So 2025 is almost over and i wanted to make something to honor it. So i had stolen a format from one irishman and will tell you about a bunch of stuff i liked during this year. Not only stuff that had been released this year, also stuff that i had <played/watched/listened/experienced/discovered> during this year

And that last sentence i put there for a reason, because i really had been catching up with “good stuff” this year. So here is a list of things i liked in no particular order

# Neon Genesis Evangelion

Congratulations!

You know this piece of media after which you get in the shower for an hour just to think about: “Why we still here? Just to suffer? WTF is wrong with my life? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”?

Well i will not invent the wheel by saying that i had been sitting in my shower for an hour while thinking: “Why we still here? Just to suffer? WTF is wrong with my life? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

I hadn’t been as depressed as after watching Eva’s original ending in a while, and then i watched the movie and the original ending is still my preferred ending

Evangelion is goddamn crazy, i hadn’t got what the hell was happening, but it was rather obvious to me that this was the greatest thing 90s anime industry had created. And thinking of what it had became made me even more depressed, because i am not sure how to feel about knowing full fact that Evangelion is the most popular collaboration material in Japan and it is a great anime but damn Eva’s collabs are the definition of saying How? before Should I?

I do not see any sense in describing how great Eva is. There is more that enough people who already did it, but i recommend not touching their analysis if you hadn’t seen the series before. I just must recommend taking your time and watch the series by yourself, in silence, give yourself a couple moments in between episodes just to think. And also this is the thing to be in proper mood before watching, not quite depressed, but definitely far from your best point in life

# Fantastic Four by Ryan North

I never liked Fantastic Four that much, i knew they existed, knew they were important, but never really got em. As i started getting into Marvel comics i of course started with Spider-man, hadn’t liked reading Spider-man that much. I hadn’t liked the format of the modern comic book. You get an issue per month and it is one sixth of the full arc. On paper sounds good, bigger and more complex stories give a way better stories right? The problem with this format is that there are always 6 issues per arc, and this format sucks. Because now any short 2 issue story will get prolonged to 6 issues because “we need to sell the volumes”. It sucks. So i was in search for more compact and better written stories and some guy on the net recommended North’s run of FF

And thanks to this guy, because it is currently my favorite comics and FF became my favorite comic. So for the basics let me explain a thing for people who know Marvel Universe only by Marvel movies — most likely modern comic’s status quo is long far from the status quo you know. X-Men already dumped through 5 full scale really impactful genocides of the nation. Avengers had changed their cast almost every 5 years since release. Spider-man is depressed, because he had sold his marridge to satan. And Fantastic Four is now not just Four people, it is a whole family with 5 adults, 4 children and that one uncle

I deeply adore everybody in this comic. I loved how Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben play off each other. I loved how Alicia is practically fifth member of the teams with less then no superpowers. I loved shenanigans Franklin, Valeria, Jo and Nicki got themselves into. I adore how wholesome their family is

Also i cannot praise Ryan North’s writing enough. I already known this guy from his “How to…” book duology, so i couldn’t expect a better guy to write a story about a group of scientists getting into science adventures. This guy had introduced me to a bunch of concepts i could’ve never get to know otherwise. His FF is not a superhero book, it is a high-concept science fiction series main cast of which wears spandex. Every new issue works with new concept. You can go from future predicting China brain to sentient dinosaur universe in a span of one volume. It is the exact mix of craziness and sincerity i missed in Doctor Who since Series 10

As a whole i hadn’t read all of this series yet(due to me being generally against modern trend of binging every piece of media you got), but i can be sure that North wouldn’t disappoint me with it

# Hundreds of Beavers

Had you ever seen a movie that is definitely shot on a budget of a six-pack of good beer and some diy costumes? Hundreds of Beavers is exactly this movie, and it wears it’s low budget proudly on it’s sleeve

The protagonist of this movie goes from a naked looser with nothing to his pocket to a guy abusing the mechanics of the world to build traps and scheme to get some food and sell for some tools

It is a batshit insane movie that is at the same time: a silent comedy, a video game let’s play, the stupidest excuse to wear a bunch of mascot costumes and it had a scene of hundreds of beavers of the forest combining into one big beaver mech

It is the movie you need to watch with some good company

# Umurangi Generation

I am not a big fan of making photos, but after i watched Evangelion and seen that there was a game that can be described only as: “Punk teens living in New Zealand during a Kaiju induced disaster that government cannot handle”

So of course i tried it, and i loved it

This game’s camera is currently my favorite in-game camera of all time, because it allows the right balance of film photo tactility, freedom of expression and simplicity. As a result of this game i got a whole bunch of cool photos for my desktop wallpapers. And the world of this game was a bit of continuation of my Evangelion induced depressive spiral on the state of humankind :)

The story goes like this: you are punk and your mates are punks, and you cannot do anything to save the world so you have time that one last time. You document how this disaster slowly but surely unveils into the full on destruction of civilization and civility itself, how rich of this world destroy society even more than Kaiju does, how much of this now inevitable tragedy being turned into the commercialized product of mass media about heroes saving the world, meanwhile you can only run around the town, do some shots and make some buck from selling this photos. But the question is who will need this money if the world had ended

# Novocaine

I like a good movie with a gimmick. A single watch through experience that you can watch and remember only the gimmick. This movie is exactly this type of movie. I also like then superpowers have consequences. So what if the gimmick movie got a gimmick there superpower has a logical consequence? We get this film

A guy named Nate doesn’t feel pain, any pain and you’ll be surprised how much of our tactile perception is pain. So if Nate gets hurt in any way from a papercut to getting a third degree burn, he’ll not feel it, but he will definitely die if he does not treat it in any way

It is a fun R rated movie for an evening to spare, stupid, predictable, but pretty good in choreography and ingenuity in fight scenes, it uses almost every potential to use it’s gimmick

# Luke Humphris’s channel

We are basically torturing an elder god…

This guy had became my favorite story teller from YouTube. His shorts are the exact vibe of comfort i needed at the moment. He mixes together things that shouldn’t be comfortable and makes them feel nice. Like post-apocalypse in which you can be sure that the civilization is dead, but humanity and goodness is not. Or getting into the unknown dimension in-between reality itself and seeing stuff that will for sure fuck you up, but if you know what you are doing you’ll be fine, even get back home

After each of this things i just like to think about life

# Bayonetta

I feel like a fucking celebrity in this town!

This quote is the exact sentence to describe how it feels to play this game. It is a crazy, absurd, sexy, stylish, cool, extravagant and a bunch of other words that can be made up to describe this game

Seriously in which game you can have a scene in which the main character does a pole dance to reverse time or use four guns at the same time: two are wielded normally and two are her fucking heels

Seriously this game is full on farce, more specific term here might be camp — aesthetics and theatricality over common sense and realism. In this type of art absurd, grotesque, over the top acting and vulgarity. And Bayonetta is the campiest game you can currently play. Each character dresses like they are having a shoot for the cover in some fashion magazine. Angels look in the Biblically accurate ways combined with greek sculptures and then you break through their facade of divinity you see the Gigeresque monstrosity they really are. The city of Vingrid seems like the mix of whole European architecture with heavy influence of Italy and occultism. And this whole stylistic and aesthetical mess gives us character of every place and person you’ll see on your journey

And this campiness also gives us humor. Bayonetta is the coolest heroine in gaming history and the bitch knows it. Her sexuality and confidence is amazing and it is hard not to laugh on it. She seems to physically incapable to not strike poses or even make a step like a normal person. And this stupid vulgarity works, and it doesn’t ruin her character. She is a real character, she got autonomy many modern characters lack. She got a goal, a motive and choices. Even if she got a very irritating trope of being a chosen one, but in this case it works because of all the camp. You cannot believe into the existence of this woman and this is the point

And the gameplay is fire too, it is all about the rhythm of ballet-like combat and unstoppable action and even QTE-s don’t feel like QTE-s. It feels like the most empowering combat system to ever exist. It doesn’t need a huge SSS in the corner of the screen to say how stylish you are, you see it with your own eyes: Bayonetta jumps around the arena, shoots everything that moves, summons huge fists and heels, does a breakdance while shooting off her heel guns then she gets surrounded and even has time to pose for a photo after all of this!

It is genuinely the best action game i ever played and i cannot afford making this New Year post into Bayonetta praising post. But i had marathoned the whole franchise and enjoyed it, but first game is still my favorite and i now want to make a simmilar game

# Superman by James Gunn

1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1A! 1! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

There had been an absurd amount of phrase towards this movie, so let’s add a bit of a personal element to it

I like Superman, i had read a bunch of comics about the guy, liked old movies with Reeve, watched a cartoon, but i never actually got the point of the character until i read All-Star Superman. Before that i was as many other people — a Batman fan. Now i genuinely tired of any non-Absolute Batman and love Superman, he is not my favorite superhero but definitely in my own top 5 of all superheros

Then Gunn’s movie got released in Russia(this is an important part because it got unofficially released only two weeks later and i got spoiled a bit) i got my mates and we gone to the cinema. It was a fun experience but it was a bit confusing to them, because let’s be honest James Gunn’s Superman doesn’t do a good job getting people who are more into One Piece and Breaking Bad but hadn’t been interested in superheroics for past 5 years. But it was a fun experience after all, we had a nice conversations about it

I liked the world of this movie, it felt like it had existed for a long time before we saw it and it is a nice feeling i only got before in parody shows like Venture Bros. or The Boys. And it was nice to see a bunch of stuff that hadn’t been ever in life-action suddenly gain meat and bones. Like Krypto or Guy Gardner or Superman’s robots who are definitely lieing about not having a soul

The twist involving Kal’s parents was not a good idea in a long run in my opinion, especially considering that they would be adapting Woman of Tomorrow next and it will not work when Krypton is suddenly a nationalist, harem loving utopia. Still hope it will get retconned by saying that “Oh Lex mingled with translation context a bit, don’t worry Clark your parents are not evil, they just don’t know that polyamory is not considered a normal thing on Earth”

Hypnoglasses are stupid too, David Corenswet’s way of playing Clark Kent persona works well without such a stupid explanation. Well David’s Superman is definitely one of the best we had. He is dorky, charming, fun, optimistic and all other things Superman is. He feels like the <Clark Kent/Kal El/Superman> i’ve read in the Morrison’s comic

Same for the whole cast honestly, they got the best casting for any important and unimportant character this movie had. Rachel Brosnahan’s Lois Lane is the experienced, serious, very much hard to deal with journalist. Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor is definitely the most hateable guy in movie history of 2020s who is not a real guy. Edi Gathegi’s Mr.Terrific is just terrific and i want to see more of this smartass. Even Alan Tudyk’s Gary the robot is fun

And the soundtrack of this thing, it is goddamn marvelous(pun intended). I periodically re-listen to it and i love it every damn time. I love how Planet’s theme sounds like the newspaper press and a news program jingle at the same time. I love Luthorcorps’s theme with it’s guitar riff. I loved “5 Years Time”’s sudden inclusion in the best fight scene of the movie and i loved re-listening to it then my life gets ugly

Goddammit this movie is great, and it is definitely my favorite superhero movie of the year. But not my favorite movie of the year, it is a good movie and i loved it, but it is far from perfect. Hope then Man of Tomorrow releases we’ll get a perfect superhero movie, because it can be, i know it will be one

Also i would like to thank the awesome community of r/Earth25 for making my immersion into this world even more immersive :)

# This picture

I like it. It’s cute

# Mausritter(and non-DnD TTRPGs as a whole)

The mouse kingdoms survive on the edge of collapse. A harsh winter or heartless cat could spell the end for all. The settled mice huddle together, hidden in their settlements in trees and burrows and walls, scraping and saving. A tenuous existence.

But you are not like those settled mice.

It had started as a normal game of Tabletop Roleplaying, i was mastering, as most times. And I hadn’t been prepared at all, which was less than i usually did :|

So i had made-up a basic heist scenario — Get into the house. Steal a bottle of whiskey. GTFO before house owner sees it

Simple scenario innit? But to start it i made up a rat mafia, a Ford-T made out of soviet metal construction set, a smoke grenade under the pillow and also owner of the house was a little guy controlling a huge robot body

Also while other two mice were hiding from this huge robot and it’s shotgun, one of the players filled a bunch of space with darkness, lured the Cat into that darkness and started dodging this Cat like it was goddamn Dark Souls boss. And at the end of this encounter he used a fricking Lego™ Blaster(the one that is specifically didn’t did damage) to kait it to himself and stab it’s eye with a Lego™ Crowbar piece

And it was my average experience with <playing/mastering> any TTRPG i tried that hadn’t been DnD. Seriously if you tried DnD and hadn’t liked playing it i remind you that there is a better way of life, and it is called PLAYING ANOTHER DAMN GAME! HAVE FUN WITH YOUR FRIENDS!!

# Googly eyes

I hadn’t discovered them this year of course, just bought for the first time and started sticking them

This ingenious invention allows humans to make anything inanimate suddenly full of life

After i bought them, everything kinda face looking in the close facility gained eyes: my mic, my webcam, my lamp, my bass speaker, my binder clip can, parents’ robot vacuum, one random pedestrian crossing sign in my town, a presents i prepared for Secret Santa in the media club in the uni, etc. etc

# Ballerina

Merc1: It’s suicide, it’s fucking John Wick!
Merc2: He’s just one guy!

[Both of them get shot]

Sometimes you just need a stupid movie to laugh like a maniac with your mate in a cinema. And this movie had payed homage to legendary gunfight scene from Naked Gun but playing it straight and with flamethrowers

It is a very stupid movie, but with right friends it becomes the best comedy of this year

# 22 frames that always work

Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up

This meme worthy cheat sheet for comic artists created by late and great Wally Wood is definitely one of the things that you see once and cannot unsee in other things, because most of dialog in comics is practically speaking this 22 panels, and they always work well

# Metal Gear Solid

What was she fighting for? What am I fighting for? What are you fighting for?

It’s not the first game by Hideo Kojima, it wasn’t even first Metal Gear, but it was the first properly realized Hideo Kojima Game™

And i still hadn’t finished it :| I got stuck on the REX fight. In my defense i was at the total death count of 140, and 26 of them can be attributed to REX. So let’s not speak about my embracing inability to play 26 year old stealth game, ok?

Storywise this game was fantastic, each boss was great. Except for Ocelot, this ruski bastard made me quit my first attempt because he is goddamn unfair with default PS1 version, and our next duel for my sanity thrown me straight back to Mantis because i had forgotten to save…

I of course had teared up a bit from all the drama, and dropped an F-bomb per each time this game guessed the vibe of our current times. Which is depressing

“War is hell” is definitely not the line that humanity wants to hear repeat itself time and time again, but here we are…

So yea, the whole franchise is stuck in my head thanks to Revengence memes, so after i finish with Solids i will get to it. So next year there maybe going to be a whole bunch of sections there i will say same thing again and again: Kojima is a genius

# Hi-Fi RUSH

Miss Peppermint, please don’t confuse Mister Chai by implying that he is the brains behind the mission.

I waited for this game to properly come out of Denuvo shackles and region lock by Microsoft. And it was worth the wait.

It is an action game with rhythm based combat. But it doesn’t command you to attack on rhythm, it just gives you buffs, and it is nice

Story in this game is not really good or important to what really matters. And the main selling point of this game comedy and music. And the story exist only to drive comedy and music

Comedy in Hi-Fi RUSH is amazing, but characters are only for the comedy. If you try to see any real drama in them it does not work(which had been proven by one specific character). But good that all of the characters are interesting and funny. From the smallest robot courier to the stupidest idiot who you play as. My favorites are of course the living JoJo reference Zanzo, miss accent of the year Korsica and of course the robo-therapist CNMN

And the music here is great. Everything in the game runs in rhythm with music and it feels so great. Every level while playing through i tapped to the rhythm with my foot. And the tracks themselves are great too, i constantly re-listen to the whole album then i need a good bop to listen too

Also a little tip: don’t use the rhythm meter. The world itself is full of rhythm enough and this UI element will only disorient you

# Absolute Wonder Woman

Once upon a time there was a princess

I like good mythic stories. And Absolute Wonder Woman is the best mythic story to be currently published.

The basic premise of the whole Absolute Universe is “What if your heroes hadn’t had their foundation” and with Wonder Woman they delt with it in a pretty simple way: Themyscira an amazons no more, now Diana is the princess of Hell

And it doesn’t really change her character. To be honest Absolute Wonder Woman hadn’t really came far from her main concept. She is still a kind and wise soul with a set of combat skills, magic spells and good old cutting weaponry to use only if peaceful way is no longer an option

And i like this in this version Diana, she is a great character specifically because she can to kill everything and she can, but she has no interest in killing. She is fully autonomous in her choises. She is ready to talk with her enemy, ready to forgive them.

And this is why i think Absolute Univerce has an edge over the mainline one, because in this world, no matter how doomed it seems, true redemption is possible. Thanks for it having an expiration date. In metanarrative sence. Unlike Earth-0, in which any redemption is a temporary event and in 9 out of 10 cases ends in villian getting back to status quo. But with Absolute, i can afford to care about the story, i can be really surprised by it’s twists and turns

So if you wanna get into comics without much of the lore baggage of mainline DC books there is no better option for you than to check out any of the Absolute books, and Wonder Woman was my favorite one and the most rememberable one. Even if it suffers from the curse that is writing for trades that i explicitly said a couple kind words about in my section about FF

# Collective’s channel

Do you wanna know how normal people live in Russia, here are two perfect sources of seeing this, the problem is that both of this channels do not even subtitle their content so you’ll need to learn russian to watch it :|

Collective is more of a mess of ideas that had gotten into heads of the stuff. From “How modern teens live their lives” to “How you’ll get scammed by freelance service centers” to “Terrorists thought i was one of them”, this last one is my favorite one. In short 30 minute film you’ll get a suspenseful story of helicopter pilots saving school children from terrorists. It is the best piece of non-fiction movie making, and it’s a pity that it had only been translated by a goddamn YouTube auto-dubbing

# Raskadrovka’s channel

This one is a way more collected in it’s format. Raskadrovka is a channel about people’s jobs, their personal stories and real purpose of their profession. And people in this story varie from store workers, to truckers, to clowns, to doctors, to even police investigators. This guys make weekly stories about life, and i like them :)

# The Phoenician Scheme

You and your terrorists will provide security service for our party.

My favorite archetype is conmen, especially very well mannered conmen like Ostap Bender or Arcene Lupin. And my favorite director is Wes Anderson. So thing and thing get into the bed, and we get my new favorite movie of Wes Anderson

Zsa-zsa is of course nowhere near close the greatness of Ostap Bender, but he compensates by making his scheme the most absurd and marvelous 6 step plan i had seen in a movie. This guy gift’s his colleagues hand grenades with most calm and casual tone a person can gift somebody a hand grenade.

Also there is as always a stacked cast of people you definitely seen in all the memes and most importantly: a scene of “you look better without glasses” played by Michael Sera

# The Question by Dennis O’Neil

Rorschach sucks.

If you are long enough in the superhero comic space you start liking the main hit characters less and give attention to the guys that hadn’t been as popular or hadn’t had much adaptations or this adaptations were very bad. You know: Booster Gold, Moon Knight, Power Girl, Death’s Head, She-Hulk, and many many more. So i wholeheartedly must say that my favorite superhero of all time is The Question

And now i can hear you questioning: who the hell is Question? The answer is simple, he is pretty much a literally faceless, crazy noir detective with an objectively shitty set of worldviews based on the conspiratorial mindset and pseudo-philosophical works of author(even calling this woman an author is a disgrace for the whole profession) i genuinely hate. The ultimate “Literally me” character. But i fucking love the guy

I first met him in the Pax Americana by Grant Morrison, the Elseworld oneshot parodying Moore’s Watchman. Rorscharh was based around just being the offbrand Question from original Steve Ditko’s comic. Yes the same guy who made Spider-man had later made a true believer in Randian bullshit

So then i got to Dennis O’Niel run of The Question i expected the same deal: a crazy guy doing some psycotic detective work, but now in DC universe freshly rebooted by the Crisis. And i got everything i hadn’t expected. O’Niel had drowned original Question in the lake in the first issue. And then, this 30 something issue run was the most introspective story about slow and steady process of getting to be a better person and gaining faith. Not faith in God of course, but faith in a more philosophical way of life. Zen-Buddhism to be specific

And this amazing road to personal enlightenment is written fantasticly. Because the closest reference i can describe this series is Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov and other classics of literature

The main antagonist of the book doesn’t have a face. It is a city named Hub. And Hub City is a very depressing world way beyond saving. It is full of corruption, racism, violence, fear, and no hope for better tommorow. Unlike Gotham for example, there is no way Hub can be seen as anything but a shithole. And the whole place slowly destroys itself. No matter who is in charge it cannot be saved

Now imagine being a vigilante in here, you want it or not this place is fucked, you can just help it get a bit better, support the right people, but at the end. It is far beyond saving. But you still try

Yea, this thing had resonated with me quite well…

# The Last Lecture of Randy Pausch

Although i will tell you that I have experienced a deathbed conversion… I just bought a Macintosh.

The Last Lecture is a lecture and a sort of epitaph of professor Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University. It is not a depressing lecture, it is actually a very optimistic story about making dreams come true

Randy starts with retelling how he got to live out his childhood dreams and he had the whole list completed. Then he starts talking about how he helped to create the “Dream Fulfillment Factory” and it is such a cool story. I cannot recommend watching this thing enough. I laughed during it, i teared up, i missed a person i never knew. It is a beautiful lecture everybody should see at least once

So here is a link, check it out after reading my post

# Cycling

What can be a better finale for this list than a personal story of a dying man? I’ll sound like a bastard, but how about a personal and wholesome slice-of-life story of a 20 year old man learning how to use a bicycle

Yes, i hadn’t been able to ride a bike for all of my life, it’s not like i hadn’t tried, i tried, just couldn’t do it thanks to a closest bike i could ride being on a dacha of grandma, and as any dacha this one had a traditional curse of rural area’s roads being practically non existent, also bike itself had seen better times and it hadn’t been setted up properly for my 1m 90cm height

So after one of this attempts i had been thinking that it is pretty shameful to not know how to ride a bike. At this point i often hang out with my friend(same friend i had been landing Switch to play Bayo 3 from). We were usually speaking about stuff like politics, life, videogames, internet bullcrap and a bunch of other fun stuff two twenty year old undergrads can speak about

So eventually, while speaking about not seeing sense in having a car in our current years and that bicycles are way better, i said something in a line of “Fuck i am 20 and still cannot ride a bike” so then he said “I can teach you if you want”

And so an August long saga of “Roman is learning how to ride a bike” started. During this time i had gone from being unable to ride for 15 meters without falling to the ground of an old garage complex road while humming King and Jester’s Forester to get into the rhythm of pushing the pedals, to riding through river Volga’s embarkment fairly competently while just getting out of breath every 100 or so meters

Of course for any quick progress you need to pay and i payed by almost breaking my mate’s parent’s bike by stepping on a wheel while falling over after hitting a pole(i was spiraling into a full on tree of events i might get into if i really had broken something in this damn Aist). Also i cut open my jeans’ and knee once while falling, literal minutes after which we met a guy who was searching for an emergency room and seemed to have a concussion, so we escorted him to the closest emergency and then came back home to deal with my knee and jeans…

So yea, it was fun to learn new useful skills :)