2025 Wrapped: Charitable Giving Edition

This post is my annual self-reminder to support worthy causes financially.  If it encourages others to do so as well, so much the better.

Religiously-Motivated Charitable Giving

In addition to tithe and offering to my home church, Sligo Seventh-Day Adventist Church, I gave an offering to Revision Church Atlanta. I only attend online, but gained enough from the sermons and worship see there nearly every week that it seemed appropriate to donate.  I gave to Adventist Community Services of Greater Washington also.  While I didn’t mention them in prior year-end charitable giving posts, the Helping Hands Sabbath School in Nashville, Tennessee is  Bible study conducted via Zoom that I attend most Saturdays and help facilitate monthly.  Along with donating my time as a facilitator, I contribute funds each month.  Some of them they used to help a church in Jamaica recover from damage caused by Hurricane Melissa.

Other Charitable Giving

World Central Kitchen is new to the list of donation recipients this year.  I donated to them in support of their efforts to feed starving people in the Gaza Strip.  I’ve admired their efforts to feed the hungry in disaster zones and war zones for years but hadn’t donated to them before now.  They’ve also been quite active domestically, providing clean water to families in Asheville, feeding firefighters in Los Angeles as they battled wildfires, and families recovering from floods in Texas.

Also new to the donor recipients list this year is ITSMF.  The purpose of this nonprofit is to prepare people you don’t typically see in executive roles (women & minorities) to become candidates for and to excel in such roles.  They’ve really helped me grow professionally, so I helped raise money from my Managment Academy cohort—Onyx 81—and contributed my own funds as well.  

When Trump and the GOP zeroed out the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, I increased my donations to both local and national public media.

Other Giving

What follows is a list of tip jars, Patreon memberships, Substack subscriptions, and other avenues I use to support worthy causes.

  • Flaming Hydra
    An independent collective of writers I began supporting this year, edited by Maria Bustillos. 
  • ContrabandCamp
    Another collective led by Michael Harriott, a writer whose work I’ve followed from his days at Very Smart Brothas, to The Root, to this latest venture.
  • Leah Sottile
    She’s a journalist whose work I first began following in 2019 with her Bundyville podcast.  She is the best and most prescient writer about right wing extremists in the western United States bar none.  When she posted on Bluesky that her latest investigative podcast, Hush, was cancelled by Oregon Public Broadcasting—taking away the vast majority of her income and all of her health insurance—I subscribed to her newsletter immediately. 
  • emptywheel
    The blog of independent journalist Marcy Wheeler, she's effectively become the ombudsman of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other mainstream media outlets. She doesn't just call out shortcomings and failings in their coverage, she clarifies issues that might otherwise be confusing. She's one of just two journalists I value enough to support directly.
  • The Contraband Wagon
    I initially met him through Twitter, and he's taken on the exceedingly difficult challenge of creating constructive conversations on the issue of race. I had the honor of being a panelist for one of the live conversations he moderated on the issue of race in the tech industry. You can find clips of his conversations on YouTube and join his Patreon to get the full-length conversations.
  • Mastodon
    I began supporting the Mastodon project through Patreon in November 2022 after Elon Musk took over Twitter. As we've watched Musk turn Twitter into a propaganda and disinformation platform to (unfortunately successfully) elect Donald Trump, those of us with the means putting money behind efforts to help decentralized social media networks succeed will only grow more important. They recently began selling merchandise which also helps support their operations, which gave me an excuse to buy a stuffed version of their mascot.
  • Hachyderm
    Hachyderm.io is the Mastodon server I moved to in 2023. I sponsor them with a small monthly contribution via GitHub.
  • Blacksky
    Created and maintained by Rudy Fraser, it is effectively its own social media network for black folks on Bluesky that leverages the AT Protocol. I began contributing to his work this month via Open Source Collective, a fiscal host for numerous open source projects I used back when I was still writing software full time including webpack, vue, ESLint, and thousands of others.

Beyond the individuals and collectives listed above, I’m currently donating my time as an assignment grader to a handful of students in the current Management Academy cohort.

I also donated time through my employer to a local charity A Wider Circle, and some peer training efforts for new hires.

Giving Plans for 2026

I expect my charitable giving plans next year to look a lot like this year’s plans.  

2025 Wrapped: Media Edition (Part 2)

Despite most of the movies and shows I watched being on (too many) streaming services, it proved more difficult than I expected to get a “Wrapped” summary of what I watched on each of them this year. What follows is an incomplete list of what I most enjoyed watching in 2025.

Andor

I’ve written about Andor already this year, but it’s worth reiterating just how good this show was.  It's the best live-action Star Wars outside of the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.  It rivaled the best shows on TV this year for quality regardless of genre.  Trump’s second term made the show painfully-relevant to our present.

Adolescence

As a parent to twin 10-year-olds, the most terrifying 4 episodes of TV I watched all year when it comes to the impacts cyberbullying on children.  Even though it’s set in the U.K., the ways young people have their own language, the cluelessness of police to what’s happening under the surface, the parents of the young boy trying their best but still feeling overmatched—all of it felt uncomfortably universal.  It’s the only thing I watched this year that I recommended to another friend of mine with kids as a show worth watching.  Disappointed as I was that Andor didn’t bring home any major acting awards, Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper really did earn the Primetime Emmys they won with their heartbreaking portrayals of father and son.

Dope Thief

This show was very good, and very stressful, primarily because of Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura’s portrayls of Ray Driscoll and Manny Carvalho.  Small-time crooks get baited into a much bigger score than they can handle and so many things go tragically wrong.  Corrupt cops, cheating, betrayal, addiction, grief, a gunfight outside a hospital—this show packed a lot of story into just 8 episodes.

Down Cemetary Road

Based on Mick Herron’s very first novel, this show skipped over a bunch of others in my too-long queue of show to watch—and it was worth it.  Emma Thompson is great as a sleazy, sort of punk rock private investigator named Zoë Boehm.  Ruth Wilson (an actress I’ve enjoyed watching since she first appeared in Luther) is fun to watch as Sarah Tucker.  The show gives you a bit of the dysfunctional government agent bits we see in full flower in Slow Horses, but is primarily a mystery.  There are 3 more Zoë Boehm novels.  Perhaps Apple TV+ will put all the rest of them onscreen.

F1

One of just two movies this year I made a point of going to a theater to see, it delivered on the visuals and the sound that I expected from a movie about modern F1 racing, with the unexpected bonus of a 24 hours of Daytona preamble.  Really impressive that Brad Pitt and Damson Idris really were driving those cars in excess of 180mph on camera.  Not the best racing moving storywise (Rush was better), but a fun movie to watch.

Foundation

Season 3 of Foundation, while it has key differences from Asimov’s books in both characters and plots, is a show I really enjoyed.  Lots of great acting performances here, especially Laura Birn as Demerzel and Lee Pace as Brother Day.  I was blown away by the finale, and am very curious to see what Season 4 brings.

MobLand

A proper British gangster tale starring Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, & Helen Mirren.  Mirren’s depiction of Maeve Harrigan in particular is amazing in this—a much different character than her potrayal of Cara Dutton in 1923.  Playing opposite Brosnan as Conrad Harrigan, the dynamic she creates is adversarial.  I really hope this show gets another season.

The Pitt

Noah Wyle in a medical drama that wasn’t ER was one of the best things I watched this year.  Despite some of the legal drama regarding whether or not it was an ER sequel, this show was much better than any ER sequel could have been.  The entire season spanning a single shift, the flashbacks to COVID, the casting, the acting performances, setting it in Pittsburgh, the storylines (addiction, budget concerns, PTSD, burnout, etc)—every choice just worked.  Season 2 starts January 8 and I’m looking forward to it.

Severance

Despite an awfully long hiatus between the first season and the most recent one, 

Sinners

I made a point of seeing this movie in the theater on the biggest screen I could find because I watched Ryan Coogler geek out on film formats for about 11 minutes.  An excellent story about racism, blues music, and colorism (and vampires both metaphorical and real) in 1930s Mississippi.   The depiction of Delta Chinese people in this movie was spot-on, according to a documentary I’ve seen on Chinese folks in the Mississippi Delta.  The same is true of the Choctaw people who appear briefly in the film hunting the vampire Remmick.

Slow Horses

Espionage is probably my favorite genre outside of science fiction, and the latest season of Slow Horses was excellent.  This crew of mostly-failed MI-5 agents balances the serious and the funny very well.  Gary Oldman as the profane and broken-down Jackson Lamb is the polar opposite of the capable and competent George Smiley he depicts in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  I’ve read all of Mick Herron’s Slough House series except the latest—Clown Town—which released just this year.  I sincerly hope Apple TV+ decides to put the entire series onscreen because they’ve done a great job with the first five novels.

Task

From the same creator behind Mare of Easttown, this show is another crime story set in Pennsylvania with a similarly grim tone.  As in Dope Thief, some motorcycle gang members serve as key villians in this one too.  Mark Ruffalo was excellent in this as an FBI special agent who was formerly a Catholic priest.  It was very interesting to see Fabien Frankel and Thuso Mbedu in their roles here having and enjoyed their performances in House of the Dragon, The Underground Railroad, and The Woman King.

Tour de France: Unchained: Season 3

I haven’t been on a bike in years, or come anywhere near competing, but this documentary was compelling to watch.

2025 Wrapped: Media Edition (Part 1)

Since Spotify and YouTube have started puttting out their “Wrapped” summaries of what we’ve been listening to and watching all year, I’ll use them as the impetus to discuss other media I’ve found interesting this year.

Books, Ebooks, & Audiobooks

Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford, was an amazing listen as an audiobook.  Andy Ingalls narrates a murder mystery set in an alternative 1920s America where Native Americans thrived instead of nearly being wiped out by genocide.  The same author previously wrote Golden Hill, another work of historical fiction set in pre-Revolutionary War New York City that I will definitely check out soon.

Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi, is a sci-fi story with black protagonists that plays with one of my favorite story elements—time travel.

Guardians of the Whills, by Greg Rucka, gives the reader some backstory for Baze Malbus and Chirrut Imwe, who we see in Rogue One.  I’d long ago fallen out of the habit of reading Star Wars novels (Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy is probably the last set I read) but Andor finishing up in May this year nudged me to check this out.  It wasn’t a long book, but it did a nice job of fleshing out the characters, their friendship, and their motivations.

Leviathan Falls, by James S.A. Corey, is the final novel in The Expanse series.  It was a fitting end to a great series.

Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver, deserved the Pulitzer Prize it won for fiction.  Published in 2022, this modern reimagining of David Copperfield may be truer than anything J.D. Vance ever wrote in Hillbilly Elegy.  Here are a couple of choice highlights from my reading of the ebook:

“The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpost of hopeless futures.  Goddamn.”

“Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn’t been totaled or repossessed."

Noor, by Nnedi Okorafor, was a very engaging sci-fi novel set in Nigeria that brings in ideas about biotech, climate change, and the nature of humanity.  

Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir, is being turned into a movie just like The Martian.  The latest story goes much further afield than Mars, and is also a rescue mission—only with much bigger stakes.  Not a short book at nearly 500 pages, but I was sucked in by the story and the protagonist so it took me about 7 hours to finish over the course of a few days.

 

YouTube

I spent a lot more time on YouTube this year than I expected.  I blame the YouTube Premium trial for exposing me to a product so much better than the ad-supported version I may never be able to quit.  My primary use case is watching church services (one from a church in Atlanta, another in Virginia).  According to YouTube’s recap I also watched a lot of electric car reviews.  Due largely to my obsession with Andor, I also watched a lot of videos from the GenerationTech channel.

Perhaps the most useful thing I started watching just this month (and expect to be watching and coding along with well into 2026) is an old series by Immo Landwerth where he builds a compiler from scratch.

 

Spotify

According to this year’s Spotify Wrapped, my listening age is a laughably young 36.  I have no idea how they calculate these ages.  I figured all the soundtracks and classical music I listen to would have skewed things more toward my actual age (51).  I did listen to GNX and Let God Sort Em Out quite a bit though, so maybe they’re the culprits.  In truth, since my Spotify account is the one we use with Sonos, the music we play for our twins every night to fall asleep to is probably the main thing pushing that age downward.

Because I commute from Maryland to northern Virginia for work a few days a week, I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts.  The main one I listen to is The Daily, from The New York Times.  Lately I've been listening more to Apple News Today (audio).  My primary podcast app is Overcast, where I listen to shows like Fresh Air, Embedded, Hanselminutes, Reveal, and Throughline.  Overcast doesn’t have a “Wrapped” feature, but Harold Martin on Reddit built a couple of projects to explore your listening habits and create a personal episodes page that I might need to explore.