Monthly Roundup: December 2025

01 Jan, 2026

Ah, December. The month in which Christmas actually starts (why do people start counting from November?) and the month of bangers, fireworks and Detty December (which didn't make much noise this year). I prefer Easter, but I can appreciate the long holidays of Christmas. I ate and drank a lot this month. I also did quite a lot this month, apparently.

Happy New Year, by the way!

What I Did

I went over my goals for 2025: I achieved my major goal of being set free from medical school, and it wasn't a bad year (I didn't have many goals in the first place). After that, I made a checklist of things I want to achieve in 2026. I'm not aiming to achieve every single thing, because this is a longer list than last year's and I'll be hopefully busy, but it's something to work towards.

I don't do New Year's Resolutions; they're useless for me, and it's more helpful to review my goals regularly during the year and see how far I got with my goals. I do plan to be more intentional about things this year.

What I Read

Clockwork Boys, T. Kingfisher

An assassin, a forger, a scholar, and a paladin walk into a bar together. It's not a joke—that's actually what's happening. I haven't finished this either, but I'm interested in seeing what's going to happen.

I've been interested in reading T. Kingfisher's books ever since happening upon her text adventure, Cryptic Stitching, that used the StoryNexus engine Fallen London uses. She's also the artist behind the image below, which you may have come across:

What I Played

• I've reinstalled Good Coffee Great Coffee and I can't wait for the Christmas event to be over so I can use my ad blocker again because the ads after every level are irritating the soul out of me. I liked GCGC and its older sibling, Good Pizza Great Pizza, because the ads were optional, but that doesn't seem to be the case any more.

• Hungry Hearts Diner 2: This series of games should be crowned as my introduction to cosy games. HHD1 had you controlling a Japanese grandma running her diner with her husband. You meet with different customers, learn their preferences, unlock more of their stories when you cook their favourite foods and so on. I loved that you could play offline, so no need to worry about ads. It's been years since I played the first game, and about two or more sequels have come out since then, so I finally decided to pick it up again. So far it's the same experience, but with different stories and a few familiar faces.

What I Listened To

• Everybody Scream, Florence and the Machine.

  • I was excited about a new F+TM album, but I put off listening to it for a while. I eventually got to hearing the whole album while doing chores and I was disappointed.
  • This is majorly my fault: I was expecting the Seven Devils and Pure Feelings Florence, music that's dramatic and orchestral but also equally dramatic with the lyrics. Everybody Scream had much of the drama in its lyrics, but not in its melodies and instrumentation.
  • To be fair, I hadn't listened to Dance Fever, the album prior to this, and maybe if I had I might have tempered my expectations. I didn't like the single, King, from that album, so I didn't bother with it, but it seemed to herald a change in F+TM's sound. I'll give it another listen eventually, and there are songs that stood out for me, but otherwise it was just a big meh.

• How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, F+TM

  • After listening to Everybody Scream and lamenting about how I wanted more songs like Queen of Peace and As Far As I Could Get, I realised that I was an idiot because I hadn't even listened to the album from which those songs came.
  • So I went and listened to HB³ and from start to finish it's a banger. It slows down towards the middle, but even that's not a bad thing. How have I not listened to this sooner?
  • Favourites from the album:
    • How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (I love that I could hear bits of Queen of Peace in this, and it hits even harder because Queen of Peace is right after this in the track list)
    • Queen of Peace
    • Pure Feeling (this is only on the Target deluxe album and not on streaming services, but you can find it on YouTube)
    • Various Storms and Saints
    • As Far As I Could Get (I'm not sure if this is on streaming platforms, but it's on YouTube)
    • What Kind Of Man
    • Long and Lost…I could list the entire album, honestly, that's how much I love it.

• Boney M. Boney M (and sometimes Pentatonix) have always reminded me of Christmas, even with their non-Christmas songs like Ma Baker, Sunny and Daddy Cool. Listen to some Boney M today (I recommend Auld Lang Syne, since I'm writing this and sending this post out on the first day of the new year).

• MY HOUSE, Beyoncé

• Everything is romantic, Charli XCX

What I Watched

• The Secret of NIMH: The director/producer of this film, Don Bluth, used to work for Disney before leaving, and it's obvious in the way this is drawn (he also produced/directed Anastasia). It's a nice watch, and it reminds me of Redwall and other anthropomorphic animal stories (most seem to like using mice, for some reason), but it felt short (at 1 hour and about 24 mins) and incomplete. I have many questions, but this was adapted from a children's book, so maybe it's not that deep.

• Wake Up Dead Man

  • The third instalment in the Knives Out movie series arrived and after watching it, I can confidently ask them to stop here before they ruin it for me. I liked the first movie, and the second was OK, but this was just…meh for me.
  • I think what I dislike most about it is the American politics. We just can't seem to get away from America and its politics.
  • I would have liked to see more of Benoit Blanc, but Father Judd was a great protagonist. I would have liked more impact in the final scene where the theme of grace finally comes full circle, because it just didn't hit for some reason. Maybe the reason I don't like this as much as the first two is the relative lack of Benoit Blanc. It's like reading or watching Holmes/Poirot/Marple without the detectives being actively involved. Agatha Christie has written some books in which Poirot doesn't arrive until much later, but we still got to see him do his thing. We didn't get much of that with this movie.
  • I'm not a film buff, but I liked the way some shots were framed—there's this part where Judd is talking to someone, and he's facing the window. The light hits him such that it's almost as if he has a halo round his head, that was very cool.
  • TLDR: 'Twas nice, but I needed more Benoit Blanc.

• Scream Queens:

  • This has been on my watch list for a very, very long time and I've finally watched all two seasons of this show. I'm not a fan of horror on my TV screen (or in any medium) but this was mostly comedy. Yes, there were still jumpscares and many, many deaths, but it wasn't too gory and all of my fear was whisked away by the constant stupidity of the main cast and the fast-forward button.
  • If you're going to watch it, don't have any expectations of it being serious or making sense, and it will be more fun to watch. Also be warned that it's very unfriendly for family viewing and heavy on sexual references and jokes.
  • I didn't like how everyone kept being mean to Chanel #5 for seemingly no reason at all; it might have been funny in S1 but by S2 the joke had outstayed its welcome, especially because she's so cute.
  • There's no need for a reboot; the quality would definitely drop drastically with every new season.

• Last Holiday: A lovely, funny watch. I will admit to tearing up a few times.

• Death Becomes Her

• Door Mouse

• Only Murders in the Building, S1&2

Interesting Links

• 40 questions to ask yourself every year: I'm going to answer these questions in a post later this month. They look interesting.

• Personal Income Tax Calculator: Since Nigeria's beloved president has decided to introduce his Lagos-building ways to the rest of the country (taxing everything taxable), here is the automatic tax calculator built by our government. How nice of them.

• Choose Your Life. Fiercely: Hauwa isn't just a madwoman, she also writes.

• America’s collapsing consumption is the world’s disenshittification opportunity

• Conversations about AI are different in Asia: If you're deep in the tech space online, you know there's the No-AI camp and there's the pro-AI camp. This seems to be yet another thing that Americans, specifically, seem to think there's no middle ground on. It's different in Asia, and definitely in Nigeria. Although I think we shouldn't outsource creativity and thinking to AI, AI is also a great tool for learning and searching. Always crosscheck whatever generative AI tells you—it's prone to hallucinations, and sometimes the information it gives you may be out of date.

• Afrobeat vs Afrobeats – What’s The Difference?: There is no such thing as afrobeats. When people put all music from Nigeria under the umbrella of afrobeats I want to kick them in the head. They did it with world music and African music (what does world music even mean?), and now they're doing it again.

• Mint Editor: I was happy to discover an alternative to Photopea, but that happiness quickly shrivelled up when I saw how limited Mint is. You can't even crop photos. If you can't do that, what is even the point?

• Size of Life: neal.fun is a great place to waste your time on the Internet. This is a new time-waster/game from the site owner.

• Stop Hacklore!

Other Stuff I'd Like to Share

• I didn't know this, but thanks to TikTok I know now. Ctrl + Bkspc to delete word by word, instead of torturing yourself and going letter by letter. Shift + Ctrl + relevant arrow key to select words in full. You're welcome.

• Earlier this year, I said Lexie Liu was going to be in my top lists of 2025, and she is. COME DANCE is most likely my most played song (I won't know until Last.fm's Playback is out), but she's number 2 on my top artists list (Odumodublvck is number 1. Say what you want about his rapping or his personality, but when he's not singing or rapping over trap and drill beats, he has some great songs).

WAIT!

One quick thing before you go: please fill this form if you can. I'd like to know if I should let every post on this blog end up in reader's emails or if I should just include a list of links to posts I made in the previous month in the monthly roundup. Thanks!

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