2025 was the year I leveled up my TTRPG skills (no pun intended). It started off with my participation in New Game Master Month in February. Kobold Press was a sponsor and had a coupon for the core books so I moved off the free rules and onto the main, published rules. I consumed lots of TTRPG content on YouTube, reddit, and enworld - lots of it focused on being a better GM or a more creative GM. This may have come out already if I published the other end of year blog posts before this one, but TTRPGs ended up eating up a lot of free time and reducing the time I spent on reading, video games, and programming as the year progressed.

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Just like last year, I spent a lot of time listening to the Chillhop seasonal albums. They provided an easy soundtrack to work without any distracting lyrics. That said, there were a few exceptions to that. In February I used Spotify to listen to Bad Bunny’s New Album “Debi tirar más fotos”. In March I made a Cover Songs playlist and spent a good chunk of the month listening to it. I also listened to a lot of Kill Lincoln while prepping for their September concert. When I wasn’t listening to chillhop or those albums, I mostly listened to random music while at work. For some reason, the random radio doesn’t work on the phone app for me, so if I wanted to listen to random music while on my phone, I would listen to my favorites radio. I have a decent amount of tracks so it’s not too repetitious, but it does tend to concentrate the songs I listen to. Also, when I was at work, if I wanted to listen to a whole album, the design of funkwhale biases me towards more recent additions as those appear right on the home screen.

Since I started making my end of the year posts this is the year in which I did the least amount of programming. This was actually slightly done on purpose. When 2024 was ending and 2025 was starting I looked around and realized that I only have a few years until Scarlett is an adult and a handful after that before the twins are adults. I don’t want to get all Cat’s in the Cradle about it, but looking at my own life, I know that even if we maintain the best relationship, the kids will never have as much time to hang as they do now. So I prioritized playing with them - mostly TTRPGs, but also video games and whatever else they wanted to play. Programming is often a solitary pursuit and most of my utilities do what I need them to do anyway. I also spent of a lot of my weekends cooking and baking - again providing for the family.

When 2025 started, I had 2 goals - to get caught up with the October Daye series and to read my Science Fiction and Fantasy magazines more regularly. I was able to finish October Daye, but things fell off a give on the magazine front. I read many, many more October Daye short stories than are listed here. Many of them were not on Goodreads, so I couldn’t track them. As I got to the second half of the year, my reading fell off as I spent a lot of my free time planning for various TTRPG campaigns that I was running. I did just about finish my re-read of my Discworld books. I just have Snuff and Unseen Academicals left, but I wasn’t a huge fan of them so I don’t think I’ll read those.

It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.

Unlike last year I didn’t play any of my narrative games, despite my best intentions. Unlike with my end of the year music post I don’t usually make graphs for my end of the year video game posts, but if I did you would see that games 1-3 were played WAY more than any other other games I played this year. It was truly the year of Against the Storm, Cities: Skylines II, and Balatro. I don’t know too much about what 2025 will bring, but I am sure it’ll at least have a bit more of each of those three games. I would like to actually make a bigger effort to get through my narrative games this year, but I’m not sure how much that desire is worth when I consider that I didn’t play any at all in 2024. As usual, you can enjoy the YouTube video below that will have highlights of the games I played this year along with narration that matches the text below. After that are the images of my Steam Year in Review and, finally, my Top 20 overall games since 2011.

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Overall, this year I listened to tons of Chillhop while at work. Since 99% of Chillhop doesn’t have lyrics, this would allow me to have some background music that wasn’t distracting. As each new Chillhop album was released for the current season, I would listen to it on loop for a while. I also made playlists of all the albums per season that I would listen to as well. Every once in a while I would listen to all my music on random (as I usually do), but this was a year in which I was more focused on listening to newly acquired albums when I wasn’t listening to Chillhop.

At the end of 2023 I had 3283 ebooks and magazines (a change of 234 - a similar gain to last year’s 256). Of those, 2636 were unread (an increase of about 200). I continued to get free issues of The MagPi (Raspberry Pi official magazine) and Hackspace Magazine. Tor.com pulled back on their free ebooks this year. However, Scarlett bought lots of books and I keep all the family’s books together in the same library. At the end of 2024 I had 222 audiobooks (an increase of 25 from last year).