zorealis

All right, here I'm going to have to concede that my usual strategy for disambiguating game titles has broken down. This post is about a game called 2025 that came out in the year 2025.



It's a puzzle where you're presented with two thousand and twenty-five items that you have to group into 45 categories of 45 items each. This is a much bigger version of the New York Times daily 4x4 categorization puzzle Connections (which you can play on a third party site if you don't want to deal with the NYT), which in turn is inspired by the British quiz show Only Connect.

2025 is not as conceptually difficult as Connections, which goes out of its way to trick you into thinking items go together that don't. I figured out what the 45 categories in 2025 were relatively quickly, and then spent a long time with most of them almost full (40+) and staring at a couple hundred uncategorized items that I had simply never heard of. I was able to guess some of them by what sort of a thing they sounded like they could plausibly be, but I also used a lot of brute force, especially towards the end. Yes, the first category I successfully filled was

spoilers

birds. The last one I filled was legal doctrines, which are very hard to tell apart from mixed drinks and logical fallacies because all three are mostly ridiculous-sounding nonsense phrases.

You can play 2025 for free on the website of its creator, Thomas Colthurst. His whole site is worth looking at if you are fondly nostalgic for '90s era web sites made by geeks of a certain generation who want to share their filk about linear algebra and lists of puns they and their friends came up with on Usenet.

Thanks to lirazel for the recommendation!

This short memoir follows Jones' early life growing up as a gay Black kid in 1990s Texas, through his college years and young adulthood struggling with feelings of unbelonging and uncertain identity.

The core of the book is his relationship with his mother, who died of heart disease when he was 26. She was an iconoclast, breaking with her family's conservative Christianity to become a Buddhist, and insisted on doing things her own way, including raising her son on her own. The dynamic between them is complex; he loves and respects her, and in many ways they're close and protective of each other, yet he doesn't feel truly seen by her. His sexuality is part of the barrier—she doesn't reject him, but is resistant to talking about it—and I also got a sense of her as a person who held others at arm's length because intimacy scared her.

But Jones is not too afraid to write about his most vulnerable, self-destructive, and howlingly painful moments. ( cut for content: gay bashing ) It doesn't read like he's being too harsh on himself, and it doesn't read like he's trying to make himself look good. It reads like he's found a narrative arc in what really happened rather than editing events into artificial tidiness.

Jones is primarily a poet, and the book's emotional clarity and concise lyricism bears that out. The material is heavy, but I didn't find it depressing. Rather, I felt that the fact that he's now able to write so honestly about what he's been through demonstrates that he's achieved what he's been longing for: knowing and sharing who he really is. He doesn't need to spell out that this happened for him, because when you read the book you're holding the evidence of it in your hands.