what a year! i was an absolutely mopey wuss 365 days ago, and even with the benefit of hindsight i think i somewhat had a reason to. my favourite end of year realisation has been related to all these in/out lists and 2026 bingos that people have been doing. i uh. i don't really know what half the shit people are talking about is even in reference to. and i kind of like it that way! i've locked down my social media to only show me people and places in my real life, i listen to local radio and i block ads like there's no tomorrow. my only exceptions to this rule are computer shit, and art, which i almost entirely interface with on tumblr. i do still keep an eye on international news through the abc app, but i've kept most of it out of my periphery, and i think my general state of mind has improved as a result

i really like doing these top 5s, as they help me to reconsider the things i enjoyed in 2025 when viewed from above. it also turned out to be pretty useful for music, as i hadnt written a review for a bunch of these albums.

anyway, i suppose that's it for now. this thing has taken a while to do, so i might leave the rest of the personal musing to my february post ✌️😙

music

tottomori - shoreline mistward

this isn't my first tottomori album, but its my favourite so far. i feel like it evokes such a wonderful feeling of exploration and playfulness, like it's express purpose is to give you weird childhood nostalgia. i love the simple piano chords, electronic bloops, field recordings and wavering flute, but i also just love how much the artist is willing to mess with their instruments. there's loads of variety and yet each track feels like its telling part of the same story. this album is extremely calming and i love it dearly

pezzi della sera - marco castello

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describing this album is kinda difficult - i've got it categorised as jazz-pop, which maybe gets you some of the way to understanding its vibe, but not the full distance. it combines this heartfelt vocalist (marco, i assume), synth and a bass guitar the whole way through, in a way that feels kind of close and cosy, but as a lot of the songs continue they almost "open up", as orchestral elements blast through, making the intimate experience suddenly grand and impressive. i uh, don't speak italian, so i cant speak on the lyrics at all, but his performance is so lovely that i feel like you get a lot of out it regardless

chicha libre - sonido amazonica

i spoke about this one briefly when i put it in my top 3, so i'll try not to repeat myself too much. as someone who listens to a fair bit of latin american music, this almost feels like a concentrated version of all its qualities - the bouncy beat, extremely synthy melodies, and a layer of artifact that comes from playing music out of a portable guitar speaker. in the process of writing this review i've come to learn that olivier conan, the band's creator, is a french man living in brooklyn, which does make me feel a little weird about the album's over the top, and maybe even charicature style, but a bit more reading seems to indicate that their south american audience likes it so 🤷

richard galliano - luz negra

[click here to load the youtube video]

again, spoke about this one at the start of the year, and this time in a bit more detail. i'll leave it to past me to give the nitty gritty of my feelings, and present me can just say that this album is fun! it's good!

animation cel - billiam

huh??? this album never ended up getting a review in 2025? i first grabbed it near the start of the year and have adored its frenetic style, bizarre and referential lyrics, and that damn, fucking synthesiser. i actually saw them live this year and they were amazing!

games

silksong

one of my dear friends is an absolute diehard for hollow knight, and has spent the last couple of years bothering me every time the daintiest of silksong news morsels wandered in front of his face. i, on the other hand, played hollow knight back in 2018, beat it, thought it was pretty fun, and then moved on. i remember being uninterested to push through its extremely difficult post-endgame because the controls felt just a little too finnicky, and i completely ignored godhome because those boss rushes were simply out of my skillset. i also felt that the world didnt have too much impact or depth, and that the animation and design sometimes felt a little amateurish. i'm happy to say i was incorrect about the world, but i stand by my assessment on the animation and design. thankfully, team cherry gave themselves seven years to improve on basically everything hollow knight was, and that level of skill that you get from a lot of practice and extremely fine grained criticism from your incredibly popular game (not to mention a more or less blank cheque to spend all the time you need), results in something truly stellar. the world of silksong is incredibly well realised, and moving back and forth through the areas will allow you to naturally pick up connections between all the parts of the former society of pharloom. the music is great, the visuals are cohesive and polished, and the movement and combat is incredible. i would regularly be frustrated by the difficulty of some of the more difficult bosses, but i never felt like i was unequipped - either poor planning or a poor reaction had led to my demise. you can absolutely zip around arenas or, if you're a wuss, you can change up your loadout to rely on weird tools to the point that the game kinda plays itself. the freedom is what's important. anyway, not to belabour the poandint, silksong is amazing, and if a gun were put to my head i would probably say that it's my game of the year

loco motive

this lovely little point and click adventure served me extremely well on a warm autumn evening, not because it's that short, but because i was so utterly enraptured by it and had to finish it in one sitting. this game seems to take most of what is great about point and clicks, provides more of what works with some excellent humour, and a hint system that meant i never felt the need to look online. its hook is that you play three characters on a murder-on-the-orient-express-type setting, each trying to clear your own name. i've seen some complaints that the logic required to figure out some of the puzzles is a little nonsensical and i could maybe agree, but

peak

peak is a pretty simple game, but it's one of the first friendslop games that i've actually tried and really got into. i think a lot of its ilk kind of just involve you doing things around friends, but peak multiplayer really requires you to plan and strategise to get your whole group to the top. it will actually beat the shit out of you if you're not careful, which makes winning a game all the sweeter

animal well

this is yet another game that i mentioned in a previous blogpost, but the point still stands. i wasn't originally convinced by the trailer for this game, but giving it a go really opened my eyes to this mysterious little world and its intriguing puzzles. turns out that i really like puzzle metroidvanias, and also that dunkey knew what he was doing when he helped produce this game

ghost trick

this took me an entire year to finish because i kept leaving my dsi places and not turning it on, but i officially get why people still reference this game 15 years later. the experience feels pretty similar to something like ace attorney, but i only felt myself stumped once or twice, which makes for a far less embarassing experience. the story is meted out perfectly, and the over-the-top character designs and animations were an absolute gem. i did feel that i needed a break pretty regularly due to the mental requirements to work through the game's puzzles, but i always came back eventually. well worth it! also, buy a nintendo dsi! they're cheap and easy to crack and from there it's straightforward to <LEGALLY ACQUIRE> this title

films

tampopo

how had i never seen this before? a japanese comedy western about a ramen shop intercut with insane non-sequiter cutaways? tampopo isn't the deepest drama and it doesn't have the most complicated characters, but it's hilarious all the way from the micro to the macro scale, and it's shot beautifully to boot

the shape of water

it's so nice to stumble into a modern fairytale without the slime associated with a disney or pixar film. i feel like this does a great job of almost being kind of grounded? like it's obviously a little magical but the broad strokes are all kind of make sense (besides the fish guy, of course). i think it also did such an incredible job of building a very realistic and believable, and its always lovely to see a bit of disability representation

life is beautiful

i absolutely did not expect to put a film about the fucking holocaust on my top 5, but after watching an absolute buttload of them in the past (for a reason that will be clear if you know me in person, or will continue to be unexplained if you don't) i've found myself increasingly unimpressed by each tired take on the horrific event. what was the answer? make it into a lighthearted comedy-drama, of course! i wasn't really convinced when i first heard the concept explained, but by keeping the core of the story about the relationship between a husband and his family, it gives you that little bit of extra punch when the story occasionally gets real. this is the only holocaust film i will ever recommend

conclave

i definitely got sucked into the hype with this one, and my bias for ralph fiennes and stanley tucci is also tragically showing. all this said, i was absolutely enraptured by the mystery and drama of the whole deal, all the catholic pomp and circumstance, and the costuming and set design. the score is simple but extremely fucking effective, and also did you know that that big staircase is the same one that was in star wars: the phantom menace?

song of the sea

this one was a recommendation from my partner - an animated film from cartoon saloon, who made the award winning wolfwalkers a couple of years back, as well as other animation teams from luxembourg, belgium, denmark and france. while it's a children's movie for sure, the story is far more in-depth than i might have expected, and it does a lot of lovely digging into its characters and the world of irish folklore. the illustration has this extremely charming childlike quality to it, where (for example) the top of a table is depicted as round, but the bottom as flat, emulating how a child might represent the things around them if they were drawing it themselves. loads of texture is squeezed into to these sophisticated forms, and the music and voice performances are top notch and absolutely tear jerking at times

(update, i found that the style of art i was describing is called naive art. how nifty!)

miscellaneous

niri window manager

i've gone extremely hard on linux this year and almost completely purged windows from my life (except when i need it for work)! the thing that really pushed me over the edge was initially hyprland - a bit of a trendy window manager, but one that is deeply, deeply flawed. it did really introduce me to the joy of building your setup more or less from scratch, picking and configuring each piece of software you want, leading you to being intimately familiar with everything that's going on under the hood, and giving you a really fucking efficient system to boot. hyprland was good, but not good enough to change over my desktop pc, but two things changed at about the same mind that pushed me over the edge: openai / nvidia's insane memory orders destroyed memory prices and i panic bought an amd gpu, and my discovery of the niri window manager. every decision with niri's design just makes sense to me. your windows opening on an infinitely tiling row overcomes the shitfest that is window management on a conventional tiling wm. in general, yalter seems to be in touch with what his users wants and makes an effort to implement them when they make sense, instead of doggedly dragging the corpse of i3 around. overview menus are amazingly helpful, dragging and snapping windows works with the mouse if you want to do that, and they implemented alt-tab behaviour. it's pulled me into the 21st linux century and finally allowed me to get rid of windows as my main os

the locked tomb

i somehow managed to read all three locked tomb books this year, and boy, what an experience. first and foremost, yeah, this is basically a y.a. series. but! theres enough going on under the scenes that i think it's well and truly worth a read for old fucks like you or me. i think the series really does the concept of necromancy justice compared to something like the sabriel/old kingdom series. the problem of necromancy being kind of icky and almost morally reprehensibly is inherently a big part of the themes of the books and the world. because the characters involved are masters of the art, they approach necromancy from an almost scientific perspective, which gives you lots of opportunities for non-awkward exposition. the setting being in space gives it an amazing scale, and also allows tamsyn muir to sort of peel back the layers book by book in a way that almost feels entirely intentional from the beginning. i also adore the heavy perspective shifts given to each book - harrow the ninth is potentially the best sequel to a book ever written, and nona the ninth completely shakes up the formula by putting it from the perspective of a child. it's great

whisper in the wind

i talked about this one back in august, but i still stick by putting it in my misc top 5 - i love this series, it continues to build and build despite being the fourth book of at least 5, it's gritty, it's interesting, the protagonist is such a textbook noir detective it makes me kick my little legs with glee

immich

if you're going to cut yourself off from the big 4 online tech giants, you're going to want a way to manage all your photos. you've already been using google photos, haven't you? what if you just... installed google photos at home? i'm giving immich a spot in my top 5 for being the most cartoonishly easy to install and use self-hosted program i've ever used. it just fucking works, and it works so well

bike

i love this thing, i love this thing so much. i unfortunately live a little too far from my main city to make this my primary mode of transport, but when coupled with trains it becomes an amazing way to get around. navigating the cbd is incredible on one of these, and so is checking out the beautiful bike tracks out in the country. my only complaint is that i am absolutely fucking whacked when im done using it, but its starting to improve my cardio and my leg strength, which is awesome. i've also done a bunch of fixes on it thanks to my local bike kitchen, and the feeling of accomplishment when you resolve a problem in an hour or so for an absolute pittance is hard to beat