December, and 2025 Wrapup!
It’s the end of the year. I wrote all year. I’ve done wrap-ups of my favourite writing of the past year in specific subjects like Game Pile and Story Pile, and there’s a Dev Pile wrapup coming (tomorrow). This then, gets to be the wrapup on all the rest of the writing this year, which means that this is going to be equal parts a directory of 2025 writing I like, and similarly, reflection on what that writing means for me, and will hopefully inform my writing in 2026. We’ll talk more about that in a few days and next year.
This article is necessarily going to be long, but also mostly about recontextualising and reflecting on my own writing. There’s going to be an image after this one to head up the next section and to break up other sections. It’ll look better in context, trust me on this one.
Story Pile: 2025’s Memorables
There’s something to be said for these end-of-year lists. I know that as the year peters out, there’s a perhaps prepondernace of material made to be both easy to make and also signify ‘hey, we’re taking a break in December.’
I think that year-end wrapups have a value to them, because it’s good to reflect on your experiences. When I watched, read, or listened to something throughout the year, I know I had an experience at the time, but now, months later, did that experience last? Did that experience leave an impression on me, and what do I remember of it months later?
Then here, let me talk to you about things I remember, that I like, and that I think you might like if you try them out.
Decemberween: Local Streaming
Streaming is, largely, not great as a consumer experience. The promise the service offered, once upon a time, was that you had an enormous searchable TV-like library that, thanks to everything on it being reasonably low-value individually, was all bundled up so you could watch it all, in whatever order you wanted, if you wanted to search it up. Maybe the library was a bit bottomless, but it didn’t matter because if you were paying for the service, you knew that what you wanted was to either browse a category of things like horror movies, or you were here for something specific.
Usually, it seems, that specific thing was Stranger Things, the Eddy Munson Doesn’t Quite Kiss A Boy narrative with other stuff attached.
Continue Reading →Decemberween: Shelf!
These end of year slots always make me feel a little bit weird. I know that really I could just be spending the whole December week talking about how much I love my friends and there’s always going to be someone who gets left out. In particular there are two people who I know I have spoken to almost every single day of this year who are over in another country. The days where we haven’t talked, I can think back and remember a series of whies; October pushes, family visits around Canadian Thanksgiving, Blitzball events. Being written about doesn’t make you more of a friend nor does it mean I haven’t a reason to write about you.
In more than a few cases, I don’t write about my friends because I want to keep things private for them. This is a form of gratitude journalling, a moment to reflect and appreciate friends and the stories of the year.
Shelf is one of my best friends.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Some Games, Some Year
Script and thumbnail below the fold!
Continue Reading →Decemberween: Fox, 2025
Hey, it’s Decemberween and I want to talk about someone I spoke about every single day. I want to talk about the love of my life. I want to talk to the person who I have now been married to for longer than half my life. I wanna talk about Fox, the anxious and grumpy and excitable gremlin and how hard she works and how hard she tries, and how much she’s made my life better. I can’t say this is going to be amazing or anything, like, like this is just a diary of some events and a reflection on how great she is, I can’t promise this is going to be the most interesting piece.
I can hardly believe I’m giving myself performance anxiety over talking about my partner.
Continue Reading →Dev Pile: Crowdfund That?
Last week I talked about the way I was going to revise the game Crowdfund This!, with an intention to present a print-and-play of that revision. This was part of a reflective project, to consider the way I’d let one of my old games lie fallow, despite wanting to improve it. This month, I resolved to get to work on making a new version that could be available, even if only as a print-and-play version.
I have at this point the – and I’m going to use a term of craft here – the content of the game, Crowdfund This! and its structure. Let me explain.
Continue Reading →Decemberween: The 2025 How To Be Covers
Every month throughout the year, I make an article about taking Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition and using a system that is somewhat renowned for being confining and unexpressive, and using it to represent a character who is meant to belong to a different kind of property. I’ve been doing this for a few years now, and every year, I try to present an article where you can just look at the covers, nice and high resolution, clear and visible and not in the middle of a field or at an odd angle. It’s also a chance to reflect on the How to Be Category.
Here’s 2025!
Continue Reading →Story Pile: Annabelle’s Wish
Annabelle’s Wish is a 1997 Direct-To-VHS animated Christmas Film from the Ralph Edwards Production company, which if you’re a real nerd you might reocgnise as the mind behind the radio-and-TV shows Truth or Consequences and the reality documentary series This Is Your Life. It is not a piece of media noteworthy for immense cultural impact or a relationship to a vitally important text or anything, and I even hazard it’s reasonable to call it genuinely unimpressive.
Nonetheless it caught my attention for two reasons; one, this little TV special level of Christmas animation has an absolutely stuffed voice cast, including Kath Soucie, Clancy Brown, Cloris Leachman, Jerry Van Dyke, Jim Varney and Randy Travis. The other reason, is that this entire video is available on Youtube, for free, in a variety of different rip qualities, and has been for six years, during the period of Youtube’s copyright patrols.
Nobody cares about this thing.
Oh, and since it’s a matter of policy, have a spoiler warning for how I am planning on roughly speaking, spoiling most everything about this one-hour Christmas special, and also, a modest content warning that I’m going to get all cross about America and ableism.
Continue Reading →Decemberween: Heavensrun
I don’t like Star Wars.
I don’t think I need to qualify that very much, it’s just not for me.
Wait, no, hang on, that’s not right. That’s not actually right. I don’t think it’s me that is the problem in my relationship to Star Wars. It’s not that Star Wars failed to appeal to me personally. It’s more that Star Wars, by volume, just isn’t very good. There’s so much of it, and somehow, in defiance of mathematical principles, most of it is below average.
We’re going somewhere with this, bear with me.
Decemberween: Some Podcasts!
I’m kind of self-conscious about how many times a Decemberween post is going to be just ‘Talen watches a lot of Youtube.’ Which I do, no excuses, it’s a byproduct of having two screens for marking. But there are times, I promise, when I am not in front of the Good And Bad Screens, where I am in fact, up on my feet, and walking around, during which time I like listening to long-form audio material that, tragically, because of the state of advertising in this binch of an earth, does qualify as ‘content.’
(This is my greatest beef with The Magnus Archives – a 20 minute podcast episode with 7 minutes of advertising makes me pine for the days of classic radio.)
And thus, some podcasts I’ve started listening to this year, in no particular order:
Continue Reading →Game Pile: A Pile of Free Games
Once upon a time, I imagined the Game Pile as a process of making game reviews out of a huge pile of games that I was working through, one at a time. There was an aim towards Games Journalism in my mind, the idea of integrating into the commercial space that would reward me for engaging with games as often as I could. This idea long since has faded away, but if you go back and look into the history of the Game Pile you’ll find a surprisingly recent number of them offer a verdict as if I’m encouraging you to make smart game purchasing decisions.
Nowadays I think the readers of this blog are not, by any means, hurting for choices for games to play. I think based on the way people talk about games they own, there are a lot of people who have games they’ve never played, and instead the purpose of the Game Pile is to reflect on games as a designer does, to try and connect the ideas in the games to other interesting ideas.
Games are also things for fun. They’re distractions that bring you joy and can fill time. I think of this time of the year as when people are time-rich and money-poor, possibly looking for things to distract themselves. It’s a time I know that I tend to burrow into a longer-form game, maybe a long-form TV show.
To that end, this week’s Game Pile is a bunch of games that you can have, for free, on a variety of platforms. I know that Steam and GoG are not value-neutral platforms, because no platform is value-neutral, and to that end I tried to pick some DOS games and Open Source games as well. In this case, I’m linking to Steam and GoG for things not because those are the best ways to do it, but because those launchers are useful and it might make it easier to not forget the games.
Continue Reading →Decemberween: World Building Stuff!
Throughout this year I have dedicated one slot every month to discussing worldbuilding techniques in the context of constructing fictional narratives. These are not necessarily for games, although my most common material example is the construction of Cobrin’Seil, the D&D world I have in my back shed. I’ve also used it as an opportunity to show you things that I make as supplemental materials, like the truly titanic post on the world and factions of Gyre, my Blades in the Dark setting.
And trust me, there’s more (and worse) on the way if you just want to hear me talk about what I think goes into a D&D setting that’s about pleasing me in particular.
But these posts are not the result of me being a giga brained genius whose cranium swells with overwhelming deep thoughts about the constructions of the world and the material realities of revolutionary nation-states. In fact, I try to approach these things from a position of as little expertise as possible, because what’s important to me is what can make a game fun and what makes success in that game feel satisfying. If everything is ephemeral and there’s no defined boundaries or greater world to impact, I feel like characters don’t belong anywhere and there’s nothing anchoring the details of the fiction to something that I didn’t just come up with, but if the world is so tightly defined that I need to do a book of reading before I can feel like I am entitled to make characters there, then I don’t know if there’s anything interesting to the task.
Therefore, I write about world building trying to centre myself, and the things that interest me. Through doing this I have learned what I like in a world, and what I don’t. Part of learning about this is watching Youtube channels that also like to talk about fantasy worldbuilding, and see what I think of what they say, even if I disagree with them.
Warning: This is overwhelmingly going to feature just some dudes. This is a seam of media where the typical voices are going to be English-speaking white guys. I’d love to have other people in this space I can forward, but I just don’t know any right now. Suggestions welcome.
Continue Reading →Dev Pile: Revising Crowdfund This!
Last week, I suggested that I had gotten better as a designer, and this week I’d like to present to you an example of the process I’m going to go through for addressing and improving one of my earlier designs. The design I selected is a sore point for me because the game is fun to play and I’ve never had it fail with people I love, but I always feel like I’m handing out a bad game. It’s at the point where I don’t sell the game at full price any more.
The game is Crowdfund This!.
Also, this was primarily spoken aloud and then transcribed because my head hurts and my hand hurts so I apologise if I spell things in an American way. Hopefully I come back and fix that.
Continue Reading →Decemberween: The DK Collection
Last year, I did a project where I asked my friend Rachel to imagine she’d taken me to her favorite local video rental store, Scarecrow. While we were there, she handed me 12 movies she wanted me to watch. No context, no demands, just: “Here are 12 things.” I watched one a month and wrote about them as part of an ongoing effort to engage with more media and broaden my view of the world. I know my tastes tend to gravitate toward laser swords and genre fare, and I wouldn’t normally write about racy queer cinema the way she encouraged me to by giving me works in that oeuvre.
In hindsight, I call that project the Positronic Collection. It wasn’t designed to be a set of movies about identity and perception, though that’s what it was, because that’s what Rachel picked. It wasn’t meant to be a series where everyone has a panic attack — though that happened too. The point was she picked whatever and if I found a theme, then I found a theme.
This year, I did the same thing again, but with a much harder genre: music. I asked my friend Decay to give me 12 albums. That’s what this year has been about.
This was easily the hardest writing project I’ve done all year.
Continue Reading →Story Pile: Christmas Eve And Other Stories, by Trans-Siberian Orchestra
There’s this idea floating around in Christmas music circles that the collection of music we hear in the store that we consider the ‘Christmas canon’ is basically anything that happened to a boomer twice. I got that from an old XKCD comic, and I haven’t bothered to verify it. Honestly, I don’t care to. It’s not that important. It describes the idea of a cultural landscape where a body of people – outsized in their impressions on culture – have been able to deform that culture in a way that shows a thumbprint of their lives.
A similar thumbprint, of the era just before the mp3 and ipod revolution, with the music industry of radio labels and multi-platinum recordings, is the ways that the empire’s collapse came after adding two more songs to that canon. The two songs largely seen as ‘millenial’ Christmas songs are Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You and Wham’s Last Christmas.I’m not here to praise those songs, mind you, I do not seek to be an authority on what Christmas should be as someone so far removed from the imperial core snow is an exotic material less common to me than rare earth magnets, but rather that these songs got onto the radio at the end of the time when ‘getting onto the radio’ really mattered.
There’s another track in that same category you might not realize belongs there. I didn’t realise I knew it, until I heard it on this album. I didn’t realise I’d heard it in the background of movies and TV shows, and I didn’t realise that it wasn’t just generic good Christmas music but was instead a single, distinctive track with a name and a plot. It’s Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24 by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, from their album Christmas Eve and Other Stories.
Content Warning: Doc, this is an album of prog-metal Christmas songs. As much as I love the form you will hate the function.
Continue Reading →Decemberween: 2025 Pokemon Teams
I like Pokemon a lot, and I haven’t played any Pokemon games since trying to start Sword and Shield. It’s not that they’re bad, but the style of game they represent are not clicking with me. I don’t have any problem with the JRPG for 4 year olds existing and I don’t think that’s any slight on me, or on them. Anyone who’s seriously wound up about the quality of the PVE games runs the risk of asking themselves if they’re being overly angry about having aged out of a market for a game franchise that again, primarily aims itself at children who are starting school, not parents raising children who are finishing school.
We turned forty, let’s be dignified about it.
Anyway, Pokemon has a competitive season. It has standard sets of rules, and every season of competitive play has a Regulation. The Regulation indicates what Pokemon are available, which usually translates to ‘do we get to play with the busted ones?,’ or, if you’re old like me, ‘The Mewtwo stuff,’ which means despite the absence of any serious release, the greater relationships of match to match introduce new Pokemon that get better or worse, and that means across a whole year of competitive play (and a tiny drop of next year’s seasons), we got to see some really cool stuff.
Continue Reading →Decemberween: ASMRtists
I try to keep my Youtube subscriptions reasonably under control. I know it is something of an everythingamajig in my life. It’s where I put video and audio content to be convenient. It’s where I watch my sports coverage. It’s where I check out trailers for anime and movies that interest me, before I find somewhere to steal them. I’ve even paid for a movie or two on Youtube, a long time ago. It is a place where I think it’s very easy to neglect your hygiene, to have a presence that shapes your normal because you’re thoughtlessly engaging with it.
To that end, I try to unsubscribe from channels I’ve stopped being interested in, even if I’m going to come back to them eventually. It’s an interesting thing to do, too, because when you get down to it you can notice some channels that just went quiet and you missed it because of the gap in time. In ASMR this is feels like a really common thing, too. ASMRtists can be very low-investment creators, and that means that a disruption in their life like (for example), having to move abruptly just transforms your ability to make the media, and that’s it, the show’s over.
I’m also surprised how much my ASMR consumption this year has been repeats. I’ve already spoken about the complicated work of Jimち, who was the centre of some controversy because of basically infidelity, something that really shouldn’t matter to anyone who’s not fucking them, and I’ve watched a lot of Jimち’s stuff this year, but it’s stuff I already knew. Suit fittings, Welsh lessons, a funny Welsh policeman, Harry Dubois – hm, maybe I just like how they present disasters.
That’s not to say it’s been all the repeats, I haven’t quite hit my flop era of ASMR listening, I’m still finding new stuff, I’m still with it. I think my natural resistance to Just Another Pretty White Lady ASMR (which is no shade against any member of the community who is one of those things) has made fewer of the suggestions I’ve tried this year stick.
Content Warning: This post is going to show you a bunch of different ASMRtists, with embedded videos. If you find ASMR style audio to be unsettling or unpleasant, I’d recommend avoiding clicking anything.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Dragonsweeper
Thumbnail and script below the fold!
Continue Reading →Decemberween: Music from 2025!
Every year I make a post that sits in my draft folders all year. Every time I add a new song to my playlists, I come into that thread and add it to this. Then I figure at the end of the year, I’ll look at what got added to my overall collection and just show it off. Also, the following songs have been randomised. I put the URLs of each song into a list, then commented on them from the bottom up.
Ready?
Continue Reading →Dev Pile: Well AM I Better At Making Games?
When talking about reflection on your own process and your own work, there’s a foundational challenge: where you are when you do that reflection. Any person is going to be affected by the situation they’re in. That’s just the nature of existing in a reality full of interactions. Not a lot of room to not be connected to things as a timeless spaceless mind outside of reality, which is obviously what we’d want if we wanted to be truly objective in our analysis of ourselves.
Because of this, reflection on complicated things often needs a system to give you something to handle. I’ve talked about this in the context of reflecting on big life events and personal development — like asking, “Am I a good partner?” or “Am I a good person?” which are both well beyond my scope. I instead used the example of reflecting on improving at playing Magic: The Gathering, which I will make clear, neither makes me a good person or a good partner. In fact there was a point that I in fact did the opposite. At the time, described how one could hypothetically apply this same set of tools to imagine the question: “Am I, Talen Lee, any better at making games?”
Continue Reading →Decemberween: Kate
You are possessed of a terrifying independence and obedience.
Story Pile: Ted Lasso
I have to start this Decemberween Story Pile with an admission that I have some complicated feelings on this one. See, in the purest sense that any normal person with a non-mutant brain can watch Ted Lasso and have a perfectly nice time, especially if you do what you should be doing with every piece of proprietary streaming media and stealing it. Indeed, when I watched this show, it was with one of my best friends, and it was a wonderful experience every time I was able to shut off my mutant brain.
I cannot understate this, this show is really enjoyable and really funny. Right? Is that nice and clear up front? Ted Lasso is an excellently made TV series (thatokayyesIreallykindahate) about watching charming people be sweet and funny at one another.
Occasionally,
soccer is involved.
I don’t intend to spoil anything of the greater narrative. As for content warnings, if you’re considering the show, Ted Lasso is a series where the otherwise prettty light narrative delves into panic attacks and discussions of trauma surrounding a relative’s suicide.
Continue Reading →Decemberween: Bible Study
Have you read the Bible?
I mean actually read it.
Not just done a Bible Study on it or raced through it to get to various goal points. Have you ever sat down to read the book and the text in the book and then use what you’ve read to reflect on the other stuff you’ve read?
It’s a super interesting practice not the least of which because if you do like I did, you’ll discover how easily the Book presents itself as an obvious fiction written by people with different competing ideas, and not in fact the inspired work of a God that knew you before you were born. In fact, it looks kinda like a big book of things that suck.
This year, Fox and I have been listening to a straightforward reading of the Bible semi-nightly. We do this with Joel Reads Bible, where an atheist podcaster does the very simple, straightforward task of reading the Bible, in its context, and then sits with the questions that ask. Questions like ‘hey, isn’t this a blatant contradiction?’ or ‘Hey, why does God tell them to get slaves so often?’
Continue Reading →Decemberween: Free Horror Podcasts!
Remember, Decemberween isn’t just about getting free stuff — it’s about getting good free stuff, it’s about good free stuff! And I have some Good Free Stuff here, for you! Assuming that you, you know, have some kind of podcast listening software you favour, or access to a streaming website, or just have the ability to download a mp3 and connect it to something with audio output. Like, I do know that podcasts aren’t free free, but in a landscape of stuff that’s trying to take your money, podcasts are pretty close to actually free.
October is a load bearing month on this blog. When I dubbed it Dread Month I never imagined it would wind up being such a concentration of my interests. Whenever I want to talk about a horror property — whether it’s scary, unsettling, or tied to serial killers, like that messed up article I wrote about how, you know, I probably am a lot like John Wayne Gacy?? — there’s a part of me that always wants to save it for October. Make no mistake, some things do get saved!
Juuust not this stuff.
This article is not a Critical Deep Dive. It isn’t an analysis of the media that tries to tease out ideas that I found myself grappling with when I watched it or read it. And oh boy, have I had some real tooth-pullers in that vein this year. No, this is just about two pieces of horror media that I partook in that I think are more interesting because of framing devices and which I am enjoying, even if they don’t ‘go anywhere’ or ‘do anything’ with it in the end.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Lex’s Games By Lex Friedman
I am a big advocate for what I consider ‘newspaper’ games. This is because once upon a time, these were games that you’d find this thing that existed that, once upon another time, was called a ‘newspaper.’ There was a page or two dedicated in the back of the newspaper that was otherwise full of boring stuff like who politicsed the best, and who sportsed the best, where you could find things like crossword puzzles, word jumbles, and maybe even a few comics that didn’t make any sense because who checked from day to day to see how Spiderman was getting on. Not me, certainly less so after this bloody year, I’ll tell you what. Oh where was I? Oh yes, the idea of Newspaper Games as a genre. That is, games that largely, you do not have to interact with and which the only way to test your worth at them is to see if they ‘work’ when you double-check yourself.
Absolutely first things after a lengthy introductory paragraph first, here’s a link. This website is free and I like it and I recommend it and I find it fun to engage with. You should absolutely check it out and I think that you’ll enjoy it.
Continue Reading →Decemberween: Jeffiot (And Deep Divey Friends)
This one’s gunna have some spooky video thumbnails in it, but it’s more about someone who talks about horror than someone who’s trying to do you a big spookum. In order to make this a little more palatable as a shared link, though I’m not going to embed one of those videos up front and make sure you have a preview that’s a little more generally accessible.
Anyway, you good? This is going to be about the Youtuber Jeffiot.
Dev Pile: Improvement
How do you get better at things?
How do you get better at things that are really complex?
How do you get better at things that are really complex and your emotions get in the way?
Content Warning: This is going to involve talking about a process of making things, but it’s also going to involve talking about Magic: The Gathering, but you don’t need to understand the game to follow me.
Continue Reading →You Better Believe in Decemberween
Because you’re in one.
Decemberween is this blog’s all-purpose celebration of a season when I think everyone reading this is pretty burned out and would just like some nice stuff. It isn’t specifically a Christmas issue as much as it is the aftermath and surrounding materials of Christmas. Christmas is a specific cultural holiday, but dealing with Christmas is pretty universal if you speak English.
Essentially, I think you’re probably not looking to spend more money on anything, you’re probably going to have a bit more free time than normal, and I want to reflect on what I’ve enjoyed this year. Thus we get Decemberween, a month in which all the posts on this blog are going to be about free things and things that I think are fun or good. No in-depth analysis of horrifying things or that thing I do where I put a really depressing final paragraph on something that’s otherwise pretty interesting!
Continue Reading →Story Pile: Akane-Banashi
Do you know about rakugo?
Chances are good that you might, if you’re a big anime dork or general theatre nerd. Rakugo is a specific form of Japanese theatre, a formalised type of one-person performance where a storyeller relates common, familiar stories, reinvented and redelivered, and told with a standardised set of props and items, within specific limitations. It is an art form formalised beyond almost all western types of theatre, where even forms like opera with specific lyrics and performance rule at least let you choose to some extent where on the stage you’re going to do it. Rakugo, you gotta have your knees on one cushion.
If you think Rakugo is interesting and don’t know much about it, I have a great way for you to learn more about it: You could read the manga Akane-Banashi
Spoiler Warning: I’ll mention spoilers for the first issue of Akane-Banashi.
Content Warning? I Guess? There’s not really much in the way of ‘content warnings’ for this manga, unless you’re very sensitive to some of the more normal building blocks of drama; you have young people confronting old, traditionalist people. There’s also a fairly realistic depiction of sexism in rakugo, which may just be feel bad times.
Continue Reading →November 2025 Wrapup!
Nary a mention of mustaches or nuts, it’s the end of the month that exists on the calendar with all the importance of February but without even its modest capacity for novelty thanks to a weird number of days. That’s it, that’s November and now it’s time to look at all the November articles that you, yes, you, could read, for the low low price of free this is a blog not a store!
