once bitten, twice shy: the buddy list (2025)
Ten of my friends (plus me) take stock of 2025 and put the year to rest.
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
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)
The word “bouquet”
Camp de Thiaroye (dir. Ousmane Sembène & Thierno Faty Sow, 1988)
Dub Specialist’s “Juk Incorporation”
Kimchi nabe
Ravens Shouldn’t Wear Kimono by Chisato Abe
Guardians of the Harvest (dir. Riko Hiro, 2025)
The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr
The collected manga of Fumiko Okada
Tragic Error (dir. Louis Feuillade, 1913)
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
Aaron Dilloway at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, 3/14
Los Kjarkas at the Copernicus Center in Chicago + Billy Woods at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 11/13
Michael Rother at the Mill & Mine in Knoxville for Big Ears Festival, 3/29
The Saami Brothers at the South Asia Institute in Chicago, 4/6
[Ahmed] at Regas Square in Knoxville for Big Ears Festival, 3/28 + 3/29
PinkPantheress at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, 11/2
Still House Plants at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, 3/25 + The Standard in Knoxville for Big Ears Festival, 3/28
Cindy Lee at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, 11/5
Hetta at Barlos in Barcelos for SQUARE Fest, 1/30
Erika de Casier, Fine at Outset in Chicago, 10/21
Yasuaki Shimizu, Macie Stewart/Lia Kohl/Whitney Johnson at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 3/24
BBBBBBB, RXM Reality, Anti-Soul Organization, etc. at Tritriangle in Chicago, 2/15
Helena Hauff at Into the Woods in Los Angeles, 11/8
Maria Chàvez, Mariam Rezaei, and Victoria Shen at The Standard in Knoxville for Big Ears Festival, 3/28
Xavi at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, 11/28
Mk.gee at the Metro in Chicago, 8/1
Ichiko Aoba, Gia Margaret at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 5/6
Fareed Ayaz & Abu Muhammad Qawwal at the South Asia Institute in Chicago, 10/26
Claire Rousay, Ami Dang at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, 12/6
Dijon at the Salt Shed in Chicago, 12/8
William Hooker & Alan Braufman at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, 9/19
Geese, Racing Mount Pleasant at Thalia Hall in Chicago, 10/15 + Cameron Winter at the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel in Chicago, 12/17
Fidju Kitxora at Praça Mercado in Famalicão for SQUARE Fest, 1/31
OsamaSon at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, 10/25
Autechre at Concord Music Hall in Chicago, 10/20
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
Eliana Glass with Luke Bergman at Metrograph in New York, 12/13
Taekjoon Kim, Hong Junpyo, Sunjae Lee and Kikanju Baku at Dotolim in Seoul, 9/11
Mount Eerie at Thalia Hall in Chicago + Pictoria Vark at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, 4/13
Nino Paid, BabyChiefDoIt, VonOff1700, Jorjiana, and Warhol.ss at Schubas Tavern in Chicago, 4/7
Asmâa Hamzaoui & Bnat Timbouktou at Theatro Circo in Braga for SQUARE Fest, 2/1
Ira Glass at the Empty Bottle in Chicago, 11/17
Brìghde Chaimbeul with Shazad Ismaily at the Knoxville Museum of Art for Big Ears Festival, 3/28
TWICE at Grant Park in Chicago for Lollapalooza, 8/2
Che at the Theatre of the Living Arts in Philadelphia, 9/27
De Schuurman at Cinemas Bragashopping in Braga for SQUARE Fest, 1/31
OHYUNG, Anne Ishii x Clint Takeda at Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, 4/19
Xaviersobased, Ksuuvi at the Bottom Lounge in Chicago, 12/7
Matana Roberts at the Stone in New York, 7/9
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 27th, 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:
Dogs in a Pile - 11/20/2025 @ Garcia’s Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
Goose - 08/28/2025 @ Hancher Auditorium, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa
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:
Emu
Koala
Echidna
Bilby
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.
P.S. I passed the time writing and editing this post by listening to One Loop Beyond (2013, expanded edition 2018) by WOODMAN.
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yeah shy woo shy!!!!