Happy New Year, everyone! I know 2025 wasn't...great, for a lot of reasons. And I know that the whole concept of a new year being some momentous turning point is largely manufactured with nothing to really back it up, but the only way to really go is forward. So, if 2025 has left you damaged, try your best to keep pushing on, and leave as much of that unpleasantness behind you as you can, even if it's only a little.

Well, we're coming up on the end of 2025, and what an ending it's proving to be, on my end. My wife and I got back home yesterday, threading the needle between closures of the Mackinac Bridge: one due to an, er...incident that thankfully was resolved safely, and the other due to weather. The weather-related incident is ongoing; it rolled in a few hours after we got home, and dumped over two feet of snow in less than 24 hours, with high winds making for some pretty high drifts.

It's a very busy time of year at my job, and the main thing getting me through it is the fact that we finally rid ourselves of the most toxic member of the staff. Over the past year and a half, this guy--let's call him Chungus, because seriously fuck this guy--has stuck around despite making the lives of everyone else in the office miserable.

Sometimes, you run into a game with a title that just doesn't quite make sense. A lot of these are foreign games using English words, and maybe something got lost in translation. See: Infinite Undiscovery, Under Night In-Birth, or Chaos Zero Nightmare for a more recent example. But every so often you'll get one from a Western developer where they clearly didn't think things through.

I don't normally give the word of the day away in the title of the post, but most of this story is going to be so convoluted, I thought at least some part of it should be straightforward. So, Thanksgiving is a few days past at this point, and my cat has barely eaten since then. Like, she saw us preparing all these different and extravagant types of food in large quantities, looked at the food she had been eating--quite contentedly I might add--for awhile up until that point, and decided, "No.

It's been a busy few weeks, between traveling, seeing old friends, and being short-staffed at work in between all that. But it's finally a weekend where I don't have anything going on, and we finally had our first snowfall of the year, so I figured this was a good opportunity to get another entry out. I say "finally" about our first snowfall in early November, because according to people who grew up where I currently live, there used to be snow on the ground before Halloween.

I recently attended a presentation by author, Sue Harrison, where she talked about her journey to becoming a writer. She genuinely seems like a delightful person, and her personal story was an uplifting one. But when she mentioned that she has difficulty remembering faces--to the extent that the first draft of one of her books had virtually no facial descriptions of the characters--I realized I knew the technical term for that.

A rhetorical question, really; the answer is yes, but it's generally harder to accomplish. Today's word feels like an apt descriptor of...well, a lot of what's going on lately, if you stretch it a little. purulent, adj. - filled with, or oozing pus Learned from: Cronos: The New Dawn (PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch 2, Playstation 5, XBox Series X/S) Developed by Bloober Team…

Earlier today, my wife and I headed out to her folks' place to spend part of the afternoon helping her father harvest grapes, which we will later also help him crush to turn into wine. Somewhere, there's a photo of me grinning like a maniac, with my arms stained red damn near up to my elbows, like I just murdered somebody.

Recently, Merriam Webster shared a post about words you almost always seem used in pairs. Hem and haw; hither and yon (or hither and tither); pomp and circumstance, etc. Granted, it often only applies to one of the pairing, like "tither," or "pomp," since it's pretty easy to find standalone usages of "hither" and "circumstance." One of the other pairings brings us to today's word.

Well, as everyone and their grandmother knows, Hollow Knight: Silksong finally dropped this week. I haven't started playing it yet, because there are other games that had release dates set for around this time (before the big announcement overshadowed everything), and I feel they deserve attention too. Currently, I'm playing Cronos: The New Dawn, but before that came out, I was actually playing another metroidvania that also released this year.

I'm reading a book right now about how a lot of the discoveries and inventions in math and science that are traditionally attributed to the ancient Greeks might very well have actually come from other parts of the world. It's thought-provoking stuff, and the book's called Lost Discoveries by Dick Teresi, if you're curious. But I'm on a section about Mesopotamia right now which brought to mind today's word.

We're currently undergoing a remodel where I work, and it's...not really going as planned. They just got all of the offices usable again, a week and a half behind schedule, the new desks they put in take up like 75% of the floor space, and one--and only one--of the offices has carpet that looks like dirty, bare concrete. It's not mine, but I really have to wonder if the CEO just doesn't like that particular person or something.

It's been a weird week when it comes to entertainment. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert got cancelled for "financial reasons," which is a weird way of spelling "fear of retribution from a petty tyrant." But then, mere days later, the same company renewed South Park for several seasons, and the first thing the creators did was spend an entire episode mercilessly mocking the toddler-king.

You might be expecting me to be talking about a horror game today, with a title like that, but nope. Bit of a story behind what brought this word to mind: So, my wife and I went to see the fireworks downtown last week. Our city is situated on a lake, so we went down to the lower harbor and found a spot to sit right by the water while we waited for it to get dark.

2025 has been an absolutely incredible year for games so far, which makes for a nice high point to distract us from, well...everything else. But the year's only half-over, and we've already had Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (my presumptive GOTY, unless something else really floors me), Look Outside (a fantastic pixel art cosmic horror game), Blue Prince (an architectural roguelike, of all things), and the very underrated…