Year in Review (2025)!

2026-01-25
A medium length summary of the stuff I did, heard, watched, played, and read in the 2025 Calendar year.

Life

Friendships

The events that you go to or parties you host aren’t really the measure of the substantiality of a friendship, but the easiest way to look back on my friendships for a year in review is definitely event-oriented. If you didn’t feature in one of the following focal points, that doesn’t mean your friendship wasn’t important to me or that I didn’t interact with you regularly and care about the time that we got spent together, it just means there wasn’t a big obvious thing I could put on a list.

Weddings

I went to two friends’ weddings this year. One I just attended, but for the other, I was very graciously asked not only to be a groomsmen, but invited to sing as part of a quartet in the service. This was, my first sort of foray into what I imagine being a professional performer is more like, where I was given the music a couple months in advance, I did virtually all of the prep work for it by myself, and then the day before the wedding, I and the rest of the quartet figured out how to assemble it together. The piece in question was “This Marriage” by Eric Whitacre. It went well and was received well, and for my own part you know, I think I did well, but not as well as I’d hoped, given the amount of work that I put into it, but the bride and groom were happy with it, and that’s the goal, really.

Hosting

I hosted a couple of things this year, including a not-actually-Easter-but-mid-April brunch with some friends, a 4th of July bonfire, and a birthday party for myself for turning 20-something, and I came away with an important tip for future hosting:

Do not buy a whole melon if you are expecting less than 10 people, for instance, a honeydew and a cantaloupe for a 6 person brunch, or watermelon for a small 4th of July bonfire. It sounds like a great idea until the brunch has happened and no one else has eaten any of the honeydew and cantaloupe, or if only two other people show up to your bonfire, resulting in you (who lives alone) having to eat a whole melon over the course of the next month and/or panic-turning it into a smoothie after two weeks have gone by and you don’t know how to finish the rest of it.

Other Sundry Events

In addition to these things, I had the fortune, of doing a bunch of stuff with friends for other sundry occasions. Especially memorable are the Renn Faire, an anime convention (even though I don’t watch anime), a Halloween party that a friend hosted and gave me a costume for because I didn’t have one, Secret Santa, and a bunch of board game nights. If you helped with or participated in any of the above things, I’m so grateful for your being a part of my life and to have been able to spend time with you.

Choir (s!)

I joined my church choir fairly recently, and prior to that, all my music performance experience had around three months of lead time from when I got the music to when I actually have to perform it. This is technically also the casewith church choir, but in practice, I mostly start looking at that Sunday’s music the week of, if I don’t just cram all my studying in on Saturday. Come Sunday morning, we rehearse, sing as part of Eucharist, and then are done with whatever music was set for that week. It’s been a fun and novel challenge for me, and I’m encountering a lot more music this way. Having grown up in a church that didn’t have a choir, it’s also been a new way of being a part of the community. I really like it, although some Sundays I do miss being in the congregation.

Rackham

In Rackham Choir, we had, over the course of this Calendar year, two big concerts and in both of them our centerpiece was a non-classical mass, which I find amusing. Last spring, sang Andre Thomas’s “Mass: A Celebration of Love and Joy”, and this fall we sang Will Todd’s “Mass in Blue”. I really loved moth masses, and somehow my favorite movement from both masses ended up being the “Credo”. I’ll have to keep this in mind in future masses/requiems I hear to see if that ends up being a pattern. I’ve been very happy to sing with Rackham over the last couple of years, and I’m really looking forward to not just this, but the future work that we have, that we get to sing together.

Media

Music

Concerts

Performing Art Group Concerts

At the end of the year, a community opera group hosted a Sing-Along Messiah that only did part one and the Hallelujah Chorus. I’m greatful for any excuse to sing, but it was a shame that they cut parts 2 and 3, as some of my favorite movements are in there. Hopefully they’ll do another one next year with more of the Messiah in it (and with more scaffolding for attendee singers).

My church, for the Feast of All Saints, sang Faure’s Requiem. I didn’t end up singing in the choir at the time, having not joined in time to attend the necessary extra rehearsals, but since I sang the Requiem with Rackham a few seasons ago, it was nice to be able to just attend. It was extra special not just to be able to hear it as part of the audience, but to hear it as placed within a Eucharistic service, as it was intended.

The Other Kind of Concerts

In a more concert-venue setting, I saw Lauren Blackford and Levona at some small bar shows. I first heard Lauren Blackford on the Detroit NPR Radio Show MILocal, and went to the Levona show with a friend of mine, since a friend of that friend is in the band.

I also saw the following groups from out of town:

All good shows!

Stuff I Listened To

A bunch bands I like had new albums come out!

I want to make a special mention of Oh Wonder, and did their project “Oh Wonder: 10 Years On”, which is a remaking of their debut self-titled album. The goal of any remake of this kind is to bring the craft and expertise of the later performance to prior less polished–but still meritorious–work. I think it really works. The standout tracks aren’t massively improved, but they’re definitely not worse, and the tracks that I would often skip over from the original “Oh Wonder” album are significantly improved. You should listen to this! It’s the skill that made “22 Break” applied to the original album.

There’s a couple singles from the last year that really stuck out for me. I might have “Joe Pera’d” to them a little.

There’s a couple folks who I discovered for the first time. This first list has folks who put out new albums that I also discovered.

Meanwhile I’d just separately never listened to these folks before (or not deeply) and stumbled across them.

Video Games

Tangle Tower

Tangle Tower Is a fun little detective game. It’s short. It’s cute. I liked it.

I’ll note that for its humor and usually lighthearted atmosphere, the stakes and ending were a little bit severe. It struggled a little bit in reconciling being both a fun romp and being about, you know, a murder.

Tunic

I haven’t actually played A Zelda game that wasn’t “Breath of the Wild”, so this was (kinda) my first “Zeldalike”. I played it to the end, and beat both the final boss and the non-ARG optional challenges. That said, there’s this big sort of central ending puzzle that I ended up just looking up. Given how involved getting the solution is, I’m really glad that I did. The game has some metanarrative and ARG elements that–having read about them on the wiki–I don’t think really improve the game much, but I suppose given that I’m not the kind of person to have decoded them, they’re meant for other people. Altogether, the game’s got a wonderful art and music, and some very tough boss fights.

Hollow Knight: Silksong

Silksong ate my entire September. Before the end of the month, I’d put in 81 hours and 100%’d the game, which should tell you several things about how I feel about it. That said, it’s really hard for me to judge it on it’s own merits, because it reminds me so much of Hollow Knight. When I first started it, I was even a little disappointed–I was hoping it would make me feel what Hollow Knight for the first time made me feel, but that’s a literally impossible ask. Experiencing Hollow Knight for the first time wasn’t just exploring new areas and unlocking new things in an engine I already understood, it was coming to grips with a world, art style, music, and gameplay experiences I had never seen before. This obviously can’t be done in a game that shares as many bones as Silksong does with Hollow Knight. Silksong improves on Hollow Knight in many ways, in addition to being bigger, and when I knew there was more game left, I couldn’t put it down. It also has my favorite boss fight in the franchise–the very very last one. For all the disappointment I felt because Silksong has to live in Hollow Knights shadow, it’s an excellent game, and I’m sure I’ll come back to it to try and get the speedrun achievements.

Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time / God of War PS2

These are grouped together because they feel like they’re in the same genre–a similar sort of action/platformer thing.

I’m pretty glad this genre died. Both games had their moments, but even for their strengths, I only liked them with caveats. God of War’s combat isn’t my thing, and the QTEs really grated on me (and felt surprisingly hard to do? This might have been because I emulated it). I ended up quitting out on part 3 of the Ares fight because I just wasn’t having fun. Meanwhile, Prince of Persia’s platforming is significantly held back by not being able to control the camera, and often being opaque and fiddly in its more “puzzle” segments in a way that doesn’t do it favors.

At its best, in God of War, you’re chaining together combos on large amounts of enemies at once, doing a lot of continuous risk assessment of the fight and your ability to keep dealing damage without getting hit. At its worst, you’re trying to slowly climb up a wall with spinning blades when you can’t look up and the best (and sometimes only) way to make progress is to do a blind upward jump that will sometimes leave you in the path of a blade that knocks you down to the ground. At its best, in Prince of Persia, you’re chaining together platforming challenges in a continuous flow that takes you across like three rooms. At its worst, you’re stuck blocking a bunch of enemies standing around you in a circle who will immediately knock you down if you drop your block to try to attack.

I’m told the sequels help both games empahsize on their strengths, but I’m not sure if I feel super inclined to determine that for myself. Later games have learned from this era in ways that don’t make me feel like I’m missing much by not finishing the trilogies.

Skin Deep

Fun and cute! The boxy cats feel like a nice throwback to the older Blendo games. Flushing the immortal heads of your enemies down the space toilet is both a neat challenge and helps reinforce the cartoony atmosphere. My one disappointment with Skin Deep is that I really appreciated how much Quadrilateral Cowboy felt like a puzzle game, and the more stealth/im-sim oriented nature of Skin Deep means there aren’t really puzzles in the same way. It’s always exciting seeing if you can pull off weird chain reactions, and the game kinda does the Hitman thing where every random object in the immediate vicinity feels like a special kind of tool. If I had one criticism, it’d be that the story didn’t particularly compel me, but that’s honestly not a big deal at all.

Void Crew

Void Crew I think is my favorite multiplayer game that I’ve played with IRL friends (i. e. excluding TF2). It does an astonishingly good job delivering on its conceit of co-manning a spaceship that has to fight off enemies and loot space bases. The game is a specific kind of hectic fun that you lets feel like you’re making tactical decisions while always on the cusp of everything falling apart and the ship exploding. It’s kinda like Lethal Company but with an addtional focus on operating a spaceship, or first-person FTL. If you have friends who that would enjoy something like that, consider getting it and playing together!

Batman: Arkham Origins

It’s fine. Even if the story’s just mediocre, it’s still an Arkham game.

On the pluses, the detective-ing is noticeably better than Arkham City, and it’s a solid preamble to the detective-ing that happens in Knight. I don’t even think Knight is particularly better in the doing-detective-work parts, it’s just as good as Origins and better as a game in basically every other dimension. I’m unlikely to play it again, especially when instead I could play either City or Knight, especially because there are bosses like the Copperhead fight that I just wasn’t a huge fan of, but at least now I can say I’ve played all the Arkham games.

Dead Cells

Dead Cells felt like a big time sink for me. I’ve put a fair amount of time in, although not enough to have beaten a full run, and I have mixed feelings about if I’d really recommend it. It’s sort of medium addictive, but I don’t know that any individual run ever felt terribly satisfying. Even for the ones that got the farthest, I don’t know that they felt like I was getting good at the game rather than getting lucky in the right ways. Probably for the best that I lost interest.

Replay: Dishonored Knife of Dunwall/Dishonored 2/Prey 2017

I love the Arkane 451 games 😍.

Prey (2017)

The very first time I did Prey, which was a couple years ago, I didn’t do any of the Typhoon power stuff because I suspected that there would be a good ending based on not doing the Typhoon stuff (ala Low Chaos in Dishonored), and so I oriented my gameplay around that possibility. This time I figured since I already did it the self-restraint way, I’ll just do whatever I want.

Wanna know something?

It was a lot more fun when I used the crazy alien powers.

The ending felt rushed in a way that I noticed a little bit more this time than the first time around. You get to a cutoff point late in the game where it out-and-out stops you from doing non-mainquest related tasks, and I hit it a little before I expected to, leaving a bunch of stuff unresolved that I’d meant to go back to. It’s pretty fun though. One of these days I’ll properly sink myself into Mooncrash.

Dishonored 2

This was my second time playing Dishonored 2. I ended up keeping it fairly similar to my first playthrough–still played as Emily, still targeted Low Chaos–but I saw more of the game. It’s a very large game–lots to see and do in it, which isn’t always necessarily to the game’s benefit. Compare (for instance) Dishonored 1, which is a smaller game, both in terms of kinds of interactions and map size, but I broadly think it’s the better game. That said, Dishonored 2 is also quite good! It deserved this replay, and I’ll almost certainly replay it again sometime.

Disonored: The Knife of Dunwall

I didn’t do the Brigmore Witches this time, just the Knife of Dunwall. For all 3 of the Arkane games, it felt like there was a lot of stuff I saw in the replay that I either missed or interacted with differently than on prior playthroughs, which felt especially surprising for TKoD, since its levels are comparatively small. The one gripe I had was about the spike in difficulty for the last mission “A Hole in the World”. I ended up quicksave/quickload spamming a fair bit in that particular level to get through it, although I was also reaching my personal limit on how much of Arkane game I wanted to play in a row.

Film and TV

TV

Movies

Books

I got a library card! My library card says that it’s for juveniles because when I showed up to get it, they were out of the the plastic cards that are appropriate for adults. It’s got my name and date of birth associated with it, so I’m not actually restricted in how I can use it, and I was told that I could get it replaced with an adult card the next time I went into a branch, but I’ve been using it exclusively for audiobooks and digital media, so that will have to happen later.

What pushed me into getting one after 5 years or so of living in my city was the cajoling of a friend of mine who, after I complained to him about the limited options of Librivox, pointed out that if I want to listen to audiobooks for free I could just get them from the library. I didn’t want to bother going to the branch in person, but now that I’ve done it, I’ve gotten a bunch of audiobooks from there. Thank you very much, friend Joe, for making me go to the Library.

Suprised by Hope - NT Wright

I got this one as gift from my Dad last Christmas, and listened to it with my brother on the drive back home. NT Wright is very rambly, even in written form, and he has some of staple rambles that make their appearances in the book, which is funny 1. I broadly liked it and thought there were good and interesting takeaways, but Wright wants to draw some stronger lines of causation between eschatological belief and how people treat the world than I think exist. That said, I think there’s is merit in believing that the new Earth is this Earth made new by Christ, that Christ’s return is not just going to obliterate all the old junk to pop a new perfected version into its place, and that the labors of Heaven will be our participation of Christ’s renewal of the earth.

A More Christlike God - Bradley Jersak

This one was a gift from my siblings, and the only book listed that I actually read with my eyes instead of audiobooking. I have mixed feelings about it. It’s much better at enumerating problems with the innerentist evangelical Christianity than it is at satisfyingly resolving them, which, in fairness, is just kinda how that is.

I also think the prose of the book is not very good. Consider the following sample basically representative:

The passage almost relays that narrative. Many think it does, because the kenosis is framed in Jesus descent to earth and ascent back into heaven. But I believe we must push kenosis even further.

What if? What if Jesus’ humility, meekness and servant heart were never a departure from God’s glory and power, but actually define it and demonstrate it? Take your time—read that sentence again. What if kenosis—self-emptying power, self-giving love and radical servant-hood—expresses the very nature of God! What if God does rule and reign, not through imperial power but through kenotic love!

Italics in original

To be clear, I’m not expressing a disagreement itself, but the rhetorical questions and italics and “read that again” get on my nerves.

That said, there were good takeaways! The core conceit–that Christ’s incarnation and life on earth is not an anomalous manifestation of God, and should instead be taken as a lens to understand things like Christ’s kingship really is worth thinking about seriously. Likewise, I believe it was here that I heard the best articulation of the idea that Substitionary Atonement, instead of being the fundamental mechanism of Christ’s death, resurrection, and the forgiveness of sins, is merely one lens of understanding the mystery of the crucifixion. By eating all other readings of the Crucifixion, or rather, by reading them through the lens of Substitionary Atonement, you lose a lot of both the mystery and many of the actual meanings of passages in the NT, and you subscribe to a moral framework that isn’t really defined in those terms anywhere else.

Anyhow, A More Christlike God was useful in some ways, and the metaphor at the very end was thought provoking, but it’s a tentative recommendation.

The Cost of Discipleship - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I don’t remember this one super distinctly, partly because I was on a solo roadtrip when I listened to it, not always giving it my full attention. In my memory, it ends up spanning a lot of different topics, so I didn’t walk away with any big overarching conclusions. I think there’s a lot of stuff in there that I appreciated, especially the opening statements on “costly Grace”, but I’d need to give this another listen sometime to to give it a really fair shot.

Gilead - Marilynne Robinson

Several years ago, I read Peace Like a River by Leif Enger, and Gilead shares a lot of its strengths, while also leaving more room for uncertainty. It especially reads as the work of a person who really believes something, where Robinson roughly believes the thing Pastor John believes, but also is keenly aware of the problems and tensions of Calvinist belief, and doesn’t shy away from how big they are.

Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates

I’m pretty late to read this, I think. It’s an vivid description of a life that feels far removed from my own experiences.

Liberation Theology - Michael Lee

This turned out to be a series of lectures from a survey class about liberation theology from Fordham University. It was a little interesting, but doesn’t go nearly enough into detail for my own interests, and doesn’t have much in the way of direct quotation or analysis of the works of people like Gustavo Gutierrez outside of very small snippets.

When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro

I read this because it was the only Ishiguro audiobook at my library, and I’d recently read (and greatly enjoyed) The Remains of the Day. The setting of the Shanghai International Settlement and the Sino-Japenese War was intriguing, but I don’t have a lot else positive to say about it. The resolution of the “central mystery” felt a combination of being unsatisfying (intentionally) and shocking for the sake of being shocking (probably less intentionally). The dream-like quality of a lot of the second act and Christopher’s weird delusions really didn’t do much for me.

That All Shall Be Saved - David Bentley Hart

I don’t feel like I am qualified to give a review on this because I knew I would agree with basically all of it going in. That said, I think it’s pretty well defended. It’s probably not going to convince anybody who is inerrantist in their approach to scripture because of Hart’s willingness to a apply certain kinds of metaphysical or philosophical arguments that just won’t be persuasive to someone who reads and understands the Bible in the inerrantist framework. Additionally,he doesn’t particularly care to rebut every possible infernalist passage, which is reasonable if you don’t beliveall scripture lives in perfect compatibility with all other scripture, but high school or even college me would’ve been unsatisfied by this. I did appreciate how the book pointed out passages that could be straightforwardly understood in defense of Christian universalism. This one is one of the more useful books I’ve read on faith recently.

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

I read it mostly because it was a classic, and didn’t have strong feelings after finishing it.

Giovanni’s Room - James Baldwin

Loved loved loved this. Made me cry. I don’t I feel like I can assemble my thoughts about it into a coherent paragraph, but the book is both extremely gripping and extremely devistating.

Podcasts

A Very Fatal Murder (Seasons 1 & 2)

It’s a couple years old now, but this was my first time listening through it. A funny send up of the true crime genre from the folks at The Onion.

This American Life

This American Life is maybe my favorite “podcast” that I listen to at the moment. I’ve picked out a couple of my favorite episodes from this year:

The Bible (and Faith) for Normal People

The Bible for Normal People is hosted by, and regularly features, Academic Bible Scholars. It’s generally more conversational than scripted, which isn’t quite my preference, but I’ve enjoyed listening to it.

Some highlights from the last year:

The New Yorker: Fiction

I’m not always super enamored with each short story, but the podcast is always worth a listen. My favorite from the last year was probably “The Piano Tuner’s Wives”, written by William Trevor and read by Yiyun Li.

Signals and Threads

My sole “tech” podcast. Minsky has a very soothing voice, and the folks at Jane Street seem to like working there, and talk about interesting parts of their jobs.

Norah Jones is Playing Along

Season 2 started up again toward the end of the year after a hiatus that I assumed is related to Norah Jones putting out an album and going on tour. I Really liked the John Legend and Nate Smith (whom I hadn’t heard of prior) episodes.

A Good Hang with Amy Poehler

The episodes with SNL or P&R cast members are always fun, and she’s got some wildcards in there like Ina Garten and Michelle Obama (!).

Conclusion

Here’s to a good 2026!

Footnotes

  1. I vaguely remember (but am having a hard time finding after the fact) him going on a very brief tangent on the merits of having the enterance to a church require you to walk past the graves of those who went before you that was definitely not at all related to the rest of the topic at hand.↩