Wrapping Up 2025 & Starting this Blog

First of all, why am I doing this?

I used to have a blog, back in 2005, during the era of blogspots, some years before the Internet peaked and became more centralized around fewer places, before websites became apps and social media took over screen times.

The blog was mostly for sharing random stories, “proto-memes”, or leaving funny challenges to my huge audience of 3 or 4 friends from school. We left each other comments because there was no Like button or emoji reactions. It was also where I had my “front-end” baptism, by just tinkering with markup and stylesheets. It looked so cool, you should have seen it.

Meanwhile, I have been keeping track of most of my media consumption for several years: it started with the classic watchlist .txt file, then IMDb scores (remember when we lost the IMDb message boards? I never got over it), music players with scrobbler and star ratings, and so on.

By starting this blog on my own website, I’ve built a comfortable nest at the edge of the commodified internet to try to kickstart a new era of personal writing while cracking open a few of these stats that I have been sitting on.

So without further ado, here’s a stats-based 2025 retrospective, starting with:

Music!

Last year I dropped the Spotify subscription, so in December I created my own wrapped music page using last.fm:

I was lucky (to live in Berlin and be able) to go see many music artists last year. One of them was the very last live concert from Swans. They’re always loud, a gig where you HAVE to wear earplugs, but always mesmerizing, they take you on a journey. Also very privileged for finally seeing for the first time Autechre doing one of their infamous, mind-bending live sets, even if not at a great venue for sound. William Basinski was funny to see live as a person with a certain demeanor, as a contradiction of the hauntological experience his sound creates. The Flaming Lips played the whole Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and it was the most wholesome show of the year.

I had no idea what to expect from Los Thuthanaka, and their sound echoing at Silent Green initially seemed almost out of place if it wasn’t for the fact they have the biggest drip ever seen and had the energy of an electric blue exotic car playing very loud radio in a parking lot (in the best way imaginable). I have great memories of other shows like Smerz at Betonhalle, Moor Mother and Lonnie Holley preaching at Festsaal Kreuzberg, Ninajirachi throwing a party at Oxi, and others.

The last gig of the year was John Maus, whose shirt was only dry for the first 5 minutes because he basically gave us an entire Beat81 workout session on stage.

Got tickets for CTM later this month, looking forward to get inspired by more of the exciting Berlin music scene and maybe try to channel that into practicing music.

Movies!

Movies have probably been my most consistent hobby for my entire life, and I watched 95 last year. That’s less than previous years, in fact that’s the least in a year since I have a Letterboxd account. Sometimes I write my opinions there and they have a nice page with my stats.

Since I moved to Berlin I always attend a few screenings of the Berlinale International Film Festival, and this time I went to the premieres of Mickey 17, Drømmer, and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Another “big event” for me at the theater was the special 70mm screening One Battle After Another at Delphi Lux.

I’ve been almost ritualistically doing movie wrap-ups for several years, so in a couple of months, after I’ve been able to catch up with all the 2025 movies that I can (i.e. Marty Supreme is not out yet in Germany), I’ll probably share my “best of kino 2025” list and exchange thoughts with friends and other kino opinion havers.

RIP David Lynch.

Books!

I read more books last year than ever in a single year (8), at least as far as I’ve been keeping track. I got lots of really good recommendations. My three favorites have something in common:

• Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
• Mucus in my Pineal Gland by Juliana Huxtable
• Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Managed to get my copy of Rejection signed by Tony Tula at the bookshop presentation, he was as funny as he seemed from his book. Juliana Huxtable is one of my favorite artists, and someone whose DJ sets in Berlin I try to never miss, so it was a bit of a treat to see things from her POV with this experimental book, which also reminisces a lot about that internet era of my generation. James Baldwin… well I really only have seen him on a candle. But I’m glad he didn’t burn his manuscript (apparently a publisher advised him to).

In 2026 I will try to write more about the books I read as I finish them. Meanwhile, Goodreads made a retrospective for me.

Videogames!

As the triple-A videogame industry remains stagnant with generic and formulaic titles, indie games take all that space and flourish more than ever. I try to keep up and find new gems. My 3 favorites of the year were:

• Öoo - Played it on the 1st day of 2026, but that’s still before I posted this. Takes ~2h to complete.
• Silksong - The indie game that broke the internet. I spent many hours in it and made it to Act 3.
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (is it still indie or is it just non-AAA?)

I jumped on the Arc Raiders collective experience and had a great time with it, I get why it’s so popular and acclaimed. This was also around the time I switched back to Linux, and Arc Raiders was a great test (both surpassed expectations).

Revisited a few retro games from childhood like Warioland II, and also discovered a few old gems, like the Super Nintendo adaptation of The Mask — one of my guilty pleasure movies, or Konami’s Biker Mice From Mars, another childhood show remembrance which is actually a cool-ass racing game! The art style from this era of gaming will never age.

For tracking these, I have been logging them on Backloggd and made this list of 2025.

very fast round of personal achievements to wrap it up

• Started a new job — as founding full-stack engineer at a small startup, and already built a lot of cool stuff from scratch. It has been very rewarding, I missed working at small startups!

• New hobby: 3d printing! This is something I’ve been meaning to try for years, and 3d-printers are now finally easy enough to use and maintain, so I bought an entry-level one and got addicted to printing objects. Every time I start doing anything with the printer I get sucked in, it’s obsessive. I had to start also using a system to keep track and plan the prints I want to make.

• Made this new personal website. It’s the 4th time I build one anew. This time I want to keep growing it with whatever ideas come up, and to practice more writing in the open. I still have to add comments!

• Got a German B1 Berufssprachkurs certificate. Even though I don’t need it for work, it was about time I had any certification of speaking german after living in Berlin for years.

• Joined a 16-week reading group (a whole semester?) which I never expected to do because I don’t usually read much, but it was mostly reading and discussing essays on politics, capitalism and education. Met some great folks through this.

• Returned to Linux. Once again I dropped Microslob Windows, not even dual-booting anymore. As an experiment I also got Bloodborne running on my Linux PC with my old save file extracted from the PS4. It runs better than on the console. Since Sony won’t drop a remaster… I’ll drop Sony. Might also drop a tutorial on this.

• Started a D&D Campaign with friends, playing the Curse of Strahd. I am Zothrak Slaughterfang, an orc cleric with a haunted past.

• Played a DJ set at my company’s office party with the alias of DJ 2: Electric Boogaloo.

• Wrote and performed a 5-minute comedy-horror-musical. This one was for you Pauline <3

• Recycled the same character from the musical for my Halloween costume, adding more 3d-printed props, fake blood, and smelly codfish snacks. I actually got an “award” for this one 🥇

… and that’s all I will share here, out in public 🙃 it was a good year for me personally, in spite of all the shit happening in the world, so I’m hoping for a collectively better new year.

As for future blog posts, I will be basically rambling whatever comes to mind, sharing something I learned, engaging in political drivel, praising piracy, coding stuff, showing off more stats, maybe a map, who knows. After reading this whole post you probably get the idea.