2025/2026 Xness News
Tough call, but we have decided not to run our planned Second Chanceness tourney in 2025. But also 2026 news. And a find from the archives of 2011 torrents.
Friends, there’s no easy way to deliver this news, so we’ll just get to it: The Selection Committee has decided to skip this year’s planned tournament, 2025’s March Second Chanceness.
You may have guessed this already given our recent lack of communication/hype about it. It’s a tough decision but we think it’s the right one.
We made this call for one big reason and two small ones:
The more we thought about it the less we liked the idea of running a tournament that put the essays into a straight-up essay competition, which March Second Chanceness would have inevitably been. There’s always a balance—an essential mystery even—between our readers voting for the best or most powerful essay vs the song they liked the best re the tournament theme, and that tension/mystery seems to us essential to the pleasure of this project. Initially we were hype on the idea of doing a tournament focused on essay vs essay, but we the more we thought about it the less we liked that dynamic. It might just feel bad. March Xness has always been a lovers tournament, not a haters’ tournament, and the whole project is beautiful and dumb in equal measure in part because it’s not just a competition of essays. I mean, it is a competition of essays, but the real ones know that many (most?) vote for the song. So when an essay loses or wins, it’s not necessarily about the essay; it could be and probably is about the song (at least to some degree). That tension and mystery dulls, we hope, the sting of losing in the tournament, as 63 of 64 writers do each year. March Second Chanceness might give more harm than fun is what we realized. And this year already is going to be a rough ride for many of us. So with too little time left to switch the theme and raise an army of willing writers, we decided to skip this year and focus on the next tournament, 2026’s March Sadness (Second Edition) [lottery link], where we will, for the 10 year anniversary, return to our original theme: the saddest freaking songs. This time we’ll range beyond the 64 sad-as-hell songs we initially selected, back in the early days of the tourney when The Selection Committee wrote all 64 essays for the first round and then 32 new essays for the second round, before we decided this would be a lot more fun if we pulled in other writers to write. The fact that we didn’t get a lot of nominations or self-nominations for Second Chanceness reinforced our sense that it would be better to skip this year. Sorry to be delivering this news to those of you who come along with our weird ride every year. It sucks for us too, but we think this is the right call.
Social media at the moment sucks. So does Substack, even, though we’re sticking with this, warts and all, for the moment. We’re mostly focused on Bluesky (come hang out with us there), and have completely abandoned the increasingly dire shell of Twitter. Instagram we have a presence but it doesn’t allow for the kind of chatter and friendly shit talk we like. But Bluesky doesn’t yet allow for polls, and so many of us aren’t yet there. And we are not going back on Twitter/X. We’re hoping that Bluesky matures into the place where more of our fans, participants, and friends go. If not, we’ll substack it only next year, or maybe do whatever is cool and new.
We’ve also been working on a SECRET PROJECT, and a lot of our effort has been directed there. We can’t tell you about it yet (ugh, what a tease) but we will on March 1st if not before. You’ll like it. We promise.
So here’s our plan:
In May we will run the lottery for 2026’s March Sadness tournament, which we’ll tell you more about this March. The 2026 March Sadness lottery form is now open since why not. We also welcome sad song recommendations. We haven’t yet decided on the other details (eligible dates/decades) yet, but we’ll let you know soon.
Instead of publishing a tournament this year we’re going to reprint an essay each day in March that previously lost in the first round, without the competition aspect. So watch the site and the Substack for these. So many great essays lost in the first round of our previous tournaments.
We’ll tell you our SECRET NEWS on March 1. We hope you’ll be excited as we are.
(Whoomp) There it is. Sending out light and good jams to you. In that spirit, Ander posted a copy (the only one online anywhere) of this weird troll album the indie rock band Deer Tick made to mess with people downloading torrents of their 2011 album Divine Providence. They recorded A WHOLE FAKE ALBUM and leaked it masquerading as Divine Providence. Ander downloaded it and it kind of blew his mind at the time. It’s not good. It’s pretty offensive really, a sort of send-up of bad rap, but it’s also extremely funny, and the shenanigans of recording a whole fake album to mess with the pirate kids is one for the ages. It’s too bad it doesn’t live anywhere else, but Ander has it, and he put it up on Youtube, because you probably need to know about this. Maybe you need to listen to it too?
Here it is (the Selection Committee is most partial to track 2, “Tornado of Hate,” which we’re pretty sure is the title of the album also, though no one really knows).
Ander & Megan