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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Summer Days, Drifting Away

I’m not going to lie to you, I feel a little rusty. I feel like I barely remember how to write a regular newsletter that isn’t just talking about all the media I’ve consumed recently. Maybe this is a sign that I SHOULD transition my newsletter into a media-forward space instead of telling you silly little stories about my life. However, that’s a problem for future me. For now, a few more silly little stories.I am currently staying with my parents in Massachusetts, partially for some family event...
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Podcasts I've Been Listening To This Year || Midyear Media Mayhem, 2026

You ready to Mayhem our Media one last time? (Well, one last time for now!)I listen to...a lot of podcasts, and don’t write about them a lot, so I thought this bonus Tuesday in June was the perfect time to do so. I chose the 30 podcasts that a) I still have episodes to listen to and/or b) aren’t on indefinite hiatus. There are a handful I’m caught up on but seem to be gone forever (Banshees and Booze, My Dad Wrote a Porno, The Amber & Lacey, Lacey & Amber Show, etc) and some that I’m caught up o...
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My Favorite TV Shows of the 2026 (So Far)

Hello and welcome to the final “favorites” list of Midyear Media Mayhem 2026!I won’t lie to you, this was also the hardest list to pare down. Not only because it was the longest, with 50 shows to choose from, but because I LOVE TV SO MUCH. I narrowed it down five different times and kept landing on ten shows and getting stuck, but I COULD NOT have this newsletter be 5000 words long. I just couldn’t! It wouldn’t have been fun for me OR you. So, after much hemming and hawing and self-arm-twisting,...
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TV I've Watched This Year (So Far) || Midyear Media Mayhem, 2026

Welcome to week four of Media Mayhem! It’s the biggest category because it’s the media I consume the most: Television!In Midyear Media Mayhems past, I had a rule where I didn’t include a show if it was going to have more episodes before December. However, this ended up creating an imbalance. I’m talking a 30 shows in June/70 in December imbalance. So this year I took a different approach. All the “fall” shows that ended this spring that will be back in the fall again, I still wrote about them. I...
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My Favorite Books of the Year (So Far) || Midyear Media Mayhem, 2026

It was really hard to narrow this list down. I’ve been on a real reading kick this year, and I’ve been trying to hold onto it as long as I’m able, and I’ve gotten my hands on some really great stories. While I have been a little less generous with my ratings this year (or, have read more 3.5-ers than usual), I did still have a great crop to choose from.In fact, so much so that even though I did force myself to narrow down the list to five, I have some runners-up I want to shout out. I had five 5...
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Books I've Read (So Far) This Year || Midyear Media Mayhem, 2026

Can you believe we are halfway through June already? Wild. But don’t worry, still plenty more Media Mayhem to go. Today, I will be going into all the books I’ve read so far. I’ve been on a bit of a reading kick lately—even more so than usual—so I’ve already read 30 books so far this year. Not to brag, but that’s six books ahead of schedule to hit my goal of reading 55 books this year. AND I could have counted all 20 volumes of Lumberjanes I read—they’re about 120 pages each—but I decided to only...
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My Top 5 Favorite Movies of 2026 (So Far)

I hate picking favorites. Always have and always will. So even though my midyear movie list was short, I had a hard time narrowing it down. I think also partially because I didn’t have any full five-star watches, so it was a battle of the 4 and 4.5 stars, which there were a lot more of. If you’re wondering why I make these favorites lists if I hate picking favorites, the answer is twofold. A) I want Media Mayhem to be free for everyone, but I also want to have something special for my paid subsc...
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Six Months of Movies || Midyear Media Mayhem, 2026

I hope you’ve come to this place for magic, because it’s MOVIE TIME.But first, some movie math. I have watched 27 movies so far this year, which I think is a record low since I started doing Media Mayhem. In my defense, I’ve been doing a lot of big TV binges, so I haven’t been in a movie mood as much. But I will also be adding in some movies I watched at the end of the year, in the span of 2025 after I published my movie Media Mayhem but before the new year, which WOULD technically bring the num...
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My Top 3 Favorite Video Games of 2026 (So Far)

Today I am here to talk to you about my Top 3 favorite video games I’ve played so far this year. If you have been paying attention at all, two of the games on this list will not come as a surprise to you. The third was harder to pick but I feel good about my final choice.For the newbies, this is how today’s list will work: These reviews will be longer and more in depth and less spoiler-conscious than the blurbs in the full list that went out on Tuesday. I won’t spoil major endings or any plot tw...
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My Year (So Far) In Video Games || Mid-Year Media Mayhem, 2026

Hello! It’s officially time for :trumpet noises: Media Mayhem: Midyear Edition!A brief refresher for anyone who has joined us since December: During Media Mayhem, I take the entire month to talk about all the media I’ve consumed in the past six months and give a spoiler-light, mini-review of it, including but not limited to how gay it is. Each week is a different category, with regular newsletters going out every Tuesday, and then paid newsletters going out every Friday where I choose my FAVORIT...
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Comfort vs Competency

Somehow, some way, it is the end of May, and I have been plugging away on my Mid-Year Media Mayhem project, which kicks off NEXT WEEK. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about what types of TV shows I tend to enjoy more than others, and what I mean when I say I have a “comfort show” that might be different than how other people mean it.I listen to Amy Poehler’s podcast Good Hang, and she talks a lot about comfort shows and how her show Parks & Rec is that for a lot of people. But she also sometimes...
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An Early Pride Story

Since pride month is just around the corner, and June will be a Media Mayhem month here at Wild nights - Wild nights!, I have decided to tell you a gay story a little early. After all, every month is pride month when you’re gay all year round.I was 13 when I first realized I was...not straight. There were plenty of hints and clues and suspicions before that, but I remember the moment I knew it for sure, on the dinner cruise during my 8th grade trip to Washington DC when I saw my friend dancing w...
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The Music and the Mirror

I used to be a dancer.I started when I was only two or three, in the kind of dance class where mostly it’s pliés and jumping and walking through hula hoops. In my first recital I was a “dancing poodle” whose “fur” was made of tulle and sequins. It was pretty darn cute.I don’t remember a time in my childhood before dancing. As far as I could tell, I was born a dancer. Dance class was something I attended before I ever step foot inside a school, my dance instructors the first teachers I ever had....
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On Insecurities

You think more about your biggest insecurity than anyone else does.It’s one of those things we intellectually probably know is true but is hard to internalize. I’m not the first person to say this, it’s not the first time you’ve heard it. I actually remember the first time I realized it in a small way, even though knowing it did little to help at the time. I was in high school and it was peak hormonal insanity and the buzzy thoughts were at their buzziest, and I remember walking down a crowded h...
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Journey to the Past

I think I had dinner in a wormhole this weekend.Let me set the scene. My dad and I traveled to Virginia this weekend on one of our musical road trips. Since it was a longer drive than usual, we left on Friday instead of Saturday and got to our motel around 10pm. Over 8 hours in the car for me, over 12 for my dad, we were exhausted but we hadn’t had dinner yet so we wanted to find somewhere close and easy to eat. There were a few places that would be open past midnight, and the closest one was ca...
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Poetry Corner

This week, we are once again diving into the archives to something I have written long ago, but today instead of an essay or a D&D character backstory, it is a poem I wrote in high school. I used to love writing goofy poems, poems that often lacked depth, because I just really enjoyed the challenge of fitting words into a syllabic rhyming pattern. I have lots of them in random journals from various points in my life, and I’ve shared one I wrote about popcorn before. But every once in a while I w...
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A Ten-Star Experience

A few weeks ago, I had the absolute pleasure of experiencing something that hasn’t happened to me in a very, VERY long time: I read two five-star books in a row. I don’t know how I got so lucky! I definitely wasn’t expecting one of them to be a five-star book for me specifically, but it surprisingly was.When it comes to reviewing books, I have grown a little stingy with my five-star ratings in my old age. Which is funny, because I’m pretty generous in general with my stars; I have HATED a book a...
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Live From Radio City Music Hall

If I told you I’ve been on stage at Radio City Music Hall, I would not be lying.It would be a disingenuous way to present that information, but it would technically be the truth. It was one of the many surprising perks of going to college in New York City. My full university graduation was at the new Yankee Stadium, but I had a smaller graduation ceremony for just the school of education and communications I was part of that took place in Radio City Music Hall, so I got to walk across the stage...
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Outdoorsy vs Outsidey

I am not an outdoorsy person. Growing up, the most outdoorsy thing I did consisted of camping and canoeing in Maine for one long weekend every summer. And as much as I enjoyed singing Just Around the Riverbend as we glided down the Saco River, I did not love camping. In fact, in my most petulant teenage year, I made my dad stay with me in a motel nearby for the sleeping portion of the evening.I was born and raised a city mouse, what can I say. Not to mention I’m allergic to most things “outdoors...
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Friends for a Moment

This weekend, I went to a bar in Manhattan with some friends that has live piano performances. In the past when we’ve been there, it was dueling pianos, but that day it was just a solo woman taking requests and cracking jokes. She did some impressive work, including sight-reading a song from Mean Girls the musical and Golden from K-Pop Demon Hunters, all while teasing people in the crowd, especially harping on our table since we had two birthdays at it. She gave most of us nicknames (not me thou...
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