Emerald City Video

It’s been a hell of a year and, as I alluded to earlier, things aren’t great. But in looking back at the year that was, I can get a sense for what’s connecting with the readers here, and what kind of nonsensical ramblings you all value.

While doing so, it seemed like a good time to look back on my highest-performing stories across various platforms, since the current iteration of Emerald City Video here on WordPress is fairly new and the traffic stats here don’t tell the whole story.

One thing I will say is that, for reasons both practical and moral, I largely left Substack behind last year. The platform still hosts the Emerald City Video Podcast, mostly for practical reasons that we are working on, but my subscriber base here (and at places like Ghost and Medium) is a fraction of what it was there, and I would really appreciate anybody who could subscribe, share my links, buy a book, or whatever. Walking away from money on the table at a place like Substack sucks.

So, without further ado, here’s a quick blurb (and a link) to my most-read stories of 2025:

5: “I’m Goddamn Santa Claus”

This one stings a bit. For years, I have talked about turning this old family story into an illustrated picture book, and with the loss of my grandmother last year, I really wanted to make it happen in 2025. The story which I would have been adapting was my #5 story of last year, and I think the story with the most native/organic traffic, rather than getting linked to from outside sources.

In the post, I shared a true-but-embellished story about the time my grandfather, Jim Lowe, hired a Santa Claus impersonator — and that guy’s whole day was ruined by pranksters who thought he was Jim.

You can see it here.

I’m still hoping to adapt this story in 2026. I actually talked to some really promising illustrators toward the start of last year, but by early March it became clear that without a new day job, I wouldn’t be able to raise the money to pay for illustrations.

4: Is Superman an Illegal Alien?

Wading into the deeply stupid discourse around James Gunn’s Superman, I did my best to both answer the question in the headline, and provide some context from comics, film, and beyond.

I think this one was popular, mostly, because it was written in response to a viral meme and I dunked on some pretty stupid takes. It generated a bit of buzz on Bluesky in the days after it was published and, of course, this summer people were very fixated on Superman and how it would perform.

You can see the piece here, but I would recommend dropping just a few bucks on the ECV zine Everyone You Ever Met is Beautiful: Essays on James Gunn’s Superman, which includes that piece and several others, including some exclusive to the zine. I’m especially proud to have given Tilly Bridges a chance to write about the allegories a lot of transgender people see in the film’s relationship between Clark and Jonathan Kent.

3: Okay, But…Why Zack Snyder?

I was actually very proud of this piece, which dug into why Zack Snyder’s films have developed such a fierce cult following, and whether his fandom is truly “toxic” or just a byproduct of the deeply divisive fan culture on the internet.

In a future ECV Zine, I plan to touch on Snyder in more depth, revisiting my reviews of his various director’s cuts as well as talking about the impact the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement has had on popular culture.

You can see the piece here.

2: Stop Accepting the Premise of Assholes

I think this one is the piece that is a true outlier on the list, with a lot of the traffic having come from offsite. That’s also true of the Zack Snyder pieces, and of the #1 story of the year, but those pieces are more in keeping with my “normal” posting style and are theoretically instructive as to what my audience is responding to.

In this piece, I talked about YouTuber and activist Louis Rossmann, a passionate and sometimes abrasive figure who fights for consumer rights (and sometimes just fights). I talked about how people tend to “tone police” Rossmann, ignoring the importance of what he’s saying because he isn’t saying it the “right way,” and exploring Rossmann’s thesis: “Stop accepting the premise of assholes.” You do yourself, and the discourse, more harm than good by accepting as reasonable the premise of bad-faith actors who wish you harm.

You can read it here.

1: Phil Ochs Was A Complete Uknown

This one totally shocked me. I had noticed that it was getting consistent “likes” and comments over on Substack, and I knew that one of Ochs’s cousins had posted it to Facebook, but when I looked at the traffic report, this piece generated more than three times as much as the next-highest story for the year.

Phil Ochs is my favorite folk musician of all time, which by necessity puts him in constant dialogue with the legends of the form like Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan. Those three all appeared in the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown and, in what is arguably a pretty unpopular opinion in the folkie scene, I wrote that I was glad Ochs hadn’t been written into the film.

“There were quite a few fans who were upset to hear that Phil wouldn’t make an appearance in the film, which is set in and around the Greenwich Village folk scene at the same time as Ochs and Dylan were friends,” I wrote in part. “I wasn’t one of those people, for a simple reason: Ochs deserves better than to be treated like some angry weirdo on the fringes of Dylan’s orbit…especially since, the long run, Phil held onto his principles and was defined by them, while Dylan largely gave up on politics to focus on getting high and making cool, weird art.”

You can read that story here.

What do I take away from the fact that my top story of the year was a lengthy rant about Phil Ochs? I’m not totally sure, other than the fact that Phil’s work is extremely consistent with what I promise on the site: extremely niche pop culture nonfiction.

Maybe I’ll have to double down on “niche” in 2026.