2024 In Review: The Good Stuff

Here are some of my favorite things from 2024 and a few of my least favorites.

The year is coming to a close and most of us are happy to watch it go. But some good things happened too! Here's a quick roundup of some stuff I really enjoyed this year and a handful of things I didn’t.

Books:

Finally, a year where I read as much as I wanted to! Turns out that a really rough freelance market leaves you with a lot of time on your hands. Bad for my wallet but my mind grows stronger every day. I read a handful of great books not released in 2024 this year including the bizarre and beautiful Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolf and last year's darling that I'd missed, Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow. But you're here to hear about this year!

Of the new releases I enjoyed, I tore through Sy Montgomery's Of Time And Turtles because I'm a turtle freak and love anything that yanks at the imaginary barrier between humanity and nature. Tana French's sequel to The Searcher, The Hunter was another great entry into the Irish Western genre (one that French practically owns). My favorite story of the year was Ahegao from Tony Tulathimutte's Rejection, it was maybe the hardest I've ever laughed reading a book and I love how Tulathimutte writes about the internet without it ever feeling heavy handed or trite. His characters live online but it's not their sole focus, the text is never saying "look! it's the internet!" like it does when some other authors try to tackle it.

My last book of the year was a long but really enjoyable one, Paul Cooper's Fall of Civilizations. It's the rare history book that is simultaneously readable, well-researched, and not secretly right leaning. Cooper presents the facts and lets them speak for themselves, never lionizing conquerors of dancing around atrocities. Outside of the comprehensive research and retelling of historical empires, some of my favorite moments were when Cooper, clearly fascinated by his subject matter, takes a moment to imagine what life in these faraway civilizations might have been like.

Movies:

This felt like the year where movies had to contend with a WGA/SAG-strike-sized void in their calendar but a year that looked bleak at first managed to come through for us. To me, the undisputed king of da movies this year was Challengers. Both a phenomenal watch and a cultural juggernaut, it feels tough to deny that this was the year of horny tennis. A few other big box office hits like Dune II, Furiosa, and The Substance nipped at its heels, both were a great time at the movies, but I think the movie that stuck with me the most this year was I Saw The TV Glow. Jane Schoenbrun's beautiful, experimental statement on gender, nostalgia, and identity felt like nothing else I'd seen this year (or any year.)

TV:

Unlike the film landscape, the TV landscape felt like it finally recovered from the post-strike malaise. The industry itself is in chaos but Industry the show put out its first truly great season. Only Murders In The Building continued quietly putting in the work in a way that will only be recognized ten years from now and both Arcane and Somebody Somewhere came to beautiful and obviously very different conclusions. The Franchise was a surprise newcomer for me, a show I wanted to hate because of its meta premise (a bunch of surly crew members on a massive superhero movie) but Iannucci was able to channel that classic Veep energy more successfully than he did in Avenue 5.

Songs:

I remain a pretty lax music fan these days, mostly listening to instrumental stuff while I work. Below are a handful of songs that I heard that stuck with me.

Fight - Public Works
28 - Zach Bryan
Lord Have Mercy - Ka
Screamland - Father John Misty
Non Metaphorical Decolonization - Mount Eerie

Stuff I Did:

I was very down on my work this year! I had a lot of pitches and interviews for cool jobs that got as close as they possibly could to success before breaking my lil heart so I went into this summary a little surly but I‘m actually pretty proud of what I managed to pull off while my industries were on fire.

I opened the year with a lot of my Magic: The Gathering work from the last few years finally going from top secret to fully released. You can see my writing throughout Outlaws of Thunder Junction and the upcoming Aetherdrift! Then I also did art briefs and creative text for the NOT A WOLF/Secret Lair collaboration in June. That sold out very quickly but you can still find it online!

In this very newsletter, I started doing some anti-car coverage, driven by my own slow simmering hatred for LA’s driving culture. These pieces current live behind the subscription paywall, but for $5 you can read what I wrote about the spiritual bankruptcy of the Ford F-150. I also did a (if I do say so myself) well researched long read about the history of pedestrian/car relations in America. It’s almost like someone is working on a voicey, humorous, book about car culture as a reflection of American decline. Who could it be?

I closed out the year with a piece in Rolling Stone about my accidentally prescient trip down Route 66, in which I encountered a lot of pro-Trump sentiment that clashed with the then-dominant assumption that the democrats had the election in the bag. Would’ve been nice to be wrong on that one!

Trends That Can Stay in 2024:

Vibes Only Horror - Between Cuckoo and Longlegs, it feels like horror is finally hitting its false-prestige era. Good premises and performances are being wasted on lackluster scripts and I suspect that the rise of multi-hyphenate horror auteurs is to blame. Ari Aster has a good thing going but we can’t all do that! It’s okay to just direct!!

Casual AI Use - This was definitely an ascendant year for AI. Despite overwhelming evidence that it’s an ethically reprehensible climate nightmare, it’s never been wedged into our daily lives more than it was this year. Obviously I hope that my favorite apps and services take the financial L in 2025 and recognize that I’m never going to use their “AI assistant” that they broke the bank on, but if there’s one AI related trend I could have stay in 2024 it would be the blasé use of AI by people that should know better.

So many times this year, I raised my eyebrow at friends and fellow culturally literate folks who had made some boutique excuse for themselves to use these things.

I was just goofing around when I used midjourney to make a pic of yoda ripping a bong, it was ironic

I just use ChatGPT for work emails.

I’m just being pragmatic! Even if it’s bad, this technology is going to change the world!

To quote an old friend, nobody cares and nobody believes you! I can stomach corporate entities using it, tech and entertainment companies have never cared much about ethics or the environment but my peers, especially those in creative fields that stand to be gutted by this stuff, absolutely should. If you’re touching this stuff in 2025, leave the excuses at the door and just tell me you don’t care.

Fear Of The Unseen Audience - We’ve all been online long enough to be familiar with the overly critical and willfully obtuse tendency of internet commenters but that doesn’t mean we need to cater to them! I’ve found myself shocked this year by the amount of media, everything from books to films to regular-ass posts, that attempts to preempt the criticism of the unseen audience. Let’s recognize that no amount of hedging language can prevent criticism and let the functionally illiterate reply guys do their thing in a vacuum next year.

The Rising Tide Of Fascism - fingers crossed!