Valerie Anne

Newsletter

Wild nights - Wild nights! is my weekly newsletter about media, nostalgia, and more. Visit valerieanne.substack.com for the best visual experience.

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Hacking My Brain

I have long since accepted that my brain does not work like other people’s. I think in some ways I’ve known it since grade school, when I preferred reading during free play over playing with toys. Or when other kids came to me for help with their homework or understanding a lesson, but I was teased for not knowing cool trends or fashion or having crushes on the right people. When I couldn’t focus in or study for boring history classes but I could ace an English essay I wrote over my lunch period...
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Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?

This past week I rewatched the first season of the show Paradise (because it’s great and also because season two started this week) and there’s a character who talks about selling a patent (or something like it) and essentially becoming a billionaire overnight. I have been especially stressed about money lately because I’m in between freelance contracts at my non-Autostraddle job and despite applying to 10+ jobs a week that I am overqualified for, I have gotten zero responses because people are...
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Love, Actually

I used to have big feelings about Valentine’s Day. For a while it made me sad, then it made me angry, then sad again. Eventually I came to appreciate it while not participating in it, or doing “Galentines” or some such nonsense. This year, I felt completely apathetic toward it. I didn’t spare a single emotion for the holiday, and in fact 100% forgot it was Valentine’s Day on Saturday until the afternoon. I spent the day doing some much overdue cleaning in my bedroom and binging TV shows and play...
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Thank You for the Music

I heard a song the other day that I hadn’t heard in a long time, and I was instantly transported back in time, and I was once again struck by the power music holds. For me, and surely plenty others, music is laced into my very being, and tugging at certain cords (or chords, as it were) can bring up certain moments, places, feelings, people. Sometimes it’s just a general vibe, sometimes it’s as specific as a street corner, and some songs are stronger than others. So today, I’m going to give you s...
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Career Fair

I have once again been on the hunt for jobs. Freelance jobs, part-time jobs, basically anything. One of the companies I have freelance copy editing contracts from is starting to pick up again so hopefully that will fill my time, but in the interim I have discovered that no one wants to hire real human writers anymore. I don’t (and won’t) use AI and somehow that has disqualified me for many, many positions that come up in my search. After one day of particularly disheartening searching, I decided...
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Words of Snow and Ice

I don’t need to tell you that things are bleak right now. Every time you open social media or turn on the news or read a headline, it’s more bad news. We’re only a year into this presidency and things are unfathomably bad already. Especially with the recent uptick in ICE raids, an unnecessary evil by an unnecessary force spreading fear and committing violence for violence sake. They’re not actually trying to get criminals off the street. That was never the point of ICE. Fear is the point. It’s h...
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A Day in the Life

I’ve lived in New York for over 20 years, if you count my time in college, which I do, even though I went back to Boston for the summer every year. Which is officially longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. And yet, sometimes it’s easy to forget I live in New York City. Like the NYC that has been in countless movies and TV shows over the last century. Because most of the time, to me, it’s just home. And sure, parts of my everyday life are pretty specific to New York - my local bodega, the subway,...
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Let's Play Pretend

When I was a kid, I loved playing make-believe with my friends. Whether it was playing Power Rangers at recess, pet shop with my brother and our beanie babies, or being Raja when my older friends played Disney Princess because I was the littlest and just wanted to be included. As I got older, and we were deemed too old to play pretend, sometimes I would try to recapture that feeling in AOL Buffy RPG chat rooms, which was a thrill of its own, but never quite the same.This weekend I played a game...
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2026, Let's Do This

Whew, 2025 sure was a doozy. And I know that turning the page on a metaphorical calendar isn’t actually a clean slate, but I like it as a checkpoint, a time to reset, to look backwards and forwards. And while, in the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t work—our country is devolving into a fascist regime this week just as fast as it was last week—but for my own personal journey, I like using it as a time of reflection and potential change.Instead of going through my list of goals for last year a...
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My Favorite TV Shows of 2025

Here we are, at the final installment of Media Mayhem 2025! In which I go into detail (and I do mean detail) about my favorite shows of the year.Since I watched over 100 shows total this year, I have allowed myself a top ten instead of a top five, which means technically I have a top 15 for the year, which is weird but we’re just going to roll with it. It was hard to get it down to ten, too. Luckily I don’t count rewatches, otherwise The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor would...
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TV I've Watched in 2025

Hello and welcome to the LAST WEEK of Media Mayhem 2025! This week, we’re talking all about TV, the subject closest to my heart.First, a confession: I made a mistake. It made sense to me in the midyear to only include shows that weren’t going to have any more episodes in 2025. That was until I realized I would watch OVER 100 different TV shows by the end of the year, and only 35 of them were included in the first half of the year. Next year, for shows that I know my opinion won’t be drastically...
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My Favorite Books of 2025

Unlike it was for movies, it actually was hard for me to narrow down my book list to five favorites. Since I don’t allow rewatches of movies or TV shows to qualify for my fave lists, that automatically eliminated the Hunger Games series, which helped a little because otherwise they would definitely be contenders. And ultimately I ended up bumping Stephen King’s Fairy Tale and Kalynn Bayron’s Make Me a Monster, even though they were VERY close to making it, on account of not being quite as queer...
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Books I Read in 2025, Part Two

This year, so far, I have read more books than I ever have in one year. Or, at least, since I started tracking the books I read. I’m sure back in my Baby-Sitters Club Days I was cranking them out faster, but I started tracking my reading in 2012, and the highest I ever recorded was 58 books in 2016. Since I escaped the mental block that kept me for reading for a few years back in 2020, I have been slowly ramping up my yearly reading goal. My goal was 25 books in 2023, and I read 27. It was 30 bo...
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My Favorite Movies of 2025, Part Two

This Media Mayhem, I ran into a problem I don’t know if I’ve had before. I had a hard time narrowing these down to 5 more favorites...but not for the usual reasons. Instead of having a hard time because I loved so many, I didn’t really have more than five obvious picks for this section. If I didn’t do a mid-year Media Mayhem, I might have even been able to narrow it down to a top five for the whole year without much difficulty. There are really only three on this list from the back half of the y...
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My Year In Movies, Part 2 (2025)

Media Mayhem continues this week with MOVIES. I watched over 85 movies this year, which means either I watched significantly less movies this year than I have the past two years, or I forgot to track a bunch. The first option is the most likely. I did do more reading this year than the past few years, so maybe that contributed to the list being shorter. That said, I still have like 50 movies to tell you about so let’s not waste too much more time!As always, these mini-reviews will be spoiler lig...
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My Favorite Video Games & Theater Performances of 2025

I know both the video games and theater experience lists were pretty short, but I still narrowed them down to favorites of the year! For video games it was practically cheating since I don’t ever pick unfinished games, so there was really only one option, but it WAS great and I do want to talk about it more. For theater experiences, it was a lot harder to narrow down but I narrowed down from ten to two. As always, a warning: while I try to keep my general lists spoiler-free, I will be digging a...
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Video Games & Musicals of 2025

Hello and welcome to the first installment of Media Mayhem, end-of-year edition! For those of you who are new here, Media Mayhem is when I review all the media I’ve consumed in a year. (The media doesn’t have to be new, I just have to have watched/played/experienced it in 2025!) This installment covers the back half of the year; so everything from the mid-year Media Mayhem through now. I know some people (like my friend Heather Hogan) do very respectable, short lists that are readable and fun......
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Crisis Mode

Yesterday, my mother said to me, with a hint of surprise in her voice, “You’re pretty good in a crisis.”It’s something I want to believe is true. And I think I know how I got this way. I spent many of my formative pre-adult years working with 2-8 year olds; between them acting like everything from a splinter to a missing crayon is the same level of top-tier emergency and actually getting themselves into situations that are, indeed, crises, I have learned how to exude a sense of calm in not-calm...
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Wedding Bells

This year, I have been to four weddings. Five if you count the Critical Role live show of Jester and Fjord’s wedding (which I do). And I have another coming up in March (my brother’s!). This feels minorly insane to me because I am in my late 30s and I haven’t had this many weddings in a year since my mid-20s. I had a nice long stretch there where I would have maybe one a year, if that. Of course, there’s a bit of a dark undertone to why the four actual weddings I went to were all queer weddings...
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A Soft Surprise

This morning, I was sitting on my couch reading when a crisp, cold gust of wind blew through my apartment, blowing a napkin off my table and sending something outside crashing to the ground. Nosy as I am, I got up to see if I could figure out what fell, and instead I found something more surprising: snow! Big, fat flakes were drifting down from the grey sky and contrasting against the dull brown of the building across the alley.It shouldn’t have been such a surprise to me, if I’m being honest. M...
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