it was fun to yak about 10 random pieces of media i liked in 2024, so i'm doing it again for 2025. still no particular order, most of these were not released last year.
hexarchate stories (yoon ha lee): finally finished reading this collection this year. who else is doing it like yoon ha lee when it comes to creating novel new ways to constantly torture his favorite little meow meow? glass cannon has to be hands down one of the funniest novellas and epilogues i've ever seen. highly recommend checking out his machineries of empire trilogy and then coming back to pick up hexarchate stories just so this particular line can also snipe you the way it sniped me.
the journey to the west, vol 1 (anthony c. yu translation): i grew up with sun wukong embedded in the pop culture but never actually read the original text. turns out it's funny as fuck??? the portion of vol 1 that begins with two random npcs freestyling long strings of poetry to outdo each other, then goes through a series of truly baffling plot dominoes tipping over until you reach "...and that's why sanzang ended up embarking on this journey to the west 😊" and you realize that was the actual point of it all ... my god. literature! i only wish the poetry sections were a little less tedious to get through bc of translation decisions (there's a lot of poetry), and that annotations were placed as footnotes on the page rather than all the way in the back of the book.
say nothing (patrick radden keefe): well-researched, well-written, and bleak as hell.
exordia (seth dickinson): book that is lowkey beating you up in the alley the entire time you're reading it. exordia is not about hot evil snake aliens, the trolley problem spun out to over 500 pages, or the countless ways the global military industrial complex spearheaded by the united states fucked over kurdistan, it's actually about how modern fighter jets are the coolest and sickest things ever engineered. and the comedy of math. i do have some problems with it, but overall, if you're a sicko for seth dickinson's stylistic and narrative tendencies, it's worth checking out.
king in limbo (ai tanaka): really fun character-driven scifi drama, with some beautiful inks and paneling. great protagonist (i always appreciate a perfectly normal guy with something wrong with him who knows when to be goofy and when to be competent), great dynamic between him and yet another innovation in the field of world's most tortured white-haired anime guys. this isn't really a romance story, and yet the writing draws connections between adam and rune's dead wife multiple times - so who could say! who could say! i had a great time with it.
oblivion battery (mikawa eko): this starts as pure gag comedy, which it was already pretty good at, before moving smoothly into a really interesting character study about the psychological toll of high-pressure youth sports, which it is also very good at!! the baseball games are genuinely fun to keep up with, they're pretty accessible if you know the basic rules and aren't overly long, and it's been really nice to see the mangaka's technique improve over time. an extremely solid sports series.
3:10 to yuma (2010): i really enjoyed watching this, and should probably see it again sometime on something nicer than a tiny airplane seat screen, but the only note i have for it is "russell crowe spends the entire thing looking like matt berry in garth marenghi's darkplace (not a diss, just a fact)." and i'm right.
hackers: hell yeah. they should make a movie with costume design this sick again. they should have a sleazeball weirdo skateboard out of the fog while holding onto the side of a limousine again. my only complaint is that jonny lee miller should have worn a dress at the end of the movie too.
rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles: in january i said "sure, i'll watch the turt show" in response to my friend trying to turtpill any other friends, and did indeed get turtpilled myself. making each guy a different species of turtle is such a strong and distinctive idea i wish all tmnt media did this now. great nonstop riffs, great turtle sakuga, great scenes of raph crying under the pressure of being the big brother. turtle power.
想自由 (yoga lin): hey guys anyone heard this 8yr 14yr old song before???
titsay
baratheonpilled
izzy806
discoholicmusic
andulkaphoto
snowghoul