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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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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Wild Nights Update!

This week is going to be a little “state of the newsletter” update for you all, instead of a newsletter proper.I told the paid subscribers this last week, but now I want to tell you all: I’m going to start structuring this newsletter just a WEE bit differently. Instead of sending out separate paid newsletters with any regularity (though I will still occasionally do so—specifically, for example, during Media Mayhem), I’m going to tag on a very special “paid subscribers” section at the end of each...
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Fear, Itself

We are neck-deep in spooky season, and Halloween is this week, so I thought I would do a thematically spooky post. I have already covered Halloween costumes, so this year I thought I’d go a little more broad and talk about things that scare me, generally speaking. I’m going to skip some of the more existential things (like that all my friends secretly hate me or what if when we die it’s just nothing but ceasing to exist), and stick to slightly more practical ones. I was going to say “fun” ones b...
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Proof Not EVERYTHING is Bad

Earlier today, my friend posted on Bluesky that she wished people would send her good news for once, and it reminded me of a TikTok I saw a few weeks ago that recapped some “things that went right” in the world in the previous month. I remember when I saw that video, I felt something inside me unclench for a moment, like I had been bracing for a hit that I suddenly realized wasn’t coming and I could relax. So much of the internet is constantly shoving bad news down our throats, and while a lot o...
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The Good Kind of Tired

This year has been especially bleak, globally. It’s been hard for awhile, but it’s been extra awful lately. Everything seems bad and hard and the little computer in my pocket keeps waterboarding me with every awful thing going on all at once. But for the past few weeks, I’ve had more plans outside of my apartment than I’ve had all in a row in a really long time, and even though that also means I’m more tired and sore than I’ve been in a really long time, I also feel mentally refreshed.Before I g...
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A Reading Roundup

Writing professionally for the internet can be a strange experience. You pour your time and energy (and sometimes heart and soul) into a piece that will be (maybe, if you’re lucky) read and enjoyed for 10 minutes at a time over the course of maybe 48 hours, and then it disappears into the vacuum of the world wide web. There’s nothing physical to put on a shelf, nothing tangible to take home. And especially when it comes to writing about TV and movies, sometimes these pieces take hours and then t...
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10 Little Pumpkin Beers

HAPPY FALL!! I know some days it’s still so hot that it doesn’t feel like it on the East Coast (at least, in Massachusetts and New York), but it IS officially autumn, my favorite time of year. The weather is not too hot and not too cold, but has significantly less allergens in the air than spring, the aesthetic of witchy vibes is everywhere, more people are talking about horror movies, and I get to see people in fun costumes around Halloween. But also, something I look forward to every year: ‘ti...
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