Our dumbest commenters of 2025 and our worst lit predictions for 2026
Ah 2025. It was mostly the blorst of times.
Eris: Welcome to our way-too-late end of the year post! We’d argued over what we’d get for you all so ultimately we just put in as much crap as we felt like. Click below to skip to…
No lists of our favourite books or poems in spite of this being a literature blog because we left it too late and we’re stupid and it’s already over a week into the new year
But first let us have a numerical jerkoff session!
Our 2025, by Numbers
Discordia Review started out as one guy screaming irregularly into the void about the vibe shift and (for some reason) Ray Manzarek, but over the last year it’s grown into several guys screaming two times a week into a void that, it turns out, is peopled by at least the population of a prosperous Alaskan town. Let’s run down some of the numbers for 2025:
Print Zines Published: 8 (dalton derkson’s HOTCOUNTRY98, Fellow Travellers No. 1 & No. 2, the Poetry Heel’s Modest Proposals for Demoralizing Your Local Literary Community, Kalden Rangdröl Dhatsenpa’s California: Above, Everything Else, Jack Daniel Christie’s Bay of Pigs No. 2: Stormwatch, Zak Jones’s By Hanlan’s Point I Sat Down and Watched, and Phil Hall’s The Hobo.)
Total Units Shifted: Somewhere around 400, we’re pretty bad at keeping track.
Live Shows and Launches: 4, with thanks to L’hémisphère gauche (HOTCOUNTRY98 launch with JRG Open Mic), The Crumper (Fellow Travellers launch), the Thrashcan (Bonfire of the Poets 3), and La Sotterenea (The Hobo/Stormwatch/Fellow Travellers 2 launch) for their hospitality.
Total Blogs: 118
Total Wordcount: 212,598
Longest Blog: 12,622 (“The 100 Greatest Horror Movies Ever, according to this one annoying guy”)
Shortest Blog: 568 (“My uncle, his wife, an axe”)1
Subscriber Growth: 11625.9% (Our first post of 2025 went out to 27 subscribers; as of this writing we currently have 3,166.)
Fellow Travellers Inducted: 28 (Clark Allen, Nevada-Jane Arlow, Gwen Aube, Scott Bevins, dalton derkson, Dogs Understand, Matt Farley, Miles Forrester, Jay Ryan Gobuty, Phil Hall, Meghan Harrison, Jenna Jarvis, Jonathan, Zak Jones, Dimitri Karakostas, Mickie Kennedy, kurichka, Emilie Lafleur, Rickie Leach, IAN MARTIN, Dean McClure, Sophie McCreesh, Tara McGowan-Ross, Opal Louis Nations, Fawn Parker, Shima Ra’eesi, Ev Ricky, and Bardia Sinaee.)
Soothsayers Identified: 1 (Joshua Chris Bouchard)
Performers who lent us their voices that we haven’t listed already: 4 (Joe Bagel, Alana Dunlop, Mona Gendron, Rebecca Lawrence Lynch)
Authors of Guest Posts: 6 (Frances Boyle, Rishi Janakiraman, Tara McGowan-Ross, Zane Perdue, Anna Sigrithur, and Emily Zhou.)
Folks who lent us indispensable material, emotional, and/or spatial assistance: ~ 11, such as Courtney Loathe, Xie, Doug Fnord, the Puberty Well girls, Have You Ever Printing (for all your Montreal merch needs), Tsar Print Shop (for all your somewhat more professional Montreal zine making needs), the UPS Store on Beaubien (for your somewhat less professional Montreal zine making needs), the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair, Expozine, Scatterbrain magazine, The Word, and De Stiil Booksellers.
The Comment Genius Awards
The Poetry Heel: We here at Discordia enjoy the odd “controversial” post. As such, our comments section has a tendency to be a… lively place.
Responding to comments—nay, even reading the comments—is not something we would ever suggest on principle, but the algorithm prizes engagement, and one can often drum up engagement by fanning the flames of the comment wars. That’s not to say that we’d ever be deliberately provocative, heeeeaven’s no :) but it doesn’t hurt to get people mad enough at you and at each other that they want to tell you all about it. But don’t worry, we read each and every comment carefully and make sure to take their criticisms on board—yes, whenever our brilliant commenters take time out of their busy days of playing with the the insides of broken thermometers, we Sit Our Asses Down And Listen.
The Discordites scoured this year’s comments sections to find some choice excerpts upon which to bestow our accolades as thanks, bringing us our first ever Comment Genius Awards. This one goes out to Friend of the Collective PJB, whose idea this was.
Let’s get this show on the road!
The Ayn Rand Award for Heroic Anti-Parisitism
THE END OF THE WORLD SHOW bravely stood their ground this year against that most vile of institutions, those pirates in all but name, the public libraries.
Libraries are leeches, just like the damn unions. All they do is steal books and then share them with the other lazy bums. Fucking bureaucrats. And don’t get me started on the public schools. Schools can afford books, obviously. They have tons of money! Public schools are famously lavish palaces that spend all the money they don’t spend on books serving beluga caviar in the cafeteria and building new portables made entirely out of gold bullion. Mr. T.E.O.T.W.S. is right—we should start charging them rent! And if they can’t make rent? We evict the school and all its children! To hell with those kids!
Mr. T.E.O.T.W.S. makes sure to point out how ridiculous it would be if the principles of a library were applied to something like, say, cars, and how the auto industry would react to that. God, there would be such demand for it, why I could imagine countless people signing up to take advantage of this vehicle-sharing program. Christ, they’d hardly have enough for all of them, they’d probably have to resort to making the cars bigger to fit more people, then develop a system of dropping them off and picking them up while in transit, a sort of “transit system” if you will. Sheer communism!!! Thankfully, no such thing exists, because if it did car companies would simply have no way to fight it, aside from, I dunno, over a century of conspiracies to slowly dismantle it. Transportation is a “defacto [sic] necessity,” which obviously means it should be provided to no one unless they’re rich. What we need, as Mr. T.E.O.T.W.S. suggests, is to get people to stop saving money on books at the libarary so that they can’t afford cars anymore, because we need people to not be able to afford cars so we have a proper marker to tell the rich from the poor. Or something like that, maybe. I need to sniff a bit more of this glue to get it straight.
Anyways, congratulations!
The Anger Management Dropout Award for Drywall-Punching
A user named Dave (lvx-15) commented on one of our posts seemingly to suggest us a Jonathan A. Lethem novel, and when we prompted him to tell us which one he was talking about he lost all of his Rageaholics Anonymous chips in an instant and probably had to have one of the most embarrassing calls with his sponsor in recent memory.
Not sure what your issue was Dave, but congratulations!
The [Redacted] Award for Litigiousness
This last year two different individuals threatened us with LEGAL ACTION for our blog posts. Neither came to anything. Our lawyers are telling me we cannot tag them or make any jokes about this and need to move on.
Congratulations!
The JK Rowling Award for Defence of Woomyn
Emily Hancock was on hand this year to draw our attention to all those prospective Buffalo Bills out there.
Obviously we agree, which is why half the poets we publish have been trans. That being said, Emily does have a “cock” in her name, so we’re going to have to ask her to STEP AWAY FROM THE WOMEN’S BATHROOM.
Congratulations!
The Ultra-Literalist Award for Do Read Good
In a now-deleted argument (we kept the receipts because they were just too good) under a rather insightful post that Discordia-favourite Luke McGowan-Arnold made about Roberto Bolaño, noted reply guy Daniel Solow tried to argue at length that the work of Bolaño was not, in fact, particularly political. While not technically a comment on a Discordia Review post, this reply to Eris was really worth including.
We will not explain in explicit and direct terms why this post is so funny, which will unfortunately mean that Daniel probably won’t get it. Still, we love him for it.
Congratulations!
The Maude Flanders Award for Pearl-Clutching
We’ve gotten countless comments in this vein this year, but, at random, this one goes out to Ivan Tucker.
Mr. Fucking Tucker didn’t have any fucking time for our childish bullshit. Regrettably, his intuition was fucking spot on, our puerility largely masks the way our insights sag like a heavily-prolapsed anus after being thoroughly fucked by a giant horse cock, dribbling horse cum all over the ground. It’s as unseemly as a steamy diarrhea dump all over your grandmother’s face that gets all the way into her nostrils and ears, and I apologize, I’m going to try to do better, with the tenacity of a pitbull trying to work his way through a daycare center before the caretaker comes back to trip over all the baby intestines (that then burst and are filled with shit).
Mr. Mother-Fucking Tucker, please accept as a reward this kitschy t-shirt displaying George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.”
Fucking congratulations! Piss cock!
The Robin Richardson Award for Being Robin Richardson
It was a tight race this year for this category, but ultimately we just had to give it to Robin Richardson, who was summoned to a post Sire wrote where Richardson received a dig in one of the footnotes:
Richardson responded with the following:
By “Jake Byron” we think she meant Jake Byrne,2 but we understand the mistake—Byrne writes poetry, Byron wrote poetry, the similarities abound. Eris, however, wanted to add: “I was not the one who penned that insult, because I do 100% believe Richardson is sincere. Unlike Sire (and Jake Byrne), I don’t think Richardson is ‘a grifter.’ I think that, if this demonstrates anything, she is merely ‘a crazy person,’ and I for one love her for it. Keep doing you, Robin.”
Congratulations!
The Dedicated Hater Award <3
This one was a tight one, actually, as there are more a couple users who have taken great pains to let us know we suck. One such user is our beloved boomer lib E. Lewis, who spent months in the comments of the Margaret Atwood hit piece fighting everyone about how the War in Afghanistan was a good idea, a notion that has been almost universally unpopular no matter your political tendency for like fifteen years. With tremendous comic instinct, Mr. Lewis eventually left the comment section shortly after posting this:
Out of the many people who got mad at Lewis in turn, he also drew out yet another example for a long-running inside joke here at Discordia: people try to guess Eris’s racial or sexual identity.
But the award ultimately has to go to Radek. Radek voiced his displeasure at Eris’s tankie shit months earlier in our piece on Ukrainian-American State Department poet Ilya Kaminski by having a very lengthy argument about gulags. Unlike the others, however, Radek made sure to come back and review more of Eris’s tankie shit in our piece on Jon McCurley’s attempted cancellation of the band Viet Cong. His conclusion?
Like a true man of science, he made sure his hypothesis was tested. And he’s since turned up in other replies as well! To give our thanks for your dedication, my man, we present this link to our most tankie piece we ever wrote.
Congratulations!
In/Out for 2026
Tired of people posting their insufferable in/out lists for the year? Now Discordia has one!
OUT! Comparing shit to AI
Eris: Wow it’s almost like an AI generated this entry. Yes, generative AI bad, and at best a scam and at worst an existential threat, but one of the worst impacts it has had on writing in the last year or so has been in producing one of the laziest clichés I’ve ever read. There are so many colourful ways to call something shitty and generic, and landing on “it’s like AI” feels like a ruined orgasm whenever I got to it as the punchline. While I was writing my piece on Maggie Nelson’s terrible new book on Taylor Swift, for instance, I read a piece by Kelly Oxford where at one point she listed a bunch of shitty lyrics from Taylor’s new album and then to sum them all up said… “It sounds like AI wrote these lyrics.” Huh? No, it’s distinctly its own shittiness. Most of the album’s lyrics read like the dumbest mean girl in your high school writing a novelty rap song. Likewise, I could have just dismissed Nelson’s book as “like AI” but it’s not actually “like AI,” it’s like a sophomoric, navel-gazing nitwit showing off her resolute shallowness. Be more specific with your insults.
OUT!: Tattoos that look like hot rod detailing / nu-metal aesthetics in general
Sire: Faygo rave aesthetics are done, alright? Stop it.
Eris: Fifteen years ago these same idiots would have gotten little handlebar moustaches tattooed to their index fingers.
Sire: There’s a fucking terrible beatdown electronic duo here in Montreal called HRT whose showstopper is a cover of fucking “Break Stuff” by limpbizkit. If the best thing you do is a limpbizkit cover, it’s time to try another trade. I’m so tired of this, and these tattoos mean that in some small way this cultural moment will last till after I’m dead.
OUT!: Calling your enemies pedophiles when you clearly don’t care whether they’re pedophiles
Sire: Our first post to blow up on this platform was about Kendrick spending much of the previous year stunting on Drake, and Eris’s best point in the post might’ve been right at the beginning: “It’s all so pathetic on so many levels. Kendrick obviously doesn’t care about whether or not Drake is a pedophile since Kendrick features Kodak Black, a man who has done things infinitely worse than anything Drake has ever been accused of, including violently raping an underage girl, so Kendrick’s sanctimoniousness on that issue is obviously disingenuous, and the beef is probably more personal than anything else.”
Calling someone a pederast has become totally meaningless, the type of accusation you can make without bothering to back up the assertion because 2025 was the year it turned out basically everyone was a pedo and also it didn’t matter. It’s the equivalent of rappers (or schoolkids) calling each other gay in the ‘90s. At this point a video could drop of Drake fucking a kid and within two months it’d be a throwback meme.
OUT!: Performative queerness. Again.
Eris: [to the tune of “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” by John Lennon]
Performative queerness!
And what have you done?
Another year over
Ironic trampstamp on your bum
Performative queerness!
I hope you had fun
But shit’s looking scary
So now you’re a nun
Performative queerness (Drag Race is over)
Personality-impaired (If you want it)
For rich and the richer ones (Yaoi is over)
You’ll unbleach your hair (Now)
OUT! Throwing your life away
Unless…
IN! Throwing your explosive-laden life at those who deserve it
The Poetry Heel: We’ve written about suicide here on the blog before, and believe me, there’ve never been more reasons to stop the ride. But if you’re not happy with your life, why make your death as pointless? Every day there’s a conference selling real estate in the West Bank, a congressman who’s been chewing up the public clover for a generation cutting the ribbon on a new universal AI-augmented camera product for retail employee bathrooms, a taping of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. You could be the ugly Luigi Mangione, and you’d still get more wonderfully Experienced ass in heaven (or your carefully-screened prison mail) than you will going on liver dialysis because the 200 Tylenol caps you swallowed didn’t get the job done. (We are of course speaking metaphorically.)
IN! Dropping out of your MFA program / burning your MFA diploma
Eris: It would be so hot and cool of you to do this. Being proud of your MFA is so ew. Remember that old Twitter account Dana Schwartz ran? Guy in Your MFA? Schwartz was in no position to throw stones because 1) she’s a YA author (ewww), and 2) the perspective of the account is still nevertheless someone who is in an MFA. It’s like running an account called “Guy in Your Gooner Discord”—guy in your fucking what? You’re already as embarrassing as your strawman by making that confession in the first place. This may seem like an OUT! that’s merely been inverted, but I want to specify that we are here advocating for something active, we are literally calling on you to follow these instructions: drop out of your MFA if you can help it, or, if you really need the grant money, stop showing up to workshops entirely. If you have an MFA, film yourself burning your diploma like it’s your fucking draft card.
IN! Writing with interjections
Gadzooks!
Movie Time with Sire
Sire: I was a “film guy” as a teenager, but prior to this year it’d been more than a decade since I watched more than a dozen in a year. For whatever reason (maybe finally getting the Letterboxd bug) I watched more than 100 in 2025. Here are five favourites:
Crime Wave (1985, John Paizs)
Children contain the seeds of all human emotional and expressive possibility: adults read into them, and that reading shapes them into the adults those children become. Kids are sweet, cheerful, and open, and also depraved little sickos who like licking and sticking their fingers into things and pulling stuff apart. When we describe art as “childlike,” we’re usually using it as a synonym for “simple, wonderstruck, and innocent,” but it can also connote the crabbed weirdness of adult arrested development.
John Paizs’s Crime Wave knocks you out with the beauty of a streetlamp bulb warming as it flickers to life; with its sunny Canadian weirdness; with nightmarishly wrong images of evil you’d call Lynchian except that in 1985 Lynch hadn’t manifested that Lynch yet. It is howlingly funny, yet its basic subliminally taboo premise keeps you on edge; and then it pulls some of its biggest laughs from that discomfort.
A Rosetta Stone for a certain language of Canadian art comedy strangeness that leads from Kids in the Hall to Matthew Rankin, but in a rawer, riskier, ultimately more rewarding form. Crime Wave is a masterpiece.
(The transfer on the YouTube version above is pretty rough, but there’s a good version available on the usual torrent sites.)
Salaam Cinema (1995, Mohsen Makhmalbaf)
We all know directors routinely do awful shit to actors, but it’s understood that that’s okay because actors don’t have souls. Makhmalbaf conducts what amounts to a Milgram Experiment on hundreds of aspiring actors, in pursuit of questions like, “Under what conditions does a regular person become an actor?” There are certainly many here who present with the psychology of actors, and the director treats them accordingly.
My heart swirled with pity, hilarity, dread, outrage, and wonder. I even wept, not on command like these would-be actors did... but in a way like them, because I felt a faint voice inside telling me that I should or some great opportunity might be lost.
Watch/download an OK rip from the indispensable rarefilmm.com.
Dawn of an Evil Millennium (1988, Damon Packard)
I watched the whole thing assuming it was a purposefully retro early 2000s homage to ‘80s grindhouse sci-fi, and was mightily impressed—realizing Packard made this back in 1988 made my jaw hang a ‘lil. It has that meta referential quality that the last 25 years of culture has been saturated with to the point of toxicity, but a berserk spark all its own. Honestly, more of a piece of abstract visual art that just so happens to have been assembled from slagged bits of horror and sci fi tropes. WIYL Beastie Boys videos, Sam Raimi, Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter, Tim & Eric, Everything is Terrible, Weirdo magazine
Full film available on YouTube
Whistling Smith (1975, Marrin Canell, Michael J.F. Scott )
It doesn’t particularly matter to me whether the filmmakers believed they were capturing an exemplary cop or critiquing the institution, because they stay enough out of the way that the viewer is free to make their own evaluation of the man. I found Sgt. Smith to be thin-skinned, agitated, the sort of needy, socially-defective man who uses his authority to force people to acknowledge him. In the first shot of this short, we see him stop two long-haired young men at random so he can smilingly pepper them with questions about where they come from and what they do before continuing to speedwalk his two-block beat. Ostensibly it’s a friendly conversation, but in reality it’s an obvious example of profiling, and of Smith’s approach to policing, which is to constantly remind everyone of his presence, the presence of the force he represents. Smith is constantly nattering at people who clearly wish he would fuck off, thrusting his chest out as he forces sex workers and drug users to stagger off his block—to where, who knows, his primary function in fact is snowplowing problems away from his beat, unmindful of where they pile up so long as they’re not in his immediate eyeline. The camera is in constant motion, sometimes forced into a shaky run to keep up with its wind-up soldier protagonist, but it still catches the reactions Smith misses in his ceaseless marching, the weariness and irritation on the faces of even those he’s not directly harassing. Smith, whom the film notes has received only five citations in 30 years of service, is having the time of his life being the subject of the camera’s attention, and he’s clearly hamming it up a bit—but as he acknowledges in a voice-over towards the end of the film, performing the role of the uniform is what gives his life purpose. That’s the formula for a fanatic. (h/t to Jonathan for this one)
Watch it for free on the NFB website
We Are All Alone My Dear (1977, Paul Cox)
1. My grandmother worked till the age of 78 as an RN in a nursing home in Southern Ontario. Hers was a medical facility rather than a retirement village like the one shown in this film, and I often have trouble imagining quite what it would be like to have experienced the things she speaks about so matter-of-factly. There was the demented former Nazi who would only stop his ranting at the “Poles” and “Czechs” surrounding him when my grandma was summoned because he mistook her for an Aryan; her adorable favourites who wouldn’t settle until she’d tucked them in for the night; the surprising quick ones who sat hours till they became invisible, waiting for their chance to bolt through the security door and head for town; countless passes and gropings and worse from enfeebled men either lost in a fog, or faking it for the excuse to try their luck one last time, because fuck it, what else is there to do? She was fulfilled by her work, she was good at it and she believed it was important, even as she moved from caring for her elders to caring for people she used to go to high school with to caring for their kid brothers and sisters. She’s 86 now, still independent, says she always used to tell people who’d asked that she’d be fine if she ended up a resident at her own home someday. She didn’t feel that way by the time she retired though: budget cuts, corporate and state meanness to the fate of the hapless and family-poor, have made it a place that saddened her soul.
2. The protagonist of this short documentary, Jean Campbell, has the wry dignity of an old raven. Still observant, philosophical, she’s clearly someone who has always found life endlessly interesting—even, to some extent, life in the retirement village. But it’s dreadfully difficult to stay sharp using mashed potatoes for a whetstone: the other residents seem largely incapable of matching her wits. (You’re thankful the camera is there, at least briefly, so somebody gets how funny it is when Campbell answers another resident’s inane prattle about dogs by saying she owned one once but it committed suicide.) Campbell observes the way the other residents seem to be slowly collapsing in on themselves, reduced to more and more banal conversation, longer and longer vegetative stupors. But she knows the stupefaction is happening to her too; her capacious mind is just taking longer to empty.
The film doesn’t mention Campbell’s background, though some of Melbourne’s cultured set might’ve recognized her: prolific novelist (both literary and pulp), theatre personality, art critic etc. You don’t need it to understand her role in the film: her obvious erudition, winking references to an “eventful” mature life, and love of mischievous verse mark her out as a sort of Australian Dorothy Parker type. I only mention it here because I think she’d’ve appreciated people knowing she wasn’t putting on any airs.
3. One should always be suspicious of films, especially documentaries. Like Cox, by temperament my sympathies are with Campbell, because her struggles are more legible to me than those of the other residents (based on what Cox chooses to show of them at least). Most of them babble like happy infants. A new arrival stifles sobs. Cox is morbidly fascinated by the bugged out, witless-looking eyes of one particular resident, a face he constantly returns to in counterpoint to Campbell’s, as if to represent the fate she is scratching and clawing to put off.
But by and large, the residents seem happy enough gathering fluff, gossiping about nothings and prodding at their food. When Campbell makes some energetic bid at injecting a bit of cultured whimsy into their affairs, some of them seem delighted and others wearily tolerant, perhaps wishing she’d just finish her poem so that they can get back to what’s on telly. That’s the hateful thing about the eldercare system for many artists and intellectuals (the “When I’m too old, just shoot me” contingent, of which I’m a member): that for many people being able to relax and let your brain turn to porridge isn’t such a bad thing, so long as there’s company, and gentle tending, and the food’s not so bad.
I’m terrified of old age, and fewer and fewer elderly people get to experience even the level of faded, melancholy comfort that the folks have in We Are All Alone My Dear‘s facility. Yet I didn’t find this film wholly depressing. I admired Campbell’s endurance, the elegance of her mind and her eye. As she notes at the outset of the film, there is something worthwhile about witnessing every stage of the human lifecycle, gleaning what there is to be learned as we wear away. Yes, life is sad. Who ever told you that it wasn’t?
Watch/download on rarefilmm.com.
Predictions for 2026
Discordia Review will print its first perfect-bound book.
Somaliland will be allowed to enter Eurovision.
We’ll have at least one Fellow Traveller who’s gotten a Guggenheim Grant and at least two who have shit on the floor of the Union Station bus terminal bathroom.
Olivia Nuzzi will join the 60 Minutes newsroom. Ryan Lizza will make a single desultory appearance on The View and become Joy Behar’s sidepiece.
Our first video game will be released and only fifty people will play it, but all fifty of them will continue to play video games. [Edit: Well this one already happened.]
The popularity of polyamory and open marriage inevitably leads to #MeThree movement.
Erika Kirk will do a mourning set at Coachella.
The first “AI” novel will do big numbers. Scandal breaks when real author revealed to be human.
Ottessa Moshfegh, fresh from her Prada collab, will get a signature limited time only meal at McDonalds.
Eris will be a guest on a podcast and then spend the rest of the year having to explain he thought the pod was for ‘groypers’ not ‘gropers.’
The Giller Prize will find a new brand partner in Lockheed Martin. The Griffin Prize, not to be outdone, will posthumously give an award to Julius Evola.
Someone will accidentally invite Jeffrey Goldberg into one of Pete Hegseth’s Feeld chats.
Margaret Atwood will die. OD on oxys and lean like Juice WRLD. Her inevitable posthumous novel will be fucking dreadful.
We will dislike something and post about it.
Eds.: Technically a bunch of the Fellow Travellers posts are shorter, but it doesn’t seem in the spirit of the question to say our shortest post is a song.
Sire: Or maybe Joe Biden?
dude the Daniel Solow thing is wild lmaoooo
Do I get money for this award or what?