Hello. What a decade this year has been, huh? I'm not sure if it's just me or if you're feeling it too, but this year has been a lot. The year I turned 30 gave me my first tattoo, my first flight, my first festival, my third round of Covid, two more expenses-paid visits to the physical offices of my workplace, an entire country's worth of new experiences, and the daunting experience of doing the first bits of paperwork around getting married(!!!!). And, of course, I turned 30 in a field in Kettering surrounded by friends, seeing Jeremy Corbyn talk about hope for the future, and feeling more loved than ever before.

But of course everything's worse outside of that. The UK's Supreme Court actively made trans lives harder without ever listening to a trans voice. Reform's on the rise, and it's coming for my fiance's permanent residence while the government just tries to copy them. Trump's back in the White House and America's further to the right than it's always been. There's at least one ongoing live-streamed genocide, enabled by global superpowers and megacorporations. Technology giants want me to turn my family photos into ghoulish facsimiles of reality with no opt-outs, while their datacentres gobble up clean water and energy and we all get less smart and less able to tell reality from slop. YouTube Music served me music by an artist that doesn't exist and has made 12 albums this year because I wasn't paying attention. Everything's more expensive and nothing is real. Everything is gambling, or a recurring card payment, or both.

I spent so much time trying to figure out whether I had the energy to even write one of these this year - not because I couldn't list a bunch of stuff I liked; boy howdy could I do that, as you'll see in a sec - but because writing this bit, this summary of how the year's been, feels increasingly exhausting to do. I pray for the idea that light will outshine the darkness in our world, but it feels increasingly hopeless to hope. We have so much to fix, so many communities to bring together, and yet we're retreating into our atomised online lives and arguing with each other.

But then I remember that people still show up for people. I think of the weekly protests against the government's inaction on the Gaza genocide at my city's train station. I think of the people who organise their workplaces, who show up to meetings organising political alternatives, who do the thankless work of supporting those who need the most and have the least in food banks and homeless shelters and refugee support services. I think of a close friend dropping off Covid tests and some baklava when Markus and I were sick, and the time I managed to step in and stop a physical fight breaking out when someone called my partner a slur.

There's a well-loved Mr Rogers quote that basically tells his audience to look for the helpers when there are bad things going on. Obviously some adults take comfort in that quote, but his audience was little kids - now we're old, we are the helpers. It's our collective life's work to do the right thing. To love others. To be the light that outshines the darkness. To see that light in the world.

I hope you've had a peaceful Christmas, and here's to a better 2026.

Avery's Stuff of the Year 2025

Let's start as we usually do with video games. I've been thinking about this part for far too long, to be honest, because very little that came out this year has really stood out as being exceptionally good. And of course, there are some consensus candidates; I played what feels like everyone's game of the year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and... look, in theory it's made for me. It's French Persona, in many ways; you have social links, you have a bunch of visual flair, you have interesting characters and nice twists and a rich world - and c'mon, I teared up at its ending. But fucking hell, I hated getting to that ending. The combat did not gel with me at all, mostly because I've never spent more than about 10 hours playing a Soulsborne game before deciding That's Enough Of That Thank You, and the whole combat loop is essentially Elden Ring with extra steps. (It also effectively excluded itself from the running for my Game of the Year over its use of Generative AI for art.)

I didn't play everyone else's game of the year, Hollow Knight: Silksong, for similar reasons - I just got tired of the first one ten hours in. Hades 2 was fantastic, but didn't really reach the dizzying heights of its predecessor. So: Despelote is my game of the year. It's deeply personal, both in that it's the personal story of a boy growing up in a country gripped by the fact that it might be in the World Cup for the first time, and in that I have been gripped by that same World Cup fever before; it made me think of 2018, when England had its first serious run into the tournament in my lifetime and my crappy call centre job's phones went silent as the semi-final began, and this bizarre sense of unity among those of us who were just desperate for it to come home.

It also just nails what playing football with your pals, or classmates, feels like; it's spontaneous, it's free-flowing, it pisses off your neighbours. It's probably not for everyone, but it's short and sweet. The honourable mentions list is pretty short this year, but To A T was a lovely bit of work from Keita Takahashi that handled themes of disability and conformity well while ultimately being a bit too short on gameplay, and Hades 2 did ultimately have the sauce - and a lot of hot people - even if it didn't quite hit the same as the first one. I'm always rooting for Supergiant and I hope they make something new next.

This year was a pretty awful year for pop music - there wasn't really a song of the summer - but a really solid one for music overall, and CMAT's Euro-Country is my album of the year, a collection of tightly-written songs that reflect my generation's (and particularly my Irish kin's) experiences of and frustrations with life under post-2008 capitalism. It handles her grief over losing her best friend with an incredible tenderness - I cry every time I hear Lord, Let That Tesla Crash - while having some catchy lyrics for my fellow recovering Catholics (Lord, I can feel what I hated in dreams / help me not hate myself, help me love other people, / I'll wear the beads, I'll read, Kyrie Eleison). We're all running out of time to get in on CMAT before she gets everywhere, mark my words - and check out her back catalogue when you can; Crazymad, For Me is also fantastic.

I have too many album-based honourable mentions to easily contain in this post, but I'm going to try: Geese's Getting Killed feels so unlike their previous album and that is fantastic news, because they're less likely to get tired of what they're making. Tyler, The Creator's DON'T TAP THE GLASS makes me want to find a dance floor every time I hear it. David Byrne's Who Is The Sky? is up there with whatever Sparks releases these days as a remarkable piece of work from an artist who could easily just stop doing weird songs about a face cream turning him into a man with a baby head, but I'm glad he keeps doing it. I loved two albums from trans artists this year; Kae Tempest's Self Titled feels like a real victory lap over self-doubt, and jasmine.4.t's You Are The Morning feels like an album absolutely teeming with self-doubt and uncertainty in a way I really connected with. Anthony Szmierek's Service Station At The End Of The Universe consumed my brain in the first few months of the year, a little existentialist spoken word and a lot house-adjacent banger. PinkPantheress' Fancy That samples some early-2000s electronic bangers in a way that makes them feel really new and makes me feel really old. Viagra Boys' viagr aboys is the best kind of weird - the kind of weird with saxophones in a song about a pickled bog body. Oh, and let me get Lucy Dacus' Forever Is A Feeling in here too - the best pile of love songs I've heard in years. Markus knows that I put on Best Guess when I'm feeling real gay about us and it's cute.

Christmas Day being absent of good telly betrayed the fact that we had a really solid year for TV; I've been saying Apple TV (now without the plus) has been the best streaming service for some time, and the second season of Severance and the first of Pluribus were both fantastic sci-fi dystopias that moved at different paces to satisfying effect - I'm not going to spoil either, but I can't wait for more of both. Adolescence was of course fantastic, with its one-take gimmick grounding the whole thing nicely and that teenager giving a gripping debut performance. The Traitors (both its civilian and celebrity versions) was fantastic - the format doesn't feel tired yet, and the celebrities in particular were so bad at playing the game well that its conclusion felt immensely satisfying, and I'm psyched to watch another series of it. What It Feels Like For A Girl was brutal to watch at times, but a rare thing in two ways; a trans coming of age story with a really horrible protagonist, and a queer story set in the early 2000s - so not an AIDS-era tragedy, but not an acceptance-era "it's fine, everyone will accept you" deal. And yes, it's recency bias talking, but I have to give Heated Rivalry its flowers for its leads' insane chemistry, its eagerness to show you as much of its gay sex as possible in a world where that's often still a fade-to-black affair, and its fantastic selection of needle drops.

I'm hesitant to call any film my film of the year; I saw fewer than I'd like in the cinema, and also caught some real howlers (I sat through both A Minecraft Movie and Emilia Perez this year, and I'd only drunkenly sit through Minecraft again). But A Real Pain was a lovely thing about grief and how we all handle it - Kieran Culkin is an incredible talent, and I've been saying that since he was Wallace in Scott Pilgrim. Pillion was a fun thing to watch with so many queer people with me in the audience, and its whole approach to sex seems remarkably tender for a film made and set in Britain. Recency bias again, but it was nice to feel a bunch of faith-based and Josh O'Connor-based feelings watching Wake Up Dead Man. And fuck it, I really liked Superman. Not enough to suddenly invest emotionally in the DC Universe, but it was lovely to have a little hope in a superhero movie, as well as a Noah and the Whale needle drop for some reason.

I read a ton of Kitchen Confidential in a field at Greenbelt Festival this year, and that book's great and you should read it, but it's also 30+ years old. I am a little ashamed of both what I read and how little I read outside of that. But I really, really liked my friend Meghan's piece on the misogyny of the Final Fantasy series, i'm coming to accept that the big corporation won't love me back, and she's so good at writing and you should frankly stop reading this and read that instead.

Finally, the thanks of the year. Tom, Amy, Dan, Jamie, Louis, Ro, Simon, my team and countless other Monzonauts — it has been a hell of a year and you all helped me keep it together. Tracey, thanks for being a work bud for half the year and a best bud for the other half. Jude, Jay, Anna, Charlie, Luke, Freddie, James, Greg, Johnny, Tony, Joy, Aaron, Reuben, Izzi, Rob, and the rest of my community at St Nicks, for handling the change and hurdles of this year with loving grace; Meghan, for being the fantastic woman that you are - I hope your new city treats you well, and that you come back soon; Cory, for persisting through a tough year and for being my best friend through it all; Adam, for sending me some of the most out-of-pocket text messages I've ever read (I know you're reading this you can't escape); Lindsay, for throwing your doors wide open when I came to the Netherlands; Dad and Jan, for the lovely Christmas and the feeling of safety you give Markus and I; and Markus - 10 years of me somehow hasn't put you off, and I love spending every day with you. Let's get married next year?