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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Niche Halloween Costume Ideas

One trend I see go around every year is “I hate gay Halloween what do you mean you’re” followed by incredibly niche pop culture references that would be nearly impossible to actually pull off as a costume. They make me giggle every time. That inspired me to make my own list of niche costume ideas based on TV shows. I took the shows mostly from the Emmy and Autostraddle TV Awards list to give myself some parameters. As much as I would have loved to include things like “the heart Faith drew on the...
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The Butterfly Effect

Lately I have found myself immersed in a choose-your-own-adventure dreamscape. And by that I mean, consuming two different pieces of media that have to do with the butterfly effect and how choices you make directly affect your future, a concept that is endlessly fascinating to me.The first is Until Dawn, a very popular video game I am only now getting around to playing. However, I have played other horror games like it. These games have seemingly infinite ways the story could go, because any of...
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The Art of Longform Television

I miss longform television.I know it still exists, here and there, mostly in the form of procedurals. But I miss TV that had 22-episode seasons and went on for at least five years, if not more. I miss following a character through different stages of their lives, with room for fun “filler” episodes and outside genre episodes.I just finished watching NCIS: Los Angeles, which I know is a wild place for me to start this conversation but HEAR ME OUT. It ran for 14 seasons from 2009 to 2023, and had...
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Oh, the Horror!

I know it’s not technically fall yet but the days are (finally) starting to get (a little) cooler here in New York, so I have already started to lean into spooky season. (My friends will be quick to point out that I am a hypocrite because I extend spooky season as far as I can on either end, but will be the first to pitch a fit if I see anything Christmas-related before Thanksgiving, but I AM WHO I AM.) Spooky is not seasonal, of course, and I consume horror content all year long, but I have sta...
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La Vie Bohème

I have been listening to the musical RENT since I was about 10 or 11 and it was the cool new musical on the scene. My older cousin (my musical dealer) introduced me to it and I was immediately obsessed. I listened to it so many times that I learned all the words...even the ones I didn’t understand. La Vie Bohème was especially tough because a lot of the words I didn’t know were just listed without context. It didn’t stop me from singing along, mind you. But it did provide the fun experience of p...
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Star Power

Today I was talking to my friend Nic about how I was wrestling with how to review a book I just finished. I’ve talked a little bit before about my process for deciding how many stars to give something, but it’s always complicated! On one hand, I want to be honest and fair for anyone else using my review to make a decision and also for my own future self to remember how I felt about a book. I also know that reviews are highly subjective and I don’t want to be the reason an indie author or filmmak...
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Rest Well, Dolly

Celebrity deaths are such a unique type of grief. It’s different than a personal grief, because there isn’t a mutual relationship, but it’s also heavier than the kind of grief you feel for strangers when you read a random obituary or hear a harrowing news story. Because even if you’ve never met, you do feel like you know the celebrity, in a way. Or at the very least, they’ve been part of your life. Their music, their movies, their shows, their art, whatever it is that connected you. They shared...
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Heroes and Villains

Warning: While the below will mostly be broadly about villains in the media so hopefully enjoyed by all even if you haven’t seen the shows I’m talking about, it will contain major spoilers for the series finale of The Boys and general spoilers for the show Daredevil (both iterations) if that’s not something you want to see.As has now been well established, one of the many weird things about me is that, no matter how much I like a show, there is a 50/50 chance I will procrastinate watching the se...
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Good for Her

One of the new shows I have been watching recently is Furious on Hulu. It stars my beloved Emmy Rossum (who I imprinted on at a young age watching the Phantom of the Opera movie; once in college I had to choose a director with a lot of movies to write a paper on and I chose Clint Eastwood so I could watch and write about Mystic River just because she was in it…before I came out…there were always signs) and Lola Petticrew and it is a dark crime drama about an FBI agent recovering from (or crashin...
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Criticize This

This week I’ve been thinking about how sometimes a piece of media just hits you in a way that stays with you when you’re done.This weekend, I watched and reviewed the upcoming show Sterling Point for Autostraddle (keep an eye out for my review that goes up tomorrow!) and it was one of those shows for me. Something about it drew me in and I didn’t even realize it until later but I wasn’t even on my phone while watching it, I was just totally locked in and entranced.When I get like that with a sho...
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On Series Finales

Those of you who know me, and some of you who don’t but have been reading my television reviews for a long time probably know this about me, but in case you don’t: I hate series finales. I mean, I love them, they’re often my favorite episodes of a show, but they’re so SAD. Even the happiest series finale is still a goodbye, and goodbyes hurt so much. So, more often than I’d care to admit, when a show I love is about to end for good, assuming I’m not being paid to review it, I sometimes just...do...
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The Society of Fortnite

Today I’m going to talk about Fortnite but also about human nature so hopefully even if you’ve never played a single game, you’ll still enjoy reading about it.This season of Fortnite has been really highlighting both the best and the worst of the people who play this game. I’ll start with the worst.In the most recent update, the game introduced an end-game battle bus. What this means is that randomly, some games, instead of being a battle royale last-team-standing, a bus appears and to win the g...
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More Summer Stories

Last week, I talked about my childhood memories of summer, so this week I thought I’d talk about some of my adult summers.Because summer looks different as an adult, especially one with no children. There’s no school break to signal the start of summer, no noticeable change in your daily routine. But there is always a tipping point, different every year, when the weather beckons you to go outside a little more than usual.This has looked so many different ways over the course of my 15+ adult year...
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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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