ASK UNCLE DAVE
I don’t really want to
By rule, these look back articles are supposed to be points of light. Rays of optimism. This is not that.
On a personal level, 2025 was a year surrounded by death, health scares, and upheaval in my professional surroundings. On a more global scale, fear and chaos reigned, with boring normalcy a distant dream. We can pretend that 2026 will bring better things, but if it continues on like the first few days, that seems unlikely. My capacity for optimism is low. I know that this probably isn’t healthy, and I can see myself retreating further into my shell, writing and doing less, but here we are.
In an attempt to do something, I latched onto Pete’s idea to discuss a particular photograph that resonated in 2025. About a month back, this image popped into my life via r/AccidentalRenaissance and I think it’s a perfect encapsulation of where we are in life right now. Unfortunately, I can’t share the actual photo here without forking out a few hundred dollars, so I will link back to my original Reddit find, and you can go have a look on your own.
This image stopped me in my tracks. It reminded me of a Jeff Wall photograph, almost hyperreal, with so much detail you don’t know where to look. I turned my iPad to show my partner sitting on the other side of the couch.
“That’s clearly AI.”
Really? I was flabbergasted. I felt like the hillbilly who had just attended his first high school dance. The image seemed real to me, but perhaps my typically simple surroundings had made that so? It seemed impossible that a computer could come up with something so captivating. So I dug deeper. What I found was confusing.
I plugged the image into Google Image Search and it didn’t give me anything useful. It was mostly stories from foreign newspapers I had never heard of, China Daily, Gazeta Sportiva, and Bornheimer being some of them. Most of the images referenced “AFP” or similar, but none of them provided the name of the photographer. One thing I did find, though, was an uncropped version of the image that showed a larger scene.
At this point, I was pretty convinced that this was not an AI image, and my partner was still convinced that it was. I let it go until Pete’s prompt fell into my inbox. Now, a few weeks later, I’m able to find an actual Getty Images link to the photo (which again, you should go have a look at), as well as the name of the photographer (Oli Scarff, whose portfolio is amazing). From this, I can claim my victory – this was not an AI image.
However, this feels like a problem. In remarkably short order, we’ve arrived at a world where we don’t even know if a photograph is real or not. I am not the first person to suggest this could lead to bad things.
This feels like it fits into a theme, though I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. If forced, I would say it further highlights our continuing expectation of outcome without input or effort. We have this expectation that the world exists as it does, but with no interest in continuing the activities that lead to outcomes that deposited us here. We consume as quickly and cheaply as possible, with no concern for the quality or the origin. We’ve forgotten how to make and how to repair. Shit. We look down upon the people who make things and know how to repair! We barely understand how the things around us function, and somehow this isn’t a problem. We expect the quality of things to be kind of shitty, and we’re a little bit shocked when they aren’t.
The strange thing is that somehow mountain biking is a throwback to the times before this was so. We yearn for quality. We relish knowing how things work and how they can be fixed. We’re skeptical of electronics and dismissive of charlatans and hype men. Or, at least we think this is the case.
The rest of the world is being hollowed out, with companies and products lumbering around in zombie mode. In moments, you can likely think of dozens of companies resting on past laurels, pumping out shit designed in a cost-benefit laboratory. To bemoan just one example, have you eaten a Tim Horton’s donut in the past few years? Somehow, a Timbit is still an acceptable mouthful of food, but a Tim Horton’s donut is now an edible calamity of nothingness. Empty calories shaped in a ring. A slice of Wonder Bread with frosting. If you opened a new restaurant and tried to sell these donuts to customers, you would be out of business within a few months, but somehow this legacy keeps chugging along, making money, because it always has, and people will keep going there just because it exists. The legacy of the idea of a decent donut is enough to keep the corpse chugging along. And this is so many things! This is household appliances and footwear, where brands like Maytag and Vans continue to sell people things that look like the things they’ve always sold, but that are liable to fall apart in a fraction of the time.
This is politics. This is our entire existence. We’re no longer a society that actively pools our resources to make things better. We don’t build new infrastructure. We don’t build new parks. We don’t strive for the best in public education. We search for tax cuts and wonder why the entire fucking world is falling apart, why nobody knows how to build anything, and why our education and medical systems are in shambles.
And this is where AI is taking us with information, writing, photographs and art. Hundreds of years of painstakingly crafted works are nothing more than input into the machine, but this is okay because now we don’t have to click on a google link to source some suspect information, and please don’t pay any attention to the artificial revenge porn pouring out the other side.
We’ve forgotten how we got here, and we’ve discounted everything that came before us. We’re allowing the hollowing out of our society for the enrichment of a few because it’s just a little bit easier that way. We no longer want to do the drudge work necessary to make things, from highways to bike reviews, to donuts. We’re happy to plod along through potholes, to read AI slop, or to chew on a dough ring with the texture of cardboard. We feast on past accomplishments with no concern that we’re cheating ourselves of a future. It’s entirely possible that our love of bicycles will be the only thing that saves our souls.
Television
Now that we’re past that happy little diatribe, I will tell you about some of the culture that made me happy this year. This isn’t a “best of”, this is just some things I’ve watched in the past month that made me happy and that I think you should think about.
Linking it back to the words above, television, movies and music feel like one of the islands of sense where we still reward originality and quality. It does feel like our world of streaming is doing the best that it can to flood us with shit, but out of that pops the occasional gem. I guess the barrier to entry has gotten so low that there aren’t enough executives to make sure the talent doesn’t get overly interesting. At least a few creators found some space to get really weird. So, while 2025 felt like the rise of the forgettable series, let’s focus on a couple of things that weren’t. I do not promise that you will love this.
Heated Rivalry
This is very of the moment, and I feel like if you aren’t the target demographic for our website, your social media is being bombarded with this right now. Honestly, though, does this look like a show you would want to watch?
I’m immediately suspicious of any show that uses sports as a vessel. I see this poster, and I expect a schlocky teen drama with some badly edited scenes of hunky guys pretending to skate around a hockey rink. I do not want to watch this show!
This is not that show. It’s immersive, and it’s believable, with captivating characters that you are drawn to. The two leads are especially magnetic and almost impossible not to root for. It pulls you right in and then casually shatters one of the remaining television taboos via graphic sex scenes featuring a ballet of cock obfuscation. It has montages that are second to none, a fabulous soundtrack, and several moments that left me contemplating a brighter future for society.
The Rehearsal – Season 2
This is an unsettling television show. I’m months removed from watching it, and I’m still not certain if I enjoyed it. I don’t feel like it delivered on the premise that was promised to me, but I also think that might have been the point. I wanted science and results, and I got over-the-top absurdity. What I would advise is to watch the first 3 episodes. I almost want to tell you just to watch Episode 3, but I’m not sure the payoff works without the first 2. I will think about certain scenes in Episode 3 for the rest of my life. They are some of the funniest moments I’ve experienced in a good long while. I think that payoff is worth a few hours of your life.
Books
I had something about books written, but somehow it got deleted. That’s fine, though. I’m not going to recommend a book. I’m going to recommend a mindset for reading books.
For a time in my life, I sought out meaning in the books that I read. Don’t ask me what the fuck that means, I just know that it felt like I should be reading with purpose. I should be surrounding myself with the literature that means something, reading weighty tomes that would elevate my consciousness.
Occasionally, this paid off. There are a few massively complicated books that I look back upon fondly, and that made some of that effort worthwhile.
Often, this fucking sucked. You start a book, and you slog through it, and there are all these fucking words, and you’re wondering why the author doesn’t get to the point/plot/story/entertainment.
So I stopped fucking worrying about that and started just reading things that either provided knowledge or entertainment. I’m still a bit of a snob about it, but I’m also okay with just reading things that keep me turning the page. I’m deep in a multi-year sci-fi journey. Throw in some fantasy. Throw in some guy shooting a bunch of people in the face. Whatever. Read because it’s entertaining. Read because you like the story. Read because you might learn something interesting. Don’t worry about the rest.
Music
It’s a trope as old as time. “They ain’t makin’ music like they used to!” It’s nonsense. You know it’s nonsense. There has always been, and there will always be, people putting notes together in new and interesting ways.
What I will say, though, is that we don’t seem to be in an era of dangerous music, and really breathtaking music needs an element of danger. Until now, every generation listened to music that was unfathomable to their parents. “Turn that racket off! It’s just noise!” Now, the parents are listening to avant-garde Southern death rap, and the kids are cranking the bubblegum pop. Where’s the danger?
Still, there’s some good new music being made. And what better way to celebrate new music than with an ancient band that has been around forever? Pulp!
Newer than Pulp, 2025 felt like the year of Cameron Winter/Geese. I feel like the first half of the year was building up to Cameron Winter’s solo album, and once that launched, that was just a vessel to talk about Geese. Myself, I lean towards the solo stuff.
I know I linked to a Tiny Desk version of this song a little while back, but I’d be cheating myself if I didn’t talk about Mangetout. Song of the fucking year, in my opinion. There were days this year when I couldn’t shake this song out of my head. Extra bonus points for it showing up in a Heated Rivalry montage! And…I hadn’t seen the video until today. Is that a motherfucking Hello! ferry floating by in the background! My gosh, I wish I could have stumbled upon them filming this video, but that being said…I find the visuals here almost distract me from my enjoyment of the song. Go watch the Tiny Desk version instead!