News You Can Bruise for 2026 January 19

Review of Things 2025? Yeah, I'll review some things 2025: generally speaking, 2025 sucked. And 2026 doesn't look much better. At least we have art. In 2025 I watched 40 films for the first time and almost half of them were good enough to be recommended on Film Roundup Roundup. Here's my top ten for the year:

1. Paperhouse (1988)
2. Grosse Point Blank (1997)
3. Quick Change (1990)
4. Born Yesterday (1950)
5. Sinners (2025)
6. After Hours (1984)
7. The Iron Sheriff (1957)
8. Minbo: The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (1992)
9. The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
10. Claudine (1974)

Paperhouse isn't the kind of film I usually watch, but it was so creative and such a pleasant surprise that I had to give it the nod.

Games

The Crummy.com Game of the year is my new anti-doomscrolling game, Lost For Swords. It's a real hidden gem of tactical positioning. Apart from that I haven't spent much time playing new games. I'm glad Caves of Qud made it to 1.0 though.

Literature

The Crummy.com Book of the Year is Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe. I'm not wild about the plot but the worldbuilding is amazing and he's so damn good at putting sentences together. I've had the tetralogy on my shelf for a while and will probably read the other two books this year.

Runners-up:

• Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon. Another banger from another master of sentence construction. The detective novel is a perfect match for Pynchon's sensibility and I'm glad he's found it.
• Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, the original novelizations by screenwriter Shigeru Kayama. The Godzilla-worshiping death cult was an interesting idea that didn't make it into the movie.
• Gaming the Iron Curtain by Jaroslav Švelch. This very readable academic work combines two of my top current interests: old computers and surviving a repressive regime.

My accomplishments

I dunno, not a lot, it feels like. I kept the lights on. I sold a Ravy Uvana story, "People of the Consortium of Worlds v. Rax, God of Misery", to Analog, and it was published in the final issue of the year. Two already published Ravy Uvana stories ("Stress Response", and "Meat") appeared in Chinese translation in Science Fiction World.

My procedural work appeared in Output, edited by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort.

I now work full-time at Bookshop.org and in 2025 I worked on a couple big projects, primarily the ebook store and reading system.

Thanks to the deadlines of my writing group I finished three new stories: "The Spare", "The Arcade, The Marble, The Door", and "We're From The Help and We're Here to Government". The Constellation Speedrun is still sitting around waiting for me to get an agent. I've got two new novel ideas but it's a struggle to get anything on the page.