For the past decade or so, every December has seen a run of “At least THAT’S over” posting about the outgoing year. 2025 isn’t going to be different. We are eulogizing over 2025’s open grave while it’s still sitting in the front row of its own funeral, smirking at us.

Weirdly, 2025 was personally kind to me, especially after the shitkicking I got in ’24. Nibs became a US citizen, which alleviated a little stress. I started making zines again. I finished Every Room a Hunger and a short story for Critical Role, and am making plans with good friend Haralambi Markov to collaborate on a very funny short horror story. I started working full time at the bookshop, and just found out that I got a James Patterson booksellers holiday bonus. (It’s so weird to be financially stable.) I also became an uncle to the world’s cutest and baldest baby.

It feels odd to look back at a year and be grateful for what it brought me, knowing that it brought a lot of other people abject misery. I’m doing what I can to spread out the financial stability. If you’re in the same position, please consider supporting your local food pantry, immigrant rights organization, or a trans crowdfund.

One of the things I started doing in 2025 was keeping a list on my phone of books I read, movies I watched, and games I played, which turned into a list of experiences I wanted to remember, with a few sentences (or sometimes a LOT of sentences) about how it made me feel, what it made me think about. I haven’t successfully kept a journal in twenty years, so a full year of doing this feels great.

It’s also a huge help now, because it’s time for…

2025 Favorites

Favorite Books. This was always going to be the longest list. All links go to Bookshop.org, where if you buy them, I’ll get a cut.

Nonfiction:
⁃ Sick Houses by Leila Taylor. I genuinely love Taylor’s work, and it was a joy to read this essay collection, even when I was familiar with a lot of its topics (the Nutshell Studies, fucked up doll houses, and a few famously haunted houses).
⁃ Uncanny Valley Girls by Zefyr Lisowski. Another essay collection, memoir and cultural critique through the lens of horror films. If there was ever a niche genre that was entirely my jam, it’s that.
⁃ Whack Job: A History of Ax Murder by Rachel McCarthy James. Okay, the other niche genre that speaks to my soul: macabre material history that’s a light read, despite the topic.
⁃ Marsha: The Joy and Resilience of Marsha P. Johnson by Tourmaline. Tourmaline is an artist and historian that’s done a HUGE amount to bring attention to radical trans activists in earlier queer rights movements. I’m so glad this book came out during this stupid fucking year.
⁃ The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis. Memoir and cultural critique through the lens of DAD ROCK. Honestly one of the best books I’ve read about music, but also growing up working class and trans.
Fiction:
⁃ Countess by Suzan Palumbo. I have sold a STACK of these at the bookshop using this sentence: “Sapphic anticolonialist retelling of the Count of Monte Cristo in space.” It’s incredible. Highly recommend the audiobook as well!
⁃ But Not Too Bold by Hache Pueyo. Studio Ghibli vibes for monsterfucker lesbians, let’s go.
⁃ Root Rot by Saskia Nislow. A new author’s debut novella, told in the collective first-person about a group of cousins at their family’s lake house. Impeccable Weird horror.
⁃ The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno Garcia. I’m so happy to see witches written as horrible monsters again instead of vaguely “good for her!” gestures. Structurally interesting as a braided narrative, voicey, and character-focused. I haven’t seen this one on enough year-end lists and it’s making me mad.
⁃ Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand. Yes, it’s ten years old, but I’ve never read it before, and it’s genius.
⁃ Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner. Best spore-horror that I’ve ever read. It’s chewy, it’s grotesque, and it killed nearly all my favorite characters. It wrestles with apocalyptic ideas while also being a beautiful love letter to the Pacific Northwest.
⁃ Lessons In Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders. This made me tear up on the street while listening to it. After reading so much horror, I was surprised by the tension I felt reading a book where nobody was in danger of being killed by monsters or absorbed into a fungal hive-mind. Nobody is writing like Charlie Jane, whose style is so perfectly balanced between whimsical and heart-wrenching.

Favorite movies:
• I honestly watched very few movies this year, so the only one on my list is SINNERS. What an powerful film. I still see the clip of Sammie singing “I Lied To You” circulating, and stop every time to watch it. And EVERY! TIME! It sends shivers down my spine. One of the biggest standouts of all media for me.

Favorite games:
• Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dragon Age: Veilguard. I played Veilguard three times in a row — it’ll probably be one of those once-a-year replay situations for me. I genuinely love the gameplay, the story, the look, and that the entire mission is to attack and dethrone gods.
• 1000x Resist: One of those narratives that really pushes the boundaries of what science fiction is, does, can do. Same with gaming as a medium: it’s a story that can only work in a medium that mixes space, visuals, sound, and words. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I got fully spoiled for this before ever playing it (fully my own fault!) and it says so much about how good the story is that even knowing what would happen never softened any of the blows Expedition 33 delivered. Another one that I’ll be replaying.

Favorite experiences:
• Dimension 20: Gauntlet at the Garden. I will never again pay that much money to watch DND played live from nose-bleed seats, but I’m glad I did it once. My favorite experience was making friends while standing in line for the single stall in the men’s room with a whole bunch of other transmasc people, and just soaking in the good vibes of thousands of mostly queer nerds. My second favorite was watching Brennan Lee Mulligan kiss Brian Murphy on the mouth. We also got to see Critical Role live at Radio City Music Hall, and I saw Robbie Draymond hanging out in the lobby. That man has no right being that tall or that attractive, what the fuck.
• Holding a three-hour-old baby. This picture is so gender. He did pee on me at least once.

• Watching Heathers, Hellraiser, and Society with the Astoria Horror Club at local bars. This is how horror should be consumed IMO.
• Cabaret on Broadway, with Orville Peck as the Emcee. This hit HARD in 2025.
• Emceeing and hosting a zine show-and-tell-and-sell at the bookshop. Hoping to do this more often in 2026.
• Voting in the 2025 NYC election, and actually feeling some hope about how it turned out? Weird!!!!

I still have 9 more days of retail hell to suffer through, so this is going to be my last missive for the year. My wish for us all is to have enough: enough food, enough money to get by, enough time, enough courage to see us through, enough love to keep us going. I hope the end of this year treats us with a little more kindness, but if it doesn’t? Do what you can to make up that deficit.
<3
Nino, Nibs, and Morty OldManBabyCat