2025
April 22, 2026
Hey! Remember 2025? It was doozy. So much, in fact, that I'm only now getting around to recapping it. It feels like still having your Christmas tree up at Easter. At this point, who cares? I'm a completionist at heart, so I couldn't just not do a recap.
50 I turned 50 in 2025 and the day came and went without much fanfare. I didn't feel like making a big deal out of it. People are often surprised to learn how old I am but this year, especially, I felt every year of life and then some as my body continuously seemed to fail me.
When you're young and healthy, sometimes you get sick or injured but it feels like a minor setback. After some treatment and rest, you're back to normal. "Normal" for me now feels like only having to deal with one or two ailments at a time.
I feel like I'm too young to have a cardiologist, a gastroenterologist and a hematologist, but here we are. Taking six pills a day that aren't vitamins just to feel about 80% on any given day. I'm grateful because it could be a lot worse. But it's just a lot to deal with along with everything else going on.
Travel In January I took a solo trip to Peru, my first in 13 years, to celebrate my dad's 80th birthday. It was nice being back, seeing my family, and getting away from the Chicago winter for a few days. I really need to try and go back more often. I'm going to work on getting the boys their passports so I can take them with me next time.
A few weeks later we had our company summit in San Diego for the second time. I love getting back to San Diego any chance I get. My friend Jose came down from LA and we met up with our friend Riz for drinks and tacos. The next day Jose and I grabbed dinner and caught a movie.
During the summer, the boys were off from school so I took them up to Wisconsin Dells for a few days. My dad used to take me there as a kid. It's like working class Disney World in the Midwest. It felt really nostalgic being back there after probably 40 years. A lot has changed but a lot is still the same. We took a ride on a Duck, which is an amphibious truck they used to use in the military, converted to a sightseeing ride. We played some mini golf, hit the water parks, played at the arcade, swam in the hotel pool, and took some old-timey pics. All stuff I did with my dad. It was great.
Ryan Ryan started first grade and continues to be obsessed with space. He had his first year of tee-ball and I was kind of shocked how well he did. He's almost always the shortest kid on his teams, but he was maybe out only twice all season and earned a couple of game balls. He was so excited. He tried out basketball as well. He also continued to do soccer. His favorite player is Ronaldo and loves doing Ronaldo's celebration no matter what sport he's playing. He's also getting deeper into video games, which is fun for me.
Owen Owen is as talkative as ever. He's quite the story teller. He will make up elaborate stories that sound so convincing that his teachers have to ask us if the people he's talking about are real. He loves doing whatever Ryan is doing, which sometimes drives Ryan nuts. He's really into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Sonic the Hedgehog. He did soccer for the first time and is excited to follow in his brothers' footsteps and play baseball eventually.
Joe Joe is continuing to develop into a responsible adult, which is so wild to me because he was around Ryan's age when I met Allie. He transferred from St. Ambrose to IIT, so he's been living at home. It's been nice having him around with the boys. He's been putting in a ton of work at the gym and people who knew him as a little kid are shocked when they see him now.
Work Last year I said my job at Turquoise was the best I've had in tech. In 2025 things took a dramatic turn. Part of it is just normal startup growing pains, but there have been other things that have been challenging to navigate. It feels like other people have assumed ownership over the design system I built and despite my best efforts, it's starting to stray from my vision. There's also been a huge push to use AI and I have trouble reconciling my own reservations about it with the company's full-on embrace of it. On my latest performance review I got the following feedback:
Mike should be more open to the growth of tools in our industry. AI tools are moving lightyears in short spaces of time, it’s genuinely an exciting time to be working in this industry (for a successful and supportive company). Mike should relish this opportunity to drive our adoption forwards, not hold it back. Mike routinely makes woeful assumptions that Turquoise is dying to replace us all with robots.
The irony here is that 1) this reads like it was written by AI, and 2) I actually have been using AI, just not for work. I find that it can be useful to compliment my skills where I'm less proficient, but when it gets things wrong that I'm an expert in, it makes me second guess whether it's right about the things I know less about. Not to mention all the environmental, creative, and ethical implications of AI. It's really something I'm struggling with. I feel like I need to understand what it's capable of so I look at my using it as a know thy enemy situation. A lot of people seem really eager to automate themselves out of a job.
Projects I ended my newsletter, Peruvian Idle, after 13 issues. It was a lot of work to put together every month and, as much as I enjoyed it, I had fewer subscribers than there were issues so I threw in the towel.
In my growing frustration with social media, I downloaded all of my content from Instagram and built my own version, Insta-Idol, out of spite. I don't really care about likes or comments and I was tired of giving free content to Meta. I've done a bad job at posting photos to it, but no one has complained so far.
My obsession with Balatro continued last year and in my quest to get the final trophy, I build this Balatro Checklist to keep track of which jokers I had gold stickers on. It was a fun little project and I finally earned the last trophy and deleted Balatro once and for all. Watch them finally release a huge update in 2026 and pull me back in.
Extra Life I did my 12th Extra Life campaign in 2025 and hit a personal fundraising milestone of $50,000. Team Olivia hit that number as a team the year before, but it was gratifying to know that I have personally raised that much money over the years to support Lurie Children's Hospital. It's really humbling to get so much love and support year after year. Thank you so much to everyone who's pitched in over the years.
Things I loved in 2025
Movies
2025 was a great year for movies. I logged a record 289 entries on Letterboxd, far surpassing the year before. I watched a fair amount of new releases, including pretty much every awards contender. I also filled in a lot of blind spots and revisited some movies I hadn't watched that I remember loving to see if they still held up. While most of them did, it was interesting to see how the culture has shifted to the point where some 80s and 90s material we found hilarious at the time was actually pretty gross.
Rental Family “Sometimes all we need is for someone to look us in the eye to remind us we exist.” Brendan Fraser plays an American actor in Japan who gets a job playing different roles in people's real lives with an openness and curiosity that few other actors could pull off. There's several different people whose lives he plays a part in that are deeply endearing. Definitely keep some tissues handy for this one. My favorite film of 2025.
One Battle After Another A rare PTA film that takes place in current times and it feels so relevant with everything going on in the world. Having been subjected to weeks of ICE and Border Patrol running amok here in Chicago, the opening scene felt so cathartic. From there it’s just a relentless ride with so much manic energy, save Benicio’s Sensei Sergio, who exudes cool calm when the movie reaches its most tense moments. Might be my favorite DiCaprio performance. Loved Greenwood’s score and choice needle drops. Glad I saw this in the theater.
Hamnet At one point in Hamnet, Emily Watson’s character articulates something that I’ve thought about every day since losing my daughter. “What is given may be taken away at any time. We must never let our guard down. Never take for granted that our children’s hearts beat, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak, smile, argue, play. Never forget for a moment that they may be gone.” This movie was engineered to destroy me. The whole time I’m thinking, okay but what the fuck does this have to do with Shakespeare? And then it hit me and the fucking Max Richter kicks in and I’m left sitting in a puddle of my own tears as the credits roll. Damn.
Weapons My favorite theater-going experience of the year. An incredible communal experience seldom had anymore. This movie is remarkable. Easily my favorite horror movie in ages. Right up there with a handful of horror movies that changed the game — Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense, Get Out. Seeing this gave me that same feeling, like I just watched a magic trick that had never been pulled off before.
Train Dreams Another movie that absolutely wrecked me. Gorgeously shot, reminded me of a Terrence Malick film. Joel Edgerton gives such a restrained performance. You can't take your eyes off him when he's on screen. I'll be thinking of this movie for a long time.
Other's worth mentioning: Guillermo Del Toro was born to make Frankenstein. If you think about it, almost all his movies are Frankenstein. I don’t have any great affinity for the source material or subsequent adaptations, but this hooked me from the start and never let go. Bugonia was delightfully unhinged, as you’d expect from Yorgos Lanthimos. This felt more accessible than any of his prior films, including The Favourite. Sirat is the Mad Max of rave movies. It lost me at a certain point but I stuck with it anyway and it only got more stressful from there. Quietly devastating. Rose Byrne was tremendous in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. A deeply unsettling and darkly funny movie. Felt almost Lynchian at some points. Went into Black Bag expecting more of a spy movie and what I got instead was a delightful whodunnit where all the characters are smart and lie for a living. Soderbergh brings his A-game and his signature low-key horny vibes. I loved the world-building of Sinners. There’s a sense of dread that builds that really reaches a fever pitch when the shit finally hits the fan. Borrows from great genre films but adds so much originality at the same time. An absolute showstopping musical number really wowed me. Colin Farrell starred in a pair of movies that were critically panned but I found quite enjoyable. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey spoke to me like some of my favorite films like Eternal Sunshine and Once. This doesn’t come close to the highs of those films but I dug the cast, Kogonada’s direction, and just found a lot to relate to. Ballad of a Small Player is dripping with color and Colin Farrell’s flop sweat. It has the manic energy of Uncut Gems with an unexpected twist that sets it apart from the typical degenerate gambler movie. 2025 was a big year for comedy documentaries. I particularly enjoyed Pee-Wee as Himself, John Candy: I Like Me, Downey Wrote That, and Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost.
TV
We got some great new shows in 2025 as well as the return of several shows for their second seasons.
The Pitt feels like a spiritual successor to ER but told in near real-time like 24. The show does a great job of fleshing out its characters through action rather than exposition. It's kind of a small miracle that this show and its 15-episode season exist in an age of much shorter runs of streaming shows that take years between seasons. As I write this in 2026, season two has already finished airing, with season 3 set to release early next year. Remember when TV shows did that?
The Lowdown Ethan Hawke is delightful as a very Lebowski-coded truthstorian who gets tangled up in a wild conspiracy. This show feels like a throwback to the 80s detective shows of my childhood but with a modern twist. Showrunner Sterlin Harjo, who also did Reservation Dogs, is clearly a talent. This might be the show I'm most looking forward to returning.
Adolescence As a parent, this series wrecked me. It felt extremely relevant and timely in its depiction of online bullying and toxic masculinity. I'm not sure each episode needed to be shot in one take but it's done masterfully here. If there are any sneaky edits they're extremely hard to spot, which makes the performances, particularly Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper's, that much more mesmerizing. At Second City they teach you "today is the day," that every good story is the day something happens that changes its characters. Every episode of this series takes that to heart, even if it's not immediately obvious why we're seeing that day. Truly one of the must watch series of 2025.
The Rehearsal Season 2 builds on the premise of its first season, in which Nathan Fielder helps people rehearse scenarios in their lives to help them overcome various social obstacles. This season he becomes obsessed with airline safety and, like the first season, the show starts to become more about Nathan. It all escalates to a wild reveal that I still can't believe.
Andor I was a little worried this season wasn't living up to the highs of its first season, but about halfway through it really gets cooking. That Disney let Tony Gilroy make this extremely topical story about fighting against a fascist state is kind of remarkable. It does a great job setting up Rogue One, which I rewatched after the series. It felt like there was much more context and emotion behind the sacrifices made by the rebels to get the Death Star plans that leads to the opening of Episode IV. Andor is objectively the best Star Wars story.
Others worth mentioning: The second season of Severance picks up right where the first left off and digs deeper into the psychology of the characters while peeling back the layers of its mythology. I was worried they wouldn't stick the landing but there was so much to love (Gwendoline Christie!) and fortunately season 3 has been greenlit. I was interested to see how people reacted to the big twist of Last of Us season two, as it was pretty polarizing to people who played the game. Overall they did a great job adapting the first half of the game's sequel. It was interesting to see how they handled the various character perspectives. Next season we'll get a lot more of Kaitlyn Dever's Abby. Vince Gilligan is back in New Mexico with Pluribus, starring Better Call Saul's Rhea Seehorn, who plays one of a handful of people on Earth that is immune to an alien virus that turns the rest of the world into a hive mind. I really dug this. Like Gilligan's past shows, it's a great mix of drama and dark comedy. The Studio got of to a roaring start. A send-up of Hollywood that features a ton of famous people playing themselves, shot almost entirely in one take. The season on the whole felt kind of uneven but the highs are extremely high, and not just because Seth Rogan is the star. The Chair Company feels like a TV version of Tim Robinson's deeply weird Friendship. Robinson plays a guy who gets wrapped up in what he thinks is a conspiracy that's comically mundane. I love Robinson's humor, so this was a hit for me but I could see people not being into it. Season four of The Bear felt like a bit of a return to form after a shaky third season. For me, this show is at its best when its exploring its blue collar Chicago roots rather than the world of haute cuisine. Every season has some sublime moments though, and it remains the best depiction of Chicago on the small screen. The Diplomat returned for its third season after a big cliffhanger. The show feels like its getting more into political thriller territory than the fun, horny show the first season was, but I still dig it.
Video Games
A great year for original IP. I had some great co-op experiences with my friends and sunk a lot of time into solo games as well.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 This game is a work of art on every level. The gameplay borrows from turn-based games like Persona 5 but mixes in a block/parry mechanic of a Souls-like. But it's really the combination of story, music, voice acting and art direction that pulls you into this world. Each chapter ends with such a huge twist. The game just keeps opening up layer after layer. Easily the best video game soundtrack in years.
Arc Raiders By some incredible miracle, Arc Raiders takes elements of games that are inherently competitive and gives its players a sandbox for cooperative play that rivals anything ever made. The game lives in the genre of "extraction shooter," where you're dropped into a post-apocalyptic world ruled by hostile machines. Each run you need to find resources and avoid being killed by the machines, but there's also other human players vying for the same resources that can kill you... or not. There's something about the way Arc Raiders incentivizes cooperation with other players over hostility that's like nothing I've ever experienced. In solo runs, players are more friendly in the game than they would likely be if you ran into them in real life, selflessly running to your aid or dropping the game's most valuable items at your feet while asking for nothing in return. While playing in duos or trios results in a lot more PVP gunplay, it's Arc Raiders' solo mode that kept me engaged long after there was anything left for my character to do.
Blue Prince In Blue Prince you play the heir of a vast, mysterious mansion filled with 45 rooms that change every day. In order to claim your inheritance, you need to discover a secret 46th room. Each day, the house resets and you build the mansion room-by-room, like a maze, searching for that elusive secret. But the game only begins when you find that 46th room. The story, and the mansion, reveal more and more with each passing day. Sadly, there was a game-breaking bug that lasted for months once your save reached a certain point and by the time they fixed it I had moved on to other games. But this is one I'd love to revisit to try and finally get the platinum trophy.
The Alters Maybe the most underrated game of the year that practically no one I know was playing. As The Alters opens, you are the sole survivor on a hostile planet. To survive, you have to clone yourself. The clones are based on life choices you made at various parts of your life. A different life path leads to a different personality, a different career path and, at times, a wildly different outlook on life. Finding a way to work together with your clones while you build your base and manage resources to survive is quite a challenge. Watching your clones come to terms with their reality makes for some really thought-provoking moments. This is a really unique game that's not incredibly difficult but offers a great story on top of a great, original, sci-fi premise.
Rematch This soccer game from the makers of Sifu, one of my favorite games of the last few years was a blast. You could describe it as Rocket League without cars, but that's just soccer, I guess? Rematch offers 3v3 to 5v5 matches in a futuristic indoor arena. The colorful art style and low-poly characters of Sifu are present here, but it's really the gameplay that's the star. The physics feel really good and playing co-op with a full team of friends was my favorite co-op experience of the year.
Others worth mentioning: Battlefield 6 is a throwback to the glory days of Battlefield 4. I had a ton of fun getting back to this series, which feels a lot deeper than Call of Duty with a class system that allows you to contribute in various ways besides just getting kills. The vehicle combat is still best in class and part of what makes the game so special. Ghost of Yotei is the long-awaited sequel to Ghost of Tsushima, another one of my favorite games in recent memory. I really enjoyed this game's story and the additions they made to the combat. I was disappointed the co-op mode didn't release at launch. By the time it finally did I had largely moved onto other games. The First Berserker: Khazan combines the combat of Sekiro with the buildcrafting of Nioh. The cel-shaded art style is gorgeous, the combat is fluid and satisfying, and the UI is some of the best I’ve seen in a soulslike, making a usually otherwise inscrutable genre a lot more approachable. This game is HARD, but you never feel like you’re not making progress because you can still level up skills and stats even when you’ve been fighting the same boss for two hours.
Looking forward to in 2026
CSS Day For many years I've looked on with envy as my peers in the CSS world attended CSS Day in Amsterdam. This year I decided I'd finally make it happen. And if I'm going to go to Europe for the first time, I'm going to GO TO EUROPE. So I'm flying into London, staying there a few days, taking the train to Amsterdam for CSS Day, hanging out there a few days, and then taking the train back to London before flying out the next day. Bless my wife for letting me leave her with the kids for 10 days. Looking forward to meeting up with friends Craig and Brit while I'm there, reconnecting with some friends at CSS Day and finally meeting folks like Kevin, Adam and Kilian in person.
Citizenship I've been working on getting my Peruvian citizenship, for no particular reason (waves around at the collapse of civil society), and recently my mom learned about a new Canadian law that opens citizenship to descendants of Canadian citizens. My great-grandfather was French-Canadian, so apparently that makes us eligible. So if the shit hits the fan, I may have a few options for relocating. 😅
My Career I've been thinking a lot about what's next for me, career-wise. The nature of my role is that I come into a company and set up a design system and, relatively quickly, the system is largely done and I shift to more of a support role, in which I find a lot less fulfillment. I'm thinking the logical next step is to go freelance, where I can set up a few design systems a year and train teams to use and maintain them without having to linger around. I'm hoping to get this going by the end of 2026. If you're interested in a battle-tested design system where your team never has to write CSS, let me know!
Office update To that end, I want to put some work into my office to make it more organized. Right now I have about a 5x5 foot area that is mine, and the rest feels like my kids' play room. I want to create more space for myself, maybe build out some storage in the closet to organize all my crap, get a new couch where the cushions aren't sliding off twice a day, and maybe get a record player.
Website redesign If I'm going to go freelance, I'd like to scale down my personal website a bit. Right now it's doing double duty promoting my work and a space for my personal stuff. With a dedicated work site, I can make this site more personal and minimalistic. I'd also like to add some quality of life improvements to my setup that will make writing a new post feel like less of a slog.
More moments of hope 2025 felt pretty hopeless. We're inundated on a daily basis with news about genocide, mass deportations and abductions of our neighbors, extrajudicial killings, blatant corruption, inflation, pedophiles, AI layoffs, quack science. All of that, every day, and we're expected to put on a happy face and keep delivering shareholder value so we can keep our kids clothed and a roof over their heads. It's exhausting.
In 2026, there have already been flashes of hope. During Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show, I was surprised how proud and seen I felt when he shouted out all the countries in North and South America, especially Peru. My kids and I watched in wonder as four astronauts went around the moon and landed safely in the Pacific Ocean. Hungary's far-right leader Viktor Orbán was roundly defeated in their recent election. One local election after another is swinging against the fascist regime. It's finally starting to feel like the tide is turning just a little bit.
I'm hoping when I write the next one of these it will be under better circumstances. Take care of each other and thanks, as always, for reading.
