---
title: 'My Favoite Things of 2025'
pubDate: '1/2/2026'
tags: ["Life", "Learning"]
---

We're already a couple days into 2026, but due to family obligations, as well as getting far too absorbed into Ghost of Yōtei – mostly the latter, if I'm honest – I'm only getting around to doing this post now. 

2025 was a stressful year. On a personal level, I lost my job and have been scrambling to find one for over 6 months now. More importantly though, it's just felt like the world has been constantly on fire, and AI has been quickly turning everything good about the human experience into souless slop. That being said, it's not all bad, and I wanted to reflect on my favorite things/moments in 2025.

I won't be talking any video games, as I [already covered that](/blog/2025/my-top-3-games-of-2025).

## Catching Up On Movies

One positive that came from me losing my job was that I finally had the desire to watch movies again. Seeing as my job involved me being in front of a screen for 8 hours, I was very selective about how I spent my screen time outside of work, and that time primarily went to gaming. But over the last 6 months I've watched more movies than I had in a long time. These are some of my favorites:

- The Batman
- Kiki's Delivery Service
- The Life of Chuck
- Edge of Tomorrow

Though only one is from 2025 (The Life of Chuck), these are all movies I watched for the first time last year.

## Taskmaster Series 19 - 20

On the topic of watching things, 2025 saw 2 new ~~seasons~~ series of Taskmaster, and they both had some of my favorite lineups in the show.

As if that wasn't enough, we also got the 4th Champion of Champions, where the previous 5 winners compete against eachother. While it wasn't the strongest in terms of the actual tasks, the lineup made it work. Even Sam Campbell, who's brand of humor generally wasn't really to my taste in series 16, got a few chuckles out of me. 

![](src/assets/blog/gifs/destroy-taskmaster.gif)

## Music

2025 wasn't a huge year for me in terms of music, but there were a couple albums that stood out for me. 

First, Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party from Hayley Williams was a standout as my most played album released this year, and might actually be my most played overall. Some standout tracks to me are "Kill Me", "Mirtazapine", and "True Believer".

Second, the soundtrack to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33[^1] is some of the most beautiful game music I've heard. It's up there with Journey, Nier Replicant, and The Witcher 3 for me. Like many others, I'm obsessed with the track "Lumière". But, another standout for me is "Flying Waters - Rain From The Ground", which brings in a synth track which sounds like a terrible idea on paper, but just adds to the odd atmosphere of the game.

The end of 2025 also saw the beginnings of my project to liberate my music library, and give up streaming altogether – much to the chagrin of my Mastodon followers, who have been bombarded with my grievences on the horrors of Apple Music.

## The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship

I've played a lot of different board games in 2025, but the new release from the past year that I enjoyed the most was The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship. It's yet another game designed around the core mechanics of Pandemic, but it introduced enough to make if feel distinct, but not overbloated (looking at you, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Litch King).

I tend to not enjoy board games based on existing IPs but, being a huge fan of The Lord of the Rings, I had to give it a shot, and I'm glad I did. 

## Learning New Stuff

Last year was a year of learning for me, right from the get-go. In January I created an app called AutoDock, which involved me diving deeper into Mac development than I have in previous years, diving into system APIs to detect display changes - mainly resolution changes, and external displays getting connected/disconnected.

I also expanded my horizons in the world of web development. I've primarily been a React developer, and, though I was aware of other frameworks, I never had the time or motivation to dive into them. But over the last 6 months I got up to speed with SolidJS and Svelte, and I've got pretty comfortable using them.

In addition to all that, I learned the basics of other languages: Rust, Go, and Ruby. While I wouldn't say I gained proficiency in any of those languages, I did gain a better understanding of things like memory management, and I think I'm going into 2026 a much better programmer than I was a year ago.

I also learned how to play croquet over the Summer, though I clearly need a lot of practice if I ever want to be moderately okay at it.

[^1]: I said I wouldn't be talking about _video games_. I said nothing about _video game soundtracks_. 😜
