2025 in the rear-view

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2025 has been an emotional rollercoaster, high highs, low lows. I am disappointed in myself but I cannot blame the world or people. I always believed your destiny is yours, the choices you make are your responsibility and so you endure and get better. That’s how we roll here, let’s not dwell.

Let’s do a good old top.

Music

Electric Youth and College raise to fame was about producing the music for the movie Drive. We saw those last years the advent of New Retro or Retro Cassettte depending on how you call it. I am of course a big fan. Funny enough, the video game Arc Raiders, or even Stranger Things take those code so it definitely permeated into pop-culture quite strongly. For me, in 2025 it was mostly sad songs about missing someone and you know the drill (songs like Arawa, On My Own).

spotify

Men I Trust is a band I have followed for a very long time. They were high on my bucket list to see in concert, and I finally did. It was disappointing but not entirely surprising. The singer’s vocal range is what it is, and the band couldn’t really elevate the performance beyond that limitation. That said, the live sound and instrumentation were excellent, particularly the guitar and they made very smart choices with their setlist arrangement.

Enno Cheng has been a favorite of mine for quite a while. Her style is a bit more cerebral, but she continues to release consistently great new work.

Coheed and Cambria was my discovery of the year. I’ve found that when I am drawn to Metal, it is usually driven by the melody and the singer’s voice. I found their debut album particularly irresistible. There is a specific tone in certain verses that catches me every time. I couldn’t really find that same magic in their other albums, so I stuck mostly to the first one (and listened to it A LOT).

My Top 100 includes absolute bangers like 58 BPM, Close to You, and Anxious. These tracks are currently too emotionally charged to play, but I know I’ll eventually come back to them.

I also packed in a lot of live music. The Kooks was a standout (understatement), alongside Air, Pulp, LCD Soundsystem, and classical sets at the Hollywood Bowl. My concert habits are all-or-nothing: I often cram multiple shows into a single week, then hibernate for the rest of the year.

Movies and TVs

Past Lives

The best movie I saw in 2025 was certainly Past Lives. It wrecked me, pushed me around. So I went also to see Materialists from the same director. Definitely not as good, the movie lost his point in the middle and then tries hardly at the end to get back to it. It didn’t work for me as hard as the first movie did. Again, I yelled, I cried, it pushed all my buttons.

Then I went to Superman. As the youngster says, the vibes were immaculate. It felt awesome to have a feel good movie with good acting. It is what I needed in the moment. Sinners was also excellent.

For TV shows, I was an avid consumer of Apple+ TV: Platonic, The Studio, Murder Bot, Stick, Your Friends and Neighbors. I watched them all.

john hamm John Hamm is so good

Games

steam

I played a lot of different things this year, but here are the standouts:

I revisited Half-Life: Opposing Force, Day of Defeat, Half-Life 2, and Call Of Duty 1/2 specifically to look at recoil patterns and weapon mechanics. It’s funny to see the evolution of these systems, particularly in the Call of Duty lineage. They didn’t get it right immediately, but hindsight is 20/20.

RoboCop: Rogue City: Along with Thronefall, this was my favorite. It feels “mid” regarding production values, but it has so much heart. The developers perfectly recreated the photography and shots from the original movies. The blend of humor and cinematography is fantastic. It even inspired me to rewatch the Paul Verhoeven movies, which only increased my appreciation for the game. It really highlights how impactful good visual storytelling is in this medium.

Here what I wrote on Robocop to friends:

the guy is slow as fuck, there is a lot of filler quest (beat my score at the firing range, find car violation to ticket them, speak to X then speak to Y, speak to Z then go back to X)
shooting is just fun gore
tldr: its a 2000s FPS
with an ATROCIOUS lighting usage of unreal engine as you may expect, faces are very nice
...
its really a great homage, shot by shot from the movie
iconic

Just so good, straight from the movie, shots by shots. robocop

Sports

I got serious about fitness this year and lost over 10kg. You can actually see how oversized my pants are in the intro picture. I dropped about two jean sizes, so none of my old clothes fit anymore.

My routine consisted mostly of running, swimming, and climbing. I didn’t follow a strict diet. I just started paying attention to calories to better understand the quantities I actually need to eat.

I completed a half-marathon in under two hours, which I’m very happy about. Unfortunately, running is currently on pause due to a lingering injury, but I’ve been swimming a lot to compensate. I use various apps to track my stats. Since I never swam seriously before, it is uncharted territory, and I love the process of learning new techniques.

Books

I had quite a few readings this year.

whohaveneverknownmen

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. This book embodies what I consider the best kind of sci-fi: you remove humanity from the present, strip away the codes and habits we know, put people in a new situation, and see what happens. It is a very bare and raw novel. Information is kept to a minimum, leaving you to wonder. It never really gives you the answers you want, but leaves you questioning yourself instead. It is excellent.

My mom gave me two books by Sandrine Colette. I particularly liked Et Toujours les Forêts. It is also a dystopia with a lot of similarities to the previous book: a narrator who doesn’t know much and has to make it up as they go. It would make a good movie, but it didn’t provoke the same deep questioning in me that I Who Have Never Known Men did.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. This is certainly well-known because of the movie. It is the first book of a trilogy (I am currently reading the second one). If you can visualize the weird ambiance of the film, you will find it in the book, too. That is what it does best: creating a strange vibe where you know something is very off. This tension is perfectly described in the relationship between the protagonists as they slowly become paranoid and lose their minds. But the most interesting part is the heroine’s journey through grief and sorrow. It is a bit of a “trip”, rediscovering loved ones who are gone. It is hard to describe because it is such an intangible feeling, yet it feels so real. Because of this, it is not an easy read.

I also read a bunch of biography (John Romero was very good), history and political books. Maybe for another post.

Goals

I’m craving adventure, but I’m currently stuck in the States due to some visa shenanigans so no international flights for me this year. The US will have to do. The hardest part is being cut off from my family, but I am holding onto the hope that they will be able to come visit me instead.

I have set a few “soft goals” for the year:

I am still crushing it at work (principal btw) so I am trying to dissociate a bit my identity from that. I still code every day and still growing technically in a lot of different fields: Rendering, Audio particularly. Ultimately I want to know every facets of video game making.

Friends

I couldn’t make it without them. I’m always surprised and touched by the quality of my peeps, and grateful that they can endure me. Thank you.

friends Christmas get together

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