Jacen's 2025 In Review

2025 has been fairly chaotic for a lot of people, but I've been fortunate enough to have a pretty good year. I've had a chance to work on a lot of things that I've wanted to do for a while. So, with the year coming to a close, let's take a look at some of the highlights of what I've done over the past 12 months.

Anime

While I haven't been super invested in any of the new seasonal anime that keep coming out, I did specifically make time for "Ave Mujica - The Die is Cast -", and I seem to be the only person that thoroughly despised it. The pacing was all over the place, and the plot was completely fumbled, ruining characters that I had previously liked in "BanG Dream! It's MyGO!!!!!"

It did, however, encourage me to rewatch the first season of "BanG Dream!" which, conversely, I really enjoyed. I also started rewatching "A Certain Scientific Railgun", an anime that I've always held as my favorite. Mujica, Bandori S1, and Railgun all have dedicated posts if you want to see more of my thoughts on them.

Umamusume is an anime that's been on my radar for a long time now, and I finally checked it out this year. People are apparently not super impressed with it, but I think it's a solid enough introduction to the world and to some of the major characters. Overall, I think it was a pretty good story, and I'm planning on checking out the second and third seasons of that as well. I know the Cinderella Gray spinoff focusing on Oguri Cap has been popular this year, so I'll probably check out that one as well.

Motorsports

This was a year when I fell back in love with IndyCar and out of love with NASCAR as far as motorsports is concerned. While people complained about the lack of cautions throughout the first few races of the IndyCar season and the complete dominance by Alex Palou, I think it was a pretty solid season of racing overall. Palou was certainly the class of the field, but Kyle Kirkwood was able to keep pace near the start of the year, and there was certainly some interesting racing throughout.

As for NASCAR, my issues with it aren't what you might expect. I've said my piece on the NASCAR playoffs system, but I still hold that it creates excitement in situations where it wouldn't otherwise exist. We wouldn't care about two random cars battling for 16th if not for the playoffs. Rather, my issues are with the driving standards and the overtime rules.

NASCAR has always been very hands-off about officiating, and I think that's to its detriment. The theory is that the drivers will police themselves, but that just doesn't work in practice. We're at a point where respect is at an all-time low, and there need to be some penalties for the actions of the drivers if things are ever going to improve. As for green-white-checkered overtime, it doesn't add anything of value and only serves to screw drivers out of the finishes they deserve. I get that people want races to finish under green, but sometimes it's okay to just let a race finish under caution.

While I wasn't able to get as into Australian Supercars as I would have liked, I did at least make time to watch the Bathurst 1000. The past two years have been very lackluster, but, fortunately, Mother Nature came through to give us rain, creating one of the greatest Bathurst 1000s in history and easily the best one I've ever watched personally. It was nice to see the mountain put on a great show after a couple of off-years.

I've never been an F1 fan, but I do at least follow the storylines to stay up to date on what's going on in the world's biggest motorsport. It was entertaining to watch the points battle from the sidelines. I was rooting for Oscar Piastri, but Lando Norris definitely had the more consistent season, so I can't say he didn't deserve the championship, even if I expected Max Verstappen to manage to steal the championship at the last moment.

Gaming

I've tried my hand at streaming several times over the years, but this year I was a bit more serious about it than I have been in the past. Over the summer, I also got an upgrade from DSL to symmetrical 300 Mbps fiber, which also helped.

Pokémon ended up being one of my primary focuses. I played through Violet, Sword, and Legends: Z-A on stream throughout the year. I also spent a lot of time playing Umamusume when it came out in English. While I ended up getting sick and didn't get to play as much as I would have liked, I also managed to get an invite to the first test of Honkai: Nexus Anima, Mihoyo's upcoming auto-chess game. Lastly, I had my annual rhythm game unretirement tour, jumping back into Project Sekai just in time to participate in Mizuki's fifth focus event, pulling the three main cards from the gacha.

Technology

Early in the year, I finally bought myself a PlayStation Vita, a device I've wanted to get my hands on for a few years. This opened a bit of a floodgate, and I found myself grabbing a few other handheld gaming devices that caught my eye. Among those were the MagicX Zero 40, Anbernic RG Slide, Miyoo Flip V2, Anbernic RG 34XX, and a few others that I haven't written about yet. I've always loved handheld computing, so it's been fun trying out these devices and seeing how well they work.

Another thing I did early in the year was build myself a new computer. My old one was only around five years old, but with hardware prices potentially going up (which they did, albeit not in the way I was expecting), it felt like a good idea to upgrade before that could happen. It also let me try out the new Intel Arc B580 GPU. I've been rooting for Intel to disrupt the GPU duopoly since Arc was first announced, and it's nice to see Intel finally bringing out a product that's actually worth buying. Unfortunately, Intel has made a lot of dubious decisions, killing off several product lines, so I can only hope that the Celestial line of GPUs will actually get to see the light of day.

The Blog

The biggest change for my blog was the move from Write.as to 11ty. While I appreciate what WriteFreely and Write.as are trying to do, it just felt like too restrictive of a platform for me. 11ty has given me a lot more freedom to tweak and play with things. Since the move, I've already added a handful of new features, such as thumbnails and full-text search.

The move to 11ty also came with a move to Neocities for hosting. While I could have hosted it on my existing web host, I appreciate Neocities' mission and wanted to support it a little. It has come with its own restrictions, but I've been able to work around them pretty easily for the most part.

With the big move came an attempt to post more often. While I still don't have a solid schedule, I've written more this year than I have previously. It's helped give me a push to try things I might not otherwise have, and it's been fun testing things and writing reviews on them.

What's Next

I already have a few things on the radar for 2026. There are a few gadgets in transit that I'm excited to get my hands on and try out, as well as a few that already have reviews in progress. There are a few anime that I'm working on rewatch reactions for, including the remainder of Railgun and Bandori. The 2026 motorsports season starts early, so I may end up writing posts on some of those races, but I also have plans to do recaps of other iconic races like I did for the 2021 Xfinity race at Bristol. Lastly, there are still plenty of Pokémon games that I'd like to play on stream, so I should have plenty of content on that front as well.

I've been fortunate to have a pretty good 2025 overall, and I'm looking forward to seeing what 2026 will hold.