rotating in my mind the concept of getting a womb tat that's a medical diagram of a uterus

This weekend, a few friends embarked on a voyage of romance, adventure, and discovery all from the comfort of our computer rooms. We came together to achieve something that, to my knowledge^[1], has never been achieved before. We experienced the MCCONAUGHAUPS: a two-day marathon of every 00s romantic comedy that starred Matthew McConaughey.

The germ of the idea formed when I read somewhere that Matthew McConaughey, today known for his dramatic roles on the big and small screen, had spent his early stardom almost exclusively in chick flicks. It was, in fact, a conscious attempt to flee this typecasting that led him to refuse further roles as romantic leads beginning around 2010 and eventually through force of will mold his career into what we know today.

Now, I have no particular affection for the man. I would say I hadn't thought about him much at all prior to this event. But I do consider myself quite a fan of the rom-com genre, and having watched only a single one starring him my curiosity was piqued. What does it look like for a man to spend a decade in a genre, and what does it take for him to swear it off completely afterwards? I had to know.

I managed to talk a few friends into joining me, and together we trekked into the unstoppable flood of affable grins and light Texan drawls that was the MCCONAUGHAUPS. And now that it has come to a close, please allow me to present you with the fruits of our excursion: a thoroughly-researched ranking of all six of Matthew McConaughey's 00s rom-com feature films.

1. Tiptoes. A film whose existence is baffling, but not as baffling as the choices that went into making it. This only barely counts as a rom-com to begin with; only the first third of the film and the unwelcome sprinkling of fart jokes through the rest of it are at all comedic, and the rest is a dour drama about a man (McConaughey) who hates himself and his family. Glad I watched this with friends because it would have been unbearable alone.

2. Failure to Launch. A deeply stupid film where one of the running gags is that various animals bite Tripp (McConaughey) and then visibly chuckle to themselves about it because he hasn't yet achieved inner harmony. Portrays him as a layabout loser only to reveal halfway through the film that he was engaged but his fiancée died six years ago(!) and he's been helping to raise her son(!!) ever since. Dragged into watchability by Zooey Deschanel and Kathy Bates moving mountains as secondary characters.

3. Fool's Gold. Barely a rom-com, this is more of an adventure movie with light rom-com elements. Anodyne, overlong, and suffers tremendously from every black character being a rapper-slash-murderer. Other than that, though, it's decent enough.

4. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Silly, schlocky, but at the end of the day pretty fun. Connor (McConaughey) is a huge asshole in a way…

I feel a little less dire about the films of 2025 than I do about the games, but only a little. There are no films I found outright repulsive, which is a win I suppose, although I do feel like I'm still inhabiting the hater spirit in being relatively cool on films that sent people at large into raptures. Sinners was undeniably cool, but it was also unfocused, lacking in the clarity of purpose that's necessary to make a truly excellent film about supernatural horrors. One Battle After Another is principled in a shockingly impressive direction, but doesn't quite land the plane on its ambitions. Wake Up Dead Man is an excellent whodunit, but the writing and characterization around that ends up cartoonish as often as it is profound.

The other sad fact of this year is that there's no film from it that hit me hard enough that I have given it a full five stars. I do try to be conservative about giving out my highest possible rating, but despite that I've watched multiple five-star films each year all the way back through 2021. Worse still, looking back through the films that came out this year and my friends' reactions to them, I don't know if there's anything that's even plausible that I would love wholeheartedly.

This has been a grim year in a lot of ways, and an infertile media landscape is hardly the worst of it. But it's also hard to say that the two are unrelated. How can you separate the systematic evisceration of life through genocide and culture through LLMs from the faltering of art itself? I suppose, if there's a silver lining to be had, it's that this ignites in me the fire to create things of beauty myself. And I can only hope I'm not the the only one.

Film of 2025: Frankenstein

I'm not universally a fan of Guillermo del Toro's work, although I'm always a fan of the way he thinks about and articulates his relationship to art. Frankenstein, though, hit for me in a way that nothing he's made has since Pacific Rim. It thoroughly embodies his philosophies of creation, perhaps because it's about creation. I also can't deny the influence on me from the large volume of quotes and making-of shots that I saw on Tumblr—getting into the artist's head doesn't always help make the art more compelling, but in this case it worked wonders.

The other thing that boosts this to the top spot, of course, is the lack of competition. The only other film that I gave the same rating was Naked Gun, which I do heartily appreciate as a proper comedy that refuses the tyranny of the deadpan. But ultimately the craftsmanship of Frankenstein won out for me over the exuberance of Naked Gun.

It's not lost on me that these two are an adaptation and a remake, as I was bemoaning in my post on games as well. Wake…

This year, I think I'm going to split up my oaties post into two, one for games and one for films. I don't want the posts to be massive, especially since I'm going to continue the tradition I established last year of updating my all-time of-the-year lists along with choosing individual years.

I'll be honest: I'm not feeling great about the state of video games in 2025. I certainly missed some games that might change my opinion here—notable games I didn't get around to that I think I stand a shot of really loving include PEAK, Shadow Labyrinth, Of the Devil, and Kinophobia. I'll mention Despelote as well as a game I watched Eden play most of and thought very highly of. But on the whole, this year leaves a bad taste in my mouth and makes me feel like a hater.

I always try to muster precise and thoughtful critiques of games I don't like, especially when I know other people feel differently, and that often means I'm putting myself in the position of thinking as much about the games I don't like as I do about my favorites. This year, though, it felt like I was endlessly pouring out criticism with only brief intermissions for auditions.

Many people, including numerous friends of mine, loved Blue Prince, Donkey Kong Bananza, and Hades II. I found all three of these flawed in ways that were actively repugnant to my design sensibilities. That's not to say I didn't enjoy them, but the fun I had felt like digesting content, that increasingly refined slurry of choose-three mechanics and the steady drip-drip-drip of unlocks. The failures, on the other hand, were born of deep misunderstandings of the player's perspective-in-the-moment—the very experience whose careful shepherding is what I find most compelling about the very best game design.

I was looking forward to Civilization VII so eagerly I took time off work to play it with Liz. It was so disappointing we abandoned it after two days. Even games I broadly quite liked, like Q-Up and Demonschool, were marred by notable design flaws.

That's not to say there weren't games I enjoyed this year, but looking back at them I'm faced with the horrifying realization that everything I really loved this year was a sequel or a spinoff. Fish Fear Me, Monster Train 2, Elden Ring: Nightreign, Death Stranding 2, and Hollow Knight: Silksong all remix or reinvent their source material to some degree, and I think they're all excellent. But the knowledge that none of them (nor Hades II nor Civilization VII) is fully original haunts me.

Game of 2025: Hollow Knight: Silksong

This is kind of a shoo-in choice, if I'm being honest. There are only three games I gave five stars this year. Nightreign is certainly my most played of the three, and (similar to my reasoning for picking Elden Ring as my game of 2022) exploring…

I'm a bit late to the party, but I was just linked Anthony Moser's poetic and impassioned evisceration of LLMs today and I think anyone who hasn't yet read it should do so. I cosign it as an articulation not just of my position on the subject, but of my emotional stance towards it as well. The techno-cultural nexus that we have recently taken to calling "artificial intelligence" is deeply corrosive, and we must not tolerate it. We must not give it air to breathe. When this all falls to an ignominious end, we must dance on its grave that it may never rise again.

all my friends are disowning me for saying I'm "playing a walklike" every time I go outside

is that if anyone were going to have a doppelganger with a spoonerized name it would be her. she's made multiple films about basically that. so while I'm not claiming that Swilda Tinton exists (although I'm not claiming that she doesn't) I just wanna say: it makes sense. it makes sense!

The first thing you gotta understand about the dead is that even if they manage to cling to the afterlife and retain a sense of themselves, they only have access to one verb, and that verb is "haunt". Without a medium like me who knows how to channel their voice and give them words, breaking all the glass in the kitchen is the only way to get your attention and making your friends foam at the mouth and chant gibberish is their best attempt at speaking to you. It doesn't mean they meant you or Samantha any harm. It's important that you understand that.

When you said who you thought it was haunting you? You were half right. The couple who sold you this house, the husband said his mom died here? Well, that's not strictly true. Turns out, it was his dad. And he has unfinished business that he wants you to deal with.

The second thing you gotta understand about the dead is that they don't really have the same concept of privacy that the living do. Or, it's more accurate to say that they can't. When that haunt a something, they more or less become that thing. Its spirit. Technically, its primary nooperceptual locus. Doesn't matter. Point is, if they're haunting a house, they "see" whatever happens in it. They don't even really understand anymore why that would be a problem. It's not personal, just a side effect of the consciousness shift.

So, when I tell you that your entity, the dad, saw you, um, become... transgender? Transition. Right. When he saw you transition, it's not like he was a living person looking in your window while you changed. He just knows because the walls and floors know. And apparently he didn't know, before you arrived. That that was a thing. That people could just... do that.

So. What he wants you to do is talk to his son and tell him that his mom was actually his dad, and get him to update the headstone. His name is Martin. Which, you know, it's hard for the dead to convey specific words. It's mostly just emotions and imagery, which is what makes my job so interesting. But this came through really strong. "Martin".

He seems pretty confident that his son will be cool about this, especially if someone who gets it talks him through what it means. And if he doesn't? Well, the third thing you gotta understand about the dead is that if you piss them off, they get mean. So let's hope that this guy is just happy to have gained a father from beyond the grave.

I enjoyed Bruno's post about the broad category he describes as "knowledge games" a lot, even if he allows the concepts of "genre" and "mechanic" to remain muddier than I would prefer^[1]. But my biggest takeaway was learning about the term "metroidbrania", which is so ridiculous I find it kind of fascinating. It suggests that "metroidvania" is becoming a term so divorced from any intrinsic semantics that it becomes a purely syntactic signifier.

Some of the games listed as belonging to this purported genre are almost luridly disjoint from anything that is typically implied by the (already broad to the point of near-uselessness) base term "metroidvania". I defy anyone to tell me what Her Story has in common with either Metroid or Castlevania^[2] beyond the fact that it is a video game. Some of the games do involve movement through a virtual space, but that's not the same as the distinctive many-keys-that-fit-many-locks pattern that the term implies.

But the fact that the term is silly isn't as interesting as the way in which its silly. It suggests that injecting a word into "metroidvania" functions as an affix converting it into a term for a genre of video games. It works much the same as adding "-ly" to an adjective to make it an adverb, or to use an example that's much more recent, adding "-gate" to a word to make it indicate a scandal.

As such, I propose that we standardize on this. Let us no longer argue about "roguelike" or "roguelite"; these games are now "looptroidvanias". The dual meaning of puzzle games will haunt us no longer now that we can say with full clarity "metroidbrania" or "tetroidvania". JRPGs are now "statroidganias", platformers are "metroidvaniups", and racing games are "fastroidvanias". Finally, to…

I referred to my trip to the Luis Buñuel film festival as "going to the boonies" one time and now I'm facing an excommunication hearing at the cinema society