2025 was incredible! A year in review

Wow, that was 2025! This year was filled with a truly astonishing amount of things. I met and worked with wonderful people and created beautiful and meaningful things. That’s basically what I want to be doing with my life! The goal for 2026 is to find paths to sustainability on a financial level and develop deeper and more productive collaborations!

I’ll be very forward about this — I am asking people to support my work with subscriptions either through my blog or on Patreon, at least for a little while. Most of the stuff I’ll tell you about below was made for very little. I love bringing this stuff to you, but it's not paying off yet, so I'm seeking ways to keep it going a while longer. If you're not able to support with a subscription, but want to help, please consider sharing my work around!

On Screen

I did much less on camera work than I wanted to this year, but several big projects started distribution after many years in progress.

Most personally and directly, the documentary Is This A ‘Dad’ Thing?, about my journey inducing lactation and breastfeeding as someone assigned male at birth, premiered at the BAFTA-qualifying Aesthetica Short Film Festival in York, England. I went there with my co-director and editor Dasha and my child, who is also a main subject of the film. It was a great experience! And many of you may have helped us get there by pitching in a bit, and I’m forever grateful. I also have to thank our producer Selena Leoni for her incredible support. We’re still working on distribution, working through the festival process for premieres, because that’s important to some people, and we want to bring it to you and your communities as soon as we can.

Berlin Loop is a great sci-fi bike theft film from my good friend Emily Manthei. I have a small role in it, but I also helped provide locations for this feature. It’s a fun film, and I think it will be available to stream from somewhere at some point. It premiered at the first ever Wilmington Delaware International Film Festival, and it won the Audience Choice Award at the Berlin Sci-Fi Film Fest. It’s a great film! I’m sure it will be available for streaming sometime soon.

I had a main antagonist role in After the Act, an improvised feature film about the day after a guy cheats on his girlfriend. It’s directed and produced by the amazing team over at Nexus Production Group. They took it on an international screening tour in December. When I saw it in Berlin, it was an incredible experience, because the audience was very vocally against my character — that was my first experience portraying a character on screen who elicited strong reactions from the audience, and so I feel really good about that! A reviewer gave us four and a half stars, and said the acting was “perfection,” which is super cool to hear. I’m sure this will be available to stream soon too.

I’ve also begun pushing harder on developing some of my own personal projects in film and streaming or tv series that have been slowly developing in the background for some time. I hope the new year can bring some progress on those in such a way that I can talk about them and share the excitement with you.

On Stage

I performed in three plays with Shakespeariment, a Berlin-based troupe that works with 90-minute versions of Shakespeare plays in a style that’s aiming for similarities with the original performing troupe. We get the text about a month in advance, learn it, rehearse once for 2 hours and then stage it in a professional manner, usually in the round in a very intimate setting. This has the incredible effect of removing anything resembling pretension from the delivery—we must make it understandable and clear what’s happening, so it’s usually fun, bawdy and grounded. I had the pleasure of performing as Dumaine in Love’s Labor’s Lost, a Fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and very last minute stepping into Paulina (on book) in The Winter’s Tale.

I loved my work with Tales Held Dear, Berlin’s friendliest fantasy roleplaying improv comedy troupe. We were granted a monthly slot at Comedy Cafe Berlin, and for the near future we’ll perform on the third Friday of every month at 9:30pm, so please come see us! We also performed at other events including Das Improv Fest, with special guests Jiavani and Sarah Claspell (seen on Dropout!), and Bircon, Berlin’s new international roleplaying game convention. We’re looking for more opportunities like that — if you’re looking for a fun hour or 90-minute show at your convention, we are great! Tales Held Dear also published some more sketches early in the year, and we have some works in progress!

I joined a monoscene team called Marge, and we performed a bunch of times in the latter part of the year. Monoscene is an improv format with no edits, meaning what you see on stage is in real time, one location. It’s got its own unique challenges and opportunities and I’m having fun with it! I also performed two-prov with my buddy Kevin Napir and a few other folks along the way.

You can catch see me perform with all these groups in 2026! Some shows are already announced:

• Jan 9 – Marge @ 11pm at CCB (free show!)
• Jan 16 – Tales Held Dear @ 9:30pm at CCB (tickets)

Tabletop Roleplaying Games

Tabletop roleplaying games were a huge arena for me this year. I kicked it off with two big projects—a podcast and a crowdfunded zine.

The Witches of Wederra Keep is an actual play podcast using the game Wickedness and presented in short narrative focused episodes with immersive sound design. I released Act 1, up through episode 10, between January and May. We were official selection at 6 web festivals, gathered 11 award nominations and won two awards. I’m deeply proud, and well into editing Act 2 now. The show took me to NJ Webfest, a fantastic experience filled with amazing people, a gift to meet them honestly.

We even won two awards!

• Best Concept for an Actual Play at New Jersey Webfest
• Webseries Canada Honorable Mention at T.O. Webfest

It's rare you'll catch me being this openly proud and bragging about my own work: It's good, go listen to it!

Other Channels

I got to work with a bunch of amazing Actual Play channels, producers and performers. I really can't say enough great things about all these people.

• Transmissions — The Crows Send Their Regards, a Dragon Age two-shot of revenge (part 1, part 2)
• D8 Dungeon — To All the Orcs That Loved Me (a gay orc one-shot for the big summer fundraiser); and a second recording for one of their podcast games that I don't think has been released yet!
• EUphoria — GM for a Girl By Moonlight two-shot for Mechtember; A two part series of mecha pilots facing humanity’s end after stealing the Earth’s heart (part 1, part 2)
• Who Hurt You — The Crimson Enlightenment, a four-part series of vampires in 1830’s Edinburgh using they system Paint the Town Red; and we recorded a second season that's incredible for release next year!
• Who Hurt You — Mum Chums, a two part series of parents facing their daily struggles, played by real parents, using the game Mum Chums (part 1, part 2)

Of all of these, I think Mum Chums is something special! I haven’t played many games like that before and the cast is so amazing here, I think we told a great story.

I wrote, funded and distributed Games for an Ordinary Life, a poetic art zine of tiny games. That was my first ttrpg zine and crowdfuding campaign. I’m really proud of this collection — I wrote about some of the games earlier this year. I do think quite a few of them have some worthwhile ideas that I’ll return to as I design more games. Everyone who supported me, thank you. If you got your hands on one, I hope you enjoyed it. If you want one, I still have some copies, and the PDF is available on itch.io at the link above.

I joined Sara Brink of the show Oops, All Witches! to run the Broken Sky ARG, a cross-promotional game event. It was a cool process to put together, a little game design and a little creative writing. And while the game itself didn’t run as we’d hoped (the puzzles didn’t get solved!), it was still very worthwhile to try something new and different. You can walk through most of the collected game assets in the archive, courtesy of Sara.

Public facing roleplaying games are great, but this is also a lifelong hobby of the heart. I maintain a home game and started a monthly First Tuesdays TTRPG event in Berlin, providing tables for GMs and players to get together. We’re hoping to do broaden it in the new year to include skill-building and training for GMs and maybe some sort of playtest workshop for local game designers. If you’re in Berlin and want to join us, give me your email address.

Other stuff

Along the way in 2025, I got to meet or reconnect with many people who I deeply admire — if you’re on that list, you probably sat with me at some point this year either online or a physical table. I’m deeply grateful to you!

There were hardships as well. Notably, my grandfather passed away mid year, and helping him through the medical challenges and hospice took a big chunk of energy from a lot of people. He taught us how to love each other and build family together despite coming from a home broken by the Holocaust (he fled Germany with only a few siblings and cousins on the Kindertransport in 1939) and we miss him terribly.

But life is full of everything, the downs and the ups. A few months later, my sister got married, and her husband is someone I consider a best friend and now another brother. We all got to spend some quality time together as family in the US. And of course with family, I spent a lot of good time with my partner and kiddo. We traveled, we played, we made things together and more when we weren't all running off in every direction.

I also have to speak about the unfinished-till-now projects—they’re still there. I'll be doing my best to share work in progress when I can! (I'll put that stuff behind a paywall as an incentive for supporting me.) These days I imagine them as drying herbs hanging from the kitchen ceiling waiting for the right time to use or a garden of freshly seeded earth and tiny sprouts requiring care and patience. Each one brings a unique texture or flavor to my life. I have games, shows and films in development and collaborative projects in the works. It's so many of the things I love, and it's overflowing.

The political world continues to smash us like an uncaring hammer and I can feel a reactionary, polarized radicalization rising in response to it within me. This has been a constant process through most of my adult life but it’s been accelerating in recent years. Among other things, the response to and wholesale support of the genocide in Gaza, the police brutality and the bowing to the right here in Germany, the fascist takeover of the US government and capitulation-through-inaction of the opposition party leaders and the advances in the wholesale attack on trans folks in many places has heightened this to a crisis that I feel going into the new year. We continue to try to figure out how to build a bastion of safety in our home for our community and use that as a foundation to act from. I feel like every day this year I’ve had to remind myself that we will persevere.

And so that’s a year of life and everything, and if I’ve forgotten anything, then it’s a sweet secret that I get to take with me into the next year to bring life and joy to the early days of 2026. I’ll see you there. Happy new year!