The Eighth Glass of Water: 2025 On Both Feet

Hello, everyone! And Happy New Year~!

It's been a while since we shared a cuppa, huh? Sadly I only have water to spare at the moment, but I promise it's good.

As with many others, as we get to the top of the year, let's talk about how we get through the rest of it.

Starting The Year Off With Patience Panic

[on 2025, productivity, my goals, and being patient with myself]

I am pretty sure I only sold two new pieces of art in 2024.

In early issues of Uncanny Magazine in the last year, I wrote one essay and one poem. I am deeply proud of them. I am particularly attached to that essay (despite how I wish I could massively reword the whole thing now), and the poem come to me specifically after a sudden burst of inspiration that is slowly gathering nacre until it becomes a whole poetry collection.

I am proud of what I made. I am excited by what I made. I've also accomplished quite a bit I'm pleased by: getting to write for some really engaging projects, getting invited as a guest to some amazing cons, and more.

But I sure do wish I was making more often, and that does bring with it a droplet of shame.

It's not like I'm not trying, either. But 2024 has been a nebulous territory. I took notes for maybe a dozen short story windows that I all ran out the clock on with very little actual words written on them. I set a recurring bull's-eye on finishing the poetry collection I was working on before Can You Sign My Tentacle? and even honed in on some of the poems that the collection needed, but that book is now both bigger and still not done.

My output is not as high as I would like. Of course his is not a problem per se, but it bothers me in part because there is always so much I want to do, so much I planned on doing, and then my own brain gets in the way. If I were simply a slow worker, or had already set intentions to produce at this pace, there would be no issue. In fact, if that were the case, this newsletter would be about how I found the system that works for me, how I’m actually hitting my own productivity goals by simply reducing my yield. But that’s not the case.

On several occasions last year, I’ve had Scrivener open for several hours and didn’t type a word. On several occasions I’ve been excited by a poem or story idea only for something else minor to get in the way, or for the very notion to slip out between my fingers. On several occasions I’ve gotten excited about learning new skills I know I want to put to productive use, only for shame and doubt to creep their heads and lay me low before I could even get started. Hell, it has taken me all of the first two days of January just to gather most of this newsletter's thoughts in many small bursts, knowing exactly what I want to say and yet struggling to just put it together on paper.

For some things, I’m not trying to overwork myself. Health and skills-related goals are complex; I just want to be present for myself, to slowly gain consistency. But the creative ones—those deserve more oomph, no? If a writer writes, isn’t someone who hasn’t written a new word in the new year a former writer? How can I show up for myself in that regard, and actually start meeting the professional goals that make me feel like my craft is growing?

It also doesn’t help that it feels like there are no really good places to learn how to get past this point. There is a small cottage industry of productivity content that one can get lost in—watch this YouTuber, subscribe to this newsletter, use this digital planner or this Notion template and you’ll finally crack the code, I promise! And at a point it feels less like I’m becoming focused and engaged, and more like I’m becoming… a productivity otaku. Someone hyperfascinated by productivity as an arcane concept, as a series of inscrutable busywork, rather than someone actually gaining control over their life.

I am, of course, trying to be patient with myself. I want so badly to develop a streak of better habits that will at least increase my output, but burning out to get there doesn't encourage longevity either. But I want so badly to get there—to work in the ways I know will make my work better, and to be better at taking care of myself in the process.

So I guess 2025 is about slowly working my way up to there. To being better to my body, to my craft, and about the things I want to learn and improve myself in. Not necessarily a resolution or a Big Idea About The Year or anything so grandiose. Just a series of small goals I hope to hit every few months that will hopefully see me on the other end with a few more short stories, closer to a finished novel draft, and even more.

Pray for a bredren. I may need it.

Tasting Notes

One of the ways this (recurring and frustrating cycling) search for ways to boost my productivity is that it has re-established how gamification as a concept is by definition prone to manipulation.

All the way in November of 2023, a video by a YouTuber named struthless broke down how gamification as a benign productivity hack had theoretical value, but is somewhat undercut by how those same values are used by predatory games and other endeavours specifically to steal and break your attention, trapping you in a loop of dopamine overindulgence in order to keep spending and never take your eyes off them. The fact that you have a positive Duolingo streak tends to look very value-neutral when Robinhood is using the same techniques to get you to spend money you don't have gambling on the stock market.

It pairs well with a more recent and absolutely brilliant video by gaming YouTuber yakkocmn about gacha games and how they use these techniques to keep players in a loop of shady behaviour that seems to trump actually making challenging game mechanics.

This sticks in my brain-craw because it immediately triggered a very hostile thought that I do want to see fulfilled in my lifetime: the possibility of a productivity app reapplying all the predatory techniques of gacha games with the specific goal of hijacking our brains into actually accomplishing tasks. Or as I put it on Bluesky:

So that's not going to dislodge any time soon. Here's hoping someone figures that out before I have to figure it out myself.

A reminder that this newsletter, as well as the rest of my writing and game design work, thrives with your support. My Patreon is where you can find snippets of new TTRPG projects, exclusive writing drafts, and more:

Some Bests

In lieu of some tunes, here's some of the media I enjoyed this year:

AARO: -All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office-

One of the best series I've seen for the last year was undoubtedly AARO: -All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office-. It was definitely a late catch to my tv watching habits (I have been far too busy for most of the year to merely peruse Netflix, but I’m glad that I did at the time), and it is already perhaps my favourite series of 2024.

The pitch is simple: a series of weird events have taken place all over Japan, triggered by the social media presence of ‘Hiruko’, an entity claiming to be a god seeking to punish evildoers and bring about a new age. Police officer Koyume Amano (played by Alice Hirose, who I have only just learned played an alternate-universe version of Electronic Wave Humanoid Tackle in a Kamen Rider movie I haven’t yet seen?!?!) has been recruited to serve as a liaison between the police and a secret office responsible only to the Japanese Cabinet Secretariat, whose staff includes peculiar and seemingly aloof investigator Miyabi Okitama (played by Tatsuya Fujiwara—yes, the guy from the first Death Note movie adaptations, or if your tastes are as old and dark as mine, from Battle Royale). Okitama and his equally odd bunch of colleagues then get to the bottom of both the eerily supernatural and the deeply mundane parts of their cases with wit and graciousness, all the while despite Koyume noticing the weirdly distrusting manner in which Okitama regards the selfishness and brutality of modern society.

Technically, I just spoiled the show there, but I’ll let it slide.

This show is absolutely delightful in its first episodes—it’s hilariously refreshing for a supernatural procedural to play so eagerly into letting the guy with the cockamamie theories always be right, or at least never be doubted as eagerly as a more irony-poisoned version of this show may be about the interplay between Perfectly Reasonable Explanations and The Truth Being Out There. And then the show takes a sudden and radical turn a few episodes in that doesn’t make you second-guess everything you’ve already seen so much as it makes you question why you doubted your own initial assumptions.

I described it on Bluesky as “like if The X-Files, Persona 5 and Death Note had a baby”, and I stand by it. If you’re in the mood for equal parts quirky and intensely dramatic supernatural mystery fare, it’s on Netflix.

Matlock

I have never actually seen an episode of the original Matlock series. Like most things from that era, if I know anything about it, it’s almost entirely from digital osmosis. I couldn’t even tell you who the actor was, and I promise you that I can't guess him, either.

All this is to say I have no immediate attachment to Matlock as a character, and yet when I say the 2024… not-quite-a-reboot? of Matlock is some of the most interesting legal drama I’ve watched recently.

This premise is both fun and very deep: there’s an old lady named Madeline Matlock who just got a job at a high-powered law firm and is hoping to leverage her one key skill (namely being an old lady, a class of person who people regularly let their guard down around) in order to move up the ladder and put food on the table for her grandson after her husband ran off with another woman and her daughter passed away. Only very little of what she just said is true. Not even her last name (“But that’s the name of the show!!”). She does want this job, and her daughter is sadly gone—but the link between these two facts is the kindling for a raging fire with which Madeline hopes to demolish one of the most destructive industries in American capitalism, one butterscotch sweet at a time.

A lot of legal dramas love to play with the inherent conflict of being personally upright while being a zealous advocate for their client—how does one defend someone they definitely believe has committed a grievous wrong, or find the will to challenge an opposing defendant they know is deserving of justice? But in recent memory, I don’t think any show has ever been as committed to demonstrating how much that can suck—how utterly draining, demoralising, and heartbreaking it can be even when things go well—as this show hints at. That dour nature is more than often cut by just how charming Kathy Bates is as our ‘titular’ heroine, simultaneously so effortlessly calculating about how to use people’s dismissal of the elderly to her advantage but so deeply earnest in her dealings with her clients.

If you got CBS and nothing to do for an hour on Thursday night, it’s definitely worth a watch.

Superman & Lois

At the recommendation of Charlie Jane Anders’ brilliant newsletter, I have decided to bump Superman & Lois to the top of the list of Things I Should Get Around To Watching.

Reader, the only reason I’m not saying I should have gotten into this years ago is because I am absolutely enjoying the experience of being able to binge this in chunks at a time with the finish line in clear sight.

Especially as someone who was not watching any other DC Comics CW series except for the consistently complicated Black Lightning, the only reason I was holding out that I would enjoy this was because it was, well, Superman. In a universe of media so eager to be cool and aloof about itself all the time, the most earnest character in comics seemed right up my alley, and it was.

So much of the initial setup of this series—that Clark and Lois have twin teenage sons, and have to deal with the requisite disparate personalities that they bring; that the first thing we see Clark do as a reporter for the Daily Planet is lose his job to downsizing; that the sudden passing of Martha Kent brings Clark back to his hometown in the hopes that a slower daily life will bring stability to his family while still allowing him to do the Superman thing, only to learn that maybe Smallville, Kansas is actually in more trouble than Metropolis ever is. This show was deftly constructed to be a genuine drama about balancing simple town life with the complexity of Clark’s heroism, identity, and service. Even the parts I thought I’d never enjoy eventually won me over, and the entire package seemed to come together to tell a version of the Superman story that I feel was laser-focused on my own dramatic interests: we know that beating up bad guys comes easy to the Man of Steel, so what comes hard?

If you got Max, you can now inhale all four seasons of Superman & Lois, like I presently am.

Warriors

Lin-Manuel Miranda did his thing again.

Bad news: you probably won’t actually ever see it on stage anytime soon.

Good news: that doesn’t mean you won’t get to enjoy it. In fact, you can enjoy it right now.

On the long list of media I have not consumed in my life yet, the 1979 movie The Warriors is obviously one. In fact, it takes a very vaunted subcategory alongside the Macross franchise and Iron Maiden—namely, stuff that I would have gotten into ages ago if someone had told me sooner that it Went This Hard In Particular.

So, as with Matlock, when I discovered Miranda and Eisa Davis produced a concept musical-theatre album based on the film in October, I was intrigued. I expected it to be full of bangers, but other than that, I had no expectations—I barely even knew the movie was about gangs, let alone anything else. So suffice it to say that discovering the radical reshaping the album made of the core world of the story—first and foremost of which genderbending the protagonists, inadvertently telling the more pointed story of how a lack of solidarity always risks women first—like an all-new piece of media was a beautiful experience.

Like other people have noted, it isn't impossible for this to become a stage show at some point, and in fact using a record as a bridge between the theoretical and an actual musical is hardly rare—it's happened very recently with Hadestown, after all—but for my money, I wouldn't even be bothered if they never produce a play. (I live too far to see it anyway, so I'd rather not be jealous.) I get everything I need from the record. I'd even argue some things in this album version are bothe the most perfect they will ever be and also a hard sell for a theatrical run, no matter how rad they would be in theory (you know, like getting Cam'Ron, Busta Rhymes, and Lauryn Hill to commit to making dozens of appearances over several months just to drop one song in a two-hour show).

Warriors is on pretty much every music streaming service (but sadly not available on Bandcamp, if that matters).

Whiplash

I did in fact mention this in a previous newsletter, but to recollect: slowly over the last four years, the British band bôa experienced a unique resurgence—people were rediscovering 'Duvet', their kickass OP for the 90s cyberpunk technohorror anime Serial Experiments Lain, even bringing the song to Certified Platinum before the end of October of 2024.

So in between soaking in the hype by dropping social media reels imagining other anime with their songs as OPs and rereleasing a new video for the song, the band went, 'are we so back?'

Reader, they were.

Whiplash is their first album in nearly two decades. While it doesn't feel like my favourite album of theirs (Get There, by the way), it does feel like the album they were supposed to make in this moment: briefly capturing the feeling of not being sure whether this feeling you're having is going to last forever or not, about fitting in in awkward places. I'm not merely jazzed to see them come back, I'm jazzed that they dove headfirst into telling the stories on these songs. I can only hope for them what I believe they deserve, the success of the last few years, the success of the 90s—of having dozens of anime nerds clamor for more of them, and then be surprised to get it all at once.

From Zero

A new Linkin Park album may be a bit fraught for established fans. Notwithstanding the lingering longing for the way the band once sounded, between the passing of Chester Bennington eight years ago and the reveal of new lead vocalist Emily Armstrong's complicated relationship with the Church of Scientology, getting into their new music must feel like finding out your favourite meal is no longer seasoned the way you like.

But for my money, I've been able to get into From Zero by taking what it says on the tin at face value. In that sense, it feels kind of like flipping through alternate universes of what this new band may sound like, and some of those sounds are actually really rad to me. I liked more songs than I were ambivalent on, and that has to be a good sign of something. I can only hope that their next album is willing to confront a more solid theme and settle on what it will sound like for the rest of its new future.

Mountainhead

Everything Everything has been one of my absolute favourites for some time now, and Mountainhead as a very premise only solidifies how much I dig their vibe, their willingness to experiment conceptually, and how that manifests as songs that are equal parts undeniably catchy and still deeply weird.

This was such a top-tier album for me that not only did I end up running it almost entirely on loop when it dropped in March of 2024, but pretty much every track almost immediately made up the backbone of a Spotify playlist that inspired me to write more tabletop content—Mountainhead is almost entirely the soundtrack of an actual-play that is running in my head at all times using a system I haven't finished writing yet.

The Leaves

So that’s all for today.

A reminder that you can help keep this newsletter and the rest of my work afloat by supporting me on Patreon, buying me a coffee on Ko-fi or sending a donation via PayPal, or by buying one of my small game projects over on Itch!

If you're seeing this on the first day of the year, you still have a little time to get in on my Winter Two-Player RPG Bundle over on Itch! It and Ko-Fi donations would go a long way to getting me to my next con goal: attending Capricon in February!

In case you missed it, among the other convention news for 2025 is that I'll be in Seattle for Worldcon 2025 as the Poet Laureate! One of the things I want to be more consistent about in this year is spreading the good word of speculative poetry, so I hope you'll join us in Seattle and take in some beautiful verse!

Until next time, I hope you enjoyed the tea!