantom of Les Rallizes Denudes’ Takashi Mizutani may appear in your peripheral vision. And if you think that a band is teasing the Mii Channel theme during the intro bars of “Bennie and the Jets,” they are. Is it any surprise that Phish now incorporates a Miku Stomp pedal in their setup?

A particular highlight of the year was seeing the mighty Grateful Dead cover project Joe Russo’s Almost Dead at Chicago’s Salt Shed in October. As with most concerts this year, I found genuine new friends in the process—here, a 50-something-year-old government shutdown-furloughed white dude from Arkansas who became my show partner and best friend for the night, regaling me with recollections of setlists and venue rankings of the 27 Dead shows he saw over a 3-year span. Though we were separated, he waited for me outside to offer a ride home, but not before we took a long breather seated in that parking lot to snack on his choice of concert snacks: blueberries and blue corn chips. This gesture has affected me endlessly since. One may assume a posture in music for validation; or one can practice loving kindness and treat each new person in life as worthy of having a bag of blue corn chips passed to them.

In 2026, I encourage you to envision yourself as both the driver and the passenger riding in this car containing blueberries and blue corn chips; our love and care for each other may well be the best way to make it through the rest of this ride.

One potential balm in 2025 and ahead to heal the grievous wounds caused by the streaming era is through application of the overwhelming richness of live musical recordings available for listening through Archive.org and Bandcamp. When streaming services fund little bits of war fashioned specifically to hurt people, the incentive to turn off, tune in, and drop out via disconnecting entirely from the hydralike beast of streaming proves all the more appealing.

Below are 5 live recordings—some bootlegs from audience members in the taper’s section, others sourced directly by the artists themselves—which provided an escape route from the morass of 2025 for yours truly, and suggest a more immediate path towards interfacing with bands and their community:

1. Phish - 07/27/2025 @ SPAC, Saratoga Springs, New York

2. Sqwerv - 10/01/2025 @ The B. Bar, Omaha, Nebraska

3. Dogs in a Pile - 11/20/2025 @ Garcia’s Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

4. Goose - 08/28/2025 @ Hancher Auditorium, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa

5. Dwelling Unit - dwelling_unit_april_2025_VHS_footage; 04/26/2025 @ Special Features, Portland, Oregon

aspalas

In my head, I’m always writing. But writing has come difficult as late. This year saw a feature of mine published in Unsanctioned Recollection, a zine dedicated to exploring the subject of emulation and its relationship to memory. I’ve considered journaling or starting a diary too many times to count, but I don’t have the self-discipline. I compromised another way: in lieu of signing up for another website, I write down games I’ve played, books I’ve read, shows I watched in an Excel file. (Letterboxd is my sole exception.) Even if I haven’t written anything that week—or devastatingly, month—I tell myself": “It’s okay. You did something.” The title of whatever it is jogs my memory; proof to myself that I’ve read someone’s writing; that my time was not spent unwisely.

But it’s still not mine. I grieve for the time I wish I could just do it.

That time is far and few between now. I think of when I would excitedly type out whatever in Word ’98 or in a Notepad file on my dad’s work-issued Thinkpad. My initial writing was saved on several 3½-inch Floppy Disks, still stored in a handsome study desk drawer in our living room. An example of an early work: a short story (certainly no more than 2 pages, single spaced) involving a stuffed animal and my younger brother’s classmate going on an adventure. The details are ostensibly trapped in 1.44MB of hardware. It’s funny to still recall the general outline of such a silly story.

Yet, when I think about the time and place I was writing, reshaped to fit a kid’s perspective on the process, it’s difficult for me to recall details. I tried keeping a diary, inspired by characters in children’s books who did just that, but I found it tedious and would stop after a few days. If I had taken fastidious notes on my life, what would that reveal? Teen angst, anxiety, academic pressure—I don’t need specific memory for those, though; they still simmer under my flesh today. Just the notion of forgetting details of my life has caused an unsettling feeling in my stomach. I ask questions to myself: How could you forget that? Did you not care enough to remember? I’ve been told before I have a “selective” memory, usually in the case of when I’ve done something I shouldn’t have. I’ve been upset at myself for not remembering the minutiae of details—what someone likes, their birthday, some other piece of trivia I scold myself for not committing to memory. I should know it, but I don’t. I try, though. I’ll do better next time. When someone asks, “Do you remember when…?” my response has been: Honestly, I don’t. It’s normal to forget things, I tell myself, while sinking into a typical wish of how I want to remember.

I wonder if I owe it to the person I was to remember details not necessarily lost, but what my mind misplaced. Was that memory, that event, that casual remark so important? Maybe it’s a kindness to my current self to not recall the anxiety and anger of my formative years—with my family, my friends, and my own growing pains. Some games I played this year—No Case Should Remain Unsolved, ICO, the Fatal Frame series, Kanon, and Death Stranding: On the Beach—examined the concept of memories and relationships in ways that reminded me of my own Unsanctioned Recollection piece. Ghosts who don’t want to be forgotten will force you to remember. That some memories may try to fade, but against all odds, they’ll come back to you. A memory so strong it transcends life and death. These mediums have spoken to me, and thus I write: Don’t forget how this made you feel.

Circling back to the beginning of this, I think that’s why I—and so many of us—write. We want to capture the intangible—an experience, a feeling—and pin it down on the page: a thought made eternal. “I like to remember things my own way,” Bill Pullman’s character says in a way of explanation in David Lynch’s 1995 neo-noir Lost Highway, when questioned about his disdain for video camcorders. “How I remembered them, not necessarily how they happened.” Memory helps shape us, but does not define us. We—or at least, I’ll try to, keep 2025’s memory close, but paradoxically, welcome the next year with open arms.

In lieu of any resolutions, because I can’t keep that steadfast either, next year I want to do an equal amount of thinking and writing—physical, of course.

Thank you to the zine organizer, Game&Burger, for giving the collective Us the creative freedom to just Be. Thank you to all my friends and family that helped me in ways that only the heart can see. And thank you Shy, for giving me one more chance to get some writing in before the chapter closes on 2025. Here’s to another year; for everyone still here, and everyone we’ll carry with us.

Top 5 animals I rescued in Death Stranding 2: On The Beach’s post-apocalyptic Australia:

1. Emu

2. Koala

3. Echidna

4. Bilby

5. Wombat

Shy Clara Thompson

Why is it so embarrassing to want better for yourself? Why does gesturing toward the life you want feel like the one thing you’re not allowed to do? For the last fourteen years, I’ve lived in the same city, in the same apartment. Most of that time, it was fine. I lived here with my partner, who I was comfortable with. As long as she was also content, I was happy to plant my roots here. A couple of years ago, we decided to amicably split. It wasn’t a dramatic event; it had simply become impossible not to acknowledge that our hearts had grown apart. It didn’t lead to much practical change, at first. This apartment is big enough for both of us. We still share most of our things. We have a cat that we raised from kittenhood together. We’re still pretty good friends. The lack of sudden moves, I thought, would be a gentle on-ramp that would get me accustomed to an inevitable change. These days, it’s causing me nothing but pain.

This place isn’t a home anymore. It’s become a museum. It’s an interactive shrine to more than a decade of life shared with someone else, a never-ending stream of sense memories that transport me right to the threshold of feelings that are no longer accessible. The bed we used to sleep in together is only occupied by me now, and I still sleep on the side that I’ve always slept on. The empty space is heavy like a neutron star, pulling me toward the center as I cling to my familiar crevice in defiance of the laws of gravity. What’s stopping me from unfurling my body to stretch out a little bit?

This year, I’ve been splitting my time more between the eastern half of Washington and the west. The first time I buried myself in the uncomfortable seat of a Greyhound bus to stay a few days with a friend, I was afraid. I didn’t travel often because I was prone to nasty motion sickness. I spent the entirety of a five hour commute holding down the contents of my stomach, unable to glance out of the window and take in the scenery. I doubted I’d be able to have any fun once I arrived. I wondered if I was being selfish for earmarking four days for myself, even though I didn’t have anything important to do back home. Turning an eye to something else, I thought, was giving up. I felt guilty.

The more accustomed I got to making the trip, the less my body protested. I looked forward to having uninterrupted time to paw through a book I’d left neglected on my shelf, or to queue up four or five albums to listen to on my Sansa Clip Zip—one of my favorite pieces of technology because it only does the thing I love doing the most. My tolerance for being whipped around on winding roads gradually increased, and I was finally able to enjoy the view. The way the flat plains of Spokane bunched up into peaks and valleys as I approached the Cascade mountains felt like looking at my heart activity on an electrocardiogram; I was spinning back to life like Frankenstein’s monster as I neared closer to a place where someone was happy to see me.

Still, I don’t quite feel like I’m clear to do anything I want to do. After more than two years of nursing my heartbreak, I was sheepishly able to ask someone out on a date. I felt awkward, I stumbled, and I missed every social cue because I forgot what it felt like to be in the company of someone making an honest effort to get closer to me. I had grown too accustomed to my daily reality of being around a person that adds a few millimeters of distance every day. It was fun, but was it okay? Am I allowed to say “I’d like to see you again”? With any hope, I’ll stop pre-empting my emotional needs with arguments for why they’re impossible to fulfill. Rather than trying to divine if someone wants my company, I suppose I can just trust what they tell me.

So to whom it may concern: let’s hang out again sometime? 💜

Five books I read on my various five hour bus commutes

• Miss Ruki by Fumiko Takano

• 투명한 남자 (Transparent Man) by Sim Daeseop

• Popocomi 1 by various artists, curated by Popotame Book Gallery

• Listen but Don’t Ask Question: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Across the Transpacific by Kevin Fellezs

• Creating Enka: “The Soul of Japan” in the Postwar Era by Wajime Yusuke, translated by Kato David Hopkins (RIP)

Five albums that sound good on my fourteen year-old mp3 player

• killwiz - Schizophrenia

• Tsukino Mito - 310PHz

• Gabby Pahinui - Pure Gabby

• Utah Kawasaki - Static Pulse

• ex. happyender girl - girls chronicle (2020-2024)

Thanks for reading this fourteenth installment of once bitten, twice shy. Don’t have too much to say. I bled my heart out already. I’ll be getting on a bus and spending my birthday in the company of friends pretty much right after I hit publish. I need a vacation, and by golly I’m taking one.

If you appreciate the newsletter, consider hitting the Ko-fi link and donating. It’s my birthday. Work’s been slow and it’s been hard to find gigs, so it helps me live! As ever: don’t ask how old I am! Seventeen plus an undisclosed number.

Considering doing more regular posts in the new year. Maybe monthly roundups of albums I liked? (In addition to the stuff I normally post.) Would y’all like that? Lemme know.

See you soon. Happy new year. Kiss kiss.

Donate via Ko-fi

P.S. I passed the time writing and editing this post by listening to One Loop Beyond (2013, expanded edition 2018) by WOODMAN.

Dearly beloved. We are gathered here today on the anniversary of my birth, and as you can probably see, things have not quite gone according to plan. The newsletter has gone pretty quiet, with only one post separating this year’s buddy list from the previous one. I thought about calling it off this time, but ultimately decided I’d be disappointed in myself if I did that. Above all else, this thing is for me. I love my friends and want to hear more about them, and this is my selfish window into their lives. If you happen to enjoy reading it too, that’s a lovely bonus. I’m sure you will.

To get any newcomers up to speed: this is my annual tradition in which I invite friends to reflect on their most recent trip around the sun and share the things they spent their time on. You’ll see that not all of them felt up to getting personal, and that’s fair; it hasn’t been the best year in recent memory, has it? Despite that, they all made the time to give a bit of themselves. Our free moments are precious currency, and it fills my heart that they were willing to spend some of them for me. I’m grateful.

As usual, there are some familiar names if you’ve read the previous installments and some you won’t recognize. This little yearly shindig is both a way to strengthen bonds with close friends, and to build bridges to people I want to get to know better. If you’ve contributed to this list, last year’s, the year before, or one yet to come: thank you. I love you.

(As ever: I didn’t tell any of them to mention me. Please stop. 😭)

—Shy Clara Thompson

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Kei

Looking back at my 2024 conjures to mind the eighth episode of 1959 science fiction horror anthology television series The Twilight Zone, in which a man simply wants more time to read books.

In 2024, after far too many years of making it a habit, I began to pull away from spending time on social media, and it still felt like there was a constant pressure to take all the time I could get whenever I could get it. Much like the aforementioned story, where the bookworm dodges the effects of a nuclear war going on outside by circumstance, I may have dodged worst of it by logging off, but it wasn’t all fun and games after that.

This pressure I put on myself wasn't without benefits though. In January, I installed Ableton Live and began learning about music production. I had entered my anime music obsession just over 10 years ago and it wasn’t long after that I discovered the anime remix community active on sites like SoundCloud and Twitter. I felt inspired by breakthroughs I’d had with understanding song structure and production through DJing to pursue making my own remixes in similar styles to what I’ve listened to for years. Which basically came down to learning music production period.

In pursuing different musical references, I found that working on music is actually an extremely peaceful place for me to retreat to, and it provides an incredibly interesting challenge every time I approach it. Even if I were never to put a single thing out into the public, I would still be happy to pursue it in private, as that’s how much I get out of it on a personal level. It does make me happy even just seeing small numbers on the few things I did put up online though, I admit. The only unfortunate part is how much that time comes at a premium.

Anyway, between practicing DJing on my own, seeking out new music to discuss with friends, and learning to make it, music was an even larger part of my year than it has been before. My list has 10 songs that meant more to me this year than most everything else.

• DiverDiva - “Fashionista (Galbae Cider New Jack Swing Remix)”, which is just one of Galbae Cider's remixes that inspired me to learn how to make music like it. Very directly responsible for me learning what the Korg M1 was. Turns out New Jack Swing has been having a revival in South Korea, but honestly, Galbae Cider was way ahead of that.

• “Glorious Moment！ (Matitann HC Bootleg)”, for m4titann's incredible Note post series which helped me grasp how to structure a remix better than any tutorial I have found yet. Such a key part of me getting fundamentals down, I cannot state my thanks enough.

• “Ready!! Steady!! Derby!!” from Uma Musume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era , which I got to hear live at Uma Musume 5th Tour Event New Gate Day 2 as a member of the crowd for its debut performance. Those horses blew the roof off of that place. Likely the only time I’ll ever hear calls so loud that were made up on the spot.

• “Heart Beats” by emon(Tes.) featuring Himawari, which I found searching for virtual singer/vocaloid dance videos to work out with. I subsequently became obsessed to the point that I threw together my own remix of it just weeks before the Goblin Bunker Public Access 4 event that I definitely needed to already have been assembling music and video for. No worries though, it made the cut.

• “Empty Box (VOID)” by Diamond Dust, covered by Iseri Nina, for introducing me to Iseri Nina. It stands for everything I love about Girls Band Cry, a perfect show for me.

• “Shini Yuku Kisetsu no Kimi e” (To You, In Your Dying Season) by Yanagi Nagi and Jun Maeda, for being the centerpiece of the best sequence I experienced in a video game this year. Every comment on this song from players reads something like “this part of the game made me think ‘I’m happy I’m alive’” and that says it all to me, really.

• “Hino Sasu Mukoue” (Beyond the Sunshine) by She is Legend, for allowing Tomori Kusonoki to directly express how I feel playing Heaven Burns Red for several years now.

• “回層浮” (Kaisou/Reminiscence) by MyGO!!!!!, for allowing me to hear Youmiya Hina scream in real life.

• “Medicine” by Haraguchi Sasuke. Seeing him perform this for YouTube Music Weekend 8.0 as my formal introduction to his music was truly like witnessing lightning in a bottle. This tune did not leave my head for weeks and became my gateway drug to Kasane Teto.

• “Otsukimi Recital” by Jin, for being a hopeful song that gave me something to latch onto when going through rough times this year. I got back into virtual singers in a big way thanks to artists like Haraguchi Sasuke, but for me it all started way back when with KagePro. If virtual singers believe in us, we have to keep believing in them too.

ivy

What an insane one, this year was. Essentially, I went through three interlocking character arcs spanning several months each and now stand before you today, after all of it, feeling… uh, relatively normal, I guess. Outside of all of that noise, I personally accomplished a lot of things I have been trying to accomplish for the last decade, namely releasing an album and playing a live show of all original songs. Yay! I couldn’t have done any of it without my friends convincing me that I can and should, so thank you to all of you! :,)

But enough about all that friendship, let’s fweaking talk shop. In general I find this kind of year-end reflection really tough to do, not so much in an emotional sense, moreso in a… physiological? Sense? I don’t know how else to describe it, but I so rarely take stock of my year that I’m entirely out of practice on it. Attempting to dig back through the memory banks with nothing to prompt them out of their elusive little hovels takes about 200% of the brainpower I have. That all being said, I’m gonna try my best to bring up some things I saw or experienced or viewed or heard or even that I played in the last 12 months that have stuck with me, but I will PROBABLY forget something. Maybe. We’ll see. Transgender WatchMojo vocal fry voice:

Top 4 Things I Watched/Read/Played in 2024 that Someone Specifically Recommended to Me

• Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash (1992) (rec’d by Lucie, and just about everyone else ever) — Starting my lists off with the most basic shit possible so when I mention Buffalo ‘66 later, you’re caught completely off guard. Anyways, if Billy G’s Neuromancer is computer anxiety by someone who knows nothing about them, Stevey’s Snow Crash is computer anxiety by someone who knows way too much about them. In a lot of ways, this thing reeeeally is a product of its time, but it is actually insane reading this book and having it evoke extremely specific emotions and scenarios that I’ve experienced while playing VRChat.

• Baby Assassins (dir. Yugo Sakamoto, 2021) (rec’d by golok about 50000 times) — Saori Izawa in the Weezer shirt.

• Suckdog: Drugs Are Nice - A Suckumentary 1988-2005 (2005) (rec’d by Lynn Minmei) — Using this as a general spot to talk about and mention Suckdog since who tf else is gonna?! Suckdog!! I was recommended this after bringing up sinkdog unprompted for the 100th time, and I’m glad I was. Suckdog.

• Lil Hyvää - 応​用​夏​学 (rec’d by shy! (hey girlie!)) — I’ve listened to this more times than betrayed by my last.fm profile. Seriously one of the most gorgeous collections of music I’ve had the privilege of hearing in a while.

Top 4 Things I Watched/Read/Played in 2024 that I Ignored All Attempted Warning Signs Steering Me Away From It

• Subarashiki Hibi (Wonderful Everyday: Down the Rabbit Hole) — This thing has a Reputation, and for myriad good reasons, but oh my god. If I had to give just one thing the “Favorite Media” crown for this year, it would easily be Wonderful Everyday. So utterly mind melting in every conceivable way, and so singularly committed to every piece of work that inspired its writer.

• Coquette Dragoon — It feels almost unfair to put this on a 2024 list given its status as a Work In Progress, so I’ll compensate by not going into too much detail about it. I love it!

• Kingdom Hearts I.5 & II.5 Final Mix: HD — It’s probably well known amongst my friends that I absolutely adore these games, but to everyone else who didn’t already know that, yeah I’m a fangirl. I replayed these games for the first time since Kingdom Hearts III released back in 2019. Yeah. 2019. Jesus. And so I was really worried that I would butt up against something on this playthrough that would make me realize that these games suck. AND THE RESULT? Look what list this is on and figure it out for yourself!! ;P

• Buffalo ’66 (dir. Vincent Gallo, 1998) — See? Anyways, by all counts this thing should suck, and it does, but it completely accidentally captures something that really stuck with me, and that I refuse to go into any detail about. Maybe don’t watch it! (Reverse psychology) (Double reverse psychology)

Jinhyung Kim

You can read my reflection for Tone Glow here if you're interested in how things went for me in 2024. For the buddy list, I wrote about seven albums/mixes not from 2024 that I had on repeat this year and kept me company through it all.

• ARIE GOGON - DJ AKU TERTIPU KEDIAMANMU X PAMBASILET X SAKITNYA TUTUTU VIRAL TIKTOK JEDAG JEDUG FULL BASS.mp3 (self-released, 2023) — Thanks to my friend from Tone Glow billdifferen, I got super into Jungle Dutch. To quote him:

  [It's] called either Breakbeat or Jungle Dutch[—]it's a offshoot of Funkot music that's more EDM-focused. [It] got popular off of TikTok due to these Jedag Jedug edit videos in Indonesia…

  Mixes are often tagged with "Bass Boosted," "Jedag Jedug," or "Terbaru"/"Terlalu" (the latter of which means "active" in Indonesian). There are enough mixes of this stuff on SoundCloud to sate any living soul for a thousand lifetimes. I typically just follow the algorithm, chipping off bits of the tip of the iceberg. The first mix I found that I really loved got taken off the platform, so I've learned to rip and save the ones I dig. Some of this year's best mixes came from bennni10—a prolific account that uploads 2-hour-plus Vinahouse, Breakbeat, Jungle Dutch, and Manyao mixes almost every other goddamn day; I like to imagine that it really is just one dude. I love how Jungle Dutch is indissociable from the ABG thirst pics that permeate the genre’s social media presence; you'll see this for yourself if you choose to fall down the SoundCloud rabbit hole. It’s self-consciously memetic stuff in both musically and in iconography, and in due course, you’ll hear a bunch of pop songs you know (and some you don’t) churned through the 10,000-volt electric transmogrifier that is this genre’s sound. The mix I chose for this list is pretty short and sweet: just over 20 minutes of pure adrenaline via one rush of tonal whiplash after another. Imagine a world where EDM festivals make top 40 way cooler, instead of even lamer…

• Jun-Y Ciao - Learning from Insects 师虫 (whereisthezeitgeist?editing office, 2019) — There’s a long and storied history of music that lies at the intersection of electronics and nature sounds; their timbral adjacency is something people picked up on almost as soon as electronic music became a thing. The same is true for brass instruments, in a different way; while pitched brass was one of the last parts of the traditional orchestral palette to be effectively imitated by synthesis, free jazz players were quick to realize how noises they could make at the limits of their instruments’ capacities inhabited a continguous realm of waveform fuckery. Learning from Insects completes the triangle by exploring resonances between Ciao's saxophone playing and samples of various insect sounds. While the sense of a direct mimetic relation between, say, a soprano sax and a cricket is perhaps less immediate than the one either might possess with respect to a high-pitched oscillator, the affinities emerge in a sense of rhythm: the little variations of pulse in a cricket’s chirp invite a similar mode of listening as the cracked squeals, vacillating flutter tones, and slide effects that Ciao coaxes in periodic repetition from his instrument. Conversely, hearing the saxophone affects how we hear the insects: as with any reed or brass instrument, one can hear the breath that undergirds the sound, even when the performer is “silent”; Learning from Insects encourages the listener to hear insect noises in the manner of respiratory cycles. No other album I heard this year provided a more open space for meditative attention than this one.

• DJ Screw - Chapter 74: Mash for My Dream (Screwed Up Tapes & Records, 2004) — My current favorite “Diary of the Originator” mix. I played this while cruising around town in a car for a few weeks in July—something I normally don’t get to do; I was housesitting for a friend, so I was driving theirs. I live in Houston, which is 95% sprawl and linked together by a web of cracked pavement resting atop fickle swampland. Hearing this through overblown car speakers while lolling around the vast suburban expanses was deeply fulfilling in a way I probably don't need to explain; the dank, warm breath of the Houston summer night heat whipped through the windows as I let the warping and lurching of the road and the beat both stretch my sense of time. Could not recommend a better way to feel at one with this city.

• Luciano Maggiore - 18 Rhythmic Studies for a Pen, a Cassette Case and a Korean Cassette Deck (Hideous Replica, 2016) — The stutter is a unit just below the threshold of legibility; almost semantic, straining toward it, but not quite. I reread Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee this year and was captivated yet again by its stutter, its constantly getting caught in its throat. The inability to communicate, or the refusal to, or somewhere in between—all this can say so much. The ambivalence is key; the stutter of Dictee often gets read as abjection, or its protest. That's definitely a part of it, but there’s more: there’s also a ritual satisfaction in taking words as forms, sounds, or elements for perpetual recombination. One can play with the building blocks of language in a condition of prelapsarian, pre-egoic joy; even the encounter of a stoppage throws one into the mesmeric state of negative space. To my ears, 18 Rhythmic Studies sonifies this joy of the stutter, the stopping of the throat, and the compelling silence that honors it and suggests the unspoken depths it points toward.

• Organ Tapes - Hunger in Me Living (Tobago Tracks, 2019) — I didn’t really hear anything special in Hunger in Me Living when it came out; the music and Tim Zha’s vocals felt uniformly understated. I didn't bother revisiting Organ Tapes until this year; I’m not exactly sure why, but I hear so much more soul in this album this time around. It might be that my appreciation for music with an ostensibly flat affect has grown considerably since 2019; maybe I have a distance from singer-songwriter music now that allows me to listen to the album as something different; hell, it could just be that I found out Organ Tapes is Asian, and for some reason, I just get where he’s coming from. Whatever it is, I found Hunger in Me Living to be chock-full of tiny yet animate flourishes that had slipped my ears the first time, floating past like little buoys amidst its gentle melancholic ebb and flow; the thick AutoTune that had previously masked emotional specificity now exhibited a willful anonymity, like layers of a veil fluttering gracefully in the persistent breeze. It’s perfect winter music: a bit cold to the touch, but deeply warm and intimate nonetheless.

• Torture - 4 - “Enduring Freedom” (self-released, 2023) — 4 - “Enduring Freedom” confirms that zoomers have grown into and codified their own brand of patriotism: a condemnatory consensus on American empire. It’s odd how this record feels as if it’s straddling two eras—Bush-era protest against the Iraq war on the one hand, but also a broader understanding of American global and domestic hegemony impressed upon young folk today on the other. It’s not as if the geopolitics have changed fundamentally over the last twenty years, but in the media consciousness, military might and the diplomatic theater of foreign policy are now just the tip of the iceberg. People on social media saw videos and got live feed updates from Ferguson to Gaza—all the anger and suffering of the thousands and millions actually on the ground, bearing so much direct violence with their bodies, eyes, and voices; there’s innumerable threads detailing all the industries and channels of capital that fuel that violence. Given the frequency of state brutality and the exponential multiplication of the witnesses to its production and use, it’s become harder for anyone who claims to be against it to not connect all the dots.

  Of course, there are plenty who refuse. But among people who are online, the centrist middle has been steadily destabilizing over the past several years; to comment any further on this (especially the “online” part) would take this blurb way too far afield. Suffice it to say that 4 - “Enduring Freedom” taps into a political mood that feels very much in line with the 2020s, despite the iconography of its cover. The covers for the three Torture albums that preceded it are gruesome images of American cruelties of the Iraq War, which really ought not to have been embedded as the main album image on Bandcamp; some sort of content warning would have been advisable. But their use follows the ethos of zoomer anti-imperialism: you cannot deny what is put before your very eyes. The music on 4 - “Enduring Freedom” is blunt, but not in a mode of direct address, a la the ’90s to ’00s tradition of heavy music in protest. It’s slow and thick, all sputtery low end; it’s viscous and errant in its rhythms, with a vocal delivery that rarely departs from a steady, menacing bullfrog croak. The album’s sound is of a piece with its politics—maybe protest shouldn’t be catchy or anthemic; maybe it should be as fucking nasty as the thing we’re protesting. That doesn’t stop it from being really good music, though.

• Trang Hạ - Đừng Nhớ Người Xa (Giọng Ca Để Đời, 2021) — I first got into Vietnamese bolero a few years ago when I was introduced to Hà Vân's Tiếng Hát Hà Vân. A lot of records in the genre, even some of the classics, can be a little heavyhanded with their production, but the good stuff conjures a subtle and soulful yearning of an ilk that’s hard to come by. Đừng Nhớ Người Xa is my favorite Viet bolero album that I found this year—the Spotify algorithm threw “Người Đã Nói” my way one day, and it blew me out of the water with its delightful staccato guitar hook, which lands with a forceful duh-duhn from the piano on the downbeat and sharp, synthetic string trills on the upbeat; each element, in its restraint, makes the breadth of the mix pop. “Lửa Mùa Hạ” opens with an overdriven guitar lead that sears atop a crashing cascade of drums, punctuated every so often by what sounds like a triangle player tinkling their instrument as if it were a school alarm bell. But this is all far from overwhelming—the distinction between lyric and ornament persists, creating a throughline between the more raucous instrumental sections and the more discreet accompaniment during verses, which play off of each other well. What impresses me overall about the album is how it integrates a large variety of synthetic sounds and novelties into its palette while still evoking the magic and warmth of a small ensemble. For a genre whose forms and tradition stretch back nearly a century, these soft modernizations push the envelope with great ingenuity.

Joshua Minsoo Kim

For the last two buddy lists I wrote down goals that I had for myself as I was heading into the new year. I appreciate how much the goals don’t actually matter beyond being a form of record keeping; they’re a way to reflect on what matters to me now, and seeing how much that changes over the course of 12 months. Seeing that evolution is crucial. My goals for the year are pretty simple this time around: keep Tone Glow afloat, organize more stuff IRL with people in Chicago, read more, write more, and eat more good food.

Favorite Concerts of 2024

1. Toiret Status, Koeosaeme, CVN, Tentacle 229, and Dawn Division at DADS in Chicago, 10/11

2. Still House Plants at Co-Prosperity in Chicago, 9/25

3. Roméo Poirier at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, 11/6

4. Charli XCX at Radius in Chicago, 6/12

5. Model/Actriz at Pitchfork Musical Festival in Chicago, 7/21

6. Tinashe at Radius in Chicago, 2/15

7. Foodman, Jana Rush, EQ Why, DJ Hanks, Toxic Yuri Love Triangle, and Mukqs at Archer Ballroom in Chicago, 12/14

8. Chuquimamani-Condori at Prosper Skate Shop in Chicago, 2/23

9. Tyla at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 7/31

10. Rafael Toral, Daniel Wyche at Elastic Arts in Chicago, 10/22

11. The Softies at PhilaMOCA in Philadelphia, 10/3

12. Astrid Sonne at Co-Prosperity in Chicago, 9/26

13. Kim Gordon, Irreversible Entanglements, and Drew McDowall at the Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago, 6/8

14. MJ Lenderman at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 10/16

15. Eiko Ishibashi at the Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago, 5/11

16. ML Buch at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 12/11

17. Wendy Eisenberg, Big Bend at Constellation in Chicago, 11/15

18. Ice Spice, Cash Cobain at The Met in Philadelphia, 8/2

19. Jessica Pratt at the Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago, 9/13

20. Laurel Halo with Leila Bordreuil at the Epiphany Center for the Arts in Chicago, 11/8

21. Amina Claudine Myers at the Chicago Cultural Center in Chicago, 8/29

22. Sour Spirit at Johnny Brenda's in Philadelphia, 8/4

23. Nilüfer Yanya at the Metro in Chicago, 10/7

24. Agriculture, Porcelain at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 11/5

25. Jan Jelinek at Constellation in Chicago, 11/13

26. Kevin Drumm at Constellation in Chicago, 2/8

27. Asa-Chang & Junray at the Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, 10/26

28. American Football at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 9/27

29. Sachiko Kanenobu at Johnny Brenda's in Philadelphia, 10/5

30. SahBabii at Avondale Music Hall in Chicago, 12/22

maría ilmutus

DEAD BUT DREAMING.

i love this phrase. i like to put it under everything i make. but what does it actually mean? while i’d love to act mysterious and hint at some deeper significance, the truth is that it means nothing. i just like the words. in reality, i’ve never had a guiding philosophy behind my art—i just create for creation’s sake. i love ideas and i dream a lot: big dreams, little dreams, sweet dreams, dark dreams. in them, i sense my calling... to explore unmapped emotions. deep down though, i’m still searching for meaning.

unfortunately, it’s gotten harder and harder to hit my personal milestones due to some really brutal circumstances. the last few years have taken, what feels like, everything from me. i’m only 24, so i know how silly that sounds—this is all just part of adulthood—but it can be so devastating to lose basic resources, your financial stability, your family, your pets... when you never had any structure to begin with. really, i’ve been improvising ever since i dropped out of high school! i guess that’s why i keep making things. because it’s the only thing i can do. i’m just learning new tricks in hopes of finding some solace... and some money.

having said that, i think my art hands were pretty idle in 2024. i overworked myself last year and really needed a breather so i spent more time admiring craft than honing it. i watched like a hundred movies/anime, read dozens of manga and listened to a bunch of albums. i realized some years ago that i had become quite passive about my media engagement so i tried to seek out new experiences. i’m tempted to say this was inspired by the youtube channel i started, but i’d much rather thank my friends. the kind people i befriended this year really opened my eyes. not naming any names, as to not embarrass anyone, but you know who you are!

despite the money troubles, the grueling winter cold and being stuck in this shitty haunted town... i’m still here! i made some goofy-ass videos, wrote some bad poems, laughed with my friends, met some amazing people (who are all way cooler than me) and finally let myself be. but as the year comes to a close i realize just how much i’ve yet to learn. i need to piece my life back together, for one. but i also need to pursue music seriously again! it was such a huge passion yet i stagnated so hard. i’m gonna start analyzing songs critically again, and speaking with other musicians (locally & online). on top of all that, i need to keep searching for the "maría" in my heart. funny as it may sound, i know there's a very strong person inside of me—a beautiful person—and i will find her. her shape and intensity keep changing, like a flame in the wind. but i can change too. i’ve done it before and i’ll do it again.

realistically, i can’t guarantee that i’ll survive whatever B.S. life decides to throw at me next year… but i’ll try!... promise. ♥

some manga

• sing “yesterday” for me by kei toume — i finally finished it. the manga that got me back into comics, slowly and over the course of several years. i’m thankful to have shared it with one of my best friends, who showed it to me and said “hey, seems like your kinda thing.” she was right!

• river’s edge by kyoko okazaki — this one’s very visceral for me. i tend to feel strongly about things which remind me, distinctly, of high school.

• yokohama kaidashi kikou by hitoshi ashinano — the whole thing. lovely, terrifying, essential.

• the caterpillar by suehiro maruo — it do be like that sometimes!!!

• reading about gekiga (activity) — a rabbit hole i wasn’t expecting to fall down. shoutouts to ryan holmberg and thecomicsjournal!

• drawing manga studies (activity) — yep, with screen tones and everything. i got some cool digital illustrations out of this!

meaningful things that were enabled by having internet access:

• sharing WIP music files with certain musicians i met online this year.

• streaming weird anime and movies to my old friends on discord — i’m glad i upgraded my internet, i’ve been able to show them so many questionable things!

• sharing/encoding/downloading/subtitling video files.

• joining the “goblin bunker public access” stream.

• being invited to write for this list — i really don't think i belong here but if shy says it’s okay, then i guess it is! thank you dear :-)

• listening to the “human insects” podcast — i put it off for years but i finally listened to all of it. very fun. great music discussions!

  ---

Rist

Before this year, I had never really had a stable sense of community. I think there’s an insecurity at the heart of why that is, something to do with me feeling too inadequate or too afraid to ask people to pay attention to me long enough to maybe like me. It’s still something I struggle with, but finding online groups and meeting people like Shy has been the best thing in my life so far for getting over that.

I’m constantly reflecting on just how vast the difference is between where I am now and where I was before. 2023 feels like a lifetime ago, and in a lot of ways it is. I’m having new experiences with art at about ten times the rate I used to. I’ve met people who have seen all the shit I thought were deep cuts and who’ll recommend stuff I never would have found without their help. I’m finding that I can just make stuff whenever I want and I have others that I can show it to. I never realized how much I could care because I never had the right environment for that enthusiasm to reflect back onto me. Spending time with everyone I’ve met this year has made me want to try harder and harder to be someone I’m proud of. I can truly say that I’ve met my people.

There’s a lot of ways that I’m trying to make 2025 even better, but this is the first time in my life that I have a strong sense of who I am and who I want to be, and I owe it all to the people who have made me feel welcome in their home.

Top Ten Best Things I Got To Do in 2024

1. Fujo out over Bang Bravern, Like a Dragon, and Kamen Rider Kuuga

2. Join a zine group where I can write about my love for Sonic the Hedgehog

3. Get bullied repeatedly into having transcendental experiences with art

4. Start a game club as an excuse to talk about why cute anime girls are the best

5. Share a secret about myself in the chatroom of a virtual DJ set

6. Stream increasingly shitty movies to people I care about

7. Fall in love with the sport of sumo

8. Find out that I actually do enjoy roguelikes, I just had never played one before

9. Realize that Boredoms contains the best collective of musicians to ever exist

10. Make a bunch of new friends

dicegame uchiha

My 2024 began with me staring down the barrel. I lost my job in early 2023 and took the opportunity to coast on unemployment and go “All In” on a video game I prototyped in 2020. By the end of the year, my savings were packed into shotgun casings and aimed at the rental agency. The video game could probably never be published—unless there was a publisher who suddenly became Really Fucking Cool. So the beginning of 2024 started Serious. Near the end of February, after about 4 months of searching, I secured a job and retreated to a life of eating, sleeping, and working.

Throughout this lull period something interesting happened. Without the pressure of an all-encompassing long term project (The Video Game), I fell back in love with making music—something I’ve been doing far longer than making video games. Enter: my roommate and new friends. It’s understated how ephemeral making music with other people is. I’m not the type to actively advertise or publicly seek people to play with. I prefer to let it happen naturally between friends; thanks to some cosmic luck, that happened this year. We Learned To Rock Again. And We Did Rock. This changed my listening greatly. I settled back into the “Old Me,” raising my love for rock music back from the dead. I present below my own “Buddy List” encompassing the attitude of our basement studio and the friends who have come by to play.

• Camberwell Now - “Working Nights” — The Band After This Heat. Another avant-prog / post-punk epic. We’re trying to actively rip this one off.

• Massacre - “Killing Time” — I saw this record in one of Portland’s strangest independent bookstores recently and have been kicking myself for not picking it up. Bill Laswell · Fred Frith · Fred Maher. Y’all know about that “egg-punk” shit every smelly guy with a mustache, carabiner, and beanie seems to like? Try this one out and then we can talk.

• Free Kitten - “Harvest Spoon” — What can I say, this song is effortless. 2 chords.

• Saboten - サボテン — 80s post punk oddity. This has been a comfort-food listen for me. Something about the vibe always breaks me out of the post-work malaise. This and a CBD soda.

• Throbbing Gristle - “Hit by a Rock” (At The Highbury Roundhouse, London) — This is what the basement sounds like after we’ve all had a rough ass day.

• Scientists - “Human Jukebox” — The dynamic range on this recording is inspired. You really gotta turn it up and let those blown out vocals grow, some hair on your shoulder. Hair of the Dog.

• Pengo - A Nervous Splendor — Blind bought this at a record store because of the rip-off “Actuel” design. Went down a rabbit hole on the military bands under Ugandan president Idi Amin Dada Oumee. Experienced raw ego death.

• Dead Moon - “Spectacle” (Eindhoven, Netherlands 1992) — Another 2-chord scorcher. You can see god to this one.

• The The - “Flesh and Bones” — This one is for my roommate Jack <3

• Lez Rallizes Denudes - “俺は暗黒 / I'm the Darkness” — This CD has been in my car for months and I don’t see it leaving anytime soon. Nothing like driving home late to this song.

Ryan Waller

At the school where I teach, my students became obsessed with a meme last month where a guy attempting to shoot a basketball into a hoop covered in spikes misses his shot, then says “I understand it now!” and immediately sinks the next one. I can’t think of many videos I relate to more these days. Despite the hardships I’ve faced this year, life has finally started to feel like it’s making sense.

I have accomplished about 25% of what I wanted to accomplish this year. This is natural and not surprising. I think everyone falls short of what they intend to do every year, but one thing I was able to accomplish was deepening my understanding of my creative process. Through the art I consumed, the conversations I held, and the choices I made, I truly feel like I’ve grown immensely as a person. Of course, I couldn’t do that without the patient people who keep caring for me and making space for me in their lives. Shy, thank you so much for letting me be your friend. You have taught me so much about being curious, being open-minded, being honest, and being emotionally vulnerable. I only hope I can offer you even half of the kindness you show me.

Below are some albums I really really love from this year. I hope you find something worth listening to.

• Able Noise - High Tide — The moment the first DJ Screw-esque reload launches seconds into this hypnotic record on my first listen, my brain literally drooled out of my ears. Rock music free of dogma.

• E L U C I D - Revelator — BREAKING NEWS: Greatest rapper alive makes another perfect record: millions are shocked the world over.

• Paco Panama - Southside Sopranos — The benchmark for good rap music. Gorgeous, rich beats and solid bars filled with a cool, easy humor.

• HavinMotion - MOTION — The other end of the DMV rap renaissance. Cloudy yet melodically active crank beats with a rapper who, despite all of his claims to the contrary, seems to enjoy getting his silly and funny bars off.

• Chuckyy - Tweak Till the End — A new frontier for the depths of contemporary gangsta rap. Chicago drill reinterpreted via Philly and the UK, a leap forward for horrorcore. Beats reimagined as massive yawning caverns of echoing pianos and animal sound effects, with the slipperiest, most abstract quantum triplet flowers you’ve ever heard weaving in and out like hyenas devouring a dying antelope.

• Nídia & Valentina Magaletti - Estradas — Two of the most brilliant sound workers in the world going rhythm for rhythm and producing a magnificent canvas of sound in the process.

• Richie Culver - Hostile Environments — Like a Subtext artist doing dub poetry. Crushing, lonely and massive, just like 2024.

• Red Hot Organization - TRA​И​Ƨ​A — This has been an amazing year for compilations, anthologies, and charity records. TRA​И​Ƨ​A is one of the best, and most important. It’s amazing to get a new Sade song, and such a beautiful one at that, but there are amazing collaborations all over this. Lucy Liu and Grouper? Moses Sumney and ANOHNI? Niecy Blues and Joy Guidry?! Rachika Nayar and Julianna Barwick?! Kelela and Nsámbu Za Suékama?! SEVERAL BEVERLY GLENN-COPELAND APPEARANCES?!? This album is important for a thousand reasons, but it’s also a genuine joy to listen to. Considering how many cooks were in the kitchen, that’s amazing to me.

• RESIST COLONIAL POWER BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY — An equally crucial and amazing compilation by one of the greatest labels around, PTP. Everything and everyone here is incredibly important if you care about art PERIOD. Peace to Griff Spex, Malik Abdul-Rahmaan, YATTA, and everyone on here.

• Outer Spaceways Incorporated : Kronos Quartet & Friends Meet Sun Ra — Another Red Hot masterpiece. Kronos Quartet teaming up with pretty much almost all of my heroes to take Sun Ra even further into space.

• Darius Jones - Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) — Jazz as it should be. A raw black scream of power, vulnerability, and love. Along with the أحمد [Ahmed], Space and Sly & the Family Drone albums, this is the best jazz is gonna get all year.

• Ghostmass - Improvisation for Dusty Ballz & Ghost Meditation — Two of the pinnacles of music for me this year. Chinese noise metal mastered by the god Lasse Marhaug? Engineered for me at this point. Shouts out to Yan Jun.

• Klein - Marked — Klein has been the best musician in the world for like seven years now and she clearly is not interested in taking her foot off our necks yet. I’m happy to stay where I am, personally.

• Joshua Chuquimia Crampton - Estrella Por Estrella — If you make music with guitars, you have a moral obligation to study the shit JCC is doing on this record. There is guitar music before and after this record, in my opinion. Get on the right side of history if you ain’t already.

• Endon - Fall of Spring — The best currently active Japanese band is finally back, and they have unleashed an incredible elegiac current of pure noise hell. Incredibly cathartic. RIP Etsuo Nagura.

• more eaze and Kaho Matsui - computer and recording works for girls — If you listen to any ambient music this year, make it this. Absolutely essential record. Calling it ambient is a disservice honestly. Just listen!

Patrick Lynn Wilson

2024, much like the years immediately preceding it, was a bit rough.

But let’s not dwell upon that. Rather, we’ll recall one of the best things to bechance 2024: Shy gifting me Masato Saito’s Fragment of Tomorrow, a collection of 10 cover songs recorded over 10 days during the thick of the Coronavirus lockdown in April 2020, and only released through Japan’s great Galaxy Train label this past February.

Masato is a purveyor of that varietal of Velvets-like strummy, folk rock cross-pollinated with ‘90s twee tape-pop and slowcore dynamics that drive a particular set of music nerd into Devils of Loudun-like convulsions. Masato’s old outfit Pervenche have a brilliant 2001 debut record, Subtle Song, followed up by a second album, quite small happiness, released 20 years later but carrying the exact same torch at the same lumens—some people are truly gifted with the musical goods to really get the heads hopping at the sock hop.

Fragment of Tomorrow is a bonnet deserving of the headiest of heads; a mixtape assortment of ’60s and ’70s cuts covering the suspecting usuals: Eno, Syd Barrett, Arthur Lee, Television, Can, and, of course, the Velvets’ “Sunday Morning.” The vibe is appropriately early morning—hazy, reverbed, languid—with each song growing more gorgeous than the last, their subsequent rhythms resembling the comfortable rocking of a rowboat adrift off the breeze. My favorite track is the cover of Kraftwerk’s “Neon Lights,” which envisions the German automatons’ metropole fanfare into something more akin to a liturgical hymn sung ‘round a campfire.

I spent so much of 2024 listening to Fragment of Tomorrow, either tucked away in reading or hurtling down the street working, the lightness of the music buoying me and sparking mutual love for this sort of record nerd music—-from Shy, Masato, and myself—as well as for that love located in the friendship between Shy and myself. 2024 will forever be marked as the year that Shy had me listen to Fragment of Tomorrow, and that more than makes up for most misgivings about a bit of bumpiness along the year’s path.

Lynn’s Top 10 Albums of 2024

1. Itasca – Imitation of War

2. Space – Embrace the Space

3. Masato Saito – Fragment of Tomorrow

4. Niboowin – giving in

5. bulletsbetweentongues – The Lights Never Lie

6. ivy synthetic – meaningless off-screen death

7. PAS TASTA – GRAND POP

8. The Fiery Furnaces – Stuck in My Head

9. Cancer House – demos

10. Joshua Chuquimia Crampton – Estrella Por Estrella

• +1: Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee (Already timeless album, so it needn’t be ranked. Must a lonely astrologer graze a star just to prove they exist?)

Shy Clara Thompson

Something I’ve come to appreciate about writing these yearly reflections is that it will inevitably become a thread that connects me to a future self. I referred to my writing from previous years while trying to figure out what I’d like to say this time, and I’m sometimes struck by my own revelations. In the inaugural issue, I wrote about how honoring my loved ones has become so important to me that I changed my own name a little to remind myself of the mission. The following year, I astutely predicted that it would be premature to declare 2024 to be the start of a comeback. (It absolutely was not.) This year, if there’s any message I would like to impart to an older and wiser version of myself, it’s: I dunno. lmao.

I feel like I know less about myself than last year, and that’s equal parts exciting and terrifying. My social life has shuffled around in small, but significant ways; I’ve gotten extremely close to people I didn’t even know six months ago, and some of my longest-lasting friendships have changed in ways I never thought possible. I’ve lived in the same apartment for the past thirteen years, but I don’t know if I’ll still be here next year. I have fallen into career opportunities that I would have once said were outside my skill set, but I’m gonna see where they take me. I’m more uncertain about how tomorrow will look than ever in my adult life, and I’m not sure if I like it.

To be perfectly honest with you, I’m afraid. As I navigate unfamiliar relationships and make myself vulnerable to people whose responses I can’t predict, I cringe. Working with people I have no rapport with, I’m bracing myself for the inevitable disappointment I’m going to saddle them with for placing their trust in me. I like to take things slow. I need time to deliberate my next move. An unfortunate truth I’ve discovered, though, is that with enough time I can craft an airtight argument why I shouldn’t bother doing almost anything. I’m tired of having those arguments with myself, so I’m trying to have less of them. I know I won't always succeed. Fear is a powerful inhibitor, especially when you’re as skittish as I am. But I’m also afraid of accumulating too many scenarios where I’m upset at myself for not giving something a try. I’ve got far too many weighing me down already.

Ten albums I loved that didn’t come out this year

• Dream Dolphin - Visions/Rebirth/Underwater (1997)

• Facundo Cabral - Facundo Cabral (1971)

• Jewel Akens - The Birds and the Bees (1965)

• Hanali - Rock Music (2013)

• Kiyoshi Kobayashi - Pacific Swing (2006)

• Mar-pa - Rimland (1989)

• Meadowdale Middle School 8th Grade Jazz Band - 2005-2006 (2006)

• Satellite Lovers - Sons of 1973 (1996)

• Usushioshisuu - Crazy Salt Rock (2014)

• Yuka Umezawa & Tomoko Tsuyama - Fishes’ Dream (2004)

Top five guys I hugged when I got sad

• #1 🐈

• #2 👻

• #3 🎤

• #4 🐸

• #5 🐹

Thanks for reading this eleventh installment of once bitten, twice shy. This would normally be where I apologize for not posting more and make big promises for the future, but I’ll spare you this time. I would simply like to thank my friends for making life worth living. Below, I have compiled a list of past and present buddy list contributors’ other projects. They all do fascinating stuff, so please have a look.

I’d also like to make a small housekeeping note that I have updated my about page with the most current information, if you’d like to find my socials and such.

If you appreciate the newsletter, consider hitting the Ko-fi link and donating. It’s my birthday, so that’s another good reason to toss me some change. Don’t ask me how old I am! I’ve been seventeen for as long as I can remember.

I’ll be seeing you. Happy new year. Give your friends a hug and your sweetheart a kiss.

Donate via Ko-fi

Blogroll

• Nicky Austin is no longer with us, but left behind a wealth of great writing at Letterboxd and Backloggd.

• Baxter runs his own newsletter called Tsundoku Diving, covering all sorts of esoteric Japanese media.

• ivy makes music under the name ivy sinthetic and has a website with some stuff on it over at ivy.dog.

• Jai makes thoughtful video essays about a variety of topics including film, television, and manga over on their YouTube channel.

• Kei makes incredible mixes and remixes of anime and idol songs as dj takamine mion.

• Jinhyung Kim wrote a quarterly column covering sound poetry for Bandcamp, which wrapped up recently.

• Joshua Minsoo Kim does about a million things, but most notably runs the Tone Glow newsletter, which I also contribute to.

• maría ilmutus makes video essays covering a variety of topics like weird anime and video games on her YouTube channel.

• Rist co-writes for Mobius Loop, a digest on all things relating to the Sonic the Hedgehog comics published by Archie.

• Shy Clara Thompson is me, hi. I maintain this newsletter and do culture writing in various places. Most recently, I put together a primer on calypso music.

• dicegame uchiha is hard at work on a game called SYYGYL and also posts badly on X dot com the Everything App.

• Ryan Waller runs the newsletter Vacant World, covering a variety of topics that interest them.

P.S. I passed the time putting this post together listening to Giant Beauty (2024) by أحمد [Ahmed]. It is handily the best album of the year, in my opinion.

Something doesn’t truly become a tradition until you’ve managed to do it a second time, right? When I posted my original buddy list exactly one year ago, I wrote that I was going to cultivate this newsletter as a space to explore my own interests. I wasn’t entirely sure I meant it; I’ve got a lot of incomplete projects and unfulfilled ideas, and it was possible that this would be no different. I didn’t accomplish everything I wanted to in that time, but hey—aspirations don’t have to die just because you don’t get to them on schedule. I did plenty, so I deserve to celebrate.

A lot has changed since then. Some of my friendships have gotten stronger, and some have grown distant. To a degree, this collection of writing reflects that. I’ve tapped some friends that contributed last year to return, but not all. Some were busy with life and I didn’t want to bother them. Some probably would have agreed, but I felt anxious troubling them again. Some of the new names are people I wanted to ask last time. Some I decided to approach on a whim. There’s no method to it, really. Like celestial bodies, everyone’s got a gravitational force that’s constantly pulling against others in ways that are difficult to predict; this is simply how the planets aligned.

I’ve invited eight dear pals to reflect on their trip around the sun and share some experiences that stuck with them. The moments spent conversing with friends and trading excitement are, as ever, what keeps me going. I wanted to share a bit of what I love about them, but nothing I say could possibly do them justice. Instead, I’ve given them the space to be themselves and say whatever they want about how they’ve spent their time. I think it comes through why I feel so warmly about each of them. They’re all into cool stuff and show me new and exciting things almost daily. Hopefully something shared here piques your interest too. :->

(By the way: I didn’t tell so many of them to mention me. 😭)

—Shy Clara Thompson

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Baxter

2023 was a year of movement and statis. It was the same as every year in the sense that it was nothing like any other year. It’s the year I finally realized dreams I’ve had since the first grade, and realized that doesn’t change a thing, not really; a year where I have evolved dramatically but remain disappointingly me. But that’s life, huh! And hey, as much as the year felt like the temporal equivalent of squatting beside a river and watching all the water rush by, it was also a good one—one of the best for me, maybe! Plus, importantly for this post, it was one with a whole lot of soul-altering experiences with art. 

Top 10 experiences with art in 2023 that rewrote who I am on a molecular level (in absolutely no order)

1. Writing — I started the year getting a short story published for the first time, ended it with my first freelance gig (where, in a historic first, I earned money…for writing???), and in the middle of all that started a newsletter/blog where I put up around 30k words of art criticism! All very cool. But really, what made writing so satisfying in 2023 has been all the amazing people I’ve met because of it (people like Shy!!).

2. Ice skating — Despite the ice, this is one of the hottest, most passionate sports there is. People voguing, wearing Attack on Titan cosplay, and drifting through ambient strings while caught in a delicate balancing act of improv and rehearsal, emotional expression and athletic perfectionism. Everyone should be into ice skating.

3. A salt rice ball — This year I got COVID! And then I got shingles! While I was sick and stuck inside, my girlfriend left some food at my door, including a homemade salt rice ball, which is exactly what it sounds like—just rice and salt and nothing else. It was, without question, the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten in my entire life.

4. Thriller: A Cruel Picture — Shoutout to Evil Movie Night, a little group of my best online friends made so we could watch movies that wouldn’t be appropriate in larger Discord servers. The highlight this year? Thriller: A Cruel Picture, an ice-cold Swedish arthouse revenge flick the director claimed was supposed to be the most commercial movie ever made. He might be the dumbest man alive. The moment the film smash cuts to actual hardcore pornography, me and my friends suddenly staring a winking butthole in the face, is one of the most shocking, embarrassing, and hilarious movie viewing experiences I’ve ever had. A movie that is permanently part of my vocabulary now.

5. Disneyland — Look, I’m not a Disney guy and I’d be very fine if our evil media conglomerate overlord bit the dust, but when Mickey Mouse draws an air heart around you and your partner smiles bigger than you knew it was even possible to smile, I mean, what are you supposed to do? 

6. Les Vampires — I’d seen about half of Les Vampires, the 1915 French serial before, but this was the year I finally went all in, and friends, I am obsessed. I’m a full-blown Feuillade fanatic now. Wildly imaginative and surreal and exciting and obscenely entertaining and deeply complex under the surface. All TV for the past 100 years has just been a desperate attempt to recreate what Feuillade did. None of them have ever gotten close. 

7. Kaleidoscope museum — What I thought would be a mildly-amusing diversion turned out to be a glorious little adventure of light and color radiating childlike glee and wonder. The kaleidoscope is such a playful creation with infinite potential. Picking a favorite from the place is tough, but it might have to be the old man sitting in his boxers and staring at an orb, the kaleidoscope hidden in a hole in the back of his head.

8. The Adolescence of Utena — Me and a friend watched this sequel/retelling of probably the greatest anime of all time three times in a row one night. And if I hadn’t had to work the next day, I could’ve easily watched it three more times. A perfect circle; a donut movie that gives and gives and inspires obsession.

9. Magino Village: A Tale — A mammoth four-hour documentary about rice farming that’s actually about everything. Went into the movie as one person, came out as another, suddenly seeing the history and holiness in my home, in the dirt, in every grain of rice I eat. Monumental; one of the greatest, most vital films ever made.

10. Top 5 Manga of 2023, because manga is good and I’ve grown closer to the medium this year than I ever have been before — Happiness Comes From Eating Sleeping and Waiting, Umibe no Stove, Ink-iro no Yoku wo Haku, Hikou Bungaku, Fool Night

Jai

More than anything these days, I find myself thinking my biggest opponent in life is myself. Earlier this year I read Death of a Salesman, the Arthur Miller play, and something in that really got under my skin: a core theme in the narrative is how the main character Willy Loman can’t confront that time is passing with every second. Despite being married and having a child in his 30s, Willy refuses to accept the material conditions of his life—he believes all his dreams and desires will come true while making zero steps towards them.

I think, for years, I was Willy Loman. Maybe I’m being too harsh on myself, I also have my fair share of interests—I weight lift, I think I’m a pretty good video editor, and I’m proud of the work I’ve written. That being said, my aspirations have always been higher. I’ve wanted to entertain people for most of my life and, if possible, teach them something along the way. I had been juggling the idea of making YouTube videos for years, but in 2023, I actually did it. I made a few lengthy ones! And I’m incredibly proud that I actually managed to break through the mental barrier I had.

No man is an island though, and more than anything, I am incredibly grateful for the fantastic friends and family I’ve had support me through the year. I’ve grown so close to so many great people, and I find myself wanting to make great things, not for myself, but so I can share them with those around me. I’m thankful daily that I can message people randomly to talk about Will Smith’s oeuvre, or even have a community around me that’ll understand the juxtaposition of “oeuvre” and “Will Smith” as a joke. 

I would be lying if I said I could’ve done this by myself. I suppose I wrote and edited the videos, but it was the fact that those around me saw something in me that I couldn’t. They were so generous and forthcoming with their time to help me grow into a better person. I’m incredibly grateful to know them. They taught me a very valuable lesson: it’s hard to get started, but once you’ve got momentum, it’s harder to stop.

For those who talk to me, or watch my videos, or whatever else, know this: I don’t think I’ll ever be able to truly convey how much your support means to me. Here’s to another year of finally getting out of our own ways. As hard as it is these days, I hope you do the same.

Top 5 Graphic Novels/Manga I Read in 2023

• Book of Human Insects by Osamu Tezuka

• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

• Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

• Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

• Ashizuri Suizokukan by panpanya

My 10 Favourite Films I Saw for the First Time in 2023, But Did Not Come Out in 2023

• Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (dir. Nagisa Ōshima, 1983)

• To Sleep So As To Dream (dir. Kaizo Hayashi, 1986)

• Barton Fink (dir. Joel Coen, 1991)

• Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl (dir. Katsuhito Ishii, 1998)

• Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants (dir. David Mamet, 1996)

• Sanjuro (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1962)

• The Color of Money (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1986)

• Targets (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1968)

• When We Were Kings (dir. Leon Gast, 1996)

• Catch Me If You Can (dir. Stephen Spielberg, 2002)

  ---

Kei

For the longest time now, I have had an affinity towards things “of the moment.” Albums released this year, anime airing this season, games that are having their time in the spotlight. I really do get swept up in all of it, and I’ve made it my goal to sift through sand to find my favorites. Despite the way I’ve stuck to this outlook, the way that I have interacted with almost everything online has changed in recent times. When I went to look back at things I posted throughout the year on social media, it didn’t take much time at all for me to scroll through the entire year on my media tab. I have noticed that I don’t post as much about things I love openly anymore, and it’s just hard to wear my heart on my sleeve in the same ways I used to take pride in. It’s not that they don’t happen though. I’m still out here. That’s why I’m so happy Shy invited me to write about some of those things here. I was so excited, even, that I went and wrote a staggering amount of words that would have totally busted the symmetry of everyone’s posts. So, if you feel so inclined, I put the original version up here at a Substack I have literally just opened as of now. 

That being said, let’s give this list an outline! If I had to pick a single way to describe this year, it would be “surprises.” Which is pretty nice given that I feel I lacked a plan for it. The following is my favorite currents I followed this year—Events I got to experience, Media of the moment, Observations I got to make along the way, or Parties I was late to. 

1. all in a day’s walk — Life can be noisy sometimes. A quiet afternoon and a lot of walking can really do wonders for the mind. 

2. overly susceptible to advertising (Heaven Burns Red) — Akihabara. Onoden Building 4th floor COSPA. Just enough Lemondou chuhai to feel like nothing will ever go wrong. 4 t-shirt purchases later I have drafted myself into playing Jun Maeda’s big game. It’s on trains. It’s on automobiles. It’s in the train station. I figured out why as soon as I heard Before I Rise on the title screen.

3. TOKYO MX PRESENTS Healing Time — Somehow there has been an iyashikei headline news program every night at bedtime in Tokyo, and nobody ever told me about it. 

4. Hello and Goodbye: A Dance Evolution Arcade Story — I started learning how to dance because of arcade games. One of them was dead and turned offline before I even started playing it. Late at night, so far in the depths of the city, on the 6th floor of a monolithic shopping mall, in the far corner of an empty arcade, was that same game—running in online mode. I may never get to experience playing the game in networked format again, and I tried to take it in as much as possible. Just a few weeks later, not missing a beat on instituting order for the cruel indifference of the universe, my local arcade orders our cabinet to be taken down and put out of commission.

5. the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come should have just showed me this anime (accidentally discovering MyGO and also Remorse) — I used to be particularly mean, for no reason other than to fit in, towards this media mix project. You can imagine the regret years when the band I stumbled upon through a Tower Records display was part of that project. MyGO lit up my year. Their unveiling and subsequent anime announcement, later to be referred to by Yahoo Japan News as “Reiwa’s Most Depressing Anime,” so many more great live events, and even supplemental materials have kept me going through 2023. I just hope I can make up for being such an ass back then.

6. still chanting in-n-out at the top of my lungs (Walküre Final Live) — I wouldn’t be the same without Walküre. All it took was hearing that first “Ikenai Borderline” to convert me. They tipped so many dominoes over in my life, and it was the least I could do to drive a long distance just to watch an official delayed viewing in a theater. My hardships (driving through the state of Ohio) paled in comparison to the effort these girls put in throughout this tour. My first delayed viewing, and also my first time seeing a group I loved retire. I’m just thankful I had penlights this time.

7. Breaking out of The Algorithm (does anyone have some cdjs we can borrow) — It took years for me to dust off the DJ controller I bought in the midst of the pandemic. I was particularly inspired by seeing KZ perform on a livestream and the rest was history. It turns out that picking that up was the key to making good on my brazen claim that I would “get back into music in 2023.” Really what I meant was that I wanted to be more active about listening, and it’s something I’m glad to have accomplished. Further thanks to 4s4ki, DENONBU, lil soft tennis, She is Legend, PAS TASTA, Tomori Kusonoki, Nagase Yuka, Cerise Bouquet, DOLLCHESTRA, Ohzora Kimishima, Ave Mujica, and of course, MyGO!!!!!

8. I Got Government Assigned These School Idols (Link! Like! Love Live!) — If I were to send myself a message back in time a year ago and claimed I would get back into Love Live, particularly through an “active time school year long livestream and low budget 3D models storyline”, I’d have thought the message was complete bullshit. Strange as it is, it’s been exciting to follow considering it is just on-going every day. Seeing the wave of excitement slowly build online over these girls has been a riot to watch unfold. 

9. gaijin jumpscared at the coco ichibanya (THE IDOLM@STER M@STERS OF IDOL WORLD!!!!! 2023) — Bandai Namco’s Idolm@ster Royal Rumble was an event I could never have conceived, even in my dreams. I ended up in seats on the very bottom of the upper bowl of the Tokyo Dome, unable to stand due to safety rules, but by god I had one of the best views in the house. My highest heart rate for the entire year was likely hearing the opening melody to “Hanazakari Weekend✿”. I hadn’t even heard “Saku-wa Ukiyo-no Kimi-HANABI” before but the amount of UOs popped for it sure will give it a place in my memories forever. Perhaps the most memorable moment was after the second day of the event. A few drinks deep after the concert while waiting in line at a curry restaurant, I noticed that the older Japanese gentleman in front of me had pins of my favorite character (Cinderella Girls Idol Nono Morikubo) on his bag. I believe I must have given him the biggest white man jumpscare of his entire life when I complimented him on them, getting a full triple take to confirm that I indeed had merch from the event on. It’s moments of international idol unity like getting back a “let’s keep trying hard as her Producer” that make it all seem worth doing. 

   
   In summary: I heard M@STERPIECE live, I’m never going to fail.

10. “ohhhhhhhh so that’s what those girls are from, I wasn’t sure” game of the year 2023 (Blue Archive) — It would be a difficult task to avoid Blue Archive, if you run in the same subcultures and niches I do. It’s hard to understand the appeal at a material level. Sure, the music is incredible. Sure, the character and world designs are super modern and full of details. You just need more to survive in the hellishly competitive big social game landscape these days. I went in intending to discover what it was that was so special about this game, why it had built such incredible numbers and gained so much fanfare. It was over for me as soon as they invoked a few tiny scrimblos responsible for making kusoge thanking a robot they kidnapped for enjoying the bad games they made. I followed it through to the final chapter and it ended up being my favorite game this year.

Jinhyung Kim

My life has changed so rapidly and so consistently in the past few years that whenever I revisit any of the writing I’ve done or conversations I’ve had in that time, the selves I find feel impossibly distant—not unrelatable; just a gulf of experience removed. Pre-2020 feels like ancient history, and the older I get, the less I feel the need to draw a line of narrative continuity from past to present. But if I had to articulate one thing about myself that’s stayed stubbornly the same throughout my entire life, it’d be that I value friendships above all else. School, work, and nerd shit provide the general frameworks by which I structure my time, but it’s all second to (or for the purpose of) making and maintaining connections with people. That’s my fundamental source of happiness, and that's something that will never change. I used to think I cared more about art than I did about people; now, I don’t even bother pretending there's a line separating the two. Love you, Shy—thanks for helping me make it through one doozy of a year.

Ten Zines/Zine-y Things I Got in 2023

Last month, I attended the 2023 Houston Zine Fest; I first went in 2022, and both events were an indubitable highlight of my year—a real nexus for anyone who practices DIY in a city whose sprawl easily scatters chances for communal gathering. It felt even more special this time because I personally knew a lot of the vendors, mostly thanks to having met them through Basket Books & Art (where I work). Here’s a list of zine (or zine-adjacent) things I got—mostly via zine fest, but a few from other occasions (titles embedded with pictures!).

• Chris Cascio - Artifacts and Source Material, I - III (2011 - 16) — This guy’s made a lot of cool zines in a classic punk/“American Transgressive” mode that compile the iconography of things like sensationalist media, metal and rave subcultures, etc. These little zines are an unthematized selection of xeroxes, clippings, and other flim flam from the moldiest dregs of humanity.

• Izaac Costiniano/Redd Howard  - Hello Houston: Four Architectural Sites (2023) — My friends! Izaac’s a great photographer, and his partner Redd is an art historian (and ceramicist in formation, I believe?). They made a zine together featuring photography and writing on some of the city’s more subtle architectural quirks.

• Ian Gerson - Tremble (2023) — Ian’s recent work comprises explorations of historic queer night life in Galveston, TX; Tremble accompanies an exhibition of the same name featuring woven tapestries made with various found objects from the Galveston Bay area “as a way of centering the refused, the invisible, the marginal.”

• Harmony Korine/Mark Gonzales - Collected Fanzines (2008) — An early anthology of DIY sleaze by the ever-notorious Harmony Korine, published as a book by Drag City in 2008; these zines’ stark and simple presentation are a refreshing contrast to a filmmography whose approach to transgression can often be saturated and demanding.

• ed. Adam Marnie - F Magazine, Issue 6: “Sex” (2018) — Adam’s F Gallery + publishing project is one of the few art things based in Houston I’m consistently excited about; his longest-running output is F magazine, which invites contributors to submit an anything-goes gamut of art, poetry, essays, and experimental writing in response to the theme at hand.

• Dani Newman - Lonely Places (2022) — Dani’s a neighbor and erstwhile cafe buddy; this little photo zine is a document of her time living out of a car with her partner while on a road trip across the Great American West.

• Jessica Ninci - Window Shopping (2022) — Ian (Gerson—see above), Jessica, and Dan (Schmahl—see below) are all connected via the Galveston art community, as well as Dan’s publishing project Super Hit Press (all the work of theirs I’ve listed here was printed by Super Hit). Each spread of Jessica’s Window Shopping zine documents a trinket from a Galveston antique/thrift/local shop on the left and her ceramic recreation of it on the right.

• Grace Sydney Pham - A Glimpse Into the Houston Experimental Music Scene (2023) — Friend of a friend made this hardcover photo zine that features many a familiar face I’ve seen attending free improv shows ‘round H-town.

• Dan Schmahl - Let's Pretend (20??) — Dan’s an amazing Galveston-based artist and printer (and Jessica's partner); he downplays his own work too much, but his monochrome risographs are some of the most gorgeous things I've seen.

• Ann Weathersby - Reliquaries (2021) —Also published by F. A documentation of 14 reliquary boxes, each with a collage and a text, that present material personally important to Weathersby in the form of sacred objects.

Joshua Minsoo Kim

Reflecting on any year is weird because you realize how much you experienced despite it all going so fast. I don’t really think I need to spend more time thinking about any of it though because I’m just ready to move on—not in the sense that 2023 was especially horrible (it was in various ways, both personally and not), but because I’m still in a mindset that has fueled me since I stopped being insanely depressed half a decade ago, which is that I’d prefer to just do things than think about them. Of course, a lot of the things I do are a result of careful consideration, but I’m always thinking about how little time we have in this little life. I’m just doing what I can.

Favorite Concerts of 2023

1. HiTech at Phố Việt in Chicago, 7/22

2. Underground Resistance at Nowadays in New York, 5/28

3. Still House Plants at First Church in Jamaica Plain in Boston, 3/26

4. Kath Bloom at the Hideout in Chicago, 10/14

5. Patti Smith at the Salt Shed in Chicago, 12/27

6. Richard Dawson at Public Records in New York, 3/28

7. Numero Twenty (specifically Unwound, Karate, Tsunami, Codeine, and The Hated) at the Palace Theater in LA, 2/18 & 2/19

8. Martin Dupont at the Brooklyn Monarch in New York, 5/28

9. NewJeans at Lollapalooza in Chicago, 8/3

10. Hermeto Pascoal at Pioneer Works in New York, 5/25

11. Agriculture at the Bluebird Theater in Denver, 11/2

Aspirations for 2024, Written on the Spot, in No Particular Order:

• Regularly work out and be more mindful of my health (benching 225 by the end of the year???)

• Keep Tone Glow consistently running (writers panel + film coverage especially)

• Learn how to swim (dear god please it’s time)

• Attend more avant-garde puppetry shows here in Chicago (and write about some of them???)

• Follow through on publishing the interviews I’ve conducted in the past

• Go to the Galapagos on a research trip with other science teachers (it’s now or never…)

• Visit Toronto and go through the film archives there (and especially going through Michael Snow’s archives)

• Do some film programming (hopefully of James Herbert’s works)

• Eat at more restaurants in Chicago so that I can map out the best places to eat for at least 15 different cuisines (within my budget…)

• Learn how to cook some cuisine I’ve never tried cooking before (most important thing on this list maybe???)

• Read more fiction (lol)

Saoirse

It’s been a frustrating one. I started the year lost, burnt out and directionless and in some ways I feel that’s where I'm leaving it. My mental health is worse than ever, but for once I feel like I've got the people around me to pull through.

I received an email from a university about course openings for their communications/Film course and applied on a whim. I’m a high school dropout, so didn’t expect to get in but I did—I absolutely threw myself at it. I took advantage of almost every opportunity. I’d spend hours in the library just researching for fun. My curiosity will never be satiated; I came close, though. For almost 6 months, it was the perfect environment to foster me. (I don’t know how I'll live without free access to academic papers when I graduate.)

God, the films I watched, nearly 300, it’s freakish, it’s twisted and this year it brought me closer to people than ever before. I volunteered for the local film festival. I go to a screening every week (Shoutout to C.U.M., the best cinema experience in Sydney). Film has given me a chance to unapologetically express myself and I'm forever grateful. I’ve met so many wonderful people this year, including my sweetheart.

Around July, I fell hard. My depression came back and everything became a struggle again. I don’t know what caused it, or if the miracle of (almost) dysfunction-free life was just mania, but I'm so glad it happened. It gave me the energy to immerse myself in community and find pockets of stability. It’s not my first walk around the block, and I’m sure clearer skies are ahead next year. Even if they’re not, I'll keep pushing through. I’ve never felt so loved and supported. Thank you all so very much. <3

The Media That Stuck With Me

• Yamaji Ebine’s manga — I tore through almost all of her available work during the early year malaise and I don’t think I’ve gone a day without thinking about her stories. There’s a little bit of me in all her protagonists. They’re stuck, dysfunctional and love-struck. Nobody is writing about young queer women like her.

• Girls of the Night (dir. Kinuyo Tanaka, 1961) — I found myself “out” more than ever this year. The ways this film forces its protagonist to navigate disclosure speaks to me viscerally. It’s heartbreaking, but for a moment she can slip into pure romanticism. “Just being treated so kindly is more than enough, it made me so happy”

• Paris Funeral 1972 (dir. Adam C. Briggs, 2021) — Had the pleasure of seeing this at my favourite local movie club. It’s nice to feel like there’s a creative present and future in Australian film production and film culture. The beautiful people that made both possible know who you are. I’m extremely proud to call you my friends.

• Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (dir. Kazuo Hara 1974) — Of all the diary films I watched this year, this was simultaneously the most self destructive, invasive and healing.

• The YouTube Upload: 本多俊之 - “マルサの女” / Toshiyuki Honda - Theme from “A Taxing Woman (Marusa no onna)” (uploader: Pure Jam, 2020) — YouTube made it a mission to put this at the top of my recommended tab almost daily. I clicked and listened to it more than I’d like to admit. Thank you Toshiyuki Honda for letting me channel Nobuko Miyamoto girlboss energy for late night study sessions.

Assorted Lovely Moments

• A beautiful drive down backcountry roads with my sweetheart. The best navigation mistake I’ve ever made.

• Getting to present a screening of Tourism (2017) accompanied by Q&A with Daisuke Miyazaki. When we wrapped up, a friend shouted “GO SAOIRSE!” It was just such a pleasure to get to contribute to such an important place for me.

• Selling a brand new friend on Tampopo, primarily with the egg scene and then suggesting we watch it then and there.

• I went swimming for the first time in years. I cried when I touched the ocean; I’ve missed it so much. It felt like I’d never go back. I’m so proud of myself.

Ryan Waller

I fell apart this year. Usually, I’m very apprehensive about going in depth about my emotional state, because I’m embarrassed of my emotions. I spiral out a lot; I feel bad, then I feel awful about feeling bad, then I start feeling about how it makes people I care about feel bad, then I think about how that makes me feel bad. And the spiral continues on and on. For a long time, I felt like I was beginning to develop a level of maturity that helped me to stabilize my emotional state and give me more strength to handle the world.

Then 2023 happened. I lost a wonderful friend; I lost my grandmother; and I lost so many heroes. It’s harder than ever to feel stable. Every single day, I wake up wanting to give up—and my end of the stick isn’t even the shortest.

In the face of the deep sorrows that have plagued me since the literal first week of this year, music has kept me afloat. Shy and I share the same passionate stance: every year is a good year for music. Yet I have to admit that this was a particularly incredible year for music. Tons of indispensable archival releases, like the previously unreleased Os Tincoãs album Canto Coral Afrobrasileiro, have bowled me over this year. Consistently brilliant artists like Klein and KMRU have stepped up their practices and delivered some of their best work yet. We’ve even gotten amazing returns from long dormant artists like Japanese gamelan-rock masters goat, and a sequel to a long beloved collaboration by Éric La Casa and Seijiro Murayama. It’s hard to want to be around these days, but the surplus of unbelievably great music this year has made it much, much more tolerable.

I love Shy, and if you’re reading this I’m sure you do too. I’m beyond ecstatic to have been called back to contribute to another buddy list. She’s so amazing, and I’m happy to be a part of what she does in any capacity. All of my friends keep me alive, and I love you all.

Top Ten Under-Discussed Albums of 2023 (By My Metric) (Unranked)

• goat (JP) - Joy in Fear — This band is absolutely disgusting. If you love Kukangendai, do not miss these guys’ long-awaited return. When I say math rock, this is what I mean.

• Aaron Dilloway - Bhoot Ghar: Sounds of the Kathmandu Horror House — Dilloway is one of the most freeing artists to follow. Can think of few people who make field recordings more fun to listen to. Shouts out to Nepal.

• Me'Shell Ndegéocello - The Omnichord Real Book — The motherfucking greatest. Nobody can do it like her, as long as she’s done it. And she’s got a veritable who’s who of contemporary jazz on here. Would love to hear her chop it up with Makaya McCraven or Junius Paul sometime.

• Fielded - Plus One — A real motherfucking star. Everyone needs to run them up expeditiously. Backwoodz has had an amazing year, and Fielded is absolutely a huge part of that rich tapestry of excellence.

• Raja Kirik - Phantasmagoria of Jathilan — Yes No Wave is one of the best labels around, and if you appreciate experimental music that genuinely pushes the boundaries of what industrial music can sound like, you’d do well to familiarize yourself with Raja Kirik’s catalogue. Absolutely raw sounds on this one.

• Scúru Fitchádu - Nez Txada Skúru dentu skina na braku fundu — Can’t believe no one is talking about this. Probably the most genuinely punk thing you’ll hear all year. Folkloric tradition meets electronic wizardry is a huge draw for me and the atmosphere of fury and resistance imbues every howl with the utmost urgency.

• Edward Skeletrix - Skeletrix Langauge — If you’re seriously saying that hip-hop isn’t good anymore in current year, you will not survive the revolution.

• münki - ACT IIIL SMIL :3 — No seriously. Hip-hop has never been better.

• Vayda - Forrest Gump — And nobody proves that better than Vayda. She’s really the future.

• Sabiwa - Island no.16  - Memories of Future Landscapes — A rich and exciting fusion of EAI and indigenous Taiwanese folk that has me very excited to dig into the latter in the new year.

Patrick Lynn Wilson

Webster’s Dictionary defines 2023 as the number dating the year following 2022 and preceding 2024. In keeping with several of the authors featured here, I define it as a rough patch for me personally, but please notice the meringue layer of my despair pie is flecked with chocolate flakes from the sweet cacao tree of positivity. For while a large chunk of this year may have sucked, my friends and Shy were there to agree that it sucks with me, and then send me a link to a crusty YouTube vid of an old free jazz improv set featuring tabla, gong, and analog synth. I started out 2023 reeling from loss, slightly inert; as the year bows out, I find myself no longer reeling but surrounded by the comforts of a supportive and loving partner, a cozy reading nook, and what is sure to be a normal presidential election cycle in 2024. Shy, I couldn’t have made it through without you—and frankly, why would I want to?   

Patrick Lynn’s Top Albums of 2023 or Whatever:

1. PAS TASTA – GOOD POP — The most forward-thinking album of the year; the sound of a thousand envelopes pushed at once and pressing back with equal force.

2. Emma Aibara – i don't know who i am & sound of my ♡ EPs — Perfectly processed DnB pop on this bookend of EPs. Emma’s YouTube-uploaded breakcore covers of Evanescence’s “Going Under” and Kittie’s “Charlotte” were my songs of the summer. If you’ve ever cried at a Mitsubishi Eclipse ad from 2003, this is now the brightest star in your sky.

3. Peterparker69, Jeter, & Y ohtrixpointnever – Deadpool — Smeary hyperpop that tips its hat to the sonic qualities of today’s radio R&B, then twirls the hat around and does a little parallel shimmy.

4. Lana Del Rey - Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd — Shows how one can effectively string their neuroses along their fingers like a cat’s cradle to major effect, while transgressing all manner of good taste in the process.

5. Summer Eye – 大吉 Good Luck — The year’s best dance pop jawn. And to think, I very nearly made it the entirety of 2023 without having to hear the words “LCD Soundsystem”.

6. XV – On the Creekbeds on the Thrones — Best and most cerebral rock LP of the year or whatever.

7. Erik Kramer – Where the fish are as fine as the color of colors — Late contender for best folk release of 2023, maybe even the nascent decade so far.

8. eleven thistles – demos — Absurdly accomplished set of debut demos from this Chicago ambient duo.

9. hoodie x james K – 065 (Scorpio) — My trip-hop revivalist jawn of choice this year.

10. J and the woolen stars – Personal Problems — When twee pop stops getting real and gets in a chamber music mode instead.

11. heartstopmiami & FearDorian – K.A.S.O.B. — Blown-out helium hyperrap built of wheezy saccharine energy and copious references to Betty Boop.

12. ML Buch – Suntub — A veritable Rorschach of an album; A future classic.

13. 100 gecs – 10,000 gecs — America’s house band.

14. Addison Rae – AR — A hermetically sealed vacuum of horny. Here, sex is the most oppressive and powerful force in existence.

15. audry – Turbulence Mapping — The death blues of a moth trapped in a screen door.

16. Run Along Forever & AyooLii – Crashing Tf Out — I love my fiends!

(Other releases I listened to heaps but don’t have room to write about: Jim Legxacy – HNPM; Gendo Ikari – ROKUBUNGI; Gridlink – Coronet Juniper; Tomb Mold – The Enduring Spirit; Ostraca – Disaster; Closet Witch – Chiaroscuro; Christian Mirande – Beautiful One Day, Perfect The Next; Laurence Crane – Natural World; SATOH – Born in Asia; Joanne Robertson – Blue Car; Liv.e – Girl in the Half Pearl; Emily Robb – If I Am Misery Then Give Me Affection; Jack Sheen – Solo for Cello; Opheliaxz - 11//11)

Reissues/Archival Releases of the Year or Whatever

• Thomas Buckner sings Robert Ashley - Spontaneous Musical Invention

• Mag-Amplitude – Wizards of Today

• Easter Monkeys – Splendor of Sorrow

• Pitchman – My Angel Age

• Richter Band – Smetana

• Angus MacLise – Tapes

Lynn’s Shoe of the Year or Whatever

• Puma - Perks and Mini x Nano 'BIO/VERSE' — Dressing like a hippie so that others may hurl death threats at you is the highest calling we can hope to follow in this life; these flower-patterned sneakers make that so much easier to accomplish. Counter culture ain’t just for bacteria in the kitchen anymore...

Shy Clara Thompson

For most of the year, I felt like a powerless observer. A lot of things happened to me, and I was convinced that all I could do was curl up and take the abuse. I lost a friend and two family members. The relationship I’ve been in since high school ended. I fell in love again and got my heart broken just as swiftly. I didn’t feel equipped to handle any more misfortune, so I withdrew from being a participant in my own story. I stopped writing. I stopped listening to music, reading, and playing games. I stopped getting out of bed. I didn’t necessarily want to take my own life, but I did want to stop living. Wrapping myself in a chrysalis was my way to minimize the hurt.

Though no matter how hard I tried to opt out, some folks wouldn’t let me be. The editors I worked with kept asking where I’ve been and prodded me to share my ideas, even though I didn’t think they were worth shit. Friends kept checking on me if it had been too long since they’d heard from me. As I was increasingly giving less of myself, my loved ones were determined to tease as much out of me as possible. I have a habit of believing the moment I stop being interesting, I lose all value and there’s no reason anyone should care. Time and time again, I was reminded that I’m more than just my despair and a person worth loving still existed underneath the wreckage. I can’t possibly express my gratitude to everyone that refused to let me decompose and return to the earth. Sincerely: thank you. Your kindness has done more than you know.

I’m far from what I’d describe as “okay,” but I’m not on life support right now. I’ve managed to write some things I feel proud of in this final quarter of the year. My excitement for the arts is as strong as it’s ever been. I’m into cosplay now, I guess, which is something I never thought I’d be brave enough to try. I hesitate to slip into the cliché of “2024 is my year,” because it’s not like life lets up just because the calendar rolls over—but I think I’ll be fine. At the very least, I’m probably a little better prepared to handle it.

One Extremely Good Comic Book You Should Read

• Optometry (Xiang Yata, 2023)

Ten Non-2023 Albums I Heard (and Loved) This Year

• Beilkhan Haliakbar - Air Walk (Modern Sky World, 2018)

• Blue Asia - Hotel iBAH (Seven Seas, 2001)

• Electric Satie - Gymnopédie '99 (Roux, 1998)

• Harry & Mac - Road to Louisiana (Epic, 1999)

• Maki Asakawa’s entire discography

• Mathey - Clépo (Lusafrica, 1996)

• Motoya Hamaguchi Group - Takara・Monde (Panam, 1990)

• Ray Kāne & Yuki Alani Yamauchi - Maika'i No Blues (Respect Record Ltd., 1999)

• Tank - Force of Nature (Blackground Enterprises, 2001)

• Xerinay Malik - Xerinay Malik (太合麥田, 1996)

Thanks for reading this ninth installment of once bitten, twice shy. A huge thanks to my pals that have generously given their time and effort to make this one special. You are the best. I’ve cut the amount of contributions from nine to eight this time, and there’s a reason for that: It didn’t feel right to “replace” my departed friend Nicky, so I’ve left the spot open for them. It’s important to me that I keep finding small ways to show my appreciation.

I’ve come a bit short of my original goal of (at least) one post a month, but I didn’t give up! I’m proud of myself for that. There’s a solid four months where I didn’t publish anything at all, and for a while I thought the newsletter would die a quiet death. I’m thankful that you’re still reading. I’ve got more stuff for you in the new year if you wanna keep sticking with me.

By the way, today’s my birthday! If you’re feeling nice and appreciate what I do, consider hitting the Ko-fi link below and donating. Do or don’t, I appreciate you anyway. Be safe. Happy new year. Tell your friends you love them.

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P.S. I wrote all my sections in a four hour sitting. I like to listen to instrumental music while I write. If you’re curious what I put on to get me through it:

• Culturemix - Geography (1993)

• Atlas - Breeze (1987)

• Oscilation Circuit - Série Réflexion 1 (1984)

• Satoshi Ashikawa - Wave Notation 2: Still Way (1982)

Now more than ever, I find myself appreciative of the endless breadth of expression that can manifest in the totality of art. In the past, when I felt flattened by the weight of a world that only seems to get heavier—my spirit eroded under the onslaught of a raging wind that, in the moment, feels like it might never let up—my solution was to simply give up. I’d do nothing. I wouldn’t reach out to friends and attempt to stave off loneliness. I wouldn’t put on music to fill the vacuum of silence in my empty skull. I’d just seal my eyelids shut for as long as I could manage, trying my best not to let an errant beam of light convert into an electrical impulse. My lack of ability to form any kind of human connection in extreme emotional states, whether directly or through art, was alarming. I didn’t want to feel less like myself in the moments when my grasp on identity felt weakest—and so, I sought to level up my grip.

The risk of falling into a state of emotional comatose was high in the month of January. On the morning of the 13th, I received word of my dear friend Nicky passing away. While oscillating wildly through the various stages of grief throughout the day like my Kübler-Ross playlist had been put on shuffle, I was buffeted with additional news that my nephew and niece (ages 2 and 3, respectively) had also lost their lives. I shattered into a hundred thousand pieces. Without the support of some treasured companions who knew how devastating the loss of my fallen friend was—not only for us, but for the world—I may not have found the resolve to gather up those jagged fragments and start fitting them back together. The critical difference this time, I’m guessing, is that I couldn’t easily convince myself that nobody understood how I felt.

Remembering my friend’s passion for celebrating their favorite things prevented me from falling into another quiet repose. I spent the following week absorbing the words they left behind, desperately clutching the leftover warmth from a soul that burned hot so that mine wouldn’t go cold. Nicky loved manga, so I thought about manga. I flipped through the pages of things they loved; I revisited the things I wish I could have shared with them; and I took the plunge on things we were supposed to experience together.

In this exercise of silent remembrance, I made a useful discovery for myself: in the state I was in, manga was a good way to nurse myself back to health. Days felt longer and lonelier, but I felt more able to adapt to the dulled edge of my weather-beaten emotions by immersing myself in an art form that let me take it at a slower pace. The spaces between panels provided a comfortable place to camp when I felt at capacity. I often fell asleep with a book or tablet in hand, picking up where I left off when it felt safe to open my eyes again. Shorter stories affected me most strongly; I appreciated the ability to sip on a fully realized vision in short bursts, in the moments I was best primed to receive them. So here are five one-shots that reminded me how to access the depths of my own feelings.

I’m dealing with very short stories here, so it’s impossible to write about them without some degree of spoilers. If that bothers you, I encourage you to read them first! They all come with my highest recommendation.

Makimodoshi (Akino Kondoh, 2012)

It’s interesting to think about how personalized one’s relationships to physical space can be. Depending on where you were born and the type of architecture you’re most accustomed to seeing, you could be more or less responsive to certain optical stimuli. For example: one study has shown that people from India are more susceptible to the vertical-horizontal illusion, while a contrasting group from England were more likely to be fooled by the Müller-Lyer illusion.1 To narrow the scope further, another study showed that the indigenous Khoisan people of rural South Africa showed far less sensitivity to the Ames window illusion than those from more urban areas of the country.2 It would naturally stand to reason, then, that you could get more granular and still find significant variation—even on an individual level.

Akino Kondoh’s Makimodoshi (transl. “rewind”) gets me thinking about these individualized micro-spatial adaptations with its unorthodox flipped paneling. The protagonist examines two simultaneous lines of thought, trying to remember whether she went right or left while chasing down two identical looking people to return a mitten dropped on a train. Evaluating her thought experiment, she ponders the implications of a world that has abruptly flipped. All of a sudden, everything looks familiar but feels wrong; you have to be mindful of bonking your elbow against the wall while brushing your teeth, stretching your arm to your opposite side to scan your train pass, and which direction you need to twist a doorknob. The unsettling feeling of being in an unfamiliar situation is rarely so dramatic, but maybe it’s worth considering your biases and challenging them a little bit.

A Trip to Tynemouth (Hayao Miyazaki, 2006)

For someone with the stature of celebrated Studio Ghibli filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, it can be difficult to imagine any opportunity being out of his reach. From his humble beginnings at Toei Animation in the early ‘60s, he’s done it all. He’s been able to bring some of his favorite stories to the big screen, building a grassroots venture between passionate friends into a media empire known to the entire world. But Miyazaki’s got unfulfilled dreams just like anyone else—heroes he wishes he could have met and places he wishes he could have gone. A Trip to Tynemouth shows a rare side of the old fogey, letting the whispers of his own heart grow a little bit louder.

Published in a Japanese edition of British author Robert Westall’s anthology of short stories, the manga is a partially autobiographical dramatization of Miyazaki’s relationship to Blackham’s Wimpy—a tale of rival Royal Air Force crews manning Vickers Wellington bomber planes. Perhaps because of the unusual nature of the comic as a companion piece to the short story, Miyazaki gets personal. He details his pilgrimage to the coastal town of Tynemouth in North East England where the story takes place, writes of his lifelong love of aviation with childlike excitement, and even fictionalizes a meeting with Westall himself. In typical Miyazaki fashion, he doesn’t allow the work to be too much about himself. He self-inserts as a cartoonish little pig, and takes long detours to describe the inner workings of aircrafts and scenes of war, but the imagined conversation with Westall reads loud and clear as his own internal dialogue—a conduit to explain the similarities he saw in the author despite being from countries that opposed each other in wartime. After all, who hasn’t done a mental rehearsal of what you’d say to your hero if you could meet them?

Pulp Girl (Youichi Abe, 2016)

I have no notes. It’s sick, it’s eight pages, there’s no dialogue. Just read it lol

Chirpy (Yoshiharu Tsuge, 1966)

I’ve been completely enraptured by the oeuvre of Yoshiharu Tsuge lately. The legendary manga artist, who got his start writing stories for kashi-hon rental comics in the 1950s, spent his entire career evaluating his relationship with storytelling. He honed his skills by borrowing heavily from his influences—even going as far, in one instance, to copy the composition of an entire page from Osamu Tezuka—but by the time he retired from manga was unshackled from established convention. His final efforts before putting down the pen in 1987 were works of warped surrealism and nakedly autobiographical confessionals that resembled little of what preceded them in manga’s then-young history.

But Tsuge’s transformation didn’t come from nowhere; he had like-minded contemporaries that pushed each other to evolve in the pages of Garo magazine, where its artists were given room to sharpen their craft with almost complete freedom from editorial oversight. Tsuge’s early stories in Garo, collected in the English language anthology The Swamp, track his stark shift in philosophy. His first, The Phony Warrior and Watermelon Sake, are Edo period tales of samurai that pick straight up from his kashi-hon days, but by the following year he was casting shades of the Tsuge that would change the landscape of alternative manga.

Chirpy is straightforward in its presentation, but unusual in its execution. It centers around a bar hostess and manga artist (a stand-in for Tsuge) down on their luck in modern Japan who decide to adopt a pet bird as a distraction from their financial woes. It manages to work as a temporary fix, but things fall apart when their avian friend unexpectedly meets its end. The story ends on a purposefully ambiguous and unsatisfying note, and was famously poorly received when it was published—perhaps because the manga-reading public wasn’t yet ready to confront that sort of discomfort with no help from the author. You don’t know if the couple turns out okay, and you’re not meant to. As a person that hinges a lot of my personal happiness on a pet that will only live a fraction as long as I will, it terrifies me; I can’t help thinking of my inevitable heartbreak.

The Real Momoka (Sumiko Arai, 2021)

There’s power in a name. Being addressed by the one you prefer can be intensely affirming, while being called something you don’t want to hear can make you feel like an alien in your own body. Even being called by a name you like can color your feelings about someone, depending on the amount of derision or affection you detect in their voice. “It suits you,” says one, but to another “it’s not what I expected.” Maybe your name was bestowed upon you by your parents, or maybe you took it upon yourself to veto their decision—but your relationship to your name is always in flux, at the mercy of whoever last let it part from their lips.

In The Real Momoka, the titular bartender has swapped names with her lover and regular patron, Makoto. The two of them are the only ones in on the secret. To the customers of the bar, “Makoto” is an appropriate name for a handsome woman with boyish charm, but Momoka is conflicted; she’s irritated how well her own name suits someone else, and feels frustrated that it only sounds good coming from someone she loves—but she’s unsure if those feelings are reciprocated. Makoto treats her delicately, the way she feels, rather than like a rough-and-tumble butch. It’s in those intimate moments that Momoka’s name truly feels like it belongs to her. It’s a potent metaphor for one of the reasons we chase after lasting romance: when someone makes you feel whole in a way nobody else does, it’s difficult to let them go.

I chose my name for myself. I’ve been using it ever since I was thirteen. I’ve had periods of being unsure if I’m truly who I say I am, but one thing has always been certain to me: my name sounds really good when someone I love says it to me.

Thank you for reading this second installment of my silly little newsletter. Getting this one out meant a lot to me, because I very nearly gave up on this creative venture and let it die on the vine. I’m glad I didn’t. I feel like I’ve accomplished a couple of important things. I’ve memorialized my friend Nicky in a way that makes sense to me, and my head feels clear in a way that it hasn’t since the day that I lost them. I followed through on something that’s strictly for myself, for once. And most importantly, I didn’t succumb to that ever-present desire to go into hiding just because things have been rough. Besides! I’ve got far too many good ideas to let them go to waste. I’m currently working on another one, so you can probably expect the next issue sooner rather than later.

If you’d like to donate, there’s a link below where you can do that. A couple of kind souls have done so already, despite the fact that I’m far too anxious to draw too much attention to the existence of the page. Whether you do or don’t, you have my thanks. I’m just happy that anybody wants to read what I’ve written.

By the way, you might have noticed the extremely adorable new icon at the top of the page. It was drawn by my friend BIG LOU. He’s amazing!! You should hit him up if you want someone to draw a funny guy for you.

Be safe. See you soon. I need a nap. Good night.

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Hello, and welcome to the inaguaral post of my newsletter. I’ve long insisted that this would be the year I finally allow myself some time to be selfish—to follow my own whims and write some things that are strictly for my own fulfillment—for the past several years since I’ve been writing full-time. And while I’ve produced a body of work that I’m immensely proud of, I find myself feeling frustrated by the limitations of the channels that I publish through. My interests run deep, and they pull me violently by every extremity in every direction; the more I resist in an effort to stay focused, the more I feel I am likely to be ripped apart.

The goal of starting this little newsletter is to be a little kinder to myself—to indulge my desire to write an essay about whatever excites me, to interview whomever I think would be cool to talk to, and to remind myself that my thoughts are worth having even if I don’t get paid for them. I’ve got a lot of things planned for this space that may be of interest to you, or they may only interest me. In order to properly extend that kindness to myself, I’ve elected—to the best of my ability—not to care if the former applies.

It may seem like a contradiction, then, that most of the words herein won’t even be my own. I’ve decided to cede the spotlight to some trusted friends, whom I’ve invited to share reflections of their year. I asked everyone to provide up to two lists of up to ten items. No mandates on topics, scope, or length—because I wanted these to feel like honest reflections of the way their time was spent. The reason I wanted to start things off this way is simple: relearning to bare my heart to other people again has changed me for the better and rekindled warm feelings I’ve long felt were permanently lost. Everyone here has given me some encouragement, they’ve shown an interest in what makes me tick, or they’ve simply given me space to be myself—and I want to give back. To me, it makes perfect sense as a way to show what my heart is made of. There’s a little reflection of myself in all of them.

This is by no means a comprehensive buddy list, nor is it exclusive; these are just the ones I felt brave eneough to pester for their contributions on fairly short notice. Whether they’ve chosen to share a lot or a little about themselves, I’ve learned a lot from each of them. Thanks for reading. I’ll see you again at the end. 💜

—Shy Clara Thompson

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buddy list 2023

Nicky Austin

I catch myself thinking a lot some days about the disposability of art. Nearly a century ago, people would use Action Comics #1 to start their fireplace. There are a lot of people out there that see music as window dressing, a backdrop to their night out with their friends. An average artist will just pour their entire being into their work and for someone out there, that whole stretch of time is just someone’s commute. This isn’t a bad thing, we’re all creatures that process our surroundings in different ways. I just think my brain runs this thought through my body once or twice every few months in a feeble attempt to give me some perspective, to not sweat the small stuff all the time… to remind myself that I’m just someone else trying to get by. Some people save lives for a living, others build furniture, I try to crunch the numbers in my brain as to exactly why Godzilla makes me feel the way he does. There are people that listen to that. We have weird jobs. 

I like a lot of weird and dumb stuff. Pop culture stuff. I’ve fostered a lifelong fascination with the concept of “Low Art” and workmanlike storytellers sprawling themselves out on an inherently capitalist structure. Looking at a promotional box of candy and seeing the human being that expressed some truly weird, hilarious thoughts in word bubbles and song lyrics. I’ve never been much of an economist but I guess that relationship between art and money means something to me. I wanna make a lot of both! I want the faith that if I ever toiled away at something from inside of some unknowable contemptible machine, they’d be able to look at it and see me inside of there. Some of those machines are so well-built they make sure you can’t see anybody inside. So over the years, I guess I’ve trained my eyes to look for people in those things and appreciate them when they make something truly special. This year, I think I got to see malfunctions new and old. 

Moving from this year to the next, I think I’ve learned to cherish my friends and family some more. I’ve lost people, I’ve gained more. I attended a nearly empty memorial service so full of silent resentment and awkward trauma that it made me sick and I’ve resolved to make sure I never leave something like that behind. I’ve tossed and turned about my artistic and financial future and I still don’t have answers or opportunities. I co-wrote the best song I’ve made to date. I’m so fucking tired and so fucking frustrated but I’m also so, so full of love and appreciation. I don’t know how to feel. It’s been an incredibly hard year and I think after about a decade of hard years I’m done making resolutions. All I know is that I experienced some incredible things, good and bad, and that I want to be confident enough to provide some cool stuff to others going forward. 

May the next year bring us more. I want more words to process pain, pictures to render truth in imagination. I want songs to sprout forth when I think of them and the ability to make it real. I want good movies, funny jokes and really fucking delicious food. I want more dumb comics to read every Sunday with my friends, I want more songs with ridiculous writing decisions to gawk at. For every difficult thing this year represented for me, I want next year to give me more. I’m done with indecision. This year’s an abandoned house and I want to move out because from where I’m standing next year is a warm bed.

Top 10 Individual Manga Chapters Published in Shonen Jump Magazine in 2022

1. Hunter x Hunter, chapter 397

2. One Piece, chapter 1045

3. RuriDragon, chapter 5

4. Akane-Banashi, chapter 28

5. Sakamoto Days, chapter 100

6. PPPPPP, chapter 61

7. Ayashimon, chapter 24

8. Undead Unluck, chapter 132

9. Me & Roboco, chapter 100

10. Jujutsu Kaisen, chapter 183

10 Creatively Inspiring Rock Songs I First Heard in 2022

• COWPERS - “Cian”

• 12 Rods - “Red (4/9 New Version)”

• Walrus - “Hikari no Kakera”

• The Hated - “Someone”

• Susquatch - “After the Thaw”

• GEZAN - “DNA”

• Piebald - “Mess With the Bulls”

• Veltpunch - “7”

• There Is a Light That Never Goes Out - “Distance”

• Popcatcher - “Punkrockauthority”

Leah Duff

This was my first full year of truly being home. My wife and I moved to Vermont in April of last year, leaving behind a whole metropolitan area filled with ghosts. When we landed, we immediately wanted to dig our roots very deep into the soil. But the thing is, you can’t force roots; they have to grow on their own. This year, they took.

It’s taken me living here with my wife—we two now legally ordained, as of May this year—to understand that home isn’t just a person, a place or a particular feeling. I mean, it is those things, yes, but in order to be home you need your self to be at peace.

So maybe what I really mean is that this was my first full year of truly being at peace.

I’ve spent most of my adult life living for others. I don’t say that to cast aspersions on anyone or to sound like sour grapes, but I just didn’t ever really think about myself. I’d learned at a very young age that casting off parts of myself made life easier for others, and it made me more palatable for others. 

So over time, I cast off my rough edges. I cast off my video games in college. I cast off anime and manga in young adulthood. I cast off my faith to appease some pain. I cast off community to live for someone else.

But this year, in this place, with this woman, I finally let myself be me. I re-found the things that made my heart glow; I bought my deeply loved SEGA systems and I spent a whole afternoon touching them to see if I could recover all of my memories (I did). I bought a ring to give to my wife to finally rectify how I had failed my own heart before. I bought MiniDisc players (lots of them) to reclaim a small part of the carefree youth I wish I had.

I also finally found community. I found a place that reinvigorated my dream for how the internet could connect people. I found a church that doesn’t hate me.

This year, I found home.

Top 5 Sports Happenings

• The Tour De France Femmes being run for the first time in 30+ years

• Mark Canha’s 3 run home run against the Phillies on August 21st

• Alyssa Naeher’s stop against Germany in November

• The entire Japan vs. Germany match at the World Cup

• Munetaka Murakami breaks the NPB’s all time home run record and he does it playing for my beloved Swallows

Top 5 Things That Made Me Cry (That weren’t real genuine harm or hurt)

• Lightning talking to a robot who lost his friends (Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns)

• The donuts I made, having never thought I could make something so delicious

• A video of my wife playing the guitar for me when I was apart from her in Europe

• When my wife proposed to me and we got married

• Having a delicious decaf coffee to wind down in the evening after a hard day

golok

despite having a good group of friends in relatively close physical proximity and a wonderful significant other with whom i spend most of my time with, i’m prone to feeling very alone (i should really stop staying up so late). some of the other freaks here on this thing have played a large part in easing that whole feeling which i am endlessly grateful for. thanks for posting 4s4ki like ten months ago shy, you have thoroughly rearranged my ears.

movies i watched this year that i'll be thinking about for a long time

• 0.5 mm (dir. Momoko Ando, 2014)

• After Life (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1998)

• Come Drink with Me (dir. King Hu, 1966)

• Cure (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997)

• Decision to Leave (dir. Park Chan-Wook, 2022)

• Drive My Car (dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021)

• Irma Vep (dir. Olivier Assayas, 1996)

• Still Life (dir. Jia Zhangke, 2006)

• The Novelist's Film (dir. Hong Sang-Soo, 2022)

• The River (dir. Tsai Ming-Liang, 1997)

2022 records that i liked a lot

• 4s4ki - Killer in Neverland

• Chat Pile - God's Country

• Cloud Rat - Threshold

• Haru Nemuri - Shunka Ryougen

• Utada Hikaru - BADモード

• macaroom - inter ice age 4

• My Little Airport - 跟你開玩笑

• Nanoray - Digimaiden

• Negative Plane - The Pact

• Sobs - Air Guitar

Jai

The last few years I kind of feel like I was stuck. I don’t think it was in any particular stand out way, but it was like being caught on a treadmill. Just looping round and round, and not really feeling like I was progressing. This year, I like to think I finally managed to break through and start making and enjoying things again. At the very least, I feel like I’m on the right path now. 

I started reading more often. I watched almost 300 films this year and I tried to write at least something on Letterboxd for every film I saw. I made several YouTube Poops of a guy I went to school with’s car review videos and he still has no idea they exist. And I’m incredibly proud of the fifteen minute long video I made for the GOBLIN BUNKER PUBLIC ACCESS 2 charity stream. I learnt a pretty valuable lesson over the last twelve months—I need to watch a movie at least once every two weeks or I get restless. Like an extremely flaccid version of The Hulk who gets satiated with Japanese films. 

It’s important to remember art is meant to be enjoyable. Getting to share films with my parents or with friends of mine has really re-opened my eyes to the brilliance of art. Thinking about it critically should come from a place of wanting to answer questions in our own head. I managed to get out of my own way with regards to that this year. I’m planning to create and release way more stuff in 2023, and I think my goal is to try and enjoy that. I know things in the world seem worse than ever, and I’m not gonna lie and act like everything’s actually fine—I don’t know nearly enough about the world to make a claim like that. But at the very least that seems to be driving me lately. If I can’t rely on the world, I’ll just have to put what I want to exist into it.

My 10 Favourite Films I Saw for the First Time This Year

• Minbo (dir. Juzo Itami, 1992)

• Chungking Express (dir. Wong Kar-wai, 1994)

• Ali (dir. Michael Mann, 2001)

• Kids Return (dir. Takeshi Kitano, 1996)

• His Motorbike, Her Island (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1986)

• Mikey and Nicky (dir. Elaine May, 1976)

• The Host (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2006)

• Throw Down (dir. Johnnie To, 2004)

• Southland Tales (dir. Richard Kelly, 2006)

• Mera Naam Joker (dir. Raj Kapoor, 1970)

10 Things I Loved This Year

• Berserk — I finally got to read and get up to date with all of Kentaro Miura’s masterpiece and, suffice to say, it is easily one of my favourite stories I’ve ever experienced. Sorry in advance for how annoying I will be about it.

• Juzo Itami’s Filmography — Itami’s films are funny, tragic, satiric and ultimately, about how much he loves his wife (and not in a Paul W. S. Anderson kind of way). I really appreciated getting to see someone express just how much they love the community around them, and seeing that they want it to grow in a sustainable way. Imagine being so good at what you do that the Yakuza have to get involved. RIP to a legend.

• Nimtoh’s Korean Fried Chicken — It is legitimately one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. I’ve written multiple paragraphs to friends about how much I love their wings.

• La Roche-Posay Anthelios UVMUNE 400 Hydrating Cream SPF50 — Take care of your skin, even if you have melanin. It only protects from one UV type!

• Babbu - “Gaddi Red Challenger” — I’ve been a fan of the Canadian-Punjabi YouTuber scene since before I was a teenager, and I’ve always loved their style of balancing sincerity with comedy. Gaddi Red Challenger is both a hilarious parody of classic Punjabi braggadocious tracks and one of the best car tunes of the year.

• Oral-B Pro 3 Electric Toothbrush with Smart Pressure Sensor, 3500, Pink — Get an electric toothbrush if you don’t have one. My last electric toothbrush was one of the first things I bought with my own money and I broke it almost immediately within the week I got it. I used it in that condition for the next three years to spite myself.

• Final Fantasy X — Okay, I realise I’m very very very late to this. But it’s good! I had never played much of this series outside of VII (after getting a third degree burn from XIII as a teenager). Playing with a group of friends in a giant chat and showing each other where we were at in the game really gave me a new appreciation for JRPGs as a whole. They’re shared stories! The genre reminds me of how things like Chaucher’s Canterbury Tales would’ve been shared between giant audiences.

• Better Call Saul — One of my friends pointed out that this is the only show that we’ve seen starting from the first day it aired till its last. Thank God it was good. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to do that with anything again. I remember several of us huddling around my friend’s iPhone 6 Plus in the school library to watch episodes during free periods in school. 

• The Analogue Pocket — This thing is fucking mental man. That screen is outrageously good looking. I can now browse the entire NES library and ultimately decide I don’t want to play any of them at a moment's notice.

• All of my friends — It’s unreal to me how many great people I’ve gotten to know this year. It’s been a pleasure hanging out with all of you. I feel like I found a piece of myself that was missing until now. I really am thankful to have such wonderful people around me who encourage each other to be better. And of course, a massive thank you to all the knuckleheads who had already been tolerating me for years. I love all of you guys.

Joshua Minsoo Kim

Once again it is the end of the year and I am grieving how little time I have in my one small life but am mostly celebrating the riches it offers. It is beautiful that I am able to partake in any of it at all. I often set longterm goals to orient myself, but am pretty lax about actually succeeding. Really, this is a way to help me assess what I care about, and what I think I want to be caring about in the years to come. It wouldn’t be fun if I turned out exactly the way I wanted, right?

Ten Goals for the First Half of My 30s (in order of when they’re likey to be completed)

1. Pay off all my student loans

2. Learn how to swim

3. Go to the Galápagos and work alongside researchers and other science teachers

4. Interview my grandma about her life before she passes away

5. Finish writing my book

6. Get involved with programming avant-garde films in Chicago (and do so on at least 5 different occasions)

7. Get obsessed with a new art form and have it define my life in a substantial way

8. Be able to consistently cook all the different Korean dishes I love from my mom

9. Become more proficient in speaking Spanish and Korean

10. Feel confident that during these years I was still making a concerted effort to be a good friend, brother, son, uncle, partner, etc.

Mocha

Hello. I am Mocha, a 3x year old Fujoshi in love with mecha anime, tokusatsu series, and sci-fi in general. I was invited to share a list of things I enjoyed this year, so I compiled a list of the anime I spent time with which spoke to me for one reason or another. You’ll notice a mixture of old and new things. 

My approach to engaging with my hobbies has always been relatively free-spirited and erratic, especially as I’ve grown older and found my free-time to grow ever more precious. I make the effort to keep up, but I’m also just as likely to revisit old favorites rather than venture through the backlog from hell. April and October were both taken by a trip down nostalgia lane with Haruhi and Lucky Star…

One of these happens to still be airing, but it’s close enough to ending that we can let it slide, right?

10 Anime I Watched in 2022

1. Akiba Maid War — The PV initially turned me right off, but then I decided to give it a chance. I’ve never been more angry about absolutely falling in love with a show. This is about the best elevator pitch I can make for it without saying too much.

2. Spirited Away — I make it a point to watch at least one Ghibli film a year, and this year happened to be Spirited Away. I don’t think there’s anything that has been left unsaid about this film. It’s the film that put Ghibli on the road to international stardom, and in some ways, a film they never really surpassed.

3. Toku Touken Ranbu: Hanamaru Setsugetsuka — My sword boy gacha game got a film trilogy this year. A selfish pick.

4. The Legend of Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These : Sakubou - Season 4 of the new adaptation of the Final Boss of anime. For those new to LotGH or have been putting it off for years, Die Neue These is a good starting option to dip your toes into. If you like the story but aren’t a fan of the visuals, move onto the older adaptation. The novels are my preference.

5. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - I was part of the Haruhi generation of otaku, so I can’t deny my continued love for this series is at least partially nostalgia.  That said, I’m not so blinded that I can’t see why younger generations have bounced off so hard. Saying that certain aspects haven’t aged particularly well is a bit of an understatement, but if you can get past it, the heart of the show still shines bright.

6. Lucky Star - Every show needs a good hype man, right? Lucky Star is that to Haruhi. It’s impossible to disentangle it from mid-2000s otaku culture. That said, outside of the increasing Haruhi fellation as it goes on, Lucky Star is honestly more timeless than people give it credit for.

7. Galaxy Express 999 (film) - I had previously only seen the television series before renting this one. The film abridges the story heavily, creating a much tighter storyline, albeit one that necessarily loses some of the flavor. Most probably won’t mind too much, however. 

8. Love After World Domination - A lovely romantic comedy where the Red Ranger of a sentai team and a villainess fall in love, and attempt to hide their relationship. You owe it to yourself to give it a try if you’re into the Super Sentai series or are a lapsed MMPR fan.

9. Delicious Party Precure - I’ve watched the annual Precure series for a good number of years now, and it’s a little unfair to be too harsh to Delicious Party. Production issues outside of the control of the studio really rained on its parade, costing the series five of its episodes. A middling Precure show is still a pretty good time, however, if you’re a new fan, perhaps try Heartcatch or Tropical Rouge first instead.

10. Mobile Suit Gundam Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island - I’m a massive Gundam fan, which is why I have some mixed feelings about this movie. It’s well made and will certainly please any Gundam fan that’s less grumpy than I am (It is difficult to argue against that South Cross Corps fight), but it ultimately feels like that episode has been overly stretched out to just under two hours without much of anything new to add onto it.

Bryan Rollins

This year had a lot in it for me. I spent a lot of time evaluating relationships, and it was good to connect and re-connect with all of my friends. Also got to re-connect with media again and remembered just how important that has always been to me too.

10 Songs

• Joyce Wrice - “Chandler”

• Snoh Aalegra - “IN YOUR EYES”

• Planet Giza - “LIMB”

• Perfume - “Drive'n The Rain”

• Freddie Gibbs - “Rabbit Vision”

• Larry June - “Another Day, Pt. 2”

• Utada Hikaru - “誰にも言わない” (Darenimo iwanai)

• KIRINJI - “時間がない” (Jikanga Nai)

• Yes You - “Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime (Tentendo Remix)”

• Amerie - “Why Don't We Fall in Love”

10 Game Boy Games

• Golf (Nintendo)

• The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls (Nintendo)

• Looney Tunes (Sunsoft)

• Nemesis (Konami)

• Vattle Giuce (Natsu System)

• Pop'n Twinbee (Konami)

• Magical Chase (Quest)

• Dragon Quest Monsters 2 (Tose)

• beatmania GB2: Gotcha Mix (Konami)

• Sagaia (Taito)

Ryan Waller

It’s been a difficult year in a couple ways for me, but it’s also been huge in many ways. I got published, and that was an unreal feeling. I couldn’t even believe that it finally happened. Didn’t get paid, but at the same time, holy shit! Hopefully, this’ll lead to more opportunities in the future.

At the start of the year I was working my first real deal job in a field that I’m actually interested in. The whole endeavor ended poorly in July and I’ve been adrift since. In a lot of ways, I’ve emotionally backslid a lot, and I can feel that affecting the people around me and harming my relationships. The people I care about are getting sick of me, and that’s a sobering, difficult feeling to process. At any rate, I’m trying to work on myself, and become a better person. A person worth being around and loving.

The art I’ve interacted with this year has helped immensely, however. For the first time in my life, I feel like my vision is clear. My interests and focuses have been all over the place my whole life, and it feels like for the first time, I can really clearly see a path in front of me creatively. Everything I’ve been studying for years feels like it’s all connecting and making sense. It’s a terrifying and exciting feeling, and I can’t thank my friends enough for helping me think through it all. I couldn’t ask for a better group of weirdos to be in community with.

Current Best New Albums I’ve Heard So Far this Year 2022

1. Billy Woods - Aethiopes

2. Moreru - 山田花子

3. Klein - Cave in the Wind

4. CEO Trayle - HH5

5. Oxbow & Peter Brötzmann - An Eternal Reminder of Not Today/Live at Moers

6. Otomo Yoshihide Special Big Band - Stone Stone Stone

7. Soul Glo - Diaspora Problems

8. KMRU & Aho Ssan - Limen

9. JUSTICE - JUSTICE 

10. Congotronics International - Where’s the One

Albums That Form My Personal Roadmap for Further Personal and Artistic Development as Well as Provide Strong Exercise for My Mind... Also 2022

1. Asake - Mr. Money with the Vibe

2. Chat Pile - God’s Country

3. Asleep Country - Helvetic Sylph

4. Cecil Taylor - Respiration

5. Papé Nziengui - Kadi Yombo

6. Ärid - From Anthropophagic Waste Breeds a Writhing Mutagenesis

7. Minami Saeki/Ayami Suzuki/Taku Sugimoto/Takashi Masubuchi - Improvisation at Permian

8. Keiko Higuchi - Vertical Language

9. Joy Guidry - Radical Acceptance

10. Laddio Bolocko - 97-99

Patrick Lynn Wilson

The following represent a scattershot jotting of some things I was into throughout 2022, mere expressions of interest which could only serve to cause pain unto my person and undue scorn directed at me from my peers and the public at large.

Lynn's Most Disreputable of 2022

• How Stella Got Her Groove Back / Ali: Fear Eats the Soul 35mm screening @ Music Box Theatre, February 2022 — Among the more provocative film screenings caught in 2022 were the two series of Highs & Lows at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre bookending the year in February and September. A grinning showcase of art flicks paired with mass-market Hollywood studio stuff; it served as proof of the durability of the double feature as a contemporary programming decision. If there was more than an element of the disreputable in the choice to schedule these movies with a slight smirk on one’s face, then the cost was worth it. The gorgeous print of How Stella Got Her Groove Back, followed by an explicitly Sirkian melodrama allowed for post-screening conversations surrounding the eternal question: would Jam & Lewis have exec-produced the soundtrack to a Fassbinder movie, had RWF lived into the 1990s? Sound off in the comments.

• Playing VNs on Switch & Steam Deck — Shouts out to these two doohickeys for allowing me ways to play highly disreputable sicko shit with ease. I had a blast playing the shoddy localization of Chaos Head;Noah on the Switch and found the Steam Deck to be the ideal vessel for jamming on the remake of Doukyuusei among other VNs like Gore Screaming Show, both highly sensitive games for perverts that are miracles for existing in English translations. The Steam Deck is truly the successor to the hacked Vita and the hacked Switch in this sector.

• Musical revivals — This year saw the surprise releases of new LPs from two outfits long-dormant, Gospel and City of Caterpillar. Gospel’s The Loser reimagines 2000s emotional hardcore as organ swirl prog licking its wounds and City of Caterpillar’s Mystic Sisters strikes after sullen atmospheres, quiet-loud-quiet dynamics, and suggests neither band ever actually left the stage. Both dominated my 2022 listening. And towards the end of the year, Singapore’s Sobs dropped their debut Air Guitar, an album redolent of nothing so much as the pop-punk sweetness of my youth, serving as a Proustian madeleine for the mall food courts of another age. To top it all off and add insult to injury by firing a literal bullet into my fucking literal head, Sobs have the nerve to end their album with a transcendent cover of Gwen Stefani’s “Cool.” For one who spent 8th grade mercilessly searching for the perfect synthesis of Ozma’s “Domino Effect” crossed with Lush’s “Hypocrite,” I feel like I’ve spotted a long-lost constellation. Late Q4 shoutout to Matcha Potato Salad's collected tracks, a bedroom shibuya-kei revival whatsit that echoes bittersweet memories of twerking to Fantastic Plastic Machine in my dorm.

• Immortality — Big white elephant art masquerading inna termitic stylee, yeah, but Immortality comes closer to capturing the feeling of a collective engaged in theatre/film production than likely any video game will until some itch.io-brained soul adapts Out 1: Noli me tangere to RPGMaker2003. It’s as infectious as the first day of summer camp. 13 Sentinels was a watershed for doling out sheets of its mille-feuille narrative in a different order for each player, offering every audience a unique stacking of its plot no matter what; Immortality suggests something similar, building upon the space for narrative possibility in Western titles. It does so with a thoroughly twisted take on art that avoids the usual pat motifs on creation, a cruel little curlicue about weirdos who like to act and fuck. A healthier conception of sex and/or boobs has rarely been glimpsed in Western games heretofore.

• TrueAnon podcast series on Synanon — A special listening experience, underscoring how all roads in the USA lead back to the cult beginnings of the troubled teen industry and beyond. It combines historical exegesis, documentary reporting, radio drama, and searing bile. I found myself highly moved while folding laundry to it.

• Boutique releases of dubious cinematic properties — One of the more intriguing new upstart boutique Blu-ray labels to spring onto the scene in the past couple of years, Error4444 outdid themselves in 2022 with not only a reverent boxed release of those irreverent totems, Funky Forest / Warped Forest, but also with beguilingly lavish editions of two thoroughly disreputable exploitation flicks, Red Spell Spells Red & Centipede Horror. For two gross-out joints that exist largely as footnotes in the larger story of scuzzy cinema, these releases fête these films as deserving of some sort of merit in a real attempt at contextualization. This enthusiasm is contagious; while the tricked-out discs are brimming with physical extras, they largely eschew fanboy packaging gimmicks in favor of the over-the-top art object and a posture respectful of film history.

• My friendship with Shy — If you could cast a spell to render a portal to last year and tell me that my forthcoming one would be marked by a friendship with the lady I long found myself hopelessly intimidated by, I would tell you that yeah that definitely could happen, but I’m a coward. And yet it did happen—and I’m a more thoughtful person for it. One of the best music writers working; a crack, and cracked, critical intellect, and among the select few to spring to mind when it comes time to recommend a musical discovery or scrutinize deviant PC-98 games—thank you for being a friend.

Shy Clara Thompson

I’ve spilled my guts thoroughly at the top of this post and elsewhere, so I’ll try and keep it brief.

The last few years have brought me a wave of life-affirming revelations. In 2020, I gained the confidence to show my writing to other people. In 2021, I learned that sharing the stories of artists and underrepresented art is the single most fulfilling thing to me. In 2022, I finally pieced together that it was never only about art—I just want to honor everyone that’s had an impact on me.

I spent so much of the latter half of this year evaluating how I’ve built up the fortress around my heart. I still like the protection it offers me, but it’s been nice to do a little renovating; now, I’ve installed a drawbridge to let people in and out. I’ve been convinced for a long time that I don’t really need recommendations from others to have a good time with my interests—and that’s true, I don’t! I have a self-perpetuating curiosity and an engine for discovery that could probably keep me happy forever. But I’m finding more and more that I want to share the paths I’ve traveled, and I don’t mind taking roads that might lead me to civilization.

Recently, I started using my mother’s name in my byline as a way to remind myself how much of her essence still clings to me. If possible, I’d like to start leaving more reminders of the catalysts that continue pushing me to evolve. I suppose this is as good a place to start as any.

10 Manga That Made Me Want to Meet a New Friend

• 3 More Things to Talk About Before Falling Asleep (Chiro & Hasha, 2022)

• Boku no Marie (Sakura Takeuchi, 1994)

• Drifting Body (Michiyo Matsumoto, 1995)

• The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy At All (Sumiko Arai, 2022)

• Korogaru Kyoudai (Tsubumi Mori, 2020)

• My Wandering Warrior Existence (Nagata Kabi, 2020)

• Plica (Sae Amamiya, 1997)

• Renai Joshi File (Akiko Morishima, 2012)

• Super Cub (Tone Koken, 2017)

• V.B. Rose (Banri Hidaka, 2004)

Thank you for reading this monster of a post. If you’re interested in what else I’ve got in the chamber, feel free to subscribe. It doesn’t and will never cost you anything. I have a whole load of interviews with artists and interesting people I will be posting as soon as I can find the time to transcribe them.

Happy new year. Be safe. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.

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