It's that time of the year again: for me to speedrun writing a blog post in time to be posted on January 1st, talking about the games I played the previous year and the events surrounding them (narrator voice: I did not, in fact, manage to post this on January 1st, but 2nd is good enough).
Last year, I pondered about my place in the world, and whether I have any rights to center my life so much around video games: a frivolous hobby to many, even if it has become a profession for me. I ended it noting that 2024 was the year when learned to allow myself to be fascinated, to engage with creative works more earnestly.
Well, as I look back through 2025, I see that I've been carrying that sentiment even further. I've been allowing myself joy, whimsy. I've been letting myself be immersed in whatever I got into, to see a work for what it is and what its creator meant it to be, not what I want out of it. I have the privilege of being comfortable; instead of turning it into survivor's guilt, I will find a way to pay it forward.
This year, let's just cut to the chase, is the year of Granblue Fantasy. This 12 year old grand elder of gacha games walked into my life in the exact year when I would be the most delighted with it. Its basic fantasy setting I found comfortable, its casual—I'd even say unambitious— storytelling I found charming. I came here for a good time, not good writing, and then found myself constantly surprised at how earnest it can go. Sometimes it succeeded in telling its stories to a degree I've never seen before, and sometimes it just kinda bumbles along with a tenacity that I can't help but admire; either way, my fondness for it runs deep.
If it had come at any earlier part of my life, I might have dismissed it as drivel, a pastime padding, but this is the exact year that, I feel, I can fully understand it. A grand adventure. A story running on Fuck It We Ball. Anything can happen. Anyone can show up. The world is full of wonders. The sky can be blue because of all the people who make it so. Never dismiss even the slightest bit of joy you can find.
And in a way, that sums up my sentiment for this entire year.
The way I usually do these blog posts is by listing out about five games that had an impact on me in chronological order (roughly), and then at the bottom some honourable mentions for those that didn't make the cut. Let's do that.
0. Arknights
My first year of marriage with Granblue Fantasy might be going exceptionally well but I still love and care for my wife Arknights.
I've, I think, said every praises I needed to say about this game. A thoughtfully realised world, never shying from the sort of human conflicts that can arise out of simple greed, or simple fear of differences. To quote what I wrote last year: at its core is this idea that all lives are worth living, that all oppression against this must end, that we can strive to be better even when the world is against us.
I wrote last year that Arknights was taking bolder steps with its stories, hurling towards a climax. This year I regret to report that they've kinda been fumbling it. There were some great events: Ending a Grand Overture explored what happens after the climax of a glorified war, the compromises you have to make to rebuild a nation, and rejection to the call for empty celebrations. I Portatori de Velluti is a murder mystery without a culprit to find, a maze of relationships and the masks people wear over themselves. Exodus from the Pale Sea is a fun adventure on the high sea (or rather, sand) that sees our favorite nerd grew from a self-centered loner to someone who is honest to himself about how much he cares for his crew.
Most of the other events, unfortunately, I didn't quite enjoy as much. The biggest disappointment, and likely emblematic of my issues with Arknights recently, was The Masses' Travels. It has grand ambitions but, in its pursuit of it, ends up flattening many of its characters down to tools that exist only to move the plot. The message it seems to be sending is that the Big Crisis is more important than the lives of the little people, that Hype Moments and Aura are more important than moments of sincerity. This is the sort of thing that can break my heart.
I hope this is just a fluke and not something they're carrying to the end. Endfield is releasing next month and it's, uhh, not looking good. But we'll see.
1. Metaphor ReFantazio
I'm holding this game tight in my heart. If it came to me when I was 15 it would have formed the trajectory of my life. I sincerely hope it's doing that the 15-year-olds playing it now, and that it makes them a kinder person, someone willing to not only extend a hand for those in need but to also understand the limit of individual acts like that. Sometimes there is a need for structural change. To be kind also means to be willing to be strong; to be able to gain and wield power.
I started playing Metaphor a few days before writing last year's Game of the Year list and it very easily made its way there. I wrote there that I was worried it won't be as good as its opening hour, or that I won't be able to finish playing it, like I did so many other 100-hour RPGs. Past me, your worries are unfounded. I blazed through the game such that by February I've wandered across nearly every inch of Euchronia, made friends with all my companions, and pondered about ten thousand different things. It's wonderful, both as a game, and a fictional world. It has so many flaws I want to talk about but never got around to doing. I started writing a novel taking place 40 years after its ending, just to see how far the world can develop. I wish dearly for a spin-off sequel where you manage the kingdom.
Metaphor's story has so much heart in it, I always feel bad talking about what I dislike about it. It feels defanged; that's my main problem with it. Instead of being about overthrowing the current system, it's partially about continuing a status quo, even if you push for incremental changes for the better. Instead of engaging head-on with the opposition's arguments, it kinda devolves into the usual Final Battle Spectacle towards the end. It's. It's basically this tweet.
But putting that aside, I find the main crux of the story deeply heartfelt: that there is power in fiction. That the first step to making the world better is to believe that it's possible.
I said that if I had played this at 15 year old it would form the trajectory of my entire life. This is because at 15 I already experienced a work—a novel, to be precise—that did, in fact, form that same trajectory. It pushed me, though I didn't realise it at the time, to look out for the little people, to be interested in the structure of politics and society. At 28 now I don't really end up being anything; just a game programmer, an inconsistent storyteller, someone with ten thousand thoughts barely able to be put down into words. I just hope I can pay this sentiment forward: at some point, maybe, someone will inherit these thoughts and make real changes.
You should all play Metaphor ReFantazio regardless tho. I need you all to meet Leon Strohl da Haliaetus. I love him.
2. Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising
This is how it started: playing Guilty Gear Strive last year has awakened me to the charms of fighting games. Unlike my previous dabbling in the genre, I took this one a little more seriously: comboing, footsies, how to take advantage of neutrals, what to do when under pressure. With more knowledge of the genre, I also get to appreciate more of what they put into it: how differently each character play, how much their moveset is an extension of their personality, how much of modern fighting games are influenced by years of history of the genre.
I went into GBVSR expecting an extension of this understanding of fighting games, and in a lot of ways, I did get that. I've never played Street Fighter, so this game was kind of my introduction to the more ground-based combat that's more common in non-anime-styled game. The movesets here are also more rigid, which took more getting used to, but easier to digest and analyze moment to moment. The characters are charming and talkative and there's a sense of camaraderie between them and before I knew it, I went pretty deep into getting to know them.
To say I fell in love would be an understatement to how much real estate Granblue Fantasy, as a whole, has taken up in my brain.
This is Sandalphon's fault. His was the first song I listened to from the soundtrack. He looks so cute in his Rising art. His hair so ruffleable. His mannerism so cute, his grumpy streak so charming. What is his deal? The game was fun enough that I bought the full version and Season 1 DLC after only a day of playing the demo. Sandalphon is in Season 2; no matter. Within a week I've already bought him as well. He's so nice to play. I understand his personality better from playing him, but I want more. Why is he called the supreme primarch? Why does he have so many multi-coloured wings? Why is he apologizing for something heinous that happened long ago? What is he apologizing for?
Surely, I told myself, I'm not going to wade into an 11-year-old gacha game just to find out, right? I clearly don't have time for that kind of nonsense?
A month later I logged in to the original Granblue Fantasy.
3. Granblue Fantasy
My friends on Twitter has seen my slow descent to madness throughout this year. I'm just here for Sandalphon, I said, and then I fell headfirst into everything else that Granblue Fantasy is.
It's so charming!! It's so corny!!! It just pulls out bullshit plot developments out of nowhere!!! Here is a world of floating islands in the sky, of people with animal ears and horns, of monstrous beasts and immortal beings, of mountains and snow and beaches and deserts, anything you can imagine. Here is an airship riding between the worlds, and a crew tight-knit as family, going on every adventure imaginable, making friends and growing the crew as far as they can.
So many hands take part in making the world of Granblue Fantasy, from the writers and artists and all the voice actors and composers. There's such a wild variety of stories, both in term of content and quality, but I almost always have a good time with it. Despite the variety, you can tell there's so much love put into this world, it hurts. These hundreds of characters live and breathe and grow in their many authors' head such that you can't help but have them live in your head too. We're all linked in this together.
Granblue Fantasy has been around for almost 12 years at this point, featuring hundreds of side stories alongside one continuous main story. That's a pretty crazy length for a mobile game, which is still a relatively new medium. 12 years, and with all the support of its creators, is long enough to build a whole culture of its own; as I'm writing this I'm watching a livestream of Granblue Fantasy Fes, a 2-day yearly event taking place in Tokyo featuring set design based on locations in the game, actors with carefully-made costumes playing the part of the game's characters, physical minigames, stages for live plays, dance numbers featuring character songs, silly game shows featuring the voice actors, and a bunch of art and merchandises.
I'm just living it voraciously through the livestream and the photos and videos that the event's goers post on social media, but I've been really enjoying the atmosphere. There's this genuine shared love for a goofyass fictional world and its goofyass stories and goofy characters. Well, of course Cygames made all this because they wanted to make money, but you can't look me dead in the eye and tell me that the people who work there don't love it too.
To love—to love something so much it propels you to take action, to go out, to create things no matter how strange or off-beat it is—maybe it's enough.
I wrote a blog post earlier this year about my favorite storyline of the game. It's the one Sandalphon is from, of course, titled What Makes the Sky Blue. It's mainly a single trilogy that started out only mildly more interesting than the average stories, but then combine to hit me right in my heart in the final sequence. I haven't recovered. I don't think I'll ever recover. The trilogy was completed nearly seven years ago and people still haven't recovered. A lot of people are still making art based on it: paintings the likes of which you'd see in the Sistine Chapel, prose and poetry that'll make your heart bleed. I, like so many others, am also driven mad by it: I'm writing a novel thanks to it.
What Makes the Sky Blue can be about a lot of things: The mortal bond shared even between immortals, the tenacity of human ingenuity, the extent that one can create or destroy for love. The part of it that I keep going over in my head, which I wrote in the blog post linked above, is about the relationship between a creator and their creations. "All creations are work, and all creation begin with love, but not all of them remains loved through the process. Sometimes the love is for the process, and sometimes only to what the finished work can be. And when you're done with it, your creations can still grow and change and even surpasses you."
My friends can also attest to how I fell (i.e. lost my footing, crippling my composure, destroying all chance of being seen as cool) for the Dragon Knights. I will never say their story is good, but it is fun, and the boys really are very cute and handsome and everytime Percival say anything I cover my face in embarrassment. I love him. The only thing running in his mind is statecraft: how to be able to lead a kingdom such that even the least fortunate of us can thrive. Fuck. He's cringe. I love him.
4. Hollow Knight: Silksong
I started playing the original Hollow Knight within the first week of its release. It took me three years to finish it.
It made it to this year-end list on all the three years that I played it since 2017. I wrote that Hollow Knight was not a game for me—my terrible reflexes hate it, my piss-poor sense of direction is confounded by it—and yet it also was a game made for me: the way the world slowly opens up as I learn to traverse it, the superimposition of the bleakness of its surrounding and the lively cheer that its characters hold on anyway. As I wrote, "Each playthrough has frustration in store, but there were always moments of wonders."
I was one of the thousands of people waiting patiently (or, impatiently, patiently to the point of madness) for the sequel to be released. Then years went by and Silksong became a beloved joke accompanying every games announcement. "There's a Nintendo Direct tomorrow, guys, don't forget to wear your clown makeups, haha." But then the news became real. Silksong in two weeks. That was when I started to become worried for real.
Seven years is a long time. Long enough for a person to change. A work meant for the me of seven years ago might not work as well to the me of today. I may, in this phase of my life, no longer be able to enjoy its subtle details and difficult movements. Maybe I'll never be able to enjoy something like that again.
I got Silksong within the minute of its release (beating out everyone else having to deal with Steam crashing, haha!). That was a few months ago; by now I think I'm on a pretty good pace to get at least one ending without needing another three years. My worries are, essentially, unfounded. It's true that I'm a different person now, but not in the way that I was worried about. I'm older, but also smarter, wiser, and now have a better understanding of high-difficulty action-based video games. And, after all, I didn't lose the sense of wonderment that made the first Hollow Knight so enjoyable for me.
In a sense, Silksong also grew and changed in comparison to its predecessor: Pharloom is a larger ecosystem and more affected by the society that lives in it. Hornet, unlike the little mute knight who preceded her, is talkative and has a more assertive personality. It's not just Hollow Knight But More, in a similar way that an older version of you isn't just You But Older. It explores new grounds and try new things and, to its credit, manage to balance things in a way that doesn't make the new additions overwhelming or superfluous (though some may argue otherwise). The passing of time, and the changes that come with it, is inevitable, but it doesn't have to be scary.
5. BlazBlue: Entropy Effect
My current day job is being a game programmer and I'm currently working on KidBash: Super Legend, a roguelite platformer inspired by MegaMan and featuring loving parodies of many classic games. It's been in development for over two years now and we're hoping it's going to be ready for release within the next year (don't quote me on that).
I love my job. I love video games. I looove programming. It's something that's a little more craft than it is art; you're solving a puzzle, essentially, but how you solve it can take some creative thinking. Game programming in particular presents interesting puzzles that's often unique to the specific games. I'm good at it, this puzzle-solving. What I'm not good at: keeping myself focused on the work, managing tasks and setting priorities, delegating tasks to my juniors, all while not trying to bash my head in when the old chronic pain shows up. Even if love (and a good paycheck) can sustain you to the end, you'll still have to deal with all the tiny cuts.
I'm woolgathering. Making a game is hard work and takes a long time and requires a surprising number of different skills. When you're deep in the inner workings, as we are right now, it's hard to see what the final piece is going to be, if it will be any good. When I get too frustrated, I take a break in the middle of the day and often end up playing the same few games, the kind that can be done in short sessions and don't burden me with emotional load (i.e. a narrative). BlazBlue: Entropy Effect ends up being one of my most common gotos.
It also happens to be in the same subgenre of the game we're making. And fuck it all, it's really good at what it is. This is the smoothest, most satisfying, combat platformer I've ever played. In term of 2D combat it's probably only second to the genre the game owes its life to: fighting games. Everytime I feel like I need a break—or if I'm in an online meeting and I need my hands to do something in the background lest I go insane—I load up Entropy Effect. After a 40-minute-or-so session it'll be like I remember why I want to make games in the first place.
In a way, I'm envious. I want our game to be this good to play too! Why would people play our game when they can play that instead? But if I allow myself grace and think for a moment, I can see that our games are also very different. In a lot of ways, we're more casual: evoking the childlike joy of finding toys in the attic instead of the laser-focus fluidity of fighting games, which Entropy Effect excels at. All games are different, no matter how similar their constructions may be, because they're all made by different people, at different phases of their life, with different intentions. You can't really rank them up and say "just play the top one of these". Our industry has grown beyond that, I hope.
BlazBlue: Entropy Effect really is awesome though. If you like fighting games or action games in general you should give it a try.
Honourable Mentions
I played a good number of other games this year too. I think it's only this year that I feel comfortable enough with my finance to just look at Steam during sales, say "fuck it", and buy a few games for cheap without worrying that I'll never play them. It's true, some of them I haven't touched at all, but on some rainy days I pick one from the pile that seems interesting and then I'll have a generally pleasant time.
On the other hand, I've also been very busy this year, sometimes to the point of despair. A lot of highly-anticipated games (by me, at least) were released this year: Silksong, Hades 2, Unbeatable, Demonschool, Rift of the Necrodancer, but a lot of these I end up having to put away for later because I'm just not in the right mindspace for it. RIP Hades 2. Maybe someday I'll consider you worth playing.
A release that surprised me this year was The Chef's Shift, made by a local Indonesian studio. I played the demo in a few in-person events and I quite enjoyed its time-management-but-with-typing gameplay. I bought it in hope of just getting more of that, and I did, but I also got a whole sprawling soap opera in the style of all corners of the globe. It started with an Italian mafia drama but then moved on to such things as Chinese family tragedies, Latin American telenovelas, Korean love stories, ending with a family skit you'd expect from an Indonesian tug-your-heart commercials. The line deliveries might be clumsy and the writing could do with an editor but the way it all works together leaves me in awe. The typing game itself is also pretty fun and very polished.
I'd been eyeing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 since it was announced a year or two ago. I liked the little I saw of the turn-based combat and the belle epoque French aesthetic, and after finishing Metaphor ReFantazio early this year I was excited at the prospect of another world to explore. I bought and played it day one! What I got, however, was just alright. While the combat was pretty good, I felt the game just didn't live up to the potential of its world and characters. The environment, while beautiful, felt haphazard; a bunch of pretty aesthetic but narratively incoherent. The characters were well-thought-out but felt disparate from each other. The tonal shift is bizarre: not willing to commit either drama or comedy and its attempt at being both mostly fell flat for me. Its user interface looks pretty but is an ass to navigate around, almost as ass as navigating the world itself.
So I was surprised at the overwhelmingly positive reception it got from everyone else. Are they blind? Particularly, blinded by the AAA-nearing realistic visual style? Have they just never played a JRPG before? What? The prologue made them cry? Really now. Someone said it's better than Metaphor ReFantazio? Huh?? Okay now they're just picking a fight.
I'm still rather fond of the game, but I'm pissed at everyone saying it's good. It's not! It's jank as hell! This is a good debut game for a new studio, but it's obvious it's the work of newcomers and not industry veterans.
Rift of the Necrodancer was another game I'd been waiting for and, for the most part, fulfilled my expectations. It's a good rhythm game! Its story is admittedly one-note and forgettable, but it's charming and has some very nice art. I already wrote about it previously: "Rift is kinda a weirdo compared to other rhythm games.. The notes fall down beat-by-beat so you can't just rely on your eyes, you gotta listen to the beat" It's a good arcade game to get to when I'm tired of everything else.
And while we're on the topic of rhythm games, I got Kill the Music recently. I tried the demo on a whim and was immediately awestruck—starstruck, even. Music-wise, it might not be noteworthy; most of the tracks are just a few short loops. But the way the beat of the music is weaved into the experience of playing it, the way the bold visual pops in and out, the vibes, frankly, is just immaculate. I'd say it has a light story, but that's because instead of a linear narrative it gives you bits and pieces through the vibes and the scattered illustrations and the fragment-like chapters at the end of a run. Sort of stuff I can play in the middle of a tiring workday and just absorb the narrative through osmosis.
Demonschool is a game I wish I have the energy to play more often but playing it is liable to make me fall asleep. The game ends up being a little more rigid than I expected, with the day-night-week-cycle and city-map aspect being little more than extra menuing between battles. The battles are great! It's more puzzle-like than the usual SRPG: there's very little of that party-and-skills management, deciding-how-your-character-grow aspect, and more on how to move your character in exactly the right way to take out as many enemy units in as few turns. I enjoy it, but it is also rather exhausting to play in a way that overwhelms even its casual party banters and abundance of jokes (most of which are actually funny!). Hopefully I'll get to the ending eventually though.
In the realm of gacha games, aside from Arknights and Granblue Fantasy I've also continued to dabble in and out of Honkai: Star Rail and Wuthering Waves (while both Genshin Impact and Reverse: 1999 are officially left in the dust). I've kinda been treating them like any other long game instead of a live-service game: I pop in every now and then and play at my own pace, ignoring whatever fancy new updates they got. I still got mixed feelings about either of these, but I have to admit that no other game fits that itch for insane turn-based buff-debuff bonanza as Honkai: Star Rail does, and no other games does traversal and combat choreography like Wuthering Waves does.
I also, like a thousand others, got into Umamusume: Pretty Derby. I wasn't very interested at first but my friends tempted me with how much number-crunching it can take (I'm a freak) and the fact that it's actually a stat raiser game (niche genre I'm fond of) and I basically got way too attached to my daughter Vodka on my first run, so now I also log into this game every now and then. Vodka is my daughter. Narita Taishin is my son. TM Opera O is my spirit animal. Symboli Rudolf is my favored child.
Another game that's trying to squeeze into that live-service space in my brain is Duet Night Abyss, which is gacha in all but the actual gacha mechanic. I find it soulful: it's very janky but in a way that you can tell is human-made, and it has little details that I could tell was made with a smile. Unfortunately its gacha-like trappings make it harder for it to present itself and its jankiness make it less appealing to people who could just play other, better games. In the school of gacha games, it's the little nerd who's too weird to have many friends, even if it's nevertheless very friendly.
Fighting game-wise, aside from Guilty Gear Strive and Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising, I've also been getting into Melty Blood: Type Lumina. I've just been messing around with its mechanics and trying to get a handle of its characters; I haven't yet dreamed of playing it against a real person. It's nice to play a fighting game that isn't by Arc System Works, and also something more fast-paced/flexible than their more recent approaches.
Melty Blood also got me to start reading Tsukihime - a piece of blue glass moon (Arcueid. She intrigued me). I want to say I'm a good chunk into it, considering how many fucking hours I've put into reading it, but seeing as there are Melty Blood characters I've yet to see head nor tails of, I've probably only scratched a small portion of it. Godfuck does Nasu likes to write on kazillion words, I don't get it!!! Why does it take so long just getting to the point??? But wordcount aside, I do like it, overall. When it locks in, the buildups build and the hype moments are hype. Fuck does it take a while to get there though! Do I look like I have all my lifetime to read this? Do you fancy yourself immortal, Kinoko Nasu?
Coda: Afterlove EP
I think it was about decade ago when I met Fahmi for the first time. We met on Twitter—I don't even remember what got us talking the first time, just that at some point he told me he liked reading a review I wrote in this blog for Transistor (2014) and he asked me, do you want to write for us? He was a head editor of a local gaming website at the time, and I a first year university student.
It was, though I'm sure he didn't know it at the time, during the darkest times of my life. I said yes, and though I remember little from that era, I remember playing games and writing, for the first time, professionally. With his help I got more than a few pieces that I'm proud to have published (and some that aren't very good, but hey, you don't get to write well without also writing ass the first few times). We kept in contact even after gaming websites stopped being lucrative and the place shut down and we both moved on.
He started switching from writing about games to writing games—Coffee Talk was well-received—but he never stopped talking about our local industry, never stopped helping lift others up. He got a little famous; of course he would. He was kind and gregarious and even his anxieties didn't stop him from doing good. I knew I was probably just one of the many many people he'd befriended. I think that made me just very slightly bitter; he was rising while I was still trying to find myself. We didn't talk as much as I would have wanted, but we say hi and joke a little occasionally, and I knew he'd be there for me if I need him, as I would for him when he needed the different perspective. It was a comfortable, low-commitment sort of friendship.
He died in March 2022. Bolt out of the blue. I woke up and opened Twitter and his family posted that he passed away sometime last night. I scoured the group chats. Asthma attack in the middle of the night, or something like that. It sounded almost like a joke. Wasn't he still online in Genshin Impact just a few hours earlier? It took a while for the grief to hit: to realise that I'll never see him again, that we'll never get to work together again, that there will never be anything made by his hand, ever again. Sometimes love is not enough, not without action.
He was working on a game at the time, Afterlove EP, a narrative game about a man haunted by the death of his lover. That sounds ridiculous, doesn't it. That he'd write a game about that, and then halfway through development became the death that haunts us. The rest of the team (none of which I knew personally, unfortunately) continued the development after his passing and managed to release it early this year. I bought it day one. I let it sit unplayed for months.
I only got the courage, and the time, and the mindspace, to visit it late this year. It's like I'm seeing him again; this writing, it's familiar. These story beats, it's bolder: it's him further honing his skills, trying new things beyond what he'd done before. We all get older, and hopefully with age, we get better at what we do. It's just that, at some point, everything stop, and we can't really know when that point will be, can we. Can you imagine dying at 31. How many works are still only ever in his head?
I don't know if he'd poured it all for Afterlove, if he knew would be his last, if he'd kept ideas in reserve for future projects. This is just all we're ever going to get from him.
Afterlove is—beyond the writing, seeping into its every elements—also a love letter to Jakarta, the city that we both live in. Fahmi loved Jakarta, he loved walking its streets, he loved this walkable area full of streetside vendors, known as Blok M, most of all. In Afterlove you walk these same streets that he loved. The art was careful in showing little details: signs, scattered appliances, cats and people doing their things. Our city is messy and often filthy and not honestly very pretty, but the way it's drawn in this game, it's like you're seeing it from his eyes. There is beauty even in the spots untouched by light. Maybe love is enough. Love is what make any work shines.
End Notes
2025 has been a joyful year for me. I've been enjoying new things, playing more games and reading more books and making new friends and writing a lot more (many of which are still trapped in my physical notebook, but writing is writing, ok). I guess this year I also learned more about love, particularly the love one put—necessarily, inevitably, intentionally—into their creations, and how that love gets shared to all who experienced the work.
This has not been a good year for many people. There's still a genocide happening in Palestine and Sudan. Ukraine is still under invasion. A lot of governments have been terrible to their people, and if you'll allow me to turn my attention locally, the Indonesian government is pretty prime among them. Over a thousand people died after the floods in November, caused by government-sanctioned deforestations and lack of proper aid. There were nationwide protests in March against the overreach of the army and another one in August against the national budget being used for the elite's excesses. It resulted in the death of 10 people and no tangible change in the government. Today they're putting law into effect that'll make it even easier to criminalize free speech. Our country, it seems, is going to shit.
I don't know what to do about it, just as I don't know what to do with worsening climate change or the enshittification of people's brain (thanks to generative AI) or the worldwide rise of fascism. I'll just try to do what I can: help those that I can help, read widely and learn as much as I can, take care of myself, learn to love and accept love, create. Real change sometimes begin with ideas, and ideas can only be nurtured with love. Love for others, but also love for—hope in—abstract ideals: peace, justice, that a better life for everyone is possible.
May we all get to hold on to love, and to be able to do something about it. Happy new year.
