Reflecting on 2025
I have never written a yearly roundup, year-in-review, or anything of that sort before. Lack of interest aside, I suspect my undiagnosed ADHD prevents me from enjoying any sort of data collection and organisation as is, especially pertaining to my life. It's already difficult for me to recall events -- thank you, object permanence. How do you make a year-in-review when you can't even remember your year? Of course if I think on it long enough, I'll recall plenty of things, but the act of having to sit there and meditate on it is a skill issue, and chances are I still won't remember plenty of things that I did. If it wasn't for sites like Letterboxd or Steam providing yearly recaps per account, I would really struggle to recollect a number of the things that I've watched or played, regardless of how much I enjoyed them. I like living in the moment, it feels better, it clicks nicer in my head, and I like the freedom of remembering past moments spontaneously rather than out of necessity. Despite all of this, I thought it would be a good exercise to sit down, reflect on what I've done, consumed, and have been grateful for in 2025, and find some prompts and questions to aid in the composition this 2025 review.
Starting off light, easy -- consumption habits of 2025.
Listened
In terms of listening habits, this year was pretty much like any other: filled with songs and artists I've enjoyed for many years, but also some unfamiliar tracks. Bury the Light returns in my Top 5 for yet another year, and Limp Bizkit returns as a strong contender in my top artists. Sometimes I will go weeks, even months, without listening to music regularly. Other times I'll listen to the same song on repeat for days at a time. According to the stats, I hit a 4-day repeat streak in May with Bury the Light. Yikes! A song I particularly enjoyed, that I hadn't listened to before, was Angel by Massive Attack.
| 10,426 minutes | 1,232 songs | 767 artists | 333 genres |
| Top Songs | Top Artists |
|---|---|
| 1. Moby - Lift Me Up | 1. Casey Edwards |
| 2. Casey Edwards - Bury the Light | 2. Moby |
| 3. Imogen Heap - Headlock | 3. Arctic Monkeys |
| 4. Massive Attack - Angel | 4. Limp Bizkit |
| 5. DMC3 OST - DEVILS NEVER CRY | 5. Kasabian |
Here is a little review on an album that I continued to enjoy this past year, reflecting all the reasons why I've liked it for so long. This more than makes up for my laziness in not creating this blog in 2024 and writing a proper piece about the Limp Bizkit concert I went to. 18/07/2024 -- FOREVER IN MY HEART
Spotify Wrapped told me my "listening age" in 2025 was 36 (my husband's was 60 lmao). Quite off my actual age, but judging by my decades-spanning obsession with this album, I suppose I could be an honourary millennial. Chocolate Starfish is the sound of the new millennium misbehaving, and Limp Bizkit's presence was absolutely inescapable during that time. This is an album I always keep circling back to because it is crass, bloated, juvenile, and completely self-aware about it.
Chocolate Starfish works because it understands spectacle as a weapon. The production is massive, every riff is polished, and every hook is engineered to lodge itself in your skull. Fred Durst is obnoxious and performative, constantly teetering between confidence and parody, all while putting his raw emotions on display (and on his sleeve). On one hand, you have the album starting off strong with Hot Dog, a song that uses the word "fuck" 46 times in less than 4 minutes. On the other hand, there is Hold On, buried late in the tracklist. It is perhaps my favourite from the entire album because it briefly drops the bravado in favour of something so sincere. The song is a rare moment of vulnerability that feels earned precisely because it comes from a band so committed to excess. Chocolate Starfish never really asks you to like Fred; it just assumes you'll be listening either way. It's an attitude I've always enjoyed from him, despite the hate he received from critics and his contemporaries in 2000.
This album isn't always profound, and it certainly doesn't pretend to be. I praise it for how accurately it captures the specific cultural temperature of late 90s/early 2000s post-ironic cruelty, and being loud simply because you can be. Fred Durst has said in the past that he was an outsider growing up. It still hits the same nerve it did when I was a tween, which is probably why I keep returning to it. In that sense, it remains a definitive artifact of its era and a piece of art that represents everything wonderful about Limp Bizkit's brand of nu-metal.
Played
| 48 games played | ~1,104.1 hours | 314 achievements | 2,951 screenshots |
By far, the most hours I had on any single game in 2025 was League of Legends, with 400 hours played over the year, or 16.6 days. According to Wasted on LoL, my current League account which I've been using since about 2020(?) or so, has 3,089 hours played as of writing this, in the top ~13.21% worldwide. Big yikes. I played League a surprising amount in 2025, the last time I played that much was probably around 2022/2023. Devil May Cry series had 119.5 hours of playtime, and Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot had 141.7, accounting for a hefty 24% of my total playtime on Steam. It's hard to get an exact number of total time played over the year, since Steam doesn't provide any stats on total hours played yearly, nor is there a good way to calculate non-Steam games. In terms of game variety, this was a very good year for me, and I hope to play the same amount of games or more in 2026.
The top 3 video game genres were hack & slash, dark fantasy, and cyberpunk. My longest playing streak was 21 days in February. Overall this was a great year of gaming for me, and I'm so grateful I got to experience most of these games together with my husband.
My favourite games of 2025 were DMC 3, DMC 5, Deus Ex, Alice: Madness Returns, and DBZ: Kakarot.
Watched
| 38 films | 80 hours in film | 12 series |
I don't really have much to say about my film/series consumption for the past year. It's pretty consistent with the last several years, where I watched 42 films in 2024, 36 in 2023, and 30 in 2022. 2021 was the last year that I truly watched "a lot" of films in a single year; 116 films and 240 hours, to be exact. My first watch of the year was Pitch Perfect on the 7th of January, and my last watch was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 on the 31st of December.
My favourite stand-alone film in 2025 was Dracula (2025) and my favourite series was a tie between It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and rewatching Malcolm in the Middle. Specifically, this was one of the funniest things I watched all year, and also this, and this. Watching and eating have become mutually exclusive in our home, so it just makes more sense to watch an episode in a 20 to 50 minute burst while we're having dinner, rather than a 2 hour film.
Personal Achievements
The big 3 happenings of this year -- getting married, moving apartments, and my husband receiving his degree.
I got married in June, having a small ceremony just with our closest family. In getting married, nothing really changed about our relationship other than it becoming officially recognised by the government. We felt "spiriturally" married for a long time, and had already lived together for over 3 years before getting married. Nevertheless, it always a joy when we remember that we're married, turning to the other to remind them that we are, in fact, married. Or sticking our rings in one anothers face and saying "Look, we're married." Having the extra satisfaction that it's legally binding and official is nice, but at the end of the day it's always most important what you feel in your heart about the other person, and we knew we would get married (and expressed as much to each other) a long time ago.
Our next shared exercise in Adulting in 2025 came in October, when were informed we had to pack our bags and vacate the apartment we had lived in for almost 3 years at that point. It's always a nice reminder that things like this can just happen out of nowhere when you're renting; you have to get comfortable, but not too comfortable. Almost immediately, a desperate race started in trying to find not only an apartment that was suitable for us, but in an area that we significantly preferred to any other. We are so grateful to have found one in a modest amount of time, and hopefully we'll be able to stay here at least as long as we stayed in the previous apartment.
Additionally, after 3 years of hard work, my husband received his diploma and officially graduated this past November. I am so happy for him, and he's truly an amazing example of how someone can achieve anything that they put their mind to. From a once-limited level of education, to rapid self-teaching of concepts and theories that certainly would melt my own mind, he officially holds a Bachelor's degree in a field that is practical, versatile, and challenging. This all culminated in the truest test of his gained knowledge and experience, by means of a very lengthy and in-depth graduation thesis that I'm thankful I got to watch him present. He received the highest possible marks for it, and we were all very proud of him! Both my husband and I received our Bachelor's degrees a little later in life compared to what is usually "expected" of young adults; I got mine in my mid-twenties, and my husband in his late-twenties. It just goes to show that there is no set rule or timeline for how you receive your education and achieve your goals.
To finish off, I'm also so happy and grateful for all the personal goals that my family & parents-in-law have been able to accomplish this year, many of which were a long time coming. I've had many other happy memories that I won't divulge in this post, and I hope this extra good luck that brought the people around me prosperity perseveres into 2026!
End of Year Gratitude Bingo
Hover + click over the bingo squares to reveal my answers!
Do you like this bingo? If you want to use it on your own website (contains no Javascript):
HTML
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<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">Autumn</span>
<span class="question">Your favourite season</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">My smile, my ears, my hands</span>
<span class="question">3 things about your body</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">Immersion blender</span>
<span class="question">A gadget that makes your life easy</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">Clean Elvis by Dan Reeder</span>
<span class="question">A song that turns your mood around</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">Always ineffectively, but at my own pace</span>
<span class="question">Something about how you use your time</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">KitchenAid from the US that doesn't work in Europe, our teal couch, my ageing laptop</span>
<span class="question">3 things in your house</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">My family</span>
<span class="question">What gives you strength in pain</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">My sister</span>
<span class="question">A person</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">By the sea</span>
<span class="question">A place you found blissful</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">Sea urchins between rocks</span>
<span class="question">Something in nature</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">Dhal & Samosa (eaten together!)</span>
<span class="question">Your favourite food this year</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">My husband</span>
<span class="question">What made you laugh recently?</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">HAPPY NEW YEAR!</span>
<span class="question">FREE SPACE</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">My parents and I eating pizza late at night</span>
<span class="question">A favourite childhood memory</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">Fido</span>
<span class="question">Another person or pet</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">My phone</span>
<span class="question">An item you use every day</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">Malcolm in the Middle</span>
<span class="question">A TV show that makes you happy</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">Elizabeth and Her German Garden</span>
<span class="question">A book</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">Our yearly family summer trip</span>
<span class="question">A holiday you love</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">The children playing outside everyday (and annoyingly setting off firecrackers)</span>
<span class="question">What brings you hope</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">Too many things to count, thankfully</span>
<span class="question">What made you smile</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">Peace & slow living</span>
<span class="question">Your favourite thing about where you live</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">Cooking & baking!</span>
<span class="question">A skill that you have</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">Google Pixel 9 Pro</span>
<span class="question">A gift you received</span>
</label>
<label>
<input type="checkbox">
<span class="answer">Our computers didn't decide to die yet</span>
<span class="question">Something about this year</span>
</label>
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Review: Harvest (2024)