As usual, the Siskoid Awards are followed by a Technical Achievement Ceremony, hosted by someone famous, parallel to the main event, and by technical, we mean a grab bag of categories and jokes that would have made a mockery out of the actual ceremony.
And to host, an actress I've been seeing a lot of recently - Blink Twice, Mickey 17, The Thursday Murder Club - and enjoying in every role... Naomi Ackie! And I'm sure she'll do a fine job of handing out "Technical" (AKA It's a real award, I swear!) Golden Typewriter Monkeys. So take it away, Ms. Ackie!
Musical Journey of 2024 - KPop Demon Hunters sent me back to some old playlists - we were into KPop before it really hit over here, like, before Gangnam Style was everywhere - and from there moved on to newer groups. This is the year I got into Twice (who cover one of the KPDH songs) and Blackpink (who Huntr/x is clearly based on), to the point where I have favorites in each group. I'm known to like things people would consider "prog", and KPop has the same attraction for me. Musical pieces that contain different movements, essentially different songs within the same song. With KPop, it's all done in a short amount of time, but same difference. Must be my classical education.
Best Vehicle of 2025 - You'd think I'd go with the Fantasti-Car from First Steps, but no! The winner is that WITCH card from Weapons. For something that started as vandalism, it really turned out to be badass in the context of the film.
The "I Got Robbed in 2025" award goes
to the Red Ghost, who almost appeared in FF: First Steps, but was cut out. He was played by John Malkovich, so it's extra sad. We did get the Super-Apes, though, and I think that's the most important part. Still. Runner-up goes to me. I left multiple bags full of empty bottles (I don't drink, so that's two years of Gatorade and such) on the back porch, very lazy about bringing them to a depot to get money back, and one day, a few weeks... they were gone! Not gonna lie. If someone had walked up to me and asked if they could have them, I would have said yes and given them ANOTHER that was still inside. Still.
Movie That Most Rewired my Brain in 2025 - Nabwana IGG's Who Killed Captain Alex? (question mark, theirs). In imitation of the DJ who lathers on explosive commentary on the film (not as a separate track, that's just how it IS), I started shouting "Uganda!" at random intervals. I had a lot of explaining to do given I had an improv tournament that very week, and was often master of ceremonies and abused the use of a microphone.
Favorite RPG experience of 2025 - Though I usually adapt pre-written material for Torg Eternity, I sometimes write something from scratch. This year, I wrote a Core Earth scenario about a municipal election where reptilian Edeinos, transformed to our reality, participated for the first time. I liked the result, I liked the open-ended mystery, and it playtested so well, I published it on DriveThruRPG. I hope other people are enjoying it and would love to know who THEIR culprit was.
I always like to end the ceremony with a few movie statistics and prizes, courtesy of Letterboxd, where I logged 559 entries this year (521 new), falling just short of a 50 movie a month average. Here are the top 10 stars who most appeared on my screens:
No big deep dives or anything, but the Criterion Channel offered collections on Claudette Colbert and Julianne Moore, so no surprise to find them here. Chow You-Fat and Rachel Brosnahan - our latest Lois Lane - were also on purpose, but the rest are accidental. I mean, you watch a bunch of films by Ozu, and you're going to get a lot of Chishū Ryū. Cox and Strathairn got a boost from our Jason Bourne marathon early in the year. If we look at directors next...
This list is a little wonky. Pete McTighe directs all those Doctor Who shorts that support the boxed set trailers, and I've been reviewing them. Dickson and Heise sneaked in at the end of the year because I watched a bunch of 19th-Century film experiments they conducted. Similarly, Voloshin directed some animated shorts I watched all in a row. The others are all directors I specifically sought out (Ozu pretty much as usual, but Cronenberg and McDonald are Canadian icons I often return to - the rest I was essentially discovering. Take out the four anomalies and you'd find Kelly Reichardt, Werner Herzog, Robert Altman and Ringo Lam on the list.
If Letterboxd is my movie tracking platform, GoodReads has that job for my reading (though I've also been cross-posting on StoryGraph, this year. I managed 104 books, but that's largely thanks to Doctor Who novelizations (running through the first 3 Doctors). They're generally short, so between them and graphic novels, things tend to pile up. Here's an incredibly long graphic of the 2025's reads:
To put numbers on impressions, that's 53 DW novelizations plus 5 original Doctor Who novels. 26 graphic novels or comics collections. 9 Star trek novellas. That leaves only 7 other types of books, and 3 of those were non-fiction (one on Trek and one on comics). So VERY genre-oriented, more than usual. This is probably the one space where I don't have to be ashamed of it, but I do need to do a little better this year (if not in volume).
And there you have it, folks. Another year, another completely meaningless awards show. My thanks to Ms. Akie for putting up with it, and thank YOU for sticking with me all these years. The Siskoid Awards will return in a year's time, barring any kind of permanent apocalypse.
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