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 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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Family Trees

I think we need more words for extended family in the English language.My brother is engaged, and his fiancée is wonderful and so is her family, and I've gotten to know some of them at various get-togethers over the past few years. This past weekend was the bridal shower, and as I was talking to my friends about it, I realized the English language was letting me down. There's no easy way for me to refer to my brother's fiancée's parents or siblings when I'm talking to someone who doesn't know th...
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Productive Procrastination

As I have mentioned here before, I have been doing a bit of an apartment overhaul. It was much needed and long overdue…and I've made a lot of progress! I cleaned out many bins of crap I had taken from the cellar of my childhood home and found them places to live or trashed them. I donated boxes of books to the library and bags of clothes to Goodwill. I recycled a metric ton of cardboard and finally threw away the broken trash barrel that has been in my apartment for months because I can only put...
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Underrepresented

I have spent the better part of my adult life writing about LGBTQ+ representation in media. I've covered the good, the bad, the best, the worst. Every show I watch, every movie I see, I'm keeping an eye out for the gays, and then critiquing the way they were written and portrayed, seeing if their story is being handled respectfully, if they're being tokenized or leaning into harmful stereotypes, taking into account their context and the overall story, etc, etc. It's something I talk about pretty...
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I Think I've Always Been a Writer

If you had asked me, when I was little, what I wanted to be when I grew up, depending on the year I would have had a different answer for you. The ones I remember saying the most were a veterinarian (met with pitying looks because I'm allergic to practically everything that breathes) and an actress. I don't know when I decided I wanted to be a writer. In fact, I'm not sure I decided it at all. I think I just sort of ended up doing it for work, realized I loved it and kept doing it. But the truth...
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My Dragon's Hoard

As some of you may remember, last year I went to my childhood home and took some storage boxes from the cellar, after investigating the chaos within. They were living in the spare room at my parents' new house for a while, but eventually, little by little, they all came to my New York apartment. I just shoved them in the study; I procrastinated dealing with them because of who I am as a person...and my undiagnosed (and therefore unmedicated) ADHD. Out of sight, out of mind and all that. Then one...
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The Art of a Reread

Unlike movies and TV shows, which I will often revisit, whether because I enjoy them or because a new sequel/season is coming out, I don't often reread books. I definitely did when I was younger; memorizing Dr. Suess books is how I LEARNED how to read. I read my copy of Little Women enough to practically have it memorized. And I'm sure I made my way through the Babysitter's Club series more than once. But as an adult, aside from going back to clear out my DNF list earlier this year, I think the...
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Show and Tell

Last week, after I had finished writing my newsletter, I was in Canva using a purple “marker”, dutifully erasing the background out of the bunny that would serve as the center of the cover photo for that week’s post when the thought occurred to me…I have been making covers for each and every one of my newsletters, and yet it’s very likely some of you have never seen a single one. Anyone who subscribes through the Substack app, I believe, gets a wee preview of it when a new post goes out, and of...
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Someone Else's Nightmare

And now for something completely different.Below is something I wrote in 2011 (edited slightly for clarity) about a dream I had years prior that still sticks with me to this day. I can still picture the rooms where this dream took place, can still see the reflection in the mirror that wasn't my own, can still taste the fear in my mouth. It's one of the most vivid dreams I've ever had, and I still have no idea what prompted it. It's also, to this day, the only dream I ever remember having where I...
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Memories and Moments

Sometimes I think about the people who briefly came into my life and wonder if they remember me, or if I ever pop into their head the way they pop into mine. People who probably would never remember my name, if they ever knew it in the first place, but who have embedded themselves into core memories of mine. If the moments that were moments for me were for them, or just an ordinary moment.Does the magician/clown who performed at my 5th birthday remember the terror in my eyes when he handed me hi...
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