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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My Favorite Shows of 2024

We made it! This is the FINAL installment of Media Mayhem 2024! Let's do this thing!I must have been out of my damn mind during the mid-year, because I inexplicably chose SEVEN shows as my faves. So, the way I see it, I had two choices: one, choose a whopping 13 new favorites for a total of 20 for the year, or cut down the seven to five for a very reasonable Top 10. I chose to do the latter, you're welcome.So, here is my new Top 5 list from the first half of the year: Pretty Little Liars: Origin...
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TV I Watched in 2024 (Part Two)

Welcome to the FINAL WEEK of my 2024 Media Mayhem! This is yet again a long one, with almost 60 TV shows to talk about, that I'm sure I will test the limits of Substack and your email providers, so I'll try not to ramble too much here up top.As I mentioned in July, mid-year I only covered shows that wouldn't have episodes for the rest of the year, so these shows are shows I've watched at least one episode of in the last six months. Some are long-over shows I binged, so I'll talk about those as a...
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My Top 5 Favorite Movies of 2024, Part Two

Gather 'round, it's time now to discuss my favorite movies of the year! This was actually hard, because despite watching over 120 movies this year...there weren't really 10 that stood out as favorites that weren't rewatches. Maybe THAT'S what I mean when I say I'm not a huge movie person. It takes more to hook me than it does for a book or TV show. Anyway, I only cheated a little to get this list to 10 because a list of nine was making my brain hurt, so first let's review the first half of the y...
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My Year in Movies, Part 2 (2024)

We’ve done video games, we’ve done books…so grab your popcorn and an absurdly large bucket of soda, it's movie time! It's so funny, I never consider myself a movie person, but I once again watched over 120 movies this year. And it's pretty evenly split; only about 60 movies in each half. Of course, it's no comparison, time-wise, to how much TV I watch, so maybe that's why it feels like I don't watch that many movies, and it probably helps that I have been making my way through all things Marvel...
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My Favorite Books of 2024

I read a lot of really great books this year. Of course, there were some duds, but when I did my first pass at narrowing down favorites, I had around 15 books on the list, which is a pretty solid list, especially out of 44. I did get it down to ten (partially by grouping book series, because I make the rules!) and then I realized...exactly five of those ten were the five I featured in my mid-year report. I wasn't sure how that would shake out, if some from the back half would beat out some from...
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2024 Book Report, Part Two

It's book time! Here in week two of our latest round of Media Mayhem, I will tell you about all of the books I've read since our mid-year check-in, including my thoughts, their vibe, and how gay they are. This time around, I thought I'd try something a little different and I sorted the books by their gods-given genre. That way, if you want, you can skip around to sections that pique your interest. It's an imperfect system, because I don't have enough of certain categories to do sub-genres, so so...
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My Favorite Video Games of 2024

Ah, "favorite." The word that plagues me, because I always have a caveat. I could have favorites in every category of video game! Favorite game to stream vs favorite game to play solo! Favorite gameplay vs favorite story! But instead of doing that, I have somehow managed to narrow down my list of approximately 25 video games (including games from part one AND part two) to a top 5, though I refuse to order them as such. They're all too different to rank; they're practically five different genres....
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My Year in Video Games, Part Two

Hello and happy December, friends! And welcome to another round of Media Mayhem. As most of you know, this is something I started doing last year, where I went through every video game, book, movie, and TV show I watched throughout the year and gave micro-reviews, and then narrowed all of them down into lists of favorites for the year. This year, to save us all some chaos, I did a mid-year version of these lists, so the year-end lists wouldn't be QUITE as long. However, the "favorite" lists will...
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A Trip Down Memory Lane

This past weekend, my father and I went to my childhood home, where my brother and his fiancée now live, and cleared some of my old things from the cellar. There were a few big Rubbermaid containers with my name on them, and they were a blast from the past. The things that sat on top of my dresser in my childhood bedroom, old stuffed animals I thought were long gone, piles and piles of physical photos, tangled messes of jewelry I can't believe I actually wore, and so much more. So much stuff was...
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I'm No Grinch...

I love autumn. I have for as long as I can remember. It feels like crisp breezes and cozy blankets and fresh starts. I grew up in New England, so the world always got a little brighter and prettier as the leaves started to change. Winter was a close runner-up, but the snow can get a little out of hand over here on the East Coast. I have terrible seasonal allergies, and I burn if I think about the sun too much, so spring and summer aren't high up there on my list. But fall weather is perfect for...
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Mining for Joy

It seems to me that we've been living in “unprecedented times” my entire adult life. I graduated college and entered the workforce in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2009, the first round of the nightmare presidency started practically on my 30th birthday in 2017, then the dreadfully mismanaged and devastating COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and now...this. One thing I've learned through all of these times, is that wallowing serves no one. I mean, listen, I spent Wednesday wallowing, and I...
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Election Day

It will be Election Day when this newsletter goes out, as my newsletters always go out on a Tuesday, but I am writing this before said Tuesday, so I have no idea what the day will hold. I hope by the time you read this, there will be cause to take a deep breath and start looking to the next fight instead of having to set back the clocks and re-fight battles we already won, but that’s all I have: hope. Not confidence, not assurance, just hope. Fear and anxiety and hope. I’ve done all I can do at...
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The Other Side of the Coin

Once upon a time, I set out to write a fairytale. The elevator pitch is basically: a Cinderella story told from the perspective of the noble, and make it gay. The other side of the coin, as it were. (My story also did involve a magic coin but that is irrelevant at this moment.) It’s one of the first times I sat down to write fiction that wasn’t fanfiction, and it’s definitely not GREAT. I eventually abandoned it in favor of another story that sparked my interest more, but I’m not ready to fully...
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Belated Review: Dollhouse

Belated Review: DollhouseEliza Dushku was one of my earliest crushes, before I knew what crushes really were. Of course, not my very first (that honor belongs to Amy Jo Johnson aka the Pink Ranger) but she was still pretty early on, before I figured out that not everyone felt this way about girls. But I couldn't deny how I felt when I was watching Buffy and Faith swaggered on screen. And as I got older, I realized my attraction went beyond the rogue Slayer, and actually applied to Eliza Dushku h...
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My Friends and I Are Con Artists

Eleven years ago this month, I went to my first con ever. It was New York City Comic Con, the most attended con in the US. (San Diego gets more press because it's closer to LA and has more celebs, but I'm just reporting facts here.) Go big or go home, I guess. I haven't been to all eleven, though; 2020 was canceled for obvious reasons, I didn't go to 2021 because probably it should have been canceled for aforementioned reasons, and I was in Canada for 2022. I went last year, which was during the...
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One Short Day

I had a very music-heavy long weekend, which are often my favorite types of weekends. Friday night I was in Boston for the Billie Eilish concert, and it was just...phenomenal. She's such an amazing performer and incredible talent, and it's been a long time since I've gone to a concert where I knew 100% of the songs and was equally excited for each reveal. And if you thought What Was I Made For was emotional in the Barbie movie, listening to it live is next level. It was truly an incredible night...
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Happy International Lesbian Day!

I don't remember learning what "gay" or "lesbian" meant, specifically. I know at one point in elementary school, I had somehow learned the definitions but took them too literally. One day at lunch, a boy in my class was calling a girl "gay" in the mean way kids did in the 90s. In trying to diffuse the situation, I decided to be pedantic, and said, "Well, gay means you like boys and lesbian means you like girls, so we're gay and you're lesbians." When he laughed and said "You're gay?" I puffed ou...
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Imagination Station

Growing up, I spent a lot of time in the land of my imagination. I loved making up imaginary scenarios for my toys, I loved pretending to be a Power Ranger or a character from Sailor Moon with my friends at recess. Some of my earliest memories are of my kindergarten best friend and I pretending to be twin lion cubs when we were supposed to be sleeping at naptime. I even had imaginary friends, who were all animals, but I was very self-aware that they were imaginary. My imagination helped fuel my...
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Podcast-Palooza

We're about at the halfway point of my mid-year media mayhem and my end-of-year review, and I have decided for no reason at all that it's time to break down some of the podcasts I currently have in rotation. This isn't a list I'll need to update twice a year because there's not a lot of turnaround. There are some podcasts I've tried and quit, some that end, and I'll maybe pick up a few new ones a year, but it's not as ever-changing as TV or constantly new like books and movies. Now, I am aware t...
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Unprompted

Confession: I was feeling a little stuck for this week's newsletter. I couldn't think of a story or a theory or a feeling to share. My brain does nothing but whir and think and ramble all day every day (and often long into the night), and yet whenever I tried to think about what to write for you, it went suspiciously blank. When it came down to the day of, and I did my normal stalling tactics and put it off all the way until after lunch, I was running out of time and feeling desperate, so I goog...
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