Somehow, another year has ended. The Dark Lord Char’Nagh swoops down onto the Earth to try to repair some of the damage we’ve done, but can even that impressive entity combat our stupidity?

Anyway, 2025 has not been my favourite year. It began with the worst depressive episode of my life, which lasted for months, and even once I got through that, I’ve not exactly climbed out of the hole. There’s just always a thing to make it harder. In my personal life and especially in the world at large, there’s just always something to make things harder.

I’d say the most important thing I did this year was finish The Demon of South Gloria, my set of wordsearch puzzles about fighting a demon. I am certain there is an audience for this, though I haven’t exactly struck them yet. I was hoping I’d find that project so successful that it’d make sense to do another set. It hasn’t really done so, but it still could. The reviews I’ve had on it have been nice anyway. So, I’m hoping to make a sequel in 2026 anyway. Two sets of puzzles have maybe twice as much chance of catching on, right? That’s what everybody says, right?

For the first time in my life, I have watched It’s A Wonderful Life. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but it’s pretty good. I’m not a big Christmas person, and I always had a vague sense that it was a Christmas movie, so I never looked into it. But this year it occurred to me that everything I had ever picked up about it from popular culture (“When a bell rings an angel gets its wings”, “It’s in your house and his house”, and other things that have been on the Simpsons, mostly) had nothing to do with Christmas. I started wondering if it was a Christmas movie at all.

It is. I don’t think Jesus ever comes up or anything, and the depiction of angels is less in line with the teachings of Christianity than the pop-culture idea that people can become angels after death (which works in the movie’s favour, honestly). If I cared enough to make criteria for what qualifies as a Christmas movie (I do not, I’ll stick to Halloween for that) this would probably squeak by, but only barely so. You could probably remake this with the Christmas-set scenes being New Years Eve or George’s birthday, but I don’t feel strong enough to argue that, so sure, this is a Christmas movie. But, thankfully, it isn’t a movie about how the protagonist has to learn to love Christmas.

I’ve argued that the point of A Christmas Carol isn’t that Ebeneezer Scrooge learns to love Christmas, it’s that he learns to treat people better, which is something that should hopefully apply year-round. Here, George Bailey doesn’t even learn that much, he already believed it from the beginning. George is instead driven to despair by trying to live that way under the constant pressures of capitalism, and almost kills himself. I guess the message here is “don’t kill yourself because the masses might come together to help you” which is potentially less realistic than the angel coming to rescue him from suicide, but whatever. Everyone coming together selflessly to pitch in and help is literally my favourite ending to stories, so I’m on board.

I will say, it coulda been about half an hour shorter. I say that about ANY movie that exceeds two hours, and I don’t know what you could’ve cut (if I watch it again I’ll keep the snips in mind). But I wouldn’t cut the part where we learn what all the men in town do during the WWTwo. All movies should be required to have a montage of the cast going to war. I know a movie with the theme that “everything will turn out okay” is maybe not the place for it, but if they had killed off a character during that bit, it would have greatly appealed to me.

We’re ending another year and they’ve got this new one coming up tomorrow. Who asked for a new one? Do we even need a new one? Yeesh. The Dark Lord Char’Nagh is flitting around doing his thing, which is nice, but overall I think we could skip this next one and probably nobody would complain too much.

Anyway, I can’t lie to my beloved website: 2024 ends with PDR in doldrums. I’m perpetually exhausted and I want nothing more than a break that doesn’t seem to be coming any time soon. I just don’t know that I have the mental energy to do the things I want to do with my life and I’m acutely aware that I’m just not going to be getting more mental energy as the years tick by. It’s frustrating.

I’ll keep going. I don’t have a choice but to keep going. But I’m so tired.

Hark! Do you hear those trumpets? Why, that’s the sound of the Dark Lord Char’Nagh riding down the mountain to let us know that another year has ended.

It felt like 2023 whizzed by, didn’t it? It just went by so quickly. I know that’s just what happens as one piles years upon years, but I’m not a fan. It feels like I’m forever trying to catch up to the flow of time, but if I take a rest I fall behind. Let’s hope that maybe in 2024 I’m not so overwhelmed.

I don’t know that I have anything else to report right now. Judging from the last two days, I think I’m getting over a light case of food poisoning. I’m not sure what I ate that caused it, but my body has reacted by kicking out as much fluid as it can without me becoming a desiccated husk. But hey, I don’t get ill like that very often, so let’s hope that ending 2023 that way means a fresh start for 2024.

Yesterday morning I spent some time with my family. About fifteen minutes (or more) of this were spent with me getting my hair styled by my four-year-old niece. She was very good at being a stylist, making conversation with her client, which included the following exchange that came as she was working on the top of my head:

Her: “Why is there so much skin on top?”

PDR: “I don’t know.”

Her: “I know. It’s ’cause you’re old.”

She was right, of course, so I wanted this recorded for posterity.