I’ve been meaning to write for a little while now and keep getting tripped up on all my ideas! I have thought about writing posts on:

  • What I’ve learned from financial planning in the last year
  • What tools I used in 2024 to help stay organized, and what’s helped the most
  • Media I’ve consumed in 2025 so far

I keep getting stuck on the first two, because there’s quite a lot I want to say. So here I go on the third one.

Movies

I’ve already seen quite a few movies this year! In order of favorite to least favorite:

  1. Another Round: A glimpse into a midlife crisis fueled by alcoholism and wishes to turn back the clock. For a couple of nights after watching this, I couldn’t fall asleep because I was picking apart so many details and interesting connections that were made.
  2. The Brutalist: Beautiful, sweeping cinematic journey of a genius who lives in the wrong skin in the wrong time. Yes, I liked the first half better than the second. Truly a marvel just in how well-paced it is (4 hours felt shorter than many 2 hour movies.)
  3. Flow: Biblical flood, mysterious landscapes, adorable animals. The visuals grew on me quickly, and the lack of dialogue doesn’t take away from the stories on screen.
  4. La Chimera: Josh O’Connor oozes grungy suave while on a self-destructive plot for meaning. Another movie that wormed its way into my brain and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days.
  5. Memoir of a Snail: This is a horrifically depressing movie, and yet still ends with a glimmer of hope. Also everybody is ugly. But it’s darkly funny and sympathetically lonely.
  6. A Different Man: I loved this movie’s tone and concept, but some of it still fell flat to me. So much to think about.
  7. The Last Showgirl: I really wanted to see this one because of Pam Anderson’s comeback. Had some tone and pacing issues but still enjoyable to watch.
  8. Dog Man: Cute, fun, and ridiculously fast-paced. Also the chronology is quite confusing. Sometimes it would seem like weeks would pass in a single scene, and the next would imply that only a day had transpired.
  9. The Colors Within: Slower than molasses, but comforting and sweet. Like a bowl of chicken noodle soup on a sick day. The score, both diegetic and non-diegetic, is beautiful. The foleying / ambient noise is also top notch. Beautifully smooth and human animation.
  10. September 5: Rigid, intense, interesting, but felt surface level and didn’t dig in as much as I would have liked.
  11. The Wild Robot: A little saccharine for my taste, but many cute and touching moments. Animation is stunning. I loved the way they approach death throughout.
  12. Nightbitch: Weirdly a body horror movie in parts? Felt like it would have belonged better as a TV show. I liked some of the overall themes but didn’t really hit me in ways that I hadn’t already gotten from reading something like A Life’s Work.
  13. Conclave: maybe this movie was too hyped up for me. I just found it meh. I’m confused about why it’s winning so many noms / awards.
  14. Companion: Interesting, but cringey dialogue and lots of forced plot points. Characters conveniently disappear in order to keep things moving, particularly in the third act. It’s not great.
  15. The Room Next Door: What on earth even is the dialogue in this movie.

Books

  1. I Was a Teenage Slasher: I had a hard time believing I was loving this book until I realized I finished it in two days. The ending is one of my favorites that I’ve read in a long time, and I loved how the characters pick apart the tropes of slasher films and use it to predict the plot’s next move. Maybe doesn’t have a ton of depth, but I found it extremely enjoyable.
  2. Sapiens - A Graphic History: I’ve flip-flopped a lot on the ideas presented in this book (re-made into a graphic novel). The art and presentation is top-notch and makes this so palatable. There are so many ideas that I grappled with after reading this: intersubjective reality, wheat’s domestication of humans, and how our society has enabled us to evolve beyond our genes… and how that divergence has become tenuous and challenging for our social fabric.
  3. V for Vendetta: I mean, this is a total classic but I found myself enjoying it less than Watchmen.
  4. The Kamogawa Food Detectives: I read the first few chapters, but since the structure is so similar between them all, it was hard to keep any interest in reading on.

Video Games

  1. Ghost of Tsushima: I acquired a PS4 for Christmas (thanks Tommy!) and played through some of the classics I had been missing. I want to like this game more than I do, but it really feels like a grind. I wish AAA games weren’t so long. I played this for 40 hours and was only 1/3rd of the way through the game (by my estimation). That’s far too long for a working adult to commit to, IMO. The combat and flexible stealth system are really fun to play. The open world and exploration fell very flat for me. I wish that it condensed around the combat and opened up your abilities sooner. The learning curve is too gradual and slow.
  2. Coffee Caravan: Courtney has been playing this game for a while and I finally started a new profile on her game and started playing. This is a cozier single player option to Plate Up. This game is much easier and builds in a lot more tolerances for the player. I enjoy optimizing the food prep space and planning out my days, but the execution of those days is rarely interesting or challenging enough.
  3. Card Shark: Wow, the aesthetics in this game are unique and stunning. The gameplay is a little finicky (which makes sense) and the score is quite repetitive and could become grating. There’s one particular trick that I got really frustrated with trying to execute, and it killed my mood to keep playing this.
  4. Coffee Talk: I didn’t finish this - the story was interesting but the gameplay was very uninspiring and felt like just a distraction from reading the text on screen.
  5. Dying Light 2: I played Dying Light back in high school and really loved it. Now I’ve changed my tune on a lot of AAA games, and this is another one that screams AAA. I just can’t deal with these anymore. There’s too much hand-holding, too much bloated stale plotlines, I’m just tired.