Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.
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Back in college, in what would eventually become the breakdown year, there was a person who closed out the fall semester by decorating her dorm room door with wrapping paper. It was rather plain paper, so she had written on it, “A long December, and there’s reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last.” Hopefully you get the song reference. Even then, it felt rather… teen-angsty, and come spring & the breakdown, it felt downright mocking.
But damn if it hasn’t become a MOOD in adulthood. And somehow, it’s become more mocking than it was when I was scream-crying in a dorm room corner.
I genuinely can’t think of a time when I’ve looked back on a year and thought that it had been a good year. But 2025 has been an exceptionally bad year. It was a year where people were endlessly disappointing, and every bit of brightness that could possibly bring me a shred of joy was dimmed by overwhelming forces around it. This was the year of finally going cold turkey on social media, of losing therapists through no fault of my own, and of feeling like I can never just do my job & always have to be on alert. This was the year where, as much as I want to share my original fiction, I realized that no one really wants to bother with it, so there’s zero real point in sharing it. The year where moral hypocrisy & self-diagnosis combined to reach a breaking point. The year where everything cost more while offering less, often without giving you a heads-up first. The year where MY FAVORITE FUCKING STORE CLOSED, and absolutely nothing has been able to fill that void, only making the absence hurt more.
So I’m going to start with a few observances of noteworthy things.
First off, Diamond imploding just as I got back into comics. In 2024, Dynamite learned what Funko did, which is that if they want my money, they’ll do something with Jonny Quest that isn’t in the now-considered-default-unless-you-want-to-be-labelled-a-massive-evil-bigot Adult Swim mold. It’s not the only one of their books that led me back into comic shops; their revamp of the H-B/Ruby-Spears/Turner action series have all been solid & look like they’ll be continuing this trend well into 2026. But never underestimate the lengths I’ll go to see proper versions of my boys & their handsome dads, especially after the past 2 decades. But then… Diamond finally fell apart. It had been a long time coming, since absolutely no one - not bigger publishers, not indie outlets, not shop owners - liked them or their services. The end of their monopoly beginning with DC & other companies moving away from Diamond was rightfully celebrated. But Diamond decided that they were gonna go out exactly how they had lived - without a single shred of dignity. Sitting on warehouses full of stuff that legally doesn’t belong to them, refusing to return it to companies who could really use the money from selling it and insisting that it’s totally their property, and having to be dragged repeatedly into court to correct them… the whole thing just makes me feel terrible for the affected businesses that have their whole inventory trapped in this mire. In my own sphere, Diamond’s shenanigans led to my books being delayed for months until Dynamite could find an alternative company to physically publish them, and trades that were never actually given a first printing have been announced to be receiving a “second printing” next year, since the “first” one is probably still gathering dust in those warehouses. Things are getting back to baseline at the consumer level, but my heart goes out to the indie game & comics people still fighting Diamond in court to get back their inventory. I wish them luck.
Second, the indie animation boom has been a mixed bag, at least on a personal level. I think there’s only been a couple of concept trailers or series that grabbed my attention. The Mighty Grand Piton by THELINE Studios amazes me every time I watch it (so I’m very much hoping it becomes a TV series), and I stop everything every time a new episode of Punch Punch Forever drops (in fact, I just did that while writing because they uploaded a Christmas episode & once again YT’s shadowban hid it from me, we’ll talk more about THAT later). But these works aren’t the ones that get the love online. Nonono, we get a bad edgy sitcom about demons that looks like John K’s scribbles through an anime filter, with embarrassingly juvenile levels of swearing and some seriously wonky mixed messages, but it’s okay cuz some of the characters are queer (including the worst example of “ace rep” this side of that one episode of House), so if you criticize it or just don’t find it funny, it’s clearly because you’re a bigot. We get a CGI show that is perfectly mid on its own, but because the characters’ development sticks nicely to the Wikihow guide to various mental illnesses, an awful lot of people think it’s extremely deep & important, and they’ll defend its use by fetish-farming slop channels because “it’s not for kids, so it’s okay” (even though those channels are using it illegally, the real motivation for defending them should be obvious). We get an admittedly well-designed show that is, unfortunately, a continuation of the years-long public toddler tantrum on the creator’s part about her experiences with a large faceless corpo not doing what she & her weaponized fanbase demanded; but again, thanks to said weaponized fanbase, any criticism of her or her work is painted as coming from a place of bigotry instead of disappointment that she’s decided to squander her obvious skills by being an overgrown fandom kid. These last two get pushed CONSTANTLY on YouTube, so even if you have their studio in your “do not recommend” list, you’ll still have them shoved down your face. Meanwhile, I have to hunt for PPF even after following the creator’s channel, because the same audience that’s pushed Glitch’s stuff to the skies finds it “too Newsgrounds” for their liking (the irony of how these same people will hyper-praise Smiling Friends, a show literally staffed by folks originating from Newsgrounds, is not unnoticed), which has led to the YouTube algorithm refusing to share it unless you deliberately search for it. Strangely, this also applies to THELINE’s works as well. Hmm. Basically, unless you want a show that appeals to the absolute worst, most obnoxious people in the animation fandom who aren’t as progressive as they think, you need to keep your eyes open for any signs of their existence, cuz this audience has assured that the algorithm will bury it.
Now this one IS a highlight, and it’s the wave of hard rock music fronted by badass women. When it comes to radio, anymore I default to the local hard rock station, WMMR. And this year has introduced me to a wave of amazing emotional rock bands fronted by women with powerful voices. Songs full of determination, anger, perseverance… these were the songs that I needed when I was younger. Dorothy, Halestorm, & The Pretty Deadly are my 3 favorites, but I’ve also enjoyed the newer stuff from Paramore, AND I’ll go to bat for the new lead singer of Linkin Park fitting into this trend, cuz boy howdy, do some of y’all have issues with this change. The signature mix of self-hatred, shame, & impotent rage that the band is known for, sung righteously & furiously by a woman with a strong voice? GOD, I could’ve used that in my life 20 years ago, so I’ll definitely be into it now. As music gets more processed & tedious - “oldies” being limited to a handful of 80s & 90s standards, “songs” wretched up by AI to pad out Spotify results, Extruded Music-Flavored Product that leaves your head as soon as it’s heard cuz they use the same musical structure, bland singers with dull songographies re-releasing the same album over & over just in different colors of vinyl - turning on the radio and hearing the weary defiance of “Darkness Always Wins” or refusal to quit in “BONES” just gives me a little charge of strength to counter the monotony.
Those are just the things that I found worthy of expanding upon, but of course there’s a bunch more good & bad things worth discussing. And if there’s one thing the internet loves, it’s a list. So maybe I can scrape up some highlights & lowlights of 2025:
Highlights!
Getting into Umamusume & finding out that one never truly loses her inner horse girl.
Grasping crochet well enough to work on two complicated monthly subscription boxes AND finally learn how to do amigurumi.
MeTV Toons returning some old favorites to the air after decades of derision.
The aforementioned Dynamite books above bringing me back to comics and showing how to do an “updated” revival for these characters without veering into the usual bullshit.
For one beautiful shining moment, I could get double decker tacos again at Taco Bell, an item that never should have been removed from their menu.
Punk managed to not only get good work out of the Rollins Vortex but won the title AND brought his wife out of retirement.
The Card’s new “Soup Together” strip, that started as a parody of the kind of anodyne webcomics that always go viral on social media and then turned that up to 11 by making its main character exactly as selfish & obnoxious as the people who find those amusing/relatable/wholesome actually are.
The trend of extremely well done, character-centric ARGs outside of video games (along with a few in them) continuing along nicely. Hoping to see more from Underwater Wonders in the coming year, along with more from Pendog Creative Library & Welcome Home.
Lowlights!
The nigh-omnipresent rise of AI in lieu of actual creative work, especially translated works and downright hallucinatory crochet “patterns” sold by con artists.
Wrestling hitting another doldrums era, at least with the bigger brands (sadly including GCW in that). And the fandom somehow getting even worse than it's been, especially for a certain promotion that constantly sells itself as the “moral” alternative.
Whatever the hell is going on with the Six Flags parks (y’all are making me worried about the future of Great Adventure).
A return to the odious “every single aspect of your life MUST be a political battle ground” attitude. If you do this, at least have the decorum to keep it online and function in the real world like an adult, please.
Still not being able to knit garments, let alone do any kind of colorwork.
Giving up on social media after learning just how brain-broken so many of my former moots were, be it proving the horseshoe theory is true or showing that gooner brain is contagious & always leads to literal shit. Some of them even proved both! It kinda makes you feel alone & isolated, in a Groke-ish manner, but the alternative is to risk going down the same slides of “current events justifies it when WE embrace Holocaust denialism” and/or “the entire world needs to know about my diaper/infancy fetish or else I’m being mentally oppressed”.
The continued mix of writer's block & daily life stress that has stymied my attempts to resume writing, along with the knowledge that literally no one will care once I actually do it again.
Joanns closing. That’s it. There’s nothing that’s been capable of filling that void.
TikTok basically ruining everything, from rehashing tired gatekeeping efforts to furthering the plague of “fast fashion” & low-quality dropshipping to spreading truly idiotic conspiracies to dumbing down normal vocabulary to reducing fiction to “sex scenes of dubious consent on paper, with an AO3/TV Tropes bullet point list in lieu of a plot summary due to no actual plot or themes of any value existing”. For one shining moment, it looked like all of the damage caused by its addicts would have been confined to a literal propaganda site, but nope, the checks cleared & the ban was lifted.
I try not to get optimistic about the start of a new year. I just try to hope that it’ll be marginally better than the last. That’s the best that Counting Crows could see to do 30-odd years ago, what the girl in the dorm could do 25 years ago, and it’s the best that I can do now. And even that feels like it’s giving the world too much leeway. But as always, we’ll see what the new year brings us all, good or bad. Probably bad. Fingers crossed.
Familiarity with this particular episode only makes it better.
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Lightning-squared round! Cuz something something intrusive thoughts.
I won’t elaborate, but every so often, I’ll see a piece of news that makes me extremely grateful the work-required cache clearing removed any connections I had left to Bluesky so I don’t have to see the takes of my former moots & watch them deny that they somehow haven’t proven the accuracy of the horseshoe theory.
Nothing really illustrates the eternal-high-schooler mindset of both the people in charge AND the fanbase than AEW constantly defaulting to either “OMG, are these guys friends again or not” and “OMG, evil new kids moved in” stories. Especially when they decide to make watching their remaining co-founders sub-Channel Awesome web show a requirement to see all of the story/character work that apparently can’t be fit into the TV shows.
Another excellent piece from Jeff Harris, this time looking at the SEVERE fall from grace of Toonami and how it’s been completely ignored by animation fans. Also, I’m glad someone else saw the same gross themes in CSE, since of course everyone else ignored or even defended them. But my thoughts on the Church of Adult Swim & its members are well documented by now. And the part where the channel’s head mocked people for preferring Invincible Fight Girl to “let’s graft DBZ plots onto Superman, filter it through a late-00s DA ‘anime’ filter, and animate it in Scratch as stiffly as possible” or the “MAHA propaganda starring a clone of Boogie” show only confirms why I would be okay with any business deal that results in that block/subnetwork/suite of frat boys being canned, even if everything else gets screwed. They’ve done enough damage to animation, especially online, and at this point, we basically need chemo to remove their influence.
Very glad that Jack Kirby Way is now a permanent location. And overdue, too.
You kinda answered your own question with the thumbnail, Todd. People decided that they really really like the musical equivalent of unseasoned boiled chicken.
To say nothing of the rise of Extruded Music-Flavored Product, be it AI-generated on Spotify or whole-ass genres…
I love how TCM's annual memorial reel always includes behind-the-scenes figures like cinematographers & costume designers alongside more public-facing movie making roles. Also, can’t believe THIS is how I find out we lost David Johansen… Gotta jam out to some New York Dolls now…
The Venn diagram of people who like to trot out psych diagnoses as insults against public figures that they don’t like and people who fall for the most obvious frauds in the world is a big obnoxious circle.
Uma update: Sadly, I failed to get Manhattan Cafe with her spotlight gacha. I need the caffeinated crazy cat lover, dammit…
Saw the braintrust of BookTok defending “consensual non-consent fantasies”, which is the biggest indicator that words that don’t involve naughty bits mashing against each other have literally no meaning to that crowd. Also, I think there’s another singular word for what it is you’re horny for, and uh… it’s not a good thing. And if that’s your idea of a “fantasy”, you’re basically up there with “kid who wants to shoot up his school cuz he’s mad at the world”, only with infinitely more self-hate. Put down the romantasy book du jour, ideally into a nice recycling bin so it can be repulped & turned into something GOOD, and go get some fucking counselling.
Perhaps the surest sign of adulthood is loving the chest freezer that I got for Christmas out of everything.
Currently on the hunt for copycat recipes for Au Bon Pain's corn chowder and the sauce that comes with Trader Joe's frozen tteokbokki (cuz it’s especially good with chicken & I'm the only person who likes the rice cakes).
Magica Exedra update! I somehow managed to get both the regular and the Christmas versions of Ren, one of my favorite MagiReco characters, in one pull. Feels like they saw my duddy luck over in Umamusume & decided to do me a favor. Doubly so after they tricked me with what I thought was a 3-star pull only to switch it up and FINALLY give me Alina.
All hail the maddest of Mad Artists!
Right now, AEW's “sickos” are exploding into a complete mess of politics-as-team-sports freakouts, conspiracy theories, and blaming any & every practicing Jewish person for the crimes of Israel cuz their beloved greasy cowboy lost his belt to a large scary POC (although I don’t think Joe was subjected to the same staged hate crimes as Swerve), who then lost it to that eeeeeeeeevil Jewish guy whose cheap shot promos always make them disproportionately mad. These are the same people who have been painting everyone who likes anyone at/works with/worked at some point for WWE (and sometimes TNA now) as an immoral MAGA drone and soulless hypocrite (except for Sami, who gets a pass for reasons both complicated & deeply stupid). It’s all so… autistic. Stunted, too, given how most of them are people in their damn 30s & 40s but refuse to think of anything having more nuance than “A equals good, B equals evil” like especially awful children. That's the problem with curating that audience & that audience only - unless you can get enough of a parasocial/cult leader bond with them, they'll turn on their “favorites” at the slightest point for the most ridiculous reasons. My sympathies to MJF & his wife, cuz I can 100% guess what their social media mentions are gonna be like for the foreseeable future, and a hardy point-and-laugh at Tony Khan, who is no doubt getting the same shit from his erstwhile attack dogs. He can't blame this one on Fed bots, no matter how hard he tries.
I think another thing that’s affecting my drive to write is that I really hate how, at least online, everyone thinks basic character psychology & development is some new, radical thing, especially if the works do so in the most “I'm not writing from experience or attempts to relate, I'm writing from Wikihow & TV Tropes summaries” ways. I might not be GOOD at it, but I hope to at least avoid that kind of shit & the audience that thinks it's anything but tiresome & insincere.
KaiserBeamz posted the epic length finale to the Merrie History of Looney Tunes series, and it is well worth the wait. Also, between this series (especially this entry) and a recent Second Wind video on the WB/Netflix kerfuffle, I’m starting to wonder if the original Warner lot was built over a graveyard or something, cuz every merger & partnership they’ve had since the 50s has been cursed in some way.
Still not sure what to think about the Yoroiden Samurai Troopers/Ronin Warriors remake. It certainly looks interesting, and as cool as the CGI armor looks, it also feels too… slick? Modern? In the off-chance it winds up where I can see it & it's subbed by actual humans, I’ll still give it a shot.
Can somebody jangle some keys so all of the people taking criticism of a bad show's bad finale as a personal insult forget it ever existed? I mean, that is the level of attention span both the show & its platform deliberately cultivated with them.
Man, it's a bummer that the dominant reaction to TRAJQ is still, “Yeah, the second season had better stories & a consistent style & was made by people who could stick to deadlines, but Jessie stopped being a blandly perfect girlboss good at literally everything who’s regularly praised by everyone else every time she does anything, so that makes it trash.” It's. Not. Her. Goddamn. Show. Not her name in the damn title. Go watch Kim Possible if you want that kind of character (only with the writing & performance that show just how unlikably arrogant that kind of “role model perfect at everything” would be, even if completely by accident). That kind of stuff was tiresome in the 90s and probably explains why I like walking disaster area heroines so much more. We need more Marikas & Manas - hell, more Golshis - before we get yet another “our female lead/only recurring girl HAS to be hypercompetent & flawless or else it'll be sexist” character. Someone actually INTERESTING, y'know? Why is it that “some things never change” always refers to dumb shit like this? I generally dislike the whole “Mary Sue” argument, but 1st season Jessie fit that mold to a T, thus I never got why so many people thought she was super compelling. At least the guys were allowed to have flaws, and flaws are where characters get to thrive & be interesting instead of just exist.
It’s only now that I’ve realized that I had said this was going live on the 3rd instead of the 4th. Look, the holiday interregnum week makes it easy to forget which day is which. Sorry.
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So… yeah, that’s the year-end ramble. I hope it wasn’t too much of a slog, and if it was, please accept this cat photo as an apology.
A tiny fuzzy dragon guarding his yarn hoard. Well, one of the yarn hoards around here.
See you all next time, maybe in a week, maybe not. We’ll just have to see.
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