My 2025 media favorites

2026-01-04T00:00:00.000Z

Books

I read a lot more nonfiction this year, which I found to be enriching and educational. For 2026 though, I think I want to read more literature to "nourish my soul" a bit more.

Nonfiction

Mood Machine (2025) by Liz Pelly
Empire of AI (2025) by Karen Hao
Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) by Angela Y. Davis
Copaganda (2025) by Alec Karakatsanis

Fiction

The Sympathizer (2016) by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Perfection (2025) by Vincenzo Latronico, tr. Sophie Hughes

Comics

The Nice House on the Lake (2021-2024) and The Nice House by the Sea (2024-ongoing) by writer James Tynion IV and artist Álvaro Martínez Bueno
Tongues, Vol. 1 (2025) by Anders Nilsen
Why Art? (2018) by Eleanor Davis

I reread this one after a few years, and it still hits.
Chainsaw Man (2018-ongoing) by Tatsuki Fujimoto

Like many, I got interested in Chainsaw Man after the recent movie was released in U.S. theaters, and last year, I really enjoyed the Look Back movie adapted from the work by the same mangaka.
Fire Punch (2016-2018) by Tatsuki Fujimoto

Movies

13 Going on 30 (2004), dir. Gary Winick
Boys Go to Jupiter (2024), dir. Julian Glander
Happyend (2024), dir. Neo Sora

My favorite movie this year---it touched on many themes that I find personally meaningful.
Blue Moon (2025), dir. Richard Linklater
Angel’s Egg (1985), dir. Mamoru Oshii
Hamnet (2025), dir. Chloé Zhao
After Life (1998), dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda
Marriage Italian Style (1964) dir. Vittorio De Sica
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) dir. Vittorio De Sica

My parents are fans of the Italian actress Sophia Loren. I wasn't familiar with her work, but we watched a couple of movies where she stars opposite Marcello Mastroianni, both directed by Vittorio De Sica. We found these to be so fun. I was struck by how well these movies represented a lively and connected community, something I wish I saw portrayed in movies more often.

Music

I am planning to write a more thorough blog on my music-listening. Will update here when I do~

Reflections

When I read back these lists, I can't help but think that I enjoyed a lot of great art this year. And especially with movies, I very often got to experience them with people I really love. The world is so big, and people can be so awesome.

Hosting my SvelteKit site and blog on SourceHut

2025-12-13T00:00:00.000Z

First, some background: This year, I redid my personal site, the one you're on now. For my previous site that I made back in 2021, I built it using Sapper, the predecessor to SvelteKit. I hosted my code on GitLab, which would automatically deploy to Netlify.

For this iteration of my site, I decided to go just go full in with SourceHut---both for hosting my git repository and for hosting the resultant static site! Just like GitHub Pages or GitLab Pages, there is also, reasonably enough, SourceHut Pages. I've been interested in SourceHut because of its strong alignment with open-source; this writeup at parasrah.com is a helpful rundown on SourceHut's positives.

In my web searches, I didn't find much info on how to specifically deploy SvelteKit with SourceHut pages, so I pieced together things based on resources for deploying other static site generator code on SourceHut. I thought I'd write it down in case it's useful to someone else~

Building SvelteKit as a static site

Because SourceHut pages can only deploy static sites, we have to build our SvelteKit project as a static files using adapter-static.

For example, my svelte.config.js looks like this:

import adapter from '@sveltejs/adapter-static';
import { mdsvex } from 'mdsvex';
import mdsvexConfig from './mdsvex.config.js';

/** @type {import('@sveltejs/kit').Config} */
const config = {
	extensions: ['.svelte', ...mdsvexConfig.extensions],
	preprocess: [mdsvex(mdsvexConfig)],
	kit: {
		adapter: adapter({
			fallback: '404.html'
		})
	}
};

export default config;

SourceHut configuration

To automatically deploy on SourceHut, we need a .build.yml.

I based mine off of this Eleventy sample, and ended up with this:

image: alpine/edge
oauth: pages.sr.ht/PAGES:RW
packages:
  - nodejs
  - npm
  - hut
environment:
  repo: <REPO_NAME>
  site: <SITE_URL>
  # Disable npm progress bar
  # https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v9/using-npm/config#progress
  npm_config_progress: 'false'
secrets:
  - <UUID_FOR_SECRET>
tasks:
  - install: |
      cd $repo
      npm install
  - package: |
      cd $repo
      npm run build
      tar -C build -cvz . > ../site.tar.gz
  - upload: |
      hut pages publish -d $site site.tar.gz

Blog setup

I want to get into blogging for the sake of documenting technical things like this and also just to practice writing more. :-)

I knew I wanted to be able to write posts as separate Markdown files. To that end, I found this blog post by Josh Collinsworth incredibly helpful. I don't really have anything else to add, but if you're interested in doing similar, I'd start there! Most of my setup is identical.

I also took some inspiration for my MDsveX settings from this blog post by Jeff Pohlmeyer. So my mdsvex.config.js looks like this:

import { defineMDSveXConfig as defineConfig } from 'mdsvex';

const config = defineConfig({
	extensions: ['.md', '.svx'],
	smartypants: { quotes: true, ellipses: true, dashes: 'oldschool' }
});

export default config;

In particular, I love the smartypants options, which save me time from figuring out how to make curly quotes in my code editor ha.

RSS feed

For my RSS feed, I wanted to be able to have the full contents of each post show up in RSS feed readers, so I referenced Kyle Nazario's posts on the topic (part one + part two), which also build on Josh Collinsworth's guide.

Reflections

I don't have much to say other than "it's been fun." Svelte has been fun and refreshing to use, and I feel like I understand a bit more about routing than when I started. I've enjoyed working on this site and steadily making adjustments and designing websites that are a bit "weirder" than I might be allowed in a corporate context. Totally recommend making your own site, SvelteKit or no!

vivien.garden

My 2025 media favorites

Books

Nonfiction

Fiction

Comics

Movies

Music

Reflections

Hosting my SvelteKit site and blog on SourceHut

Building SvelteKit as a static site

SourceHut configuration

Blog setup

RSS feed

Reflections