The year was heavy. But it also gave us Jake Paul's dentist bill, a few perfect moments of chaos, and this weird little website.

86 Articles, 1 Jaw, and 0 Regrets: A Bittersweet Goodbye to 2025

The year was heavy. But it also gave us Jake Paul's dentist bill, a few perfect moments of chaos, and this weird little website. Let's talk about the good parts before the clock runs out.

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Real Quick

It’s December 31st. The last few hours of a year that, if I’m being honest, often felt like it was actively trying to bench-press the soul of the world.

Last month, I wrote about that weight. Today, I don’t want to talk about the weight. I want to talk about the sparks. The stupid, beautiful, personal little flashes in the dark that made you laugh when you thought you couldn’t, or made you mutter “hell yes” to an empty room. The things that made the heaviness bearable.

For me, the biggest spark was this: I started FriedReads.

It officially turns one tomorrow. Or maybe on the 6th. I’m terrible with dates. The point is, a year ago, this was a blank screen and a stupid idea. Now it’s 86 articles, a few inside jokes, and a place where I get to scream into the void and have the void. It became my filter for the whole damn year. Everything funnels through here.

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Part I: The Accidental Clubhouse

I didn’t plan to write 85 articles before this one. I planned to see if I could make a website work. But then I had a thought about Shakespeare, and it was a mean thought, and I realized I had nowhere to put it. So I built a room for it. Then I found a story about a swearing parrot and needed a room for that, too.

Before I knew it, I’d built a whole weird clubhouse just for my dumbest opinions. And the absolute best part, the part that never got old, was the literary demolition derby.

Getting to take a rhetorical flamethrower to Great Expectations. Giving Shakespeare a therapy session on Dr. Phil. Declaring Lord of the Flies a masterclass in overrated nonsense. This website became my personal, petty, deeply cathartic revenge against every boring English class I ever slept through. It was my chance to say, “You told me this was genius. I’m here to tell you it’s mostly just old.” And people read it! It felt good. That’s a magic I didn’t expect.

I got to be a movie critic, a satirist, a guy who thinks way too much about boxing, and a commentator on the world’s dumbest news stories. It was a year of pure, unadulterated creative play. And at the end of a year that often felt so grimly serious, that play felt like a radical act.

Part II: The 2025 Gift Basket (Beautiful, Stupid Edition)

Look, the year gave us some truly spectacular, low-brow gifts. Moments of perfect, cosmic schadenfreude that felt like the universe winking at us.

The Gift of Jake Paul’s Jaw. Come on. You have to admit it was beautiful. Watching a man who built an empire on pure, unfiltered audacity have that empire physically realigned by Anthony Joshua. The frantic running, the look of dawning “oh no” in his eyes, the final, definitive thud. It wasn’t just a knockout. It was poetic justice rendered in high-definition slow motion. It was the most expensive public service announcement of all time: “The rules of physics still apply to you.” Bliss.

The Gift of Andrew Tate’s Humbling. The ultimate “find out” phase, broadcast for all to see. The man who preached untouchable, alpha invincibility, getting thoroughly, publicly flogged by a guy from a TV show. It was a delicious reminder that the loudest voice in the room is often covering for the most hollow core.

The Gift of the Billionaire Bromance Breakup. Trump and Elon. The friendship of the century, dissolving in a petty, public spat over who was on whose weirdo list. It was like watching two Roman gods bicker over a parking space on Mount Olympus. You couldn’t write satire that good. It was the perfect, messy cherry on top of the year’s absurdity.

Those moments were communal. We all saw them. We all had the same thought at the same time. In a world that feels increasingly divided, sharing a collective, silent “hah!” at the same ridiculous thing is a kind of togetherness.

There were smaller gifts, too. The fun distractions. A new Superman movie that dared to be hopeful. M3GAN 2.0 giving us more ridiculous robot dances. The weird, fascinating puzzle of Marty Supreme that I’m still turning over in my head. They weren’t all masterpieces, but they were our distractions. Shared escapes.

And then there were the quiet, personal wins, the ones the news cycle never sees.

Finishing 31 chapters of Creatures Among Us and putting it out into the world on ScribbleHub and RoyalRoad. That story matters to me, and the fact that it’s finding readers—that’s a win no bad headline can ever touch.

Building this. 86 entries. A hand-coded website that, against all odds, mostly works. That’s the real, tangible success of my year. It’s a small fire I built, and I’m just glad I wasn’t hit by some crazy lawsuit yet.

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Part III: The Bittersweet Part (And the Hope)

So, 2025. You were a lot. You were heavy, and chaotic, and often mean.

But you also gave us gifts. Gifts wrapped in chaos and delivered with a smirk. You gave us moments to laugh at the arrogant, spaces to be genuinely, stupidly creative, and tiny pockets of quiet victory in our own lives.

That’s the bittersweet part, I guess. Holding both things at once. The profound weight and the perfect, stupid spark. You can’t have one without the other. The darkness is what makes the sparks visible.

As for 2026? I don’t have grand predictions. I just have hopes.

I hope FriedReads gets weirder. I hope I get to bash more overrated classics and celebrate more bizarre news. I hope we get more moments of collective, stupid joy. More underdogs. More arrogant jaws meeting their fate. More movies that let us forget the world for two hours.

And I hope, most of all, that we all get a little better at noticing our own sparks. The small wins. The personal projects. The things that make you mutter “hell yes” in an empty room. Tend to those. They’re the only thing that lights the way.

Here’s to the beautiful, stupid, heartbreaking, hilarious year. Here’s to the art we made to survive it. Here’s to Jake Paul’s dentist, to Shakespeare rolling in his grave, and to you, for reading.

The best thing I built this year wasn’t a website. It was this—whatever this is.

Let’s build more of it next year.

Happy New Year. See you on the other side.

Thanks for a weird, wonderful year,
Allen
FriedReads.com | @Allen_Fried