The Only Five Things I Liked in 2025

My yearly struggle to get to five

2025 was the year that we turned back the clock only to discover that the old stuff wasn’t that great after all. We brought back our former president and already don’t like him again. We tried to inject life into the pallid near-corpse of comedy movies by rebooting comedy classics, but the results underwhelmed.¹ Nostalgia is so potent that social media is currently abuzz about a frozen-in-time 1994 menu board from an abandoned McDonald’s in Alaska, even though the board actually shows that McDonald’s has gotten cheaper relative to wages since then. Though I’m sure it would amuse people at an Alaskan McDonald’s in 1994 to learn that people three decades hence would picture them and think “Man, that was the life!”

My annual quest to find five things that I enjoyed this year has — as always — just barely been completed. There wasn’t much in politics, entertainment, or technology that sauced my McNuggets, but there were a few things. So, here’s the list.

5. This video where unicellular life evolves into Tom Sizemore.

I’m often in awe of humanity’s journey. We started as a one-trick-pony prokaryote with a boring, first-thought flagellum, and then we were a worm, and then a fish, then a lizard-fish, then some freakish Kermit-The-Frog-fucked-a-Dachshund type thing, and then rat > monkey > big monkey > character actor Tom Sizemore. I can’t be the only person who noticed the resemblance between “modern human” and the actor known for his roles in Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down.

On the right: Character actor Tom Sizemore. On the left: All of us if we were Tom Sizemore.

It’s been quite a ride. Of course, the comments on this video show that not everyone has mentally progressed past the eyeless worm/fat dumb dino-fish phase of development. Behold:

Let’s just say that there are good arguments on both sides.

4. My son.

It was a precipitous drop for my progeny this year. Last year, he was a hard-charging second place, denied the top spot only by a video of a rooster wearing sneakers, which is the ‘96 Chicago Bulls of online content. For a while, it looked like the boy might surge to #1, what with his mastery of shapes and vague awareness of what happens at the potty. He even pronounced “Happy Thanksgiving” as “Tappy Hasgiving”, which is the sort of premium cuteness content you hope for when you invest in a toddler.

There’s a singular reason for this two-spot drop: bedflation. The going-to-bed process has become an ornate ritual with countless steps; you could crown a new King of England with less custom and pomp than my boy now requires to go to bed each night. You have to do lotion and milk and stories and arrange the stuffed animals on the bed and jump off the chair five times and say goodnight to the Legos. And if — God forbid — a grown-up turns on the night light or picks out jammies instead of letting the boy do it by himself, a tantrum is thrown and the whole process starts over. I’m losing 40-60 minutes on this pageantry each night, and I think it would be reasonable for me to calculate what my time is worth and deduct it from the boy’s college fund.

3. Pluribus.

Each year, I try to include a TV show or movie on this list that I enjoyed, and it doesn’t always happen. There are years when the entire entertainment industry spends more money than God makes in ten lifetimes trying to entertain me, and they fail.

But I’m really enjoying Pluribus on Apple TV, the new show from up-and-coming no-name Vince Gilligan. Maybe I like the show because it features a habitually ornery main character, maybe I like it because it reminds me of recent events, but I think that I like it because it’s just smart and well done. The show doesn’t neatly fit in any genre, but maybe “thing that is good and interesting” should be a genre.

2. Calling bullshit on social media “how to”s.

There’s a genre of social media post that screams “you’ve been using (common household thing) all wrong!!!” I’ve seen these posts for colanders and can openers and two-sided tape. These videos seem to be a central part of social media’s mission to convince us all that we’re dumb, ugly, and poor.

But many of these videos are bullshit. It’s mostly highly-skilled people in ideal conditions publishing their 80th take, and some are impractical bullshit that doesn’t work in real life. I enjoy videos that point out the lie, like these two.

1. Hilarious AI animals.

About a decade ago, funny social media animals began to replace comedy writers like myself. By the time I started making these lists, the animals’ victory was total — in the first four iterations of this list, animals took the top spot. But now those animals have been replaced by the AI versions of themselves, and those videos are soaring to artistic heights never before dreamed possible. Behold:

Well well well, internet cats: How do you like it when someone takes your job? Not so fun, is it? And go ahead, form a union to create an MBA with strict rules limiting AI use — that will just push people towards media not covered by the contract. What goes around comes around, ya furry little bitches. I’m just glad that I’m still here in the waning days of 2025 writing about the AI that replaced the cats that replaced me, because by this time next year, I will probably have been replaced by an AI cat playing a didgeridoo, too.

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1. I’m talking about three movies here: The Naked Gun, Spinal Tap 2, and Happy Gilmore 2. The Naked Gun did okay financially; Spinal Tap 2 did not do well. Happy Gilmore 2 is hard to say because the budget was huge and much of the revenue for Netflix will come from streaming, not the box office, but it looks like it did so-so.