I am facing my open locker, fumbling with my cleats. The guy to my right stands naked, face obscured by the blue metal door. I can sense the shape of him through my peripheral vision. But I have seen him many times. I know his shape. His size.

To my left, there is a row of urinals; around the corner, a rectangular, group shower. After games, my teammates lather their bodies and careen across the floor tiles like a slip-and-slide, prancing and showing off. They want to be seen. They want to be desired.

I was a closeted collegiate soccer player in the early 2000’s, at a Division III school called Trinity University. I had been the best player in my high school and had played on select teams. I was good enough to be on a good D-III college team (which won the NCAA championship my junior year), though I can’t say I was a prominent player.

Watching Heated Rivalry—yes, this is a post about that show—has reminded me of the person I was there, then, and the unrelenting homophobia, sometimes external, sometimes internal, of that moment. I was a closeted collegiate athlete in a time and place where there were no out athletes, and the show has reminded me not of how much shame I felt, but of how much I would have wanted to have been able to not feel so alone.

Before Trinity, I had been part of the Olympic Development Program, a system devised to help identify talented soccer players. I played on the South Texas select team for 3 years (Texas had 2 teams, North Texas and South Texas). We would meet during the summer to train, and every year we would also attend a week-long camp in Alabama, where the other state-level teams would meet and train and play each other—in hopes of being identified by higher level coaches and invited to the regional or national team.

I am 17 years old in a moldy dorm in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. A tall guy from West Africa is smiling as he walks down the hallway, naked, swinging his thick, languid dick. There is no reason for him to be naked, except to be seen. The exhibitionism of it all.

And there is a stuck up white guy from Austin, blue eyes and long eyelashes, talking about how many girls had given him blow jobs as he sits naked on his bed, touching himself.

I am crushed. My world implodes. I cannot breathe.

I remember sharing a dorm room with a guy named Stuart. We were talking and talking at night, about our future plans, about what we wanted to do in college, and I could not imagine not kissing him. But I could not fathom reaching out across the dark room to touch him either. I could feel the redness of my neck and could not admit it was desire.

At Trinity there were guys from all over the US and some international players. It was early morning training, and weigh ins, and weigh outs, sweating your ass off every day in the San Antonio heat, winning game after game. I played my part, getting faster, being more decisive, more direct, more technically sound. Fitter, smarter. I was a creative player, but sometimes lazy. I had vision, but could not always manage to pull off what I saw in my head.

In my freshman year, in our dorm, one of my teammates had a gay roommate. Or at least, he was rumored to be gay. The way they said it wasn’t hateful, more like intrigued. One night I found myself alone with him. Without talking, without convincing, he took my hand and led me to his car. It was as if he could see inside of me. And all of a sudden, I was in the back seat of a Lexus parked on the top level of the campus parking lot, kissing him, touching his chest, his face, his thighs.

It would take me three more years to come out.

I was playing soccer and closeted, and though I would swear otherwise, deep down, I knew it. I knew it in how I had to prevent my eyes from wandering. And in how I resented how the other guys flaunted their naked bodies in the locker room. I knew the shape of every body, every curve, whose was thick, thin, long, cut, uncut. We all did. That is the thing no one says out loud. We all knew.

Homoeroticism was inconceivable, and omnipresent. It was the thing that made their taunting and exhibitionism have meaning, it made their erotic play make sense.

The captain of the team would pull out his balls and show everyone how much skin he had, the bat-wing he called it. Others would join in. Not as big, not as much—he always won.

When I was watching Heated Rivalry, what I most understood, what I knew in my core, was the slow burn and the ecstatic encounter, the desire that cannot be contained or expressed, and how the crushing shame of that moment, that place, that homoeroticism, sticks to your pores, sticks to the roof of your mouth, lingers in the everyday impossibility of touching the body next to you.

What I knew as I watched was that this show delivers something unspeakable.

This isn’t so much about what the show is, but how it has made me remember myself.

I want to sit with the yearning. The knowing glances. The touching of feet. The smiles. The sweaty fucking. The perfect, glowing light on naked bodies in bed. The love that is impossible, and yet...

I could not have imagined acting on what I knew I wanted when I was in college. And perhaps, for me, that is where the show reaches into my past and reminds me of how drastically, dramatically, the display of homoeroticism was at that time, and yet, how impossible it was to pull back the curtain, to name what everyone was doing.

What I mean to say is that there is a sincerity in how the characters in this show (Ilya and Shane; Scott and Kip) fall inevitably in love, and that sincerity resonates with me as something I wanted, desperately, but could not name, could not articulate.

And sure, the plot of these romances relies heavily on melodramatic tropes—star crossed lovers, and the like—but like all melodramatic tropes, they reveal the codes and proscriptions of a society. And what happens, or what is promised in the show, is an upending of those codes, a rewriting of the shame and the impossible romance. It gives hope, I mean to say.

They are fulfilling the romantic fantasy that many gay men have had. My own fantasy. Perhaps the show pries open the moment (the repeating, unending moment) when I wanted to have been able to reach out, knowing full well that I would have been rejected. The show constructs the drive, the compulsion, almost the destiny, that these characters continue across the chasm between bodies. They touch.

And to me, that is where the show is magical. It shows not just what it is like to be a closeted athlete, but how much desire is actually required to push beyond the limits of queer shame.

I am tending to that memory, that shame, today. I am tending to the possibilities of my past self. I wanted to write this at the end of the year, not to leave it behind, but to care for that past, the complicated, unnerving past, and hope for its future. I don’t think my 20-year-old self could have imagined the life I am living now. The love I feel around me. And that is what, at least for me, the show offers. Not an endless cycle of repression, but the possibility of tending to the wounds of the past.

Sometimes, on my better days, I think I know the answer to what keeps me up at night. Or that I have it in me to figure it out. I like those days because even though they start with a problem, I know where to go, what to do, or who to ask to solve it. That's a pretty good day. Not too many of those lately. 

Perhaps this is why, when considering the year that was, mysteries – particularly video game mysteries – come to mind. Of all the entertainment released in 2025, I was drawn to these the most: I know the dirty secret of the Roottree family. I know why Evelyn Deane disappeared from Blake Manor. I know the truth about Mt. Holly Estate. Some questions wormed into my head, and I answered them. I had problems, and I solved them.  

When executed well, sleuthing suits video games even more naturally than violence, a contest between the programming logic of video games and the human ability to think laterally. One of the first things you learn about coding is that computers are literal to a degree that is, frankly, madness-inducing. The genius of any particular application, including video games, lies in how elegantly it hides the fact that it is reducing your every input into a cascade of simple binary decisions. However, even with a program designed to do all of the heavy lifting for you, even with all the cumulative experience of the internet at your disposal, sometimes the thing that lies between you and your goal is the wildly frustrating task of figuring out how to ask the right question. 

This also happens to be the engine that drives a good mystery. 

On a basic level, a video game mystery narrativizes one of the most fundamental computational functions: Querying a database. (The narrative designer Bruno Dias has called games expressly built around that function "database thrillers" for this reason, going so far as to jam out his own – quite good! –  text parser version of one, Kinophobia.) Defining the right parameters that will separate the endless sea of useless data from the precious and narrow set of information you can actually use, perhaps to form another query in turn, rendering previously useless data into something vital. Once again: Asking the right questions. 

The Roottrees Are Dead, Jeremy Johnston and Robin Ward's 2025 remake of Johnston's browser game of the same name, operates on this fundamental level. It casts the player as an amateur genealogist, asked by a mysterious client to trace the family tree of the Roottree sisters. Recently deceased in a private plane crash just before the start of the game, the sisters are heirs to a massive family fortune, and their untimely demise means a significant windfall for the extended family. 

The pleasures of The Roottrees Are Dead lie in doing the task it sets out for you in its simulated tactility. The game is set in 1998, and in researching the Roottree family, the player bounces between a table with relevant documents and photographs to examine, a corkboard where they lay out the family tree, and a desktop computer with a blistering 56k modem for surfing the information superhighway. A notebook, available at the push of a button, allows you to type notes or collect highlighted passages from your research materials. Using all these tools, a family's history becomes a giant jigsaw puzzle, a deductive riddle that feels impossible until you just buckle down and do the work. One good lead yields another, and then another, and finally you have names and faces and the puzzle begins to take shape.

But these aren't just puzzle pieces: They're people. The connections and if/then questions that determine where they fit in the Roottree pedigree are just part of the story. What makes The Roottrees Are Dead such an exceptional game is in the way it tells you from the start that one branch of the family tree is off-limits until the end, an optional question where the answer isn't so much there to be found as it is inferred. In laying out the endgame this way, Johnston and Ward provoke the player: Were you merely solving the puzzle? Or were you paying attention to the story it told? You know the what – how about why? Can you see the people hidden between the data points? 

In the twilight of the 19th century, the massive disruption of the industrial revolution left European high society in a state of unease, as the edges of a carefully-constructed social order began to crumble. Literacy spread among the middle class, the world shrank as steamships sent people all over the globe, new customs and experiences shook the once–strong foundations of Christian institutions. For many people of means and those who aspired to such status, the church was insufficient at addressing their moment of malcontent. The occult took root. 

Set in the final three days of October 1897, The Seance of Blake Manor follows Declan Ward, a detective from Dublin, after he receives a mysterious commission to investigate the disappearance of Evelyn Deane. Deane was one of a number of mystics and magic-curious from all over the world invited to Blake Manor, a hotel in Western Ireland, for a Grand Seance to take place on Samhain, the day when the veil between the mortal world and the spirit realm is thinnest. Assuming the role of Ward, the player wanders the eponymous manor, snooping through rooms and asking guests questions, each exchange or observation deepening the mystery of Ms. Deane's disappearance. 

The Seance of Blake Manor is a work of folk horror, which means that history has something to say here, whether the story's characters are able to hear it or not. (They will pay if they don't.) While a far more traditional narrative than The Roottrees Are Dead, Blake Manor is similarly powerful in its subtext. Every character is haunted by some private thing that has brought them to the seance; each is fleeing something or in denial or mourning or desperation. It causes them to be cruel, selfish, reckless. You can piece these backstories together for as many characters as you wish – the game encourages you to solve them all – but what lingers for me is the weight of all that history. 

In the search for Evelyn Deane, Declan Ward must repeatedly contend with the beliefs of others. He learns much about Irish folklore, of the fae and the Other World and the Tuatha Dé Danann, the pagan deities worshipped in Gaelic Ireland before Christianity arrived in the country. He sees evidence of the ways both Catholics and Protestants have incorporated those pagan traditions, turning them into saints or holy days. He meets people from around the world who have their own version of those same saints and gods. 

Blake Manor requires you to note all this, and think about it some. Learning the faith of each character you meet is integral to solving its mystery. But in this story, Christ and Allah are both just characters in books. The pagan deities, however, are very much real. 

I don't believe this is the game choosing a side, asserting that the pagans had it right and everything else is just a fairytale. Rather, I think The Seance of Blake Manor's choice to slowly, deliberately communicate that, in its fiction, the folkloric deities are real is meant to underline the ways in which the indigenous beliefs and cultures of a place are never really gone, even after waves of colonization, industry, and plunder. The spirits are real in Blake Manor because we have fooled ourselves into thinking that wealthy men who build monuments to their fortunes and family name are the only ones who get to write their stories upon the land, forgetting that the land might have stories of its own. Will you seek them out, even if you don't have to? Will you carry that history within you, and keep it alive just a little while longer? 

Like many others this year, I have lost countless nights in search of the secret 46th room in the Mt. Holly Estate, and for the bewildering number of mysteries Room 46 is but a mere prelude to. I have many of the answers I set out to find, but I still have further questions beyond them. I also know that the point here may very well be learning to quit. 

It's remarkable that Tonda Ros' Blue Prince is structured as a roguelike, a genre defined by its endlessness and infinite possibility. This brings the game in conflict with its narrative setup, which casts the player as Simon P. Jones, a young boy who has learned his wealthy uncle has willed his entire estate to him – provided he can find the hidden 46th room in the logic-defying 45-room mansion that changes its layout every day. Such an explicit goal implies an ending, and upon achieving it, credits do roll. But as anyone who has played Blue Prince knows, that ending is merely an ending. It is also not a solution. Simon's strange quest, the magical nature of the house – which, after enough excursions, is clearly diegetic and not just an allowance for gameplay – are the first of many whys that are left unsaid by that initial ending. 

Thus the real mystery of Blue Prince begins, but what that mystery is largely depends on the player. What about this house and the family who built it did you notice, or care about? What in its many possible configurations, its hidden foundations, its many scrawled notes that double back and recontextualize previous findings, bedevils you? Is the game truly endless, like its genre structure implies? Can you be at peace with that? Or do you refuse to accept it? 

Consider again how well-suited games are for mystery, how they can present players with impossible enigmas but also guide and nudge them towards asking the right questions. Games can assure players that the world is knowable. We talk about power fantasies, and perhaps this is the most seductive one, even more so than those that give us guns or impossible abilities or great destinies. The fantasy of a world that fits together. 

I find that fantasy alluring. Justice has been lacking in my lifetime, and it may not be my lot to see it win the day. I like the idea that asking the right question is the first step to making sense of the world. And if I ask the right question and then answer it skillfully, I can find some kind of peace. Or at least, know what it is that will give me a direction to walk until I find it. 

This is a delusion, but a useful one. Answers aren't what make questions worth asking, but go long enough without finding your way to one and, well. That's a lot of sleepless nights. Sometimes you need a ballast.  

If there is a reason these games are the mysteries that have resonated with me most strongly this year, this is why: because while they provide all the pleasures of a solvable problem, of crimes answered for, they also present me with so much I cannot know. Of how much escapes the record of material evidence in the gaps of a family tree or a nigh-forgotten folkloric tradition or the inscrutable patterns of an ever-shifting mansion. There is tragedy in this, but also grace, and humility. In grappling with them, solving a mystery takes on another, more durable purpose: making peace with what I don't know, so I can be brave with what I do know. Every day I'm able to do that would make for a good day. Every year I strive for that goal would be a good year. 

The New Year is a powerful time in our lives, and by that I mean in our practice. Through no effort of our own, we arrive at a point of culmination. A moment of reflection and renewal. In this span between what we think of as the old and the new, regret can stir. We may be more aware of our stubborn habits and shortcomings, our losses and the never-ending ache of unfulfillment. Another year gone, and all those things we were going to do! All those changes we were going to make!

This recognition is a rare and momentous blessing, and one to be used. Recognition is all any of us needs to make a change.

My teacher Nyogen Roshi is fond of quoting his teacher, Maezumi Roshi, who said something like, “It is impossible not to do your best. You just don’t think it’s your best.” Every moment arises pure and perfect from conditions as they are. From you, as you are. Our judgment alone, our ego mind, distinguishes best from less, gain from loss and new from old. Judgment alone separates us from the fulfillment we think lies just beyond the precipice of time.

And so I seize this moment to wish you all the best.

I wish you less of what you can live without and more of what you’ve always wanted. Less anger, and less quickness to anger. Less greed, and more open-mindedness. Less judgment, doubt and cynicism, and less of the pain and confusion they create. Less hurry.

Less fear. More of the compassionate love that can only arise in the absence of fear.

I would wish you more time, but you already have it. It only takes a moment to transform your life. A moment of undefiled, nonjudgmental awareness. A moment of practice, and everything everywhere is new again.

Only you can make it so, but I will wish it just the same: your best new year.

The post A New Year’s Blessing appeared first on Lion’s Roar.

It’s frigid in Massachusetts this morning. When I woke up early to assess the damage from some trees downed by the brutal winds overnight, I saw my neighbor carrying a big box out to their car. She said hello and then immediately ate shit on the icy sidewalk lol. After checking to make sure they weren’t seriously hurt, a certain phrase popped into my mind, as it has many dozens of times over the years.

“Check this shit out motherfucker…”

After that I went inside and read that Mike Fossey had died a few days before Christmas and a couple weeks after his 35th birthday. 

I cried for a minute or two and then started laughing. It’s such a strange feeling finding out someone is gone then spending the next couple of hours howling at their old posts. 

There aren’t many people who that could apply to but Fossey was indeed one of them. You’ll find hundreds or thousands of others writing something to that effect on Twitter or Bluesky right now. Mike F – who grew up just down the street from me here in Concord, MA – was without hyperbole one of the funniest people I, or most of us, ever knew, whether it was in real life or simply through his iconic Superman-avatar online persona. He was one of the best to ever do it, many are saying.

“His posts brought me much joy over the years,” the journalist Mike Isaac wrote when I shared the news of his passing. "’its not clear what move i was trying to do’ has rattled in my head for a decade.” 

“Mike was one of the guys laying the framework for what good jokes would look like in a novel format with a strict character limit,” John Darnielle said. 

It’s hard to write about joke posts and the people who make them without coming off as overly serious or spoiling the whole point— as a lot of people learned writing about “Weird Twitter” back in its heyday—but Fossey was a luminary in the golden age of Twitter in the 2010s, up there alongside the likes of Dril and others, that we got to watch invent the form in real time. 

The thing about a sense of humor is that it is learned and shared. 

Sometimes part of the appeal is how many people remain unable to pick up on the joke. Probably his most famous post was this one about a hot dog. The kind of tweet that was shared widely all over, to the delight or anger of many. 

This is a load-bearing feminist post, someone commented earlier.

This one, too. 

Fossey was never as overtly political as a lot of his peers (and most of us everywhere) have become online. But a clear political sensibility was there, underneath the silliness. 

But more than that, there was the poetic manipulation of language. The way someone like, say, Tim Robinson, speaks a phrase weird and it overwrites how you think about it forever. This is one of those for me:

Insanely surpassed. A phrase I don’t think anyone had ever uttered before but now it’s locked in our heads forever. 

I don’t know that I’ve had an Arnold Palmer in many years either without thinking about this one:

Or seen a news story about a drug bust without remembering this:

“It feels kind of wrong, like to the point of feeling embarrassing, to talk about Posting as a writing form, but it really is a type of writing, and the shape and style of a joke-post is its own thing,” Flaming Hydra David Roth said. 

“Mike Fossey's posts were so obviously on point in that regard. They're funny, of course, but the economy of how he wrote—creating a little scene, establishing characters in it, using a few details to shade it and make it funnier—was real writing. That wasn't the point, I sense, I think the point was to be funny, and he was funny. But he was also legitimately a master of this weird type of writing. You don't have any room to spare with the character count and all that, and he didn't waste anything. He was one of the greats at doing whatever this is.”

“After spending so much of my life ‘online’ it can be easy to ask ‘what’s the point?’” comedian Mike Ginn, a friend of Fossey’s, who called him “my windmill slam pick for the funniest poster of all-time,” told me. 

“I think the point is you get to make friends like Mike F. To connect with people across the country or world who you resonate with on some deep personal frequency. He’s hilarious, wonderful, and I’ll miss him forever.”

You could call him a jokes craftsman, and that would be accurate, but he was also a regular craftsman as well. A woodworker and artisan and in recent years a signmaker around the Boston area for some big projects, not to mention a fine photographer, as you can see on his Instagram.

I just went to look and noticed this at the top, which punched me in the gut.

Rest in peace too to Kaleb Horton. Another great and funny writer and poster we lost way too young. I am so sick of writing eulogies this year.

Aside from the gags he would often share images of the cabinets and tables and such he was working on, both for his job and for his family and friends. As much as I might regularly read his jokes and think I wish I could be that funny, it was truly admirable that he also had this real world talent as well. Something tangible to go along with the ineffable. 

I wasn’t super close with Mike. We were buddies online in the way that people are, although I got the chance to meet him a couple times. I remember the first, maybe eight or so years ago, meeting up at a concert in Harvard Square. He was sweet and funny in person, too, and we walked around the corner to smoke a joint. I remember being sincerely kind of nervous about it, worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up. That I wasn’t going to be funny enough. Like I was hanging out with a beloved famous comedian or something. Which is what he was, in fact. 

Sadly, like many of the best, a number of Fossey’s original Twitter accounts were suspended over the years and have since been mostly lost to time. Luckily a lot of people have kept screenshots of some of their favorites saved elsewhere. Here are a few of the best. 

More year-end thoughts from Luke O’Neil:
The best of Hell World 2025

The best 50ish songs of 2025

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