December 2025

Published, 2025

printer's workshop: left printing press

What a year it has been, huh? Well, lots of blogs are pumping out their best posts of the year, and, well, we didn’t pump out that many posts, so here’s just a general list of what we published this year. Wrote a post about the TikTok ban. Reminder: It’s still theoretically banned. lol. Celebrated the new Turnstile album. You should listen to it — it’s super good. We are now just so surrounded by ads. So of course we need more ads. I got mad. A post about how judges are going to be on the...

Continue reading...

Favorites, 2025! Part Deux

Ok, the chanukiah has burned out, the middle school band smashed Hot Cross Buns in the winter solstice concert, and you’ve listened to Fairytale of New York.  With the end properly near, let me add to Favorites, 2025. Podcast When a lawyer wins a massive personal injury verdict, they owe the outmost thanks to the psychopath defendant that refused to settle for a lesser amount.  Something similar could be said for Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri who collaborate on If Books Could Kill.  They throw (lots of) shade at bad books, mostly self help “airport” books, but...

Continue reading...

Christmas stories

gray tabby cat lying on white string lights

The problem with composing a Christmas post is thinking of anything even remotely interesting to say. The themes have been tropes for centuries now: family, generosity, joy, the birth of a little bugger in Bethlehem (who is also from Nazareth?) who would go on to change the fate of the world. What the hell is interesting about yet another post about the Reason for the Season. What more could possibly be said? I’m sure pastors/preachers/ministers/priests have this problem every year. Oh good, the Christmas Sermon: one of the two big days for churches where you may get...

Continue reading...

Happy 20th birthday YouTube

On this day twenty years ago, December 17, 2005, YouTube was born. By which I mean the SNL Digital Short “Lazy Sunday” was aired during an episode featuring guest host Jack Black and musical guest Neil Young. Youtube was nothing before this dropped, just one among many burgeoning video sharing sites, and immediately after became one of the most popular sites on the internet, despite NBC doing everything they could to take the video down. YouTube just a couple of years later would sell itself to Google for a then-massive $1.65 billion. Not bad for a platform...

Continue reading...

Opportunity cost

black solar panel near calm body of water

We have wasted so much fucking time on this asshole. A constant theme of my posts since we have been back is how long it is going to take to get back to where we were before this asshole rode down that fucking escalator. People say years; I say decades or generations. We’re still trying to recover from the Reagan era: an era that is still around! We’ve been dealing with this asshole for over a decade now, way too long imho, but we still perhaps have three years left. God help us. Meanwhile, the world is...

Continue reading...

Great moments in judicial history

Oh, hey, look: it’s December 12. Season’s greetings. December 12 is, among a very elite few, one of the worst days in and for American democracy. On this date, 25 years ago, the Supreme Court decided a presidential election, baldly and openly on partisan lines and with partisan aims. Funny enough, it was also the first election in which I was able to participate. Yay me. Bush v. Gore was a weird case. For background, the 2000 presidential election came down to the counting in Florida, all the other states having completed their counts and announced their...

Continue reading...

Favorites, 2025

close up of a blue jay perched on a branch

Getting towards the end of the year over here at V&V (and apparently everywhere else), and so it seems appropriate (like everywhere else) to post some favorites of the year. Here, in really no order, are some of my favorites of 2025. Now, note these are not “Bests, 2025.” I have not consumed all the media that was created in the past year, and I do not have the faculty to even judge these things on any semblance of objective scale. No, these are merely favorites. Things I liked, perhaps some more than others. Music Tunde Adebimpe...

Continue reading...