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?

I haven’t posted many Rocket Racer Thoughts in 2024, but that’s not because I haven’t been thinking them, I’ve just had other things I had to do (including doing some minor Rocket Racer work elsewhere on the Internet that will be discussed next year). But I want to get at least one official Bob Farrell post on the site in 2025, so here I go:

A Rocket Racer Video Game Would Be Cool

You start with an open world New York, like in those Spider-Man games that are so popular. It’d be very possible to create a more mission-based setup with each being a well-crafted location for skateboarding, but in this hypothetical I want an open world game. And the thing about those games, I assume, is that it is fun to swing around like Spider-Man. Having to get around in an open world game is tedious if you don’t have a fun way to travel. Well, you know what has been a fun way to get around in a bunch of video games over the years? Skateboarding! And you know who can not just skateboard like normal, but he has a rocket-powered skateboard that lets him go straight up buildings and even fly. That’s fun.

So we have an Open World NYC that you traverse on your rocketboard. It already seems like fun to me (admittedly a man who doesn’t play games like this). But what next? Well, I figure there’s two kinds of currencies in the game: Money and Respect. Money you get by doing missions. There ought to be a wealth of side-quests where you can rob banks or catch bounties or any of the things that Bob usually does when he needs money. Apart from taking care of your family (which would need to at least be mentioned) money could probably be used to finance upgrades to your equipment and get new powers and stuff.

Respect would be about how the public sees you. The more you are respected, the better missions you can be hired for. A bank robbery you can probably do on your own, with no respect, but if you want to get hired for a cool casino heist that pays millions? For that you need to be impressive to potential hirers. And, for the record, I’d make a cheap way to earn respect to be performing stunt moves on your board in view of onlookers. You’re skating down the road and you do a cool flip, someone is gonna be impressed.

Story? I dunno, typical Rocket Racer stuff. There are probably factions (the mob, SHIELD or whatever, stuff like that) and you’re trying to make money by working for them. The more they respect you, the better the jobs they give out. Eventually you have to pick a side and probably betray the mob to work with SHIELD or vice versa. There’s gonna have to be personal stuff involving friends and family. Speed Demon could be a recurring foe. You want more detail than that, hire me? I’ll try to do a flip if that helps.

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.