Geekerati's Best of 2025 with Bonus Eggnog Pie Experiment

Following Up on Promises: AKA What I Hope is the Worst of 2026

Before I discuss the top ten performing articles on the Geekerati Newsletter, I wanted to take a moment to follow up on a promise/personal dare I made on Substack Notes in late December. After seeing a post by Retroist featuring a recipe for Fruit Cocktail Eggnog Pie that was featured in an advertisement for Knox Gelatin in a 1955 issue of Good Housekeeping, I decided that I was going to make the pie and give it a taste test.

I wasn’t as timely with the tasting of the pie as I’d hoped, but I did post a picture of my result…a result that looked far less appetizing than the one from the article. Not that the one in the article looked particularly tasty because it had a big fruit cake vibe, but mine looked more like a threat than food.

But promises/dares are promises and here is a clip of me eating the pie. It took me until this past weekend to actually get around to trying it and you can watch the video for my full reaction. This will probably be the only food eating video I ever do on this site, but the temptation was too big in this case.

And Now for the Best of 2025

Last year was a pretty darn good year for the Geekerati Newsletter. Our unpaid subscriber base grew by 37% and we are at a level where that’s a good number of people. Given that none of my posts are paywalled, unpaid subscribers really are my target audience and I want to take a moment to thank each and every one of you for stopping by and reading my thoughts on various aspects of popular culture.

Of course, I am especially grateful for my paid subscribers and I will have to find something special to do for those of you who are in that category. I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to have even a small number of people willing to pay a small subscription fee to support my writing. While I think of something special for this group, I’d appreciate it if a couple of you would be willing to make a suggestion. Whatever it is, I’ll consider it.

When I was looking through the top ten posts of 2025, I noticed a couple of trends but I also noticed that they were highly reflective of the smorgasbord approach I’ve aimed for on this site. Those who have been here long enough know that I’m trying to evoke the vibe of the non-house organ gaming magazines of the 1980s. These magazines, especially Different Worlds and Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer, were a mix of gaming related articles and pop culture commentary. Larry DiTillio leveraged his experience as a film and television screenwriter as well as RPG author to write film reviews, and provide Hollywood news, for Different Worlds. DiTillio worked on a lot of shows includeing Babylon 5, Murder She Wrote, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. He was also the author of Masks of Nyarlathotep, one of the best role playing game adventures written for any game system. The other magazines were similarly ecclectic and this is one of the many reasons that people go back and reread them far more than people reread the purely house magazines of the day. Even when people do read house magazines like White Dwarf and Dragon, the best issues are from when they were not house organs.

Steve Jackson Games continued this ecclectic tradition when they moved their Pyramid magazine onto the web with Pyramid Online. In this case, they transformed a house organ (Pyramid Print) into an ecclectic and wonderful online magazine with Pyramid Online. It is magazines like those mentioned, the blog culture of the early 2000s, and my own work as an academic that inspire this Newsletter and I think I’m doing a good job of combining all of those influences into something unique.

I blog about pop culture new and old, but I’m never going to aim for ragebait. When I do comment on modern controversies, I’ll make sure to include some citations to academic work related to the issue. If I’m talking about Satanic Panics or how pop-psychology can be misused by the media, I’ll likely cite Christopher J Ferguson, Ph.D. or Matt Grawitch. Discussions of bias and stereotypes will likely include articles by Lee Jussim, who’s work on those topics is widely cited in the literature. I’ll even cite my former professor Sonja Lyubomirsky if I’m discussing Happiness and I’ll add a dash of Aristotle there too. Heck, my first “academic” citation came from Joseph P. Laycock in his book Dangerous Games. I’ve been combining my academic and pop culture interests for a long time and I hope you enjoy the results.

Speaking of the results…here’s my top 10.

1) Charlotte Braun and The Ax.

Coming in at first place is my article on Charles M. Schulz’s briefly featured Peanuts character Charlotte Braun. She appeared early in the comic strip’s run, but didn’t last long. A fan sent in a letter discussing how much she disliked the character and so Schulz gave Charlotte “the Ax.”

It isn’t surprising that this article had more readers than normal because it was on a much less niche topic than I usually write about. Every one loves Peanuts and I tried to have a mildly humorous take on some of the Peanuts characters who have disappeared over the years.

2) The Horrific Hobbit Film that Almost Was

In those times when I defend the 2000 Dungeons & Dragons movie, the one starring Jeremy Irons, I like to remind people of how bad a lot of the fantasy movies I grew up with were. In a post-Lord of the Rings world, it’s easy to complain about Eregon or Dungeons & Dragons, but when your frame of reference is The Sword and the Sorcerer (which I love btw) starring Lee Horsley as the barbarian you are a lot more forgiving. That’s not even bringing up Gor, The Barbarians (starring the Barbarian Brothers), or the original Deathstalker. None of these films are great and they set my bar of expectations low.

Had I seen the version of The Hobbit discussed in my second most read post of the year, I might be even more praising of Courtney Solomon’s folly.

3) A Defense of Moldvay/Cook D&D

If any post highlighted for me who my core audience at Geekerati is, it was my article discussing how and why I love the Moldvay/Cook Basic version of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a masterpiece of game design and is highly evocative in its writing style. I may run a group that plays the most recent version of Dungeons & Dragons, but my soul longs for the Old School feel. I’ll be writing a number of posts on what I mean by Old School feel in the months to come, but a key concept in this posts will be about how older versions of the game were about emergent storylines rather than scripted stories. Yes, there were people in the time when tigers used to smoke like Robert Plamondon who in his book Through Dungeons Deep advocated for the “DM as author” style of play many favor today, but the majority of play was less theatrical and more an intersection of board games, wargames, and puzzle solving that resulted in stories.

This isn’t to say there wasn’t “acting” during play, but it is to say that failure was more accepted by players because they didn’t assume their players were great heroes at the beginning. Backstories were the product of play, rather than something that came before play in D&D. Other games, like GURPS, Runquest, Traveller, and Hero were games for those who wanted detailed back stories.

If you’d like me to write more articles like this, let em know.

4) Dungeon Crawl Classics as Intellectual Exercise

There have been a lot of retroclones and revisions designed over the past two decades, but one stands head and shoulders over the rest in my opinion. That game is Dungeon Crawl Classics and I love it not because of how it innovated rules (though it did), but because of how its creators went back and read the entire Appendix N to see what a game that intentionally captured those books would look like. Appendix N, for the non-grognards among you, is Gary Gygax’s list of recommended reading at the back of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide (sic). As much as I love what Shadowdark and Dragonbane have done to modernize Old School play with new style mechanics, Dungeon Crawl Classics is a tour de force of how I think people should approach the fantasy genre thematically.

5) Traveller’s Not-Exactly Birthday

The Traveller role playing game may not have been published on May 1st, but the game’s famous Mayday Message makes May 1st the perfect day to remember and celebrate one of the best science fiction role playing games ever designed. The game design influence of Traveller cannot be overstated, especially as the game evolved. Its lifepath character design system (where your PC could die during creation) and its unified 2d6 vs Target Number core mechanic set it apart from other early games.

It’s a great game and you should do yourself a favor and check it out.

6) Did Christian Actually Write About a Gaming Controversy?

Even I couldn’t resist commenting on the viral “Life of a Showgirl” image posted by Wizards of the Coast last August. The image was meant to leverage the upcoming release of Taylor Swift’s last album to direct interest towards D&D, but all it did was remind fans of Wizards of the Coast’s confused messaging and plan for the franchise. The image itself looks more like a scene from a Call of Cthulhu campaign than from a Sword & Sorcery inspired fantasy storie, but therein lies the conflict. Modern D&D is no longer purely Sword & Sorcery inspired. Instead, it’s inspired by literature inspired by D&D fiction and D&D comic books. In the post-Forgotten Realms comic book (both DC’s Forgotten Realms and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons titles fit this mold), D&D stories became mroe whimsical and anime/comic book in their narratives.

TSR, for all of its problems, managed to balance settings with the whimsical and comic book/anime feel (Mystara and the Forgotten Realms) with high medieval fantasy (Greyhawk and Birthright), Sword & Sorcery (Dark Sun), and dying earth (Planescape). When Hasbro purchased Wizards of the Coast, they learned the wrong lessons from TSR’s bankruptcy. They rightly learned that having too many settings cannibalized the brand, but instead of carefully curating the settings they have decided to combine them all so that a Dragonlance module published in the modern era reads and feels more like a Forgotten Realms module. They’ve got their work cut out for them in balancing the narrative and cultural divisions in the hobby.

7) An Obituary for Don Hall

The fact that the Don Hall obituary didn’t get even more attention than it did, and it received very good attention, is a sign of how much modern critics focus on acting and narrative to the exclusion of the other elements of film making. Sure, they’ll talk about directors, but often only in the context of performance or if you are lucky editing choices. Not a lot of attention is paid to Sound Editing or Sound Design. Given that the addition of sound radically transformed the medium from a primitive one to full gesamtkunstwerk, this is a tragedy.

And if you are going to talk about Sound, then you have to talk about Don Hall. His name looms large in the industry and his volume of production (and his work ethic) speak volumes about the history of Sound in film. Beyond that, he was an amazing mentor to my wife (who was his student) and to me (who was not). To say he was kind is an understatement. He is missed and my wife and I probably don’t go a single week without mentioning him in one capacity or another. Beyond all of his professional contributions though, I will always remember him with gratitude for giving Jody and me our first real Christmas in Los Angeles. We would have had no gifts that year if not for him. He didn’t know that, but we are eternally grateful.

8) Horror Film Recommendations

I learned two lessons from this Scary Season entry, and the Christmas one later in the year, and that’s that my readers like movie recommenation lists, but that they don’t want four weeks on the same theme. I think that is fair enough and it’s easier to write 7 to 10 detailed recommendations for a single post than it is to write 28 to 31 recommendations, especially if you are like me and trying to recommend things that might be underappreciated.

9) The Geek Shelf Begins

I’ve written a couple of articles in my “Geekshelf” series and they’ve all done well. The entry on 13 role playing games from the 1970s performed the best of them and you will be seeing future entries for the following decades. Each decade has at least 13 role playing games you should own (most have far more), but thew 1970s was the natural place to start the ball rolling. I’ll be writing one of these articles a quarter or so until the series is finished. As with this one, there are sure to be games you think belong that are left out. That’s great. Please mention them and let’s geek out about all the great games.

10) My Most Popular Weekly Geekly

My Weekly Geekly Rundowns (which are not as weekly as I’d like) are consistent performers on the sight. They do a good amount of traffic and since they are focussed on promoting other newsletters they are among my favorite posts, but the one that did the best was the one I wrote dedicated to K-Pop Demon Hunters. If you haven’t seen that movie, you should. As I mentioned in the Weekly Geekly discussing it, the movie is even better if you’ve watched a couple of key recent Korean films that contextualize some of the mythology. It’s isn’t necessary, the film really does stand alone, but it does add depth and you’ll have watched some excellent films that you might have overlooked. Oldboy gets a lot of the “yeah, I watched a Korean film” attention, but Korea has a rich film history and Oldboy isn’t even in the first 10 films I think of when I’m thinking of a Korean film I might want to watch.

That’s it. Another year gone, but a productive one at that. I hope you enjoyed that year and I hope you are looking forward to the discussions we will have in the coming year. I’m currently writing my review of Ravenloft: Heir of Strahd and am eager for your thoughts on that book and my review. My discussion of that book won’t be a hot take or rage bait and I hope it will open space for dialogue as I hope with all my articles.

Here’s to 2026, the year I become a Doctor Lord because as soon as I defend my dissertation, my wife is buying me the small plot of land in Scotland that comes with the “Lord” certificate.