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My friend Ocean wrote a 2025 round up on their blog (check it out here) and I thought that was a nice idea to summarise what I achieved or the fun stuff I did in 2025. It was a pretty up-and-down year for me, but I did manage to do some interesting stuff. I also want to put down on paper (well, a screen? E-paper? Whatever) some stuff that I want to manifest for the coming year. There’s a trend I saw online where people write their ins and outs for the coming year, and I think that it’d be an interesting thing to canonise my ins and outs so that I can come back to them at the end of the year and see how much I stuck to those goals.
I started off 2025 in the UK. I was visiting my family and friends back home for Christmas and New Year, and I stayed there until late January. I went to Wales with my friends and we stayed in an AirB&B that was like, a pub and huge bed and breakfast that had been converted entirely into a place to stay. The vibes there were really cool, we got our very own private pub to hang out in til late at night, it was a fairly short town to the nearby town of Fishguard so we were able to pick up supplies quickly and easily and visit the coast, and all in all a really great trip with friends, even if I caught a dreadful flu.
Other stuff I did this month was visit Sutton Park for a walk with my friends and their dogs, did a pub quiz with friends and came almost dead last (womp womp), drank an unbelievable amount of cocktails at The Victoria during happy hour, and then come home to St Louis where I got to chill for the rest of the month.
What I played:
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February was a quiet month in 2025. I mostly just stayed at home and enjoyed the warm condo with my husband and cats. It was very snowy in St Louis so occasionally I went for a traipse through the snow (my favourite weather). I spent a little bit of time visiting my friend Britney (who used to be my manager at work) at her new house.
What I played:
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During March one of my friends on Discord started a daily photography challenge where a bunch of people in the friend group all tried to take one interesting photograph a day. A few of those photos made it onto my Insta gallery (which you can view here), but there’s still a bunch that haven’t been uploaded anywhere else yet so I may create another gallery page for that March photography challenge some time, that would be fun to look back on I think.
Another cool thing that happened in March was an online friend sent me a complete in box MiniDisc pro deck for free. It’s a Sony MDS-E10 and looks great on the shelf in my TV cabinet where it has lived since. This thing seems to sell at around $200 on ebay so I was extremely grateful for the gift, it was very generous. Otherwise March, like February, was mostly spent financially recovering from the month I spent in the UK, so it was a quiet one.
What I played:
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In April I replayed some of my favourite visual novels, the Zero Escape series. I love the writing in these games, and so when The Hundred Line came out with writing by the same author I had to play it asap. The Hundred Line was pretty cool, but I spent like 40 hours playing it and only got to 12 of the 100(!!!!!!) endings, so I put it down in the end because it would have taken up way, way too much of my time. I got a new gaming handheld, the Ayaneo Pocket S, which I got because the Steam Deck is just too big and heavy for me, and the Pocket S weighs somewhere in between the Switch and Switch Lite, and is powerful enough to emulate Switch games within reason. It was a little more expensive than competitor handhelds like the AYN Odin but the weight and size were the main factors that pushed me to the Pocket S over the alternatives.
The big, big thing that happened in August was that Ru and I finally picked up and moved from St. Louis to Chicago. This, of course, meant leaving my comfy job and the comfy people I had met there behind, which was a little sad. The move was big and exhausting and frankly we still haven’t entirely unpacked everything from it (we moved from 1250sqft to around 850sqft so there just isn’t the room to unpack and store everything anyway), but living in Chicago has been a blast. On the second day of living here I walked from my apartment into downtown chicago, following the lakefront, which took a couple of hours but was really, really nice.
What I played:
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May was more or less an extension of April for me. We moved (and I started The Hundred Line) right at the end of April, so May was a lot of exploration and getting settled and learning about the area around us and life in Chicago. I took a lot of walks and L trains and ate a decent amount of good food at restaraunts in the area.
At the end of May I visited some online friends for the first time, Kathy, Mori and 7666. They have a farm in rural Illinois that has a log cabin. It was a really fun time, and definitely the most rural place I’ve stayed at since moving to the USA. I got to visit a really cool retro store and a Rural King, which was the most american shop I have ever been in by a wide margin.
What I played:
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The biggest thing that happened for me in June was that I started a new job. I’m still at that job right now and it SUCKS. But it was the first job I could get and it’s money in the bank for right now. Otherwise, I went for more walks across the lake front and downtown and locally, explored some new stuff, and had fun in Chicago. I went to a few local thrift stores to see if they had anything interesting but decided not to buy anything until I was back on my feet financially a little more. Also, the US Government decided they want me to prove my marriage is real so my immigration status was up in the air for a little bit there.
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July was the month I redesigned and relaunched this website! I wrote exactly ONE blog post last year (read it here), and then drafted up a few other blog posts but never published them because I was too busy and tired a lot of the time to actually finish them. This post is the first one in months, sorry gang! I’ll try to do more soon!!
Mostly I spent the month working, but I also visited my friends at the farm again and saw the creatures and my friends (who are also creatures) and had a really nice time.
What I played:
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In August I started therapy! I’ve been working with the same therapist since then and it’s been really helpful for me. I had never done therapy before but now I can’t really imagine life without it. I also moved some of my medical appointments to local providers in Chicago, and had a major surgery consult which will change my life once I’m all prepped for the surgery and have a date assigned.
This month I also bought a Japanese region PS2 and a couple of games. I’ve been studying Japanese language for a while so I figured I could get some cheap Japanese language games that are simple and easy to understand, like puzzle games and stuff like that. I also installed a software mod on the PS2 that lets me load games from a hard drive and play online and such, so that I can play my personal non-Japanese games from the hard drive.
What I played:
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Pumpkin Spice season begins!! I love autumn, it’s my favourite season. Realistically the only thing I did in September were go and see a Viagra Boys show at The Salt Shed, which was a really great time, so much fun, and then stayed at the farm again.
What I played:
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October was a great month. My friend Kathy moved to Chicago from the farm and we hung out a lot, did a bar crawl and found our favourite bar, and met a bunch of new people there. I got to explore a lot of the area around her apartment because we hung out together a lot and it was cool to see another part of Chicago that I otherwise wouldn’t have really gone to or explored otherwise. Also, Ru and I visited a local rotary sushi place and it was great! We go there fairly often now and have a loyalty card lol.
What I played:
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In November autumn hit hard and very suddenly. Up until late October/early November all of the trees and stuff had still kept their leaves but suddenly the leaves were falling and it felt very, very seasonal. I decorated a Christmas tree way before the season begins officially, but that was a lot of fun, and we went to Mitsuwa Marketplace and got some tasty food from the food court and went to Kinokuniya and bought some cool Japanese stuff. I got some cute pink laces for my shoes. Kathy hosted a friendsgiving and cooked up a whole thanksgiving dinner and I got to meet some people staying with her from out of town. It was a fun time.
Cybertrucks Witnessed: 1 :(
Turkey Gobbled: Significant quantities
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To be honest, December was a pretty rough month. Ru went into major surgery early in the month and a lot of time was spent helping him with his recovery (he’s doing much better now but still recovering, it’ll take a long time). I got to do some other fun stuff this month, though, like decorating another Christmas tree. Christmas is my favourite time of year each year but I did not feel particularly christmassy this month for maybe the first time in my life. Other than that, I got to each some crazy good Thai food, and some tasty cheesecake. I also went to a new years eve party which was pretty cool.
What I watched:
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A mixed bag of a year. I definitely got to do a lot of stuff this year but a lot of it felt like, maybe, it was just kind of liminal, in between doing other things that are more important and pressing. I had to spend way more money this year than I wanted to, and I’m still recovering financially a year after moving, which really sucks. But on the other hand in 2025 I made a lot of progress as a person. I worked on myself a lot where it was possible to. My depression got really bad toward the end of the year and going into the next year, but now I’m on the other side of that.and feeling like I’m doing much better in myself, more confident and spending time with lots of cool new people.
Ins
Written by Vel and published on March 4th 2026 at 3:30pm GMT-6.
