The Lizzies 2025

Welcome one and all to the first annual Lizzies, a celebration of all things Liz (that's me)! 2025 has been...a fucking year to be trans in America, so we're going to end this year with me! No judge, no juries, all executioner. Because really the true arbiter of quality is, ultimately, my approval.

The official Lizzies trophy, brought to you by Google Images

Best Post Made By A Liz: On Incomputable Language: An Essay on AI by Elizabeth Sandifer

The Lizzies was initially conceived as a joke vanity project wherein I would exclusively give awards to bloggers named Liz. I put out a call because the only ones I knew where me and Elizabeth of Patchwork Paladin, whose Seven Types of DMs post was this year's runner-up, because I love me a good taxonomy. Elizabeth Sandifer was tagged and actually responded, submitting The Cuddled Little Vice, an essay on Neal Gaiman's Sandman work, for consideration. I promptly forgot all about it, lost in the morass of the shitty security job I was working at the time.

Later this year, her essay On Incomputable Language started making the rounds on Bluesky, I read a bit, and I was like "Where have I seen this website before?" and then I was like "Hey wait a second!" So yeah. Generative AI is the bane of our modern age-it is a disaster for labor rights, for the environment, it's going to shred the economy when it collapses, all that stuff. And yet its evangelists keep holding out that the singularity or whatever is just a few more trillion dollars of investment capital away. Sandifer goes after that, arguing that this unit, as we understand it, does not and cannot have a soul. It's all just sand and vapor. It's great.

(Second) Best Post by My Evil Twin: Against Value Propositions

Markus of Personable is basically my evil twin: ask the two of us an opinion on game design, or really anything, and we're almost guaranteed to offer opposite opinions. I love the guy so much I'm dubbing him an Honorary Liz and giving him his own section here.

Against Value Propositions is a post about how we shouldn't really think of entertainment in terms of dollar per hour, and how that's not a healthy way to approach creative works and stuff. It resonated with me a lot because I catch myself doing that far too much in my personal life. "Do I want boba?" becomes "Is this worth half an hour of my life?" and that's a really unhealthy way to go through the world. So I try to think "Is it worth this to you?" 

That probably says more about my mental illness than the quality of Markus' writing, but I still think you should check out his stuff anyway. 

My favorite post Markus made is, of course, this reaction to my Huniepop post.

Post I'm Proudest Of: Big Deck Energy: A Reflection on Doctor Odyssey

The Doctor Odyssey post is not my furthest-reaching post. It's probably not my best-written or most accessible post, either. But for me it's probably the most important of this year, because it's where I stepped the furthest out of the OSR blogosphere to talk about something else. This isn't revolutionary or anything, just ask owner of a suspicious amount of Sonic memorabilia Farmer Gadda. But it was a big step for me in terms of pursuing my own interests; in this case, terrible terrible television. It was also one of the girthier pieces of writing on the blog at the time, thanks to my brief flirtation with unemployment. 

This pic was made back when I had reddish hair. It's black and green now.

Best Series: Stocking a Sandbox by Forlorn Encystment

The two contenders for Best Series this year were Stocking a Sandbox and Ten Years by Dwiz. Of the two, Ten Years has irrevocably altered my vocabulary by adding "Race fantasy" and "I want to play as an Elf" into the mix. Its a well-written reflection on the World's Most Ubiquitous Roleplaying Game.

But Stocking a Sandbox caused me to make stuff. Pulling from both newer resources like Worlds Without Number and the weirdness Cyst has been chronicling in both that series and his more famous one about other weird bits in the AD&D DMG, I created my own little hexmap. I populated it with pre-made adventures from different sources. It even inspired bits of  the most popular thing I've written to date. That kind of DIY spirit is what the blogging scene is all about, so I'm going to celebrate that here.

My Favorite Post: Why Orcs? Or, Why Do I Love Orcs? by Lyme

One of my favorite podcasts is A More Civilized Age, and it made me fall in love with the whole "Clone Trooper" thing. The concepts of self-identity and defying what you were made to be were probably foreshadowing for me being trans, but I also just think it has lots of fun ways to play with it. Lyme's post, about orcs as metaphors for industrialized warfare, and I was like holy shit.

Orcs are clone troopers.

I love clone troopers.

And now I love orcs.

Also, buy Dawn of the Orcs. I really wanna play it with someone. PLEASE.

Most Important Post: Faggot Games: An Urgent Warning by Eclipse

Most Important Post goes to the post that I consider to be the most, for lack of a better term, socially important. Whether shining a light on something important or being a powerful call for action, Most Important Post is probably the loosiest and goosiest of these categories. If the Lizzies had been around last year, Xandering is Slandering from DIY and Dragons would have been the Most Important Post, to give an example. 

Faggot Games was written in early 2025, in the last weeks of the Biden Presidency. It's about allowing ourselves (primarily transfems) to be weird and horny and fundamentally ourselves in our art, both for the sake of it and as a form of security and community. A hive is not a hive until you've held down someone's wings, after all. In the cold, dark winter of 2025, with payment processors functioning as de facto censors and going after projects like Praise the Hawkmoth King, Horses, and countless others.

I...have not been super diligent in following its advice. Me and My Broodmares Saw You From Across the Battlefield and We Kinda Like Your Vibe has been stalled in its tracks while I worked on other projects like Eunice the Nun, and I frankly need to get on that. But I'm also glad that my discord is a space where we have not one but two separate Girl Frame campaigns running, even if the tone is likely hornier than the game's creator intended. And that's something. Because at the end of the day, we're all we got, and that means we need to get comfortable with all of us. 

The other major challengers this year were 200 Proof's 1E Manifesto and Valeria Loves' I Do Not Like the Horse Women. The 1E Manifesto needs no introduction for anyone reading this post, but I just heavily appreciate its approach as a kick-in-the-pants to creatives, because some art, even incomplete art, is better than no art. 

I Do Not Like the Horse Women resonated with me because I am an American, and we are inundated in ads for gambling, whether it be on the stock market, sports, or anything else. Ultimately, there is no fundamental difference between those apps, games like Uma Musume, or any given slot machine, except that the horse women happen to have a prettier face than the other two. This was also the year I watched Noah Gervais' video on Diablo, and between that and a family trip to Vegas last year the whole gambling thing left an ashen taste in my mouth. Not to throw shade at my friends who play these games and love them enough to write tens of thousands of words of fanfic; or at least, not a lot of shade, but I find it extremely depressing.

My "Legal in all 50 states" ad has people raising a lot of questions that have already been answered by my ad. 

Wrapping Up

The Lizzies also times up alright-ish with the one year anniversary of me starting this blog. Since then, I've released Sunk Cost, Bloodmoon Crypt, and...not much else, truth be told. A decent chunk of my creative energy went to roundabout discourse posts that still somehow get views, The Adventures of Eunice the Nun, and...not much else, truth be told. I think my New Year's resolution will be to try and make more stuff. Maybe that "Elfkisser" game I keep threatening to work on.

Happy holidays, and thank y'all for reading. <3