Good Morning Folks! Long time readers of my blog might remember a reoccurring feature called Mixtape Mondays, and in theory I am hoping to bring it back. Essentially growing up the creation of Mixtapes was very important to me. I would painstakingly spend hours going over specific tracks and dubbing them onto a cassette with my stereo until I had crafted the perfect flow of songs that followed a sequence and more or less fit a theme. I would give them to friends… and attempt to bestow them upon lovers, who so rarely appreciated them. However that was not the important part. The important part was crafting what I felt was the perfect sequence of songs that fit into the album format, and more importantly than anything… looped in a way that made sense to be able to listen to it over and over. Over the course of April 19th, 2021 through May 9th, 2022 I released twenty three of these mixtapes, and you can see the entire archive over on the dedicated page. These all sort of represent a piece of my soul, and if you ever want to know anything about me as a person… they are written clearly in these assemblages.
Erasure Shaped Box
I’ve talked a bit about my romantic interest on this blog a few times with the code word of “Erasure”, this is in large part because she really likes that band. I gave her some hopeless homework some time ago, where I asked her to listen through my mixtapes as a way of understanding me a bit better. Unfortunately she is not the sort of person who really listens to disparate assemblages of music, but instead prefers to listen to the same song over and over until it is worn out… before moving on to the next song. So I set out with a rather hopeless mission, of trying to craft a mixtape that I thought she might like. Turns out she did enjoy it mostly, or at least enjoys some of the songs on it. However it was more thought experiment than anything else. Could I craft a mixtape that I also enjoyed centered around a song from Erasure the band, not the person… and make something I would enjoy listening to. I think at least in the later mission I succeeded because I have been listening to this one quite a bit lately. The catalyst was Chains of Love, and then I worked forward and backwards from that song trying to assemble a sequence that makes sense.
Track List
01 – Lips Like Sugar – Echo and the Bunnymen
02 – Space Age Love Song – A Flock of Seagulls
03 – Why Can’t I Be You? – The Cure
04 – World In My Eyes – Depeche Mode
05 – International Bright Young Thing – Jesus Jones
That brings to a close the first of this new batch of Mixtapes. I have no clue how long I will keep this run going, because I have a ton of things going on in my life right now. However there is something about crafting a Mixtape that I find deeply satisfying. I usually start with 30-40 songs and then whittle it down to just the right blend of 13-15 while trying to perfect a sequence in which they flow together nicely. I was driving home yesterday from a trip to Harbor Freight and heard a song on the radio that I have not heard in years, and I think that is probably going to serve as the nugget for the next mix. I would love for this to regularly return to my blog, but I am never certain how much inspiration I will be able to keep going. As always however you can see the entire sequence of all of my mixtapes over on the archive.
Good Morning Folks! One of the things that I have been trying to do this year is keep better track of the movies that I end up watching. I remember it was a bit of a challenge when I pulled together my 2025 in review post to figure out what exactly I had seen in a calendar year. Even then I realized that I missed a few phenomenal films like Sinners that I would have definitely talked about. My friend “The Librarian” reminded me that Letterboxd is a thing that exists, and also that I apparently have had an account for a very long time. This should not shock me because I tend to sign up for things as soon as they enter my consciousness, and then often times not use them for several years. See also that I signed up for SpaceHey three years before making a single post on it or even configuring my profile. Anyways part of this is that I am also trying to watch more movies overall and start chipping away at the massive backlog of things that I want to watch. Long gone are the weekends when I would rent 20 movies from Video Giant… but that does not mean that I lack the desire to do this thing.
Queens of the Dead – 2025 – 3 Stars
I think we are going to go with a lowest ranking to highest ranking scenario, and as a result we are beginning with Queens of the Dead which I gave 3 stars. I was honestly fairly disappointed with this… I love Zombies, and I love interesting takes on Zombies. Queens of the Dead gave me neither really… it is effectively a combination of Birdcage and The Return of the Living Dead. The film is way more of an “in joke” about drag culture than it is a cohesive zombie film, and the movie quality feels like this was a student project filmed on phones, and not even in a found footage way that would make it interesting. I specifically relate this to Return of the Living Dead instead of Night of the Living Dead, because this is a film that is way more interested in setting up the next punchline than doing anything interesting with the actual zombies. It could have been a much better film, and in theory it makes attempts at social commentary…. but does so in a hamfisted nature like a student play that has to tell you what its point was at the very end. There were some fun moments, and some humorous punchlines… but cohesively it was a bit of a mess.
The Running Man – 2025 – 3.5 Stars
One of the things that the 80s gave us, was a lot of dystopian action films… in truth a shocking number. The 1987 Movie featured Arnold Schwarzenegger and has gone on to influence so many things from the direct one to one copy via the Smash TV Arcade Cabinet, or more subtle influences like the existence of The Purge and Hunger Games. The remake takes things in a different direction, and instead of prisoners attempting to regain their freedom… we have a man who is just trying to get enough cash so that he can pay for medical treatment for his child. It is not a bad film, but it is not a great film either and I gave it 3.5 Stars. It was a fun dystopian romp, and I think it is probably way better than a lot of the negative buzz surrounding it. If you’ve played Cyberpunk 2077… everything is very thematically on point, and given that we find ourselves in a deathmarch towards our own dystopia… there are moments that feel a bit too on the nose. It was worth a watch, but I can’t see returning to watch it a second time.
Predator: Badlands – 2025 – 4 Stars
Another film that I have seen a bunch of negative buzz around is Predator: Badlands. I love the Predator series, and was also a junkie for the various Dark Horse comics adaptations of this shared Aliens/Predator and potentially also Bladerunner universes. I think the big complaint that I have seen is the design of the Yautja from this film, but this seems fine to me especially given that Dek is speccifically described as a “malformed runt”. I am mostly on board with seeing more of this society fleshed out, and I really like the character of Thia. The thing that would have made this movie so much better for me personally is if they did the thing where they shifted from spoken Yautja with subtitles to both characters spending english, and there was a perfect moment to do this transition where Thia applies an “universal translator”. I don’t love spending an entire movie reading subtitles… and for this and this along I docked it a full star so only gave it 4 stars. I had a lot of fun with this movie and would absolutely watch another film with this grouping of characters.
Rental Family – 2025 – 5 Stars
Watch this film if you need a good cry. I am a sucker for Brendan Fraser in pretty much every role he has ever done, and I am so happy to see him back in the active rotation film wise. The premise of this film is so interesting to me, folks being rented to play a role in someone’s life… and the messy rammifications that come from that. Do you actually become that person for them? Does the role ever truly end? I feel for Fraser’s character when the lines start to blur significantly… in part because Fraser also needed people to play a role in his life. This hit me pretty hard because I am someone who has a pretty signficant adopted family, that augments my blood family… and all of them are so much more important to me than just digital folks I will never probably actually meet in the flesh. I have two people that I consider literal siblings… that I have never actually met. I think the whole blending of lines in this film probably hit me harder than it might a lot of people, and I cried… quite a bit at various points during the film. It was such a good cry however… and while I think this will be an emotional sucker punch to most people… I still think it is worth a watch.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple – 2026 – 5 Stars
It is rare that you have a film that comes out and so completely gives the previous film a redemption arc. 28 Years Later was an incomplete film, and having watched The Bone Temple… I understand why. These are essentially two parts of the same film, given that Bone Temple takes place literally seconds after the conclusion of 28 Years Later. I would highly suggest watching them back to back and largely thinking of them as a single complete story. Bone Temple ties up the events of 28 Years Later neatly, but more important than that… ties up the loose bits of the entire series in a pretty little bow. There is a massive payoff at the end of this film for anyone who has been watching along as this series wound its way from days, to weeks, to years. I love zombies, but I have always found this particular rage zombies genre to be interesting… and this film does some deeply intersting things surrounding it. When taken collectively 28 Years Later with both parts is one of the better films I have seen in awhile.
So there you have the films that I watched since this weekend. Do you vehemently disagree with anything I said about these? Is there anything that I really have to watch? Drop me a line below.
The post Temples of Bone appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! It is that time again, time to roll over into a new season, and time to record our massive two-part games of the year show. As we roll into Season 13, we have a minor revision to our lineup and two shows stacked with fifteen games each. As is our tradition, the list was divided into two parts, and the more votes a title got, the later in the show it appeared. It was a great year for gaming, but also a year where we were constantly getting distracted by the next big thing coming down the pipe. While we played a lot of games… we did not necessarily FINISH a lot of games.
Good Morning Folks. I am continuing my 2025 in Review series and this morning talking about one of my guilty pleasures. I watch probably a truly excessive amount of YouTube, and in truth it is less that I am actively watching it and more that it is keeping me company while I do other things. This morning I talk going to talk about some of the channels that I regularly watch pretty much anything that they release. There are certain channels that publish something every single day, and others that release on a weekly schedule… but it is super rare that I do not click through and watch the new videos each time one drops. Other than I will likely talk about a few of the folks from different communities that I watch content for when I am in the mood to consume it.
Trent Holbrook aka Miscast
This is probably my channel of 2025, and has been a lot of why I have been interested in getting into a bunch of more creative endeavors. Trent is a bundle of chaotic creative energy, and I feel like we all need him in our lives. Like Ace is not prone to doing any of the things that Trent does, but is still watching him because he is just too pure and inspiring with the nonsense that he does. Essentially this is MOSTLY a Warhammer and kitbashing channel, but he also dabbles in 3d modeling and has been on this entire crusade to figure out how to create his own blisterpacks for the miniatures he creates. The above episode specifically is surrounding him creating reusable temporary characters for people to drop into existing D&D campaigns. His entire channel is operating in permadeath mode where if he misses posting a day, he is going to delete the entire thing and all of the assets that he has created during that time. As someone who did blogging every single day for three and a half years… I regret to inform him that there will be a time when it does happen and I will miss this spot of brightness on the horizon. In theory his original channel will still exist but obviously because of the pressure of a daily channel he has not posted there in six months.
Tia Weston – The One Dollar House Series
Another channel that has been part of my life for the last year, is the One Dollar House series by a vlogger named Tia Weston. Essentially on August 11th of 2024, she purchased a house for $1 from someone that she knew… and over the next year every Sunday morning she dropped a video talking about whatever had happened that week. This continued until November 2nd when she had effectively wrapped that series and was fully moved into and living in the house. I am not necessarily super into home improvement channels, but there was something compelling about the honest nature of how this was shown. Sure the dollar house thing was a clickbaity title, but the content itself was deeply interesting as it dealt with the ups and downs of having to renovate a house that was in quite honestly some pretty lousy shape when she got it. On November 9th of this year, she bought a second abandoned home and is now working through the process of cleaning it out and renovating it, and I am once again happily tuning in every Sunday morning for htis nonsense.
Laura Kampf
Another channel that I watch pretty much every Sunday morning is that of the self proclaimed Janitor of Los Angeles, Laura Kampf. I think I originally was introduced to her content by Simone Geirtz, which I have been following and watching content from since her shitty robot days. Laura currently is in the middle of renovating a “free” travel trailer from the 70s, but has widely varrying content from picking up trash off the street and making something out of it, to talking about how she makes products that she sells and how she markets them. Just a deeply interesting and creative person, and it pairs nicely with Tia’s House series as I am sitting down on Sunday mornings to edit the two podcasts that I edit every week. While I am eating my breakfast and trying to wake the fuck up, I am listening to these two people and whatever they have gotten up to in the previous week.
Tendo – Daily Thrifting
Tendo is a chaotic mess of a human being and I have been following since the birth of his channel called Duck Duck Blue devoted to a toy store of the same name. That channel was an infectuous mix of the interesting cast of characters working there, frank discussions about stocking and pricing issues of running a toy store, and random creative projects as he attempted to build out different parts of the store. Sadly all of that content is gone, because there was a rather wild sequence of events that led to the store closing, a breakup of Tendo from the person he co-owned the store with, and effectively him becoming a single father as the primary caretaker of their newborn son. Nothing has really been said about ANY of that, but Reid one of the workers in the store released this pretty cool video about the Final 24 Hours of the store. What the Tendo channel now is more than anything is the daily diary of someone trying to take care of a child while stocking multiple vendor malls with merchadise harvested in large part through daily trips to Goodwill and various other thrift stores. I am not sure what it is about this but I find it deeply compelling, snapshot of a day in the life of someone else type content.
Josh Johnson – Tuesday Night Comedy Sets
Josh Johnson might be the single most talented comedian out there right now, full stop. Originally I knew him for his work on The Daily Show as a corespondent, and more recently after the departure of Trevor Noah… he has subbed in as one of the more regular hosts of the show now that they are in this weird no single permanent host kind of mode. Somewhere along that point I stumbled onto his YouTube channel and more specifically his comedy sets once he started the current Flowers Tour that he is on. Most comedians have a set, that they work for awhile, until it becomes stale…. and then move on and create something new. Josh Johnson releases a brand new set every single Tuesday night, as a YouTube premiere event… and it is often times deeply topical and none of it retreads any of the ground he has visited previously. It is wild just how damned creative he is, and how he gives the feeling that what is very obviously a thoroughly polished set… comes off as though he is just talking to the audience. Phenomenally good stuff and if you are not already listening to this each week I highly suggest you tune in.
Sir Gog – Path of Exile Analysis
I am obsessed with Path of Exile. If you have read this blog for any length of time you will know this. One of my favorite content creators in this space is SirGog, and quite honestly I am probably more active in “his” community than I am in any other part of the sphere. There is a specific Global chat channel that his folks use, and I shifted to making that my home ages ago, and never doubted that decision because it tends to be a group of fairly analytical folks who are also extremely helpful. What I like the most about SirGog is his long form videos where he talks about exploring what is happening in the meta of a given league. Rarely are these things that I am necessarily chasing, but I do find it extremely valueable to know what sorts of tech is being used and in what ways. Additionally he does an amazing job of evaluating changes to the game and how it might impact players and more often the economy. All of this is deeply valuable for me when I decide to branch out and start playing that second or third build of a league.
CheckPoint – Loading Ready Run
They are still on holiday hiatus, but I love Loading Ready Run and more specifically Checkpoint. This is a weekly comedy show… and ends up being quite possibly one of the best actual gaming news shows that you can watch. All of the crew are delightful and quite honestly I am pretty much willing to watch anything from them over the years. I don’t necessarily get into the more longform stream content as much, but I do occasionally watch things if something tweaks my spidey senses. I do however watch pretty much every episode of Checkpoint and it often becomes something we reference and talk about each week on the AggroChat podcast because a large number of us do this thing. I am also a big fan of Graham Stark specifically and his solo vidocs that he records when the LRR team is visiting some event . Great group of folks, they all seem delightful, and would love to be friends with them… but I won’t be weird and parasocial about it. LRR specifically is a huge reason why we migrated AggroChat to Kind.social, because it is run by LRR fans who have a deeply compatible set of ethics.
Ashens/NerdCubed Advent Calendars
This one is topical ONLY during the lead up to Christmas but I am going to give it a shout out regardless. It was roughly a decade ago that I stumbled onto this nonsense. I had been following Ashens for awhile and enjoyed his quirky product reviews recorded with a busted brown couch seat as the backdrop. I am even a huge fan of his two Film Projects (Ashens and the Quest for the Game Child, and Ashens and the Polybius Heist). However the capstone of each year is this dumb series where they record effectively dueling Advent Calendars and choose a winner each day. Sometimes there are penalty calendars, other times it is just them making fun of the dumb things that pop out of them. This year was particularly wild because Ashens had a survival calendar that was mostly just a bunch of weapons. Nothing gets me in the holiday spirit quite like tuning in for this nonsense every day, and the videos usually dropped coinciding with my lunch break.
Rogue Hobbies
As I am starting to fall further and further down the Warhammer hobby rabbit hole, another YouTube channel that I really enjoy watching is from Louise Sugden aka Rogue Hobbies. Videos are always charming and I really appreciate the bright and cheerful color schemes that she paints. These are not necessarily the style in which I want to paint things, but I still think they end up really freaking cool. I specifically linked the above video because I thought it was a neat transformation taking an old Mighty Max toy and turning it into something Warhammer themed using Epic scale miniatures. Kind of like Trent this is just a really cool channel to watch that might give you inspirations for other nonsense that you want to do regardless of the hobby that you are into.
Laranity
Now we are going to get into a few general shout outs. Laranity is absolutely my favorite streamer in the Guild Wars 2 space, and any time I need to farm drops I know I am going to be watching her channel. She is delightful, but she also makes a bunch of edited videos that are pretty solid. The above for example is a paid collab by ArenaNet where she taught Annie Fuschia who is mostly known in the World of Warcraft creator space how to play Guild Wars 2. She does a lot of interesting build review type content as well, or various general money making strats on how to get the most out of specific map farms. Its all super pure, and charming. If you were wanting to get into Guild Wars 2 I would probably say her content is your starting space because it straddles that line between pure casual and hardcore, and does a good job of introducing you to some basic concepts to build upon.
Pohx – The Father of Righteous Fire
I also have to get a general shout out to Pohx, who is the father of Righteous Fire in its current form. This build was the build that allowed me to start to enjoy all of the many splendors Path of Exile has to offer, because it is super fucking simple to level and is aggressively tanky at end game. I still play an RF build almost every league, because it gives me a solid base to then branch out and explore whatever weird stuff is happening in the meta with my second and third build of the league. Pohx is so unbelievably patient with the viewers, because there are so many ways you can fuck up a Righteous Fire build and he maintains this painstakingly edited and simple guide site. On top of that he is just a chill dude, who does a thing and does it reliably. I appreciate constants in the digital world.
Strange Aeons – Tumblr Royalty
Something that you probably do not know about me, is that I have a deep and lasting affection for the weird world of Tumblr. I was never as active on it as some, nor did I regularly comment on it… but I have always enjoyed being an outsider looking into that particular fish bowl. When I “doom scroll” something from bed, it is usually weird arts and shit on Tumblr, and I feel better off for doing that instead of Instagram or Facebook. Strange Aeons is super fucking hard to describe, they might post a deep dive into the etimology of Rawr XD, or give us a recouting and tour of the Grover house from SomethingAwful legend. So much of it is dives into the history of the fringe internet that was, that I honestly remember quite well. They also happen to be permanently enshrined in Tumblr Royalty after fighting the Muppet Joker at Dashcon 2.0. This will not be everyone’s cup of tea but I fucking love it.
Sarah Spaceman
Another channel that I have become fond of this year is Sarah Spaceman. Like I cannot give you a rational explanation for why I enjoy her so much. Firstly I am not a sewist, nor do I cosplay, nor am I honestly into most of the shit she seems to be into. However she DID introduce me to Dan Da Dan which I adore now… so I will forever be thankful. Its a channel about the behind the scenes happens with cosplaying and the judging of cosplay at conventions, and also has had this whole side quest recently surrounding the events leading up to the wedding of her and her longtime partner that often gets featured in content. They did this whole wild Game of Thrones meets Zelda thing and it was delightful. I am all for Weirwood Trees with Korok Faces. Anyways her stuff brings me joy and I cannot fully understand why, but also do not care. It is background material to be consumed while I am doing other things.
Toy Federation
Every saturday morning this channel drops a video, and effectively it is a shot and edited show format that is similar to something along the lines of Pawnstars. Toy Federation is vintage toy store in Greer, South Carolina and they are also behind the rather large Retro-Toy Convention in Greenville, South Carolina. Essentially their claim to fame is having a very fair and public process for evaluating the toys and pricing them, essentially giving you half the value in cash and a very “take it or leave it” sort of approach. What they speciallize is complete toys, so it has been interesting as they have delved into the back and shown just how many partial versions of things that they have, and the painful process of waiting for one or two parts to come in the doors so that they can clean it up and put it out on the shelf for someone to buy. I will always have a deep resounding nostalgia for the toys of the 80s and 90s, and specifically the toys that I personally played with. I don’t have the space or the give a fuck to actually collect these toy lines anymore, but I can get my fix by watching others doing it.
So what are your favorite YouTube channels of 2025? What do you put on in the background or what did you happen to stumble across that you think I might be interested in? Drop me a line below.
The post 2025 in Review: YouTube appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
