Best of the Rest

Last updated: Wed Jan 01 2025

After my list of best films of 2024, here’s the best of the rest of media in 2024.

Books

My reading this year tended more towards non-fiction than previous years, so it was an okay year for non-fiction but pretty abysmal for fiction. Thus, I’m not even going to bother with a top 5 countdown like I did for movies.

For non-fiction, some of the standouts were:

• War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat: One of the chief influences on Bret Devereaux’s A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog, which I often cite here. It’s a bit hefty and some of his conclusions feel loosely argued — for instance, Gat argues that feudalism was due to the horse, without even acknowledging that medievalists are wary of the very idea of feudalism — but overall it’s a fascinating look at the history of warfare in human civilization.
• The Weirdness of the World by Eric Schwitzgebel: A loosely-organized collection of essays about “weird” ideas from philosophy, including my all-time-favorite philosophical essay, “If Materialism Is True, The United States Is Probably Conscious”. It’s meaty enough for academic philosophers — Schwitzgebel is one himself — but still a breezy read for non-specialists.
• So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance by Gabriel Zaid: A tiny book (less than 100 pages) about what we should do with all these books that keep getting published, including an interesting take on canon formation and how some books become “important” and others don’t.
• Crafting Interpreters by Bob Nystrom: One of the all-time great technical books, in which Nystrom explains how to build a very performant interpreter for a reasonably complete programming language. I particularly like that he includes every single line of code and that he includes features that are often skipped like closures, and I particularly like the readable tone and cute illustrations. Recommended for all programmers, even if you’re not particularly interested in programming languages.
• The Theoretical Minimum series by Leonard Susskind et. al.: These not-quite-textbooks, adapted from a continuing education course Susskind taught at Stanford, are a perfect introduction to modern physics. They assume, though don’t strictly require, a familiarity with undergraduate-level mathematics — the quantum mechanics volume is much easier to get through if you already know what a sentence like “project onto the orthonormal basis formed from the eigenvectors of the operator” means — but otherwise they’re perfect for getting “just enough” background to understand what quantum mechanics means.
• Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences by Alex Mesoudi: A perfect taster of the wider world of cultural evolution, which goes into more detail about the actual mathematical models than The Secret of Our Success does.
• The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker: At times a little too name-droppy and at other times a little repetitive, but some of the tips for hosting (e.g. “always announce logistics before the end of the funeral”) will stick with me.
• ‌Tea: A User’s Guide by Tony Gebely: This should be the de facto intro to tea for new drinkers. It gives just the facts with a minimum of snobbery. My only complaint is that it spends a little too much time walking through every cultivar in existence.

And for fiction, some of the standouts were:

• Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka: Soyinka well-deserved his Nobel Prize if only for this short play, about a conflict between a Yoruba oba’s chief horseman, his western-educated son, and the British colonial administration. But, as Soyinka puts it in the intro, this isn’t merely a story of the “clash of cultures”, and the plot doesn’t go quite the way one might expect, despite making perfect sense in context.
• The Hour of the Star and “Imitation of a Rose” by Clarice Lispector: Apparently Lispector is well-known in Brazil but was largely unknown in the English-language world until Benjamin Moser’s translations 15ish years ago. As pointed out in the introduction to her Complete Stories, her prose is capital-W Weird, even in its original Portuguese. Sometimes she does feel a little too clever for her own good — I tried to read her other novel The Passion According to G.H. and couldn’t even make it through the first ten pages — but when she’s transcendent, she’s transcendent, as she is in The Hour of the Star, a short novella about a poor young woman in Rio de Janeiro who doesn’t even realize how little she has to live for, and “Imitation of a Rose”, in which a woman meditates so deeply on a beautiful rose that she goes mad.
• Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez: A hefty 588-page novel about an Argentinian cult at the height of the Dirty War summoning… something… from beyond and the multigenerational impacts on the families involved. Although a little too long for my tastes, it’s basically unique in its blend of Argentinian history, slice-of-life domestic drama, and occult horror.
• A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay: A great little horror novel in which the narrator’s older sister is possessed by a demon… or maybe just schizophrenic. The ambiguity here is key, with the sometimes-demonic sister seeming more and more like a victim as the story goes on. It may not be the most impactful horror novel I’ve ever read, but a few of its scenes did get under my skin.
• The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag: Stålenhag is known for his picture books like Tales from the Loop, which pair his dark, surreal art with short stories. The Electric State is easily the best, telling the story of a woman traveling across the post-apocalyptic United States in the company of a wordless robot, in which society has collapsed because everyone spends all day in VR. Like the best dystopian fiction, it manages the trick of feeling completely plausible despite the somewhat silly premise, and it manages to creeping, uncanny horror that lingers, often based on no more than suggestion. Unfortunately, trailers for the film suggest that the directors didn’t realize it was a, uh, horror story.
• Moonbound by Robin Sloan: I’ve always been a fan of Robin Sloan’s newsletters, but I wasn’t a huge fan of his first two novels, Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough. Luckily, there’s finally a Sloan novel I can recommend without hesitation: Moonbound. It’s a bonkers-in-the-best-way mashup of science fiction and fantasy, bristling with every wild idea Sloan could toss in. Talking beavers whose legal system is based on competitive architecture? A robot who’s simultaneously inhabiting hundreds of bodies across the world? A pool that lets you swim in a million different dimensions? Even if it doesn’t all hang together (though it does… mostly), it’s so bursting full of life and ideas and vitality that pretty much anyone could enjoy it.
• The Many Deaths of Laila Starr and Rare Flavours by Ram V and Filipe Andrade: A pair of comics from the same writer/artist pair, based on the culture of modern India. In the former, the goddess of Death is sent down to Earth to live as a human — immortality is about to be invented, so why would you need a god of Death? In the latter, a rakshasa gives up his career of man-eating to pursue his true passion: becoming an Anthony Bourdain-inspired food documentarian. Both are charming, poignant, and beautifully drawn, and they’re short enough that you can read them together in an afternoon.

Video Games

In 2024 I played (a significant portion of) 12 video games, as well as trying 8 new board games.

The game of the year, as pretty much everybody agrees, is Balatro. It takes a simple-but-inspired concept — what if Big 2 was a deckbuilding roguelike a la Slay the Spire? — and runs away with it. If I ever need to describe “juice”, I’ll just point to Balatro — the music, the art, the little touches like how the score counter is set on fire when you’re about to when. Also, the developer hates gambling so much he wrote it into his will.

That said, the most meaningful experiences were with two older games, both literary masterpieces — Kentucky Route Zero and Disco Elysium. Even if you are “not a gamer”, if you care about literature you should seek out both.

Kentucky Route Zero is difficult to even describe — to paraphrase one review, it’s a post-industrial, hyperreal Rust Belt Southern Gothic ghost story where the ghost is the American Dream. It’s just as interested in citing the works of Tennessee Williams as it is Colossal Cave Adventure, the first work of interactive fiction. It’s an experience that’s so polyvocal and cycles through so many points-of-view that it could only really work in an interactive context — not to mention the inspired choice that you’re constantly making dialogue choices that change the tone of conversations, but don’t change the plot. After all, as one character says about a game-with-the-game early on, “I don’t think you can win. It says on the box it’s a tragedy.”

Disco Elysium, meanwhile, is one of the great works of post-Soviet fiction — it has a very specific somber-but-blackly-comic tone that could only really come out of the small post-Soviet republics of the Baltic (specifically Estonia, in this case). Set in a world not entirely different from our own — it has unions and communists and fascists — it starts and ends as a murder mystery, albeit with hints of a much larger untold story, as the amnesiac hero slowly pieces together a minor conspiracy by, basically, asking unhinged questions. But that’s not why this game is iconic. It’s iconic because of the dialogue — the mountains and mountains of dialogue, which makes The Brothers Karamazov look like a minor one-act off-Broadway play in comparison. There’s so many well-drawn characters saying so many things about the world. It has perhaps one of my all-time favorite exchanges, which is casually uttered in a very poignant side story that many players might just skip entirely. If you were thinking of making this the year you finally read Dostoevsky or Infinite Jest, consider Disco Elysium instead.

Articles

Here’s a few of my favorite blog posts from the year. I read a lot of blogs — I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds via NetNewsWire and quite a few email newsletters, too — which all eventually get read through GoodLinks (the closest app I’ve found to old-school Instapaper). This is basically the process I’ve followed for reading blogs since I was, like, 13. Every year I think, maybe this year I won’t waste so much time reading blogs. But, honestly, I get a lot of value out of some of them, like these:

• “1933 and the Definition of Fascism” by Bret Devereaux: In which my favorite public-facing historian discusses multiple definitions of fascism and whether Donald Trump meets any of them. Don’t let the current-events frame ward you off, though — what really makes this article sing is the clear-eyed explanation of how the National Socialists and the Italian Fascists overturned their respective liberal democracies and what traits both movements shared. This was also the direct inspiration for my own essay, “A Cancer on Liberalism”.
• “Investigation: Who’s Telling the Truth about Disco Elysium?” from People Make Games: Disco Elysium is a masterpiece (see above), but the tangled story of its creation — featuring the most infamous novelist in Estonian history, secretive multimillionaires / convicted fraudsters, accusations and counter-accusations, and half a dozen splinter studios — is almost as interesting. It’s truly impressive that the small team behind People Make Games was able to piece the whole story together.
• “good artists copy, ai artists ____” by Celine Nguyen: Celine operates in exactly the intersection of programming and literature that I, too, want to live in. This essay on the definition of art, the possibilities of aleatory art, and how LLMs might fit into genuine artistic practice is the best starting point for thinking about AI and art that I know of.
• “Dunbar’s Number is Quadratic” by John Bjorn Nelson: Frankly, this essay is a little difficult to understand — it uses a lot of jargon without definitions and seems to presuppose a familiarity with the discipline of computational social science that I lack. That said, if I can summarize what I personally got out of the essay: Dunbar’s Number says we can’t understand a social network with more than 150 people, but the author argues that’s not a cognitive constraint so much as a time constraint. With more than 150 people, we can’t sample enough behavior from other people to understand how they would interact with everyone else in the network, because the number of connections in the social network grows quadratically. So we have a number of more-efficient sampling algorithms to draw on, like gossip or cliques, that enable us to reason over much larger social networks, but at the cost of relying on social signals rather than direct experience. In the most degenerate case (that is, Twitter), we have a massive social network, but basically all interactions are dominated by not-necessarily-informative signaling. Or, as the author puts it, “I think I like this post but let me first check the profile description and a few other tweets to make sure.”
• “Seeing Like a Programmer” by Chris Krycho: In this LambdaConf 2024 talk, Chris Krycho combines James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State and Peter Naur’s “Programming as Theory-Building” (two of my favorites, often cited here!) to discuss what and how software engineers should be building, but most importantly, why.
• “What Liberal Arts Education Is For: A Manifesto” by Paul Cantrell: Despite my decidedly STEM degree, I am still a liberal arts kid at heart. This manifesto, from a programmer and composer, explains how he has continued to find value from a religious studies degree (!) and moves from there to a beautiful, lyrical analysis of what the liberal arts are even for.
• “Augmenting Long-term Memory” by Michael Nielsen: Despite being a proponent of spaced repetition memory systems — I’m writing a novel about them, even! — I never actually read this essay, which, alongside Andy Matuschak’s work, kicked off the most recent memory systems renaissance. Despite its length, it’s well worth reading for anyone interested in memory.
• “Notes on El Salvador” by Matt Lakeman: I, for one, knew almost nothing about El Salvador other than “pupusas are great” before reading this almost-book-length travel report. Here Lakeman discusses how MS13, an organization with a total revenue an order of magnitude lower than the average Fortune 500, took over the country, and how the crackdown led by controversial President Bukele is going. Then he talks about his travels around the country and all the weird little things he noticed.
• “Culture at Google: Part One, the Movies” by Albert Cory: An early engineer at Google describes how he set up a long-running movie night series. Of particular interest is the logistics of how it ran — how they booked rooms, how they got funding from managers, how they cleared permissions with copyright holders (!). Recommended for anybody with an interest in event hosting, even if you’re not interested in Google or film.
• “You could extinguish a star” by Robin Sloan: As mentioned above, I like Robin Sloan’s newsletters :3 As a sampler, come hear him wax lyrical about Cable from the X-Men.

Music

Apparently I listened to 217 new albums this year, half of which I don’t even remember 😅 That said, there were plenty of standouts:

• Obviously this was the year of pop girlie summer, with Charli xcx’s brat, Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, and Sabrina Carpenter’s Short ’n’ Sweet. They’re all great, although I still think brat is the greatest 😉
• At the start of the year, I was still catching up on Juana Molina, the Argentine queen of weird pop. Highly recommended if you like old-school St Vincent or Chairlift.
• I finally gave Fred again.. a real chance, and turns out that in addition to his EDM, he’s a fantastic ambient producer. More importantly, I learned he got his start in an acapella group at Brian Eno’s studio because he happened to grow up near Eno, which explains a lot.
• Somehow I, Radiohead fan that I am, never listened to Hail to the Thief. I guess I thought it was their bad album for some reason? But it’s absolutely fantastic from beginning to end and honestly might be what I recommend to people getting into Radiohead for the first time — it’s kind of the average of all their other albums in a way.
• Jlin is described on her Bandcamp as “a math lover, a former steel factory worker and a proud resident of Gary Indiana”. She makes some of the wildest electronic music I’ve ever heard, like an IDM take on Chicago footwork. She also has a song featuring Philip Glass! Definitely not for everyone but easily my artist of the year.
• I completely forgot Justice’s Hyperdrama came out this year. It’s good! It’s a Justice album! But mainly I’m including it here because their performance at Portola is perhaps the greatest musical performance I’ve been to in my life. I also really enjoyed Disclosure’s Alchemy, even though I was less impressed with their live performance at Portola.
• Many publications named Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee (initially released as a fake Geocities page!) as the album of the year, or close to it, and… yeah, it’s pretty darn good. But reviewing my year in albums, I completely forgot I actually listened to their earlier LP What’s Tonight To Eternity halfway through the year and loved it.
• Nicholas Britell, the composer behind Succession’s soundtrack, is perhaps my favorite working composer today. And wouldn’t you know it, he also composed the soundtrack for my favorite TV show this year, Andor!
• I have a friend who’s pretty much the world’s biggest Porter Robinson fan. His new release SMILE! :D mostly didn’t stick with me — but I did love the single “Russian Roulette”, which also has one of the most unique lyric videos I’ve seen.
• I really enjoyed JPEGMafia’s I Lay Down My Life for You (“if I were an NBA player, I’d be Dillon Brooks… but worse”) and Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition. Definitely (definitely) not for everybody — they both seem almost intentionally abrasive — but enjoyable if you’re on their wavelength.
• Nala Sinephro’s Endlessness is just a really nice ambient jazz album — perfect for working.
• I’m still a little bitter that the xx more-or-less broke up — but Jamie xx’s In Waves pretty much makes up for it.
• I love Mong Tong, a Taiwanese psychedelic rock band that made a collaborative album with Gong Gong Gong that’s an imagined soundtrack for a lost kung-fu film.
• I’ve repeatedly recommended Glass Beams’ “One Raga to a Disco Beat” cover and you still haven’t listened?? Luckily, I’m probably going to get a chance to see them next year 👀
• I follow the Flow State newsletter for daily ambient album recommendations. Honestly, a lot of them sound very similar. But Seconds’ Fascinating Stuff is just as fascinating as the title implies.
• Coming in right before the end of the year for me, Mk.gee’s Two Star & the Dream Police is a great shoegaze-y, production-forward album. I’m surprised I missed it at the start of the year!
• MUSTAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRDDDDDDDDDD

Goals

Now, one final aside. As you may know, I set yearly goals to encourage behaviors I want more of. In the spirit of New Years, and in case it’s of interest (and if it’s not, feel free to skip), here are how my goals from last year went:

• ✅ Play 12 video games: see above!
• ✅ Work through 3 textbooks: see above!
• ✅ Write 12 essays and 24 newsletters: see the last newsletter!
• ✅ Learn mixology: I learned half a dozen cocktails
• 💛 Finish a draft of REDACTED: instead of one full draft, I wrote two drafts of the first 3/4 of this novel
• 💛 Learn a language: I did my Mochi flashcards every day — but I don’t think I learned that much
• 💛 Learn to illustrate: I did all 30 days of Inktober, but otherwise I didn’t do much illustration
• 💛 Run a marathon: I ran two half-marathons instead due to an injury
• ❌ Send 5 query letters for REDACTED: I gave up on this novel, so this didn’t happen
• ❌ Design a game: this didn’t happen
• ❌ Make videos or podcasts: this didn’t happen
• ❌ REDACTED: this didn’t happen

And here are my goals for next year:

• Send 5 query letters for REDACTED
• Write 12 essays and 24 newsletters
• Cook 52 new recipes
• Play 12 video games
• Work through 3 textbooks
• Play music every day
• Run a marathon
• Do strength training
• Learn a language
• Learn a new technical skill (programming language, etc)
• Host 12 events
• Design a game

To 2025

That’s a wrap on 2024. Every year around this time, I work through the “40 questions to ask yourself every year” (from Steph Ango, who ironically is now CEO of Obsidian), and I realized this was a pretty good year overall. I hope you also had a good year, and I hope that, no matter what comes, we all have a good year next year.