2025 in Review

[selenicseas]

My goals for 2025 were pretty simple. Some of them were easy enough that I updated them, and others were never reached in the first place.

Read 100 short stories. In total, I ended up reading 160 short stories. I actually hit 100 back in July and then slowed down a bit to focus on novels.

Read 12 books. I increased this goal twice, and ended the year at 32 – exceeding my final goal of 30! I genuinely never thought I'd be able to read this number of books in a year as an adult.

Watch 12 movies. I achieved this goal in August and increased it twice – first to 15, then to 20. I hit 20 in October and ended the year at 24 movies.

Complete 6 new video games. I only completed one, which was Horizon Forbidden West. Quite a change from 2024, where I actually did play six games.

Leave 100 comments. Achieved toward the very end of the year, but I did it! I did better than the previous year!

Write a total of 100,000 words. This did not happen. I didn't even get close. I ended the year at 78,042, which is more than I wrote in 2024, so there actually was some improvement.

Write 1 blog post per week. I did almost double and wrote 101.

Create 26 pieces of art. I did barely half of this. 2025 was not a good year for art.

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I wrote quite a few reviews, including of books and television, which I hadn't done before. Here are all of them, listed in order of posting:

• Movie Thoughts: January 2025
• Movie Thoughts: February 2025
• Movie Thoughts: March 2025
• Brief Thoughts On: Andor S2 E1-3
• Brief Thoughts On: Andor S2 E4-6
• Some Thoughts On: Horizon Forbidden West
• Book Thoughts: Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
• Book Thoughts: The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays
• Book Thoughts: Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
• Brief Thoughts On: Andor S2 E7-9
• Brief Thoughts On: Andor S2 E10-12
• Book Thoughts: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
• Book Thoughts: How Nonviolence Protects the State
• Book Thoughts: The Conquest of Bread
• Book Thoughts: Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin

I also started a new conlang (A̋llunóñe)! And then I abandoned it, because it's linked to a story project I'm not currently working on right now.  It still felt pretty good to get back into conlanging, at least for a little bit. Those are muscles I haven't stretched in a while.

And then, in November, I took part in Pillowrimo, to start and hopefully finish the outline of a story. That outline was finished in the first week of December, and to my surprise, I didn't hate it. I'm still focusing on outlining the two sequel parts to that story, but it's something I'm actually looking forward to writing.