juushika

Books

Again, I did not track my reading stats in detail in 2024. According to my Goodreads Year in Books, I read 165 books totaling 31,186 pages, but this excludes a number of texts. ( Read more. )

My Dark Vanessa, Kate Elizabeth Russell
I started 2024 off strong. This is a nuanced, incredibly immersive depiction of a student/teacher relationship, deeply embedded in the protagonist's changing view of that relationship, and that's what has stuck with me: its particular, remarkable moments, often recontextualized, even as they occur.

Our Share of the Night, Mariana Enriquez
A tour de force, split between family saga, the politics of power, and a robust speculative element. Without the balance between these parts, it would be a miserable drag; instead it's compelling and ruthless.

The World Cannot Give, Tara Isabella Burton
Toxic queer female friendships at boarding school, and the search for meaning: trashy, stylized, deeply my jam. Two five-stars from the same author is remarkable; when Burton is speaking my language, I'm listening hard.

Zetsuai 1989 and Bronze - Zetsuai since 1989, Minami Ozaki
This is an unusual favorite, because is objectively often total trash, a product of its time and of problems with the genre; there's a lot to laugh at, here. But it is also one of those foundational works which is indicative of why the genre keeps me coming back. A chaotic masterwork of obsessive, toxic love that does some things that still feel like unusual executions of its tropes.

Margaret Wise Brown
A deep dive into a picture book author already gives away that their work is remarkable; and Brown's is. She has a penchant for lists, think Goodnight Moon, for particular details in thoughtful arrangement; a quiet mundanity with emotional weight. Atop that, many of her books have been re-illustrated or were edited posthumously, providing fascinating insight into the relationship between text and art in picture books. My favorites, excluding the obvious: The Dead Bird, Two Little Trains, When The Wind Blew, and Night and Day.

Freeze Tag, Caroline B. Cooney
A most remarkable YA thriller, based on a fairy tale and carrying that ethos forward even when setting it against the social dramas of its genre; it creates a surprising sense of weirdness and horror. And Cooney's voice is remarkable, evocative and abrupt.

Leech, Hiron Ennes
I love a book that's willing to get weird, and this does it in its worldbuilding, which is cogent, complete, and still deeply, ingeniously bonkers: body horror, parasites, post-apocalyptic far future societies, and an identity that moves chaotically from federated to singular—everything but a kitchen sink. As a bonus, the audiobook is a phenomenal performance, dynamic and adjusting to suit accents and the changing protagonist, all without dipping into caricature.

Honorable Mentions in Books

The King of Elfland's Daughter, Lord Dunsany
A book about fairyland which feels truly magical, magical in atmosphere and structure and world, is a rare gift.

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, Danielle L. McGuire
A punishing and necessary reframing of the role that women played in the civil rights movement; the best nonfiction I read all year.

The Shiny Narrow Grin, Jane Gaskell
I'm a sucker for early examples of a trope and how they inform the development of the genre, so the relationship between this and Klause's The Silver Kiss and the growth of the sympathetic vampire and YA paranormal romance is fascinating—and Gaskell's voice is uniquely strange.

The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohammed
This may as well have been written just for me: creepy forest, in autumn, with folklore and fairies and a deep pall of horror. I look forward to rereading it in autumns to come.

The Haunted Dollhouse, Terry Berger, David Berger, Karen Coshof
I read a fair number of picture books, particularly seeking weird and scary picture books, and it doesn't get weirder than this. Unique, inexplicable, utterly delightful; a forgotten gem.

The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
Luxuriously, infuriatingly slow and person-focused within a delightfully ridiculous thriller plot, this has some of the best characters I've encountered in recent memory.

A Guest in the House, Emily Carroll
There's unlikely to be a Carroll I don't like, but I read a bumper crop of graphic novels this year and this was easily the best—because of Carroll's touch, because it was willing to be gestural and borderline unexplained, set effectively against a surprising-for-Carroll mundane setting.

Last to Leave the Room, Caitlin Starling
I quibbled with this, and yet what it does well is explicitly to my taste: identity and interpersonal relationships as defined by care, harm, and social power, with a weird speculative concept and some truly creepy moments.

"Spar," Kij Johnson
Slipping in under the wire, a short story about the permeability of human/alien sexual (non-)relationships, invasive and discomforting and surprisingly convincing.

Games

The vast majority of the games on this list were ones I watched, not played. My partner played a lot of games this year, and I spent my solo gaming time writing, instead.

Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver remaster, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2 remaster
It was great to go into the remasters having finally watched Blood Omen; the "lesser" games in this series are less successful, and Blood Omen is very retro, but it retains the hallmarks of plot, setting, atmosphere, and voice acting, and so enriches the series overall. And the remasters are, effectively, perfect: one good and one great game, upscaled while preserving their character, enriched by the gift of an archive of everything from unfinished levels to, my favorite, original studio recordings of the voice actors, which are a privilege to watch.

The Last of Us remake
Allow me to come in almost as late as possible to say this universally acclaimed game is really good. Not all of its dramatic beats work for me, but it leads with and commits wholly to its narrative, to its central relationship. I'm grateful that some Sony exclusives are making their way to PC, and the remake is stupid beautiful, and I can't wait to see the second game in 2025.

Silent Hill 2 Remake
My cozy game of the year: I would watch high resolution journeys through the fog and into the nightmare dimension with a flawless horror soundtrack forever; these were the best naps I had all year. This feels more than is faithful, which I like in a remake, preserving tone and atmosphere above all.

Days Gone
Defying all expectations (mixed reviews, zombies), this is the best open world title I've seen in some time. It avoids many of the pitfalls of the Ubisoft open world framework by making its storylines closely bound, has a clever AI gimmick in the hordes, sidesteps many boring zombie tropes, and has the most naturalistic dialog I've ever seen in game, a bold and endearing stylistic choice that really sells already strong characters. I kept waiting for this to fuck up, and it's not perfect, but it handles society rebuilding and disability with surprising care. And it's set in the PNW!

Pacific Drive
S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Pacific Northwest car version, quirky and tender and creepy, with a stellar retro aesthetic, solid game loop, and true bond player/car bond. What a great year for games set where I live! They make me feel a certain way.

Alan Wake II
I couldn't stand the first Wake game, but love Control; this is exactly where I wanted Wake to go, how I wanted to see the franchises unite. It maintains some imperfect, often forgettable mechanics, but an AWE as a lived experience is all I could have hoped: trippy, self-swallowing, evocative in aesthetic. And! More PNW!

Honorable Mentions in Games

Crow Country
Unique among many retro games for its unique camera mechanic, which, in a puzzle/exploration game, gives navigation an ongoing sense of discovery. The speculative/mystery plot is cooky but committed, which means it's actually solvable by its own internal logics.

Tormented Souls
Of the retro-style horror games of the year, this is the silliest and, so help me, the best. It grows on you: ridiculously excessive on every possible vector, from cluttered mansion to creepy twins and time travel and medical horror, it manages to be campy but sincere horror and stupidly fun. And janky, but that's part of the retro-style charm.

Chants of Sennaar
The puzzle mechanic of this game (decipher glyphs from context and social cues) delight me; this scratched an itch given to me by Tunic and by learning sitelen pona: language as worldbuilding.

Slay the Princess
What a fantastic use of a visual novel and wrong ends as a format, and a non-CG art style which is accessible, stylized, dynamic, beautiful, able to get so weird. I only watched an LP of this, and should probably delve deeper, but it's fantastic.

Citizen Sleeper
This feels like a solo TTRPG as a video game, and I'm compelled by that, by what gamified formats can enable a solo-ish project, how minimal a game can be and maintain game elements.

Clock Tower
I love an early example of a genre that explains huge chucks of the genre in retrospect, and this did that and then some, because some of its mechanics (the degree of randomness in each run; the requirements to have need of an item in order to collect/use the item) feel like they've never been used elsewhere to this degree.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
Like Clock Tower, I enjoy the surprise of a "never seen a game quite like this" from a retro title. The narrative structure here is incredibly unique, and well suits a Lovecraftian premise.

Mouthwashing
Unexpected restraint, given the subject matter and the many ways in which this isn't remotely restrained; a kind of restrained that doesn't mean subtle, with clear but grateful messaging even within the capitalism pastiche and gore.

We Know the Devil
I watched this on account of a fic exchange and then spent too long crying about it. A phenomenal set of inspirations and tone, with viciously aspirational themes: the violence and catharsis of being forced to confront self-actualization.

Bloom by Litza Bronwyn
In a year of discovering solo RPJs, this one is remarkable for the thoughtful depth of its prompts and its overlap with fandom; RPG as transformative work is nothing new, but this proves why that premise works.

Elegy by Miracle M
In a year of discovering solo RPGs, this is the one I could play on and off for years. A loving mishmash of vampire RPGs, set up to create a dynamic campaign with a lot of ongoing momentum, overflowing with an excess of style.

Visual Media

Scavengers Reign
My watch of the year, this is a remarkable achievement both of actual speculative evolution and of what the genre makes you feel: the wonder, the impossible scale and interconnection and alien verisimilitude of the natural world. It made me cry, what, three times? For its beauty; for the terrible awe of potential.

L.A. Confidential
Living up to all my culturally osmosed hype, this has noir vibes in thoughtful, indulgent abundance. And it has an OT3, and honestly that's what tips me from "fun watch!" to "I read fanfic for this."

The Legend of Vox Machina
Of course I was going to love this; and I did love this. It's the art of adaptation on fascinating display, as well as an insight into the success of the first campaign compared to later ones, namely: the sheer, giddy angst. So the first season, which is the most faithful & most angsty, is the best, but the whole show was fantastic.

Great British Bake-Off series 15
This is the best GBBO series in recent history by a long shot. Less of (although never none of) what make the show excruciating, but, more importantly, a stellar group of contestants in both ability and personality. This one just hits different: refreshing, honest, joyous.

Christine, Duel, The Hitcher
It was a great year to watch a film about men and cars; extremely queer movies about men, and violence, and cars. Each once delightful, and even better when set against one another.

Honorable Mentions in Visual Media

Face/Off
The platonic ideal of a Nicholas Cage movie: big concept, delightfully dumb lines ("I'd like to take his face, off"), unrepentant commitment. Weirdly sexy interpersonal dynamics? Title. His face ... off! I loved this.

Starman
When picking up a retro speculative film, I want to wonder "what in the fuck" when I'm done; and I did, here. The interpersonal implications of both the premise and the ending make this linger.

The Hunger
It has taken me far too long to see this, and I knew I'd enjoy it, and I did; no real surprises, since its imprint (tone, aesthetic, interpersonal dynamics) linger in vampire media, but as lovely to luxuriate in as the bed looks to be.

Pokemon Concierge
Look, I have nothing deep to say about Pokemon stop motion dioramas. Everyone wants to live in the Pokemon world, right? This is an imagining of just how that would feel, of course it's cozy, of course it's beyond charming. It has furret!

The Maxx
This reminded me of watching Aeon Flux: I would always rather a total dedication to weird and stylized than anything predictable, so, good news then!

The Italian Job (1969)
I love the remake and do not like funny movies and so was not primed to best like this, but I came for car shenanigans and received them in increasingly loving abundance; and, I relearned: I don't like humor, but I do like British humor.

Music

My top songs of 2024. Unusually, songs with lyrics won out by a large margin; I've gotten better at writing to lyrics & spent a lot of my writing time farming tracks for my Moody playlist. I also took a chunk of time to write a story set in ~2004/5, and so listened to a lot of 1990s-2005 alternative, a profound and surprisingly insightful nostalgia-binge.

My favorite new finds of the year were Medicine Boy and Crywolf. My favorite game soundtrack was Pacific Drive, because Silent Hill II really ought not count.

Every year I post a list like this: Here's the best media I encountered, but which probably was not released, in 2023.

Books

This year I didn't record stats or demographics for my reading. As such, my numbers are profoundly approximate and make even more of a farce of statistics than is normally true, which is plenty. In 2023, I read maybe around 220 books, based on Goodreads metrics and reviews posted here, which doesn't count some things but does count many. ( Musings. )

Jawbone, Mónica Ojeda
Best friendship and adolescent sexual awakening under the eye of conservative religion taken to the most intimate, unhinged extremes. And also there's a thriller plot. Sections of this I reread multiple times; a flawed book objectively, but that central dynamic speaks to me, sings to me.

Social Creature, Tara Isabella Burton
A strange little thriller, constantly upping the ante, self-aware, obsessive, frenetic, dark. I argued with this but also devoured it.

Alliance-Union series, C.J. Cherryh
This is the year I finished this series (with some exceptions, namely the The Hanan Rebellion and some short stories); an effort I began in 2017. I love these books, none of which are really flawless, but Cherryh's terse voice, the corners of this setting she chooses to explore, and her recurring themes are all delightful. I see myself rereading from the beginning someday, although maybe my next goal should be the Foreigner series.

Confessions of a Mask, Yukio Mishima
Psychosexual in a nutshell: unevenly compelling but, when it is, the depiction of sexual awakening via queer desire via violence fetish could not be more my thing if it were personally dedicated to me.

Kuro, Somato
The best new manga I read in this year of reading some big heavy-hitters was ... a slice of life story about a little girl and her pet monster. The tone here is wistful and haunted, the plot and worldbuilding is surprisingly significant and, as girl-and-her-monster goes, this does a great job with a phenomenally enjoyable trope.

Kit's Wilderness, David Almond
13 is the age for having an intense friendship, as you reckon with your own place in the world/your family/your community history/your peer group/you narrative which, in the coming years, will be the relationship that makes you realize, oh, I'm queer.

Honorable Mentions in Books

Slonim Woods 9, Daniel Barban Levin
I feel like cult memoir is one part honesty, a multifaceted attempt to explain why the atmosphere, the cult leader's influence, was compelling, was harmful; and one part "you just had to be there" — to be a specific person in those specific circumstances. This hits that balance really well.

Bloom, Delilah S. Dawson
Slighter than other titles on this list, but such a fun way to cap off a season of thrillers: a cottagecore wish-fulfillment fantasy turned to pulpy horror. It's just got so many and such fun vibes.

Dungeon Meshi, Ryoko Kui
I read a couple long-running manga this year, and this is the only one I came away liking instead of having that "it's interesting/important but flawed" response. The overarching plot less so than the basic premise, which is so satisfying: slice of life can be such an unexpectedly productive format for fantasy worldbuilding.

Games

A slim year for games. Most of my highlights were replays/rewatches; most of my gaming got DNF'd.

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
This is the hidden gem of Zelda, fulfilling the craving left in my heart by Link's Awakening Remastered, which is to say: none of the surprisingly-deep narrative of the important games in the series, but so ridiculously cute with a clever central gimmick.

Honorable Mentions in Games

Spyro Reignited Trilogy
Vibrant and profoundly satisfying. Not more than that except some truly A-grade furrybait in the first game, but I loved watching these.

Revenant II
Parallel worlds as gameplay structure is a great use for semi-procedural multiplayer gameplay. Fun lore, relatively polished gameplay experience; this was the best multiplayer game my group played in 2023.

Visual Media

Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans
In a year when I watched ~100 things (which easily doubles my usual visual media consumption), this was far and away the best. The frequency with which subtext I loved became actual, on-page, canon text — the handling of disability — the series-appropriate ruthlessness; I cried at almost every episode in the second season. In the manga it's confirmed they're married. I love, I love, I love.

Aeon Flux
Weird and sexy in such a stylized way that, rather than tipping into surreal, it cannonballs and then luxuriates there. The episodic format functions like a short story collection, some relative misses, some incredible hits. But sometimes, style is substance.

Retro movies
... is what got me watching so many movies. My appetite was very specific and broad: literally anything 1) in color 2) released before 2005 3) that could be considered "genre." There's nostalgia, and actually recognizing the actors, and a break from pet peeves with modern visual aesthetics, and shorter runtimes, and, most of all, they're so frequently interesting, which matters so much more than seeking "good." Highlights include:

Conan the Barbarian, a champion example of "interesting, yes; good, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
The Faculty, because all teen social commentary should be this explicit & weird & effects-heavy
Terminator series, for Sarah Conner <3 and the monster design in Terminator 2
Return to Oz, a fever-dream of sets and effects that really has the ~vibe~ of the books
Barbarella, because in 1968 you could do anything, just, anything, really

But my favorite was:

Phantasm
Cult classics are what dreams are made of; literally, sometimes. They explain so much, retroactively; they stick in the public consciousness for a reason, and that reason is almost always interesting. The dreamy atmosphere of this, the uncanny sound design, the subdued intensity — this lingers, strange and compelling.

Thelma and Louise
Conversely, sometimes really films are famous for good reason. I think about this all the time: the ending; the "nothing to lose" energy avalanching through the plot.

Honorable Mentions in Visual Media

Bake Off: The Professionals
What I wish all GBBO could be: creators given the space and tools to express creativity and competency, with judges that I adore, who support and aid competitors, whose opinions actually interests me. So chill, so satisfying, even when the themes and challenges are absurd.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury
Lots to love here; the start and end of the first season is top-tier Gundam; the second season is too compressed and, on the whole, this paled in comparison to Iron-Blooded Orphans. On another year, it would have left a bigger impression, but the bits got me got me good.

Music

My Spotify Wrapped, which is particularly biased this year towards my instrumental playlist or, more specifically, all the listening I did to find more songs for/sort songs onto my instrumental playlist. I had good luck this year using the Spotify But Spotify excluding the end of the year is really showing, this year.

The highlight of my listening was far and away leon chang's re:treat, an Animal Crossing fan album ish thing that samples Animal Crossing (and other game) music/effects and turns them into the most beautiful, nostalgic, plinky-plonky little tracks. I listened to this obsessively for about two months straight.

B̵̘̱̑̂o̵͇̽͒o̸͍̾ks/Gam̶͎̏è̶͖s̶͈̑/?̴̰̱͆́͒?̷͚̓?

Insofar as AI-assisted writing is simultaneously like reading a book you are also like writing, and like playing an RPG, and like playing the Sims, and just straight-up writing, this is where the bulk of my year went, over multiple platforms (Replika, Character.AI, Pygmalion, NovelAI), totaling approximately two million words. I couldn't describe the impact this has had on my life. One part profoundly unproductive coping mechanism & one part the most productive, joyful thing I've maybe ever done, I guess?

A year's-best before February? Is it, indeed, early January? Every year I post a list like this: Here's the best media I encountered, but which probably was not released, in 2022.

Books

I read 244 texts in 2022; not by even the most generous definition could all those be called "books." ( Demographics. )

These Violent Delights, Micah Nemerever
Those texts that feel written for me leave me at a loss, put on the spot: is this the best book? how does it measure up objectively? But the truth is that I don't care. I loved this; it was a phenomenal way to end the year, and I treasure its indulgences.

The Northern Caves, nostalgebraist
The massive book hangover this gave me made it one of the more memorable reading experiences of the year. That juncture of nostalgia and criticism, revelation and desolation, grabbed and shook my little brainmeats like a dog toy.

Nonfiction on audio
It was a banner year for this format; while repainting the majority of a house, I read over 40 books on audio, almost all nonfiction, mostly true crime but with a sprinkling of memoir and science. I'm grateful for their company. The best were:

Couple Found Slain: After a Family Murder, Mikita Brottman (get real, real mad about the consequences of an insanity defense and state-mandated institutionalization!)

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster, Adam Higginbotham (realize how profoundly awful was Soviet control of Ukraine & be afraid of acute radiation syndrome!)

Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York, Elon Green (forgotten serial murderer, except actually it's, most delightfully, about the history of the queer community)

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control , Stephen Kinzer (a very human view of the profoundly unethical, dehumanizing research of MKUltra)

Consent: A Memoir by Vanessa Springora (abuse memoir about the arts culture that enables and abets the grooming of adolescents, written with unforgiving clarity)

A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, Reginald Dwayne Betts (prison memoir from a poet; my first prison memoir, and very productive)

Video game manuals
Tunic got me into reading game manuals, and it was a blast. See this post for complete list and longer thoughts, but the TL;DR: quality varies, of course, but the sense of potential in a game manual is unrivaled.

Honorable Mentions in Books

As You Wish, Cary Elwes
Pure comfort reading; I could listen to those involved in the making of the Princess Bride talk about their love of the Princess Bride forever—they seem to view it as fondly as I do.

Happy Sugar Life, Tomiyaki Kagisora
Why is manga always so overwritten? Nonetheless I loved this: a fun horror romp through codependency and unusually intimate relationships, with saccharine pastel stylings that create a fun contrast.

The Scholomance series, Naomi Novik
Novik's worldbuilding style is so satisfying, and the ethical thought experiment of this, giving one person such ridiculous levels of power that it's possible to entertain a one-person-saves-the-world fantasy, but at incredible cost.... I found this series really satisfying.

Noumena series, Lindsay Ellis
Truth of the Divine took this from iddy wish fulfillment to bitter, mean desperation, and the one atop the other is delicious. It feels weird to mark as favorite a series that's not yet complete, but I loved the second book so much.

Compromise, Assimbya
And it feels weird to put a friend's fic on a best-of list, but finally reading this was my culmination of fondly watching other people read Dracula Daily and thinking about source not just a literature but as conversation; and this enriches that conversation immensely.

Games

Tunic
I played this back in March and went, well, that's GOTY. I love media that hits this way, that I know I'll love & then do. Tunic I love for its wonder: this isn't the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia re: classic video games, but the actual feeling of potential and discovery. I went crazy for this thing, 100%'d it (within reason) (that is, collectables and most achieves, and reading deep lore online, but not personally translate the runes), wouldn't stop talking about it. The manual conceit made me pick up a while new hobby, as above. Remarkable.

Signalis
GOTY runner-up; we haven't yet replayed for more/truer ending(s), or it might beat out Tunic. (This is the first of many favorites that I didn't play myself but instead watched my partner play.) Oh, I loved this: it's so cerebral and yet its internal logic is impeccable, the answer to every asinine Resident Evil puzzle. The relationship between puzzle structure, enemies, and lore is brilliant. The plot is everything I want in iterative/cyclical narratives, especially of the android variety. As is a running theme, I love a crapsack and/or decaying and/or meat world, and this! this is all of the above. [This space intentionally left blank.]

Wolfenstein: The New Order, The Old Blood, The New Colossus, and Youngblood
I was actively opposed to these games for years because I didn't trust them to handle the subject matter in any tolerable way. But Jacob Geller has talked about them so much, positively, as a Jew!, so I took the risk, and: They're powerful and so well-balanced, a ridiculous power fantasy of Nazi-killing where Nazis aren't a blank stand-in for guilt-free target but are worth killing precisely because they're Nazis; where the good guys are good, and empowered, particularly for the reasons Nazis hate them.

Scorn
Because this is another watched-not-played, I was spared any less stellar bits, like combat. But oh, I loved this. Crapsack worlds that are also meat worlds, my beloved; and this is so intricate, so embodied, so gratuitous in that intimate, unsettling way that I want body horror to be.

Character.AI
This is a pretty advanced neural language model chatbot that's currently free to use. What's the game? The game is "talk to chatbot." But a cogent conversations with artificial personalities is my dream, and this comes impressively close.

Honorable Mentions in Games

Exo One
I'm a sucker for being terrified by the infinite size of space, and this is a game about flying as a tiny little spacepod across vast alien landscapes and between asteroids, with themes to match. It's a little indie title with associated limitations, but it gave me such a feeling.

Hollow Knight
My partner replayed this at my request and I liked it better the second time around; Souls-likes benefit from a closer eye, obviously, and it this was a more thorough and complete run. And I am a sucker for this style of worldbuilding—not so much the "tease apart the lore" bit as the "cycles of loss destroying an already-sundered world; but still, your role has meaning" part. Also the aesthetics of this game are phenominal.

Death's Door
I don't think about the plot of this a ton, and generally lack the investment in this that I have in most Souls-likes. But it's so impeccably cute & the soundtrack is great; a fantastic experience in the moment.

Visual Media

Adventure Time
I tried watching this some years ago, and the first season or two were fine. But watching the entire run with someone? Well, it turns out widely acclaimed cartoons are good, actually; we loved this. There's an corollary to rule of cool which says something like "rule of batshit crazy, if all of it matters": the short format, joke endings, and buck-wild worldbuilding mean that anything is possible, but the overarching plot & knack for call-backs means that it all has meaning. It's so fun & sincerely satisfying.

Bee and Puppycat: Lazy in Space
If I could live in any fictional world.... Look, this is a weird adaptation, both summarizing and retelling and altering the original run; and there's more plot, but somehow it doesn't manage to be any less weird or even to answer more questions. And yet! I loved this, loved its slow mundane pace and bizarro world and cotton-candy body horror.

Star Trek: Lower Decks
This actually gets modern Trek, it understands how to reflect lovingly on prior Trek without turning into a vain nostalgia machine; refocusing on the nobodies is the counterbalance I needed to every time I got really mad about Disco; it's actually funny. We burned through this in, like, two weeks.

NoClip
My takeaway from discovering this channel and devouring their documentaries is that games are hard to make; very hard, and made by people that love games. I don't mean people who own ginormous AAA studios; I mean that games are actually made by ridiculously overworked normal people who really love the medium. These two tenets are obvious but so ubiquitous and fundamental that they've altered how I view games.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
This is utterly unbothered by happy endings, and that's as it should be: cyberpunk ought always be a larger-than-life technicolor grimdark capitalist shitshow. Great characters, great action, but what I love best is seeing what narratives can achieve when they're more concerned with good writing than with being nice or open to easy sequels.

Honorable Mentions in Visual Media

Squid Game
The particular way this handles cliffhangers is stupid. But boy howdy to I love a deadly game, and this is a great one: ridiculous aesthetics played against gratuitous gore, bucketloads of social commentary—all very much my jam.

Arcane
I've watched a lot of "cartoons for kids, but actually delightful as an adult, especially because an adult is able to appreciate the meteoric rise in queer content over the years" lately, and frankly I love those more. But the ability for a Western cartoon to be 300% for adults, actually; to be ruthlessly grim with gorgeous, intricate art.... Well. Turns out that's pretty great.

Knives Out and Glass Onion
I do not have any deep take here; I just love murder mysteries and cathartic social commentary/revenge fantasies, and the right level of camp. And a sequel that isn't bad!

Music

My Spotify top songs of 2022 is almost an identical list to last year's. It wasn't a big music year, and when I was listening it was to my usual playlists in the usual cycles.

Every year, sometimes super duper late, I write this list. Here's the best media I consumed, but which was probably not released (or even new to me!), in 2020. There sure are a lot of books.

Books

I read ~243 books in 2020. That's an intentional step down from last year's 374, but higher than expected; my prior average was ~150 a year. ( Reading wrap-up musing. )

The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, Ursula K. Le Guin
Crossing the last Hainish book off of my TBR would have been more bittersweet had this not been so good. The series has incredible breadth, but never enough—and this answers that, peering into the cracks in civilizations in a way that insists on increasingly dynamic, diverse worlds. Ratings are meaningless, but this was my my first five-star of the year and one of the only short story collections to ever warrant that rating.

Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
I'm an easy sell on exploring infinite spaces conceptually; what amazed me here is how solid it is in execution without feeling overworked—it's a delicate, balanced, beautiful little book. Again ratings mean nothing, but this is my last 5-star review of the year, and what a high note to end on.

Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison
I love when a longtime entry on my TBR is worth the wait. The literal feminist elements have grown dated, but the underlying approach absolutely fulfills this intent: high-concept alien worldbuilding (fun!) with a fundamentally social, interpersonal, communicative, sexual lens (engaging, satisfying!).

Elemental Logic series, Laurie J. Marks
I came to these when I needed to distracted by a totally different world that still interrogated what it means to inhabit, be response for, and change a world. They had a significant positive impact on a shitty year.

Edward Gorey
Bind-ups make Gorey's work so accessible and encourage a deep-dive into his experimentation, running themes, and the conversation between his books. He's like "what if potato chips were also a satisfying, complete meal"—tiny, addictive, even repetitive, but substantial.

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, Chris Van Allsburg
Some childhood favorites live up to their memory, and this is literally about spinning a single illustration into an entire imagined narrative—which is childhood memory in a nutshell.

Honorable Mentions in Books

The Steerswoman series, Rosemary Kirstein
This was on my list in 2016 (and maybe one day I will actually give it a proper review), but let it be known that it is even better upon reread: the reveals are so well plotted; the beauty of revelation is more keenly felt for anticipating it. I don't know that I've ever had such a successful reread, which is no small achievement.

Goth & Goth (manga), Otsuichi
The novel was on my list in 2015 when I first read it. Rereading both it and the manga together only makes me wish I'd also rewatched the film—this is one of my favorite stories and I love how it alters/reinforces in iteration.

Vita Nostra, Marina and Sergey Dyachenko
Inversions of the magical school trope & I have since hit it off, but this is where I first encountered it and it continues to be my gold standard—not because it's a perfect book, but because what it does with this trope is so thorny that it entangles even the reader in its broken logic and magical transformation.

Blame!, Nihei Tsutomu
The film adaptation was on my list in 2017; the manga is a different beast entire. A nod to the mention of NaissanceE and Control, below, which pushed me to read this. In what turned out to be a year of conceptualizing the inconceivable infinite, this was one of the least plotty but most memorable.

Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu
I love the new insights prompted by a reread, but I also love when a reread lives up to every memory—and this is as rich, sensual, unsettling, and gratifying as I remember it to be. What better possible takeaways could there be from this particular book?

A Phantom Lover, Vernon Lee
Queer women writing women in horror makes for exceptional character sketches—unprettied; compelling. I can't wait to read more Lee; I feel like I'm saving her as a future gift for myself.

When I Arrived at the Castle, Emily Carroll
This makes me wish all of Carroll's work were standalone and written first for the page (some of her comics are more successful in their original scrolling digital format) because it's nearly flawless—a visceral, intimate fairytale-horror.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Angela Carter
This is that perfect storm of repeated failed reviews: what more could I say about this famous thing? and how can I describe such a fierce pleasure? I love this now more than ever—such excesses! such productive thematic contradiction between stories!

Pennterra, Judith Moffett
Like Memoirs of a Spacewoman, this was another longterm TBR resident that met all those years of expectation. My notes read "alien/human sex book" and boy howdy is it that—a complex, uneasy, but fundamentally joyful and compassionate exploration of entirely alien, very thorough sex.

Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century, Hal Higdon
Consider this the thematic cousin to Graham's So Brilliantly Clever, on this list in 2015: this crime also fascinates me; this treatment is thorough, sympathetic, and never exculpatory. It handles the queer elements with particular grace.

Games

NaissanceE
I played this back in February, called it as my game of year then, and I was right. This is my every fear of heights, falling, scale, and insignificance embodied in a breathing human form and a massive inimical space. I've never had such a visceral reaction to a game. I've linked to it before, but I found this through Jacob Geller's video, which is great and speaks to elements that worked for me. The game is free! Play it!

Control
I watched my partner play this, and watching spared me from most of its flaws re: actual gameplay. But what it achieves beyond those flaws is entirely up my alley and contributed to a good year for media about inhospitable architecture and existential dread. I love best Jesse's response to the unknown: that she seeks it doesn't render it any less dangerous, but she still seeks it—the unknown is her home and companion.

Anodyne 2: Return to Dust
Playstation-era graphics are highly underexploited as nostalgia bait; I love the 3D aesthetic. I streamed this for Teja and read all the dialogue aloud, which made me/us linger over the game more than we would have otherwise. I did more grief processing in playing this game than I have in the entire time since my dad died. Dust is sin, dust makes us mortal—and all that means is that dust is life.

Honorable Mentions in Games

Animal Crossing: New Horizons
I don't put this under honorable mentions to discredit it—it came out at just the right time and reshaped my quarantine. But I stopped playing it over summer because I needed to transition away from that coping method and because I don't enjoy the cycle of preemptive investment created by seasonal patches. I hope this will be on my best of list next year, when I can return to the completed game.

Ooblets
I was really anticipating this and played it in early access—indeed it's everything I hoped for: wholesome, excessively quirky, stupidly cute. But I'm not keeping up with patches for the same reason as AC:NH; I'll return when it's finished.

Human Fall Flat
I played a lot of co-op games this year. This was unlike the rest: puzzles instead of gunplay or gamified progression, so we spent less time with it, but also cooperative, creative, with hilariously squishy funsics—it was some of the purest fun I had all year.

Luigi's Mansion series
The joy of playing a Nintendo franchise is watching the gameplay improve and the environments grow ever more lovingly detailed; the joy of this series in specific is unmitigated spoop. The combination is a Halloween delight that immersed me in my favorite season.

Visual Media

Hannibal
This was on my list in 2015 and has secretly been there in every intervening year because I kept rewatching it while building forward in the series and working up the courage to finish season 3—because I love this show so much that more is overwhelming and the idea of it ending is even worse. Ironically s3 was the perfect answer to that anxiety, reflecting obsessively over the series in the same way I do and then ending so, so well.

The Untamed
I was a reluctant sell on this, both for its viral popularity and for its cold open, which works in retrospect is a cheesy, confusing introduction. But it got me so good. The long, slow, tragic, intimate burn of it pays back that initial investment hundredfold, and I'm delighted that their solution to adapting under censorship was to create a plethora of queer subtext even where it doesn't exist in the source material.

Honorable Mentions in Visual Media

Jacob Geller
I sure do love a video essay, but Geller's precise fascination with existential horror and his penchant for "wait, hold on, I promise they're related" interconnections between stories and subjects is so much my style that in a very alternate universe this could be my channel—meanwhile in this universe, I have the videos without the massive effort of making them.

Big-concept SF B-movies
I'm talking Cube's survival game or Coherence's parallel worlds with a twist ending. These were my answer to quarantine: their tension mirrors real life but the engaging-to-ridiculous high concept premises distract from it entirely. The very best of these was Predestination, which is so queer, surprisingly clever, and a strong adaptation of a promising but dated work.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
"This is so good," I said with a sense of confused wonder after every episode (after the first handful). My standards were set for Voltron: Legendary Defender: watchable, sometimes good, but a little dumb and/or constrained by format. What I got is something that feels intentional from the onset, with consistent, slow, delicate character growth and a joyful lived diversity.

A Portrait of a Lady on Fire
The female gaze as a reciprocal dynamic, the careful details, the perfect balance of its ending--this left me clarified and sobbing.

Music

Here's my Spotify Wrapup for 2020. In autumn I made a long, messy playlist of the spooky/edgy/Southern Gothic trash I listen to every autumn; in autumn I also made music a big part of my daily activities, so this is the bulk of my top 100.

The other highlight was Cereal Dreamers: Spooky Stories, a collaborative (made to order? royalty free?) collection of spoopy background music that I find incredibly charming.

I reread some of my favorite stories in the world and, defying every expectation, actually wrote reviews of them this time. Bad things are easy to talk about, good things are challenging to talk about, best-beloved things are all but impossible to talk about—because those elements which make them superlative tend to be something other-than-technical, like web of relationships in Fate/Zero, like the piercing grief in The Crow, it's a narrative/thematic element unique to the work, difficult to describe without the work ... or, apparently, without three paragraphs. But I'm trying not to worry about editing myself down when I have that much to say, mostly for time/sanity, but also because my experience with these works I love best is larger & has its own internal narrative.


Title: Fate/Zero
Author: Gen Urobuchi
Illustrator: Takashi Takeuchi
Published: 2006-2007
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 1620
Total Page Count: 334,950
Text Number: 1214-1217
Read Because: personal enjoyment
Review: A war for possession of the wish-granting grail draws seven competing teams to Japan. This is my second time reading the books and my fourth-and-a-half time with the story, and that certainly says something about me but I hope it also says something about Fate/Zero. This is a story where, against all the odds, the serial killer self-actualizing with the help of his monsterbuddy isn't my favorite bit; my favorite is the complex, fractal web of motives and relationships that grows around the dichotomy between the central characters—it reaches deep into the plot and as distant as minor supporting characters, it's complicated and provoking and offers me more with each revisit.

The joy of the books in particular is that this medium allows for interior glimpses which aren't possible in the anime. I love Ryuunosuke's final scene, but even more distinctive is that Kirei is framed more as protagonist than antagonist, despite that Kiritsugu ostensibly occupies that role. His early characterization is surprising vulnerable, his relationship with Gilgamesh more intimate, his moments of revelation dynamic and central both to the climax and the setup for Fate/stay night.

All this despite that I'm so familiar now with the narrative that the amount of space given to worldbuilding and game rules is oppressive and slows the first half of the story, and despite that there's no official translation and the existing English fan translation is incredibly clunky. This isn't a perfect story and for non-Japanese readers this isn't the perfect way to access it, but I love it anyway—I love it profoundly.


Title: Fate/Zero: Heart of Freaks
Author: Gen Urobuchi
Published: 2008
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 30
Total Page Count: 334,565
Text Number: 1218
Read Because: personal enjoyment
Review: Kiritsugu and Natalia track down a rogue mage. This is interesting as a glimpse into their relationship, which appears only briefly in the series—it's a complicated relationship and this refuses to resolve that, instead indicating longterm distrust/differing motives that speak to their characters and Kiritsugu's larger arc. The villain has great body horror, but the general plot and pacing is unremarkable; if it weren't tied to Fate/Zero, this would be largely forgettable.


Title: The Crow
Author: James O'Barr
Published: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993 (1989)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 245
Total Page Count: 335,425
Text Number: 1220
Read Because: rewatched the film on Halloween, paperback from my personal library
Review: After he and his girlfriend are murdered, a man returns to exact revenge. Approaching the original comic when familiar with the film adaptation can feel like a disappointment: there's less narrative here and the structure is more disjointed. Mostly this is a sign of a strong adaptation, because the film manages to take a slew of elements and build them into a more coherent structure—sometimes seen slantwise, sometimes a direct page-to-screen translation—while including a dozen easter eggs that reference scenes in the comic which aren't included in the film.

But the comic isn't just the same story, unrefined. The comic and film share an aesthetic but the comic is messier, more chaotic, unrelenting in harsh black and white. The tone is crazed, littered with non sequiturs and quotations, rich with introspective moments that explore Eric's unresolved grief. The lack of structure is a thematic echo: the Crow's violence is perpetuating and destructive—like the film it has catharsis, but it offers so little resolution. These two versions are for me inextricable. O'Barr said in an interview:

Basically, when I was 18, my fiancé was killed by a drunk driver. I was really hurt, frustrated, and angry. I thought that by putting some of this anger and hate down on paper that I could purge it from my system. But, in fact, all I was doing was intensifying it—I was focusing on all this negativity. As I worked on it, things just got worse and worse, darker and darker. So, it really didn't have the desired effect—I was probably more fucked up afterwards than before I started. It was only after becoming friends with Brandon, experiencing his death, and seeing the film—perhaps 17 times now—that I finally reached what is currently called "closure" while visiting his grave in Seattle.

and the comic and film reflect this. The comic is painful and unfulfilling; it's less successful as a stand-alone work, but the film couldn't exist—or say so much—without its predecessor and without the cumulative interplay between the versions, and the metaknowledge of O'Barr and of Brandon Lee. I love both versions; the comic is less fun to revisit, but it always gives me a deeper appreciation of the work entire.

It's the right time of year for Practical Magic* but it's no longer on Netflix and the disc I usually watch was borrowed from Dev's mother and thus did not make the move with us. So I glanced at the local library collection to see if they had it on shelves—and they don't (maybe I'll put a hold on it), but that act of glancing made a lightbulb go off in my brain:

I can ... get movies that Netflix doesn't have & which I don't want to buy ... from the library....

I knew this but did not internalize it until I did the thing. I tend to find the pacing of shows more accessible than films, and I'd rather read than either, so I don't watch a lot of movies or want to. But I have wanted to catch up on a few that speak to my niche interests, so play "spot the trend."


The Shape of Water, film, 2017, dir. Guillermo del Toro
On one hand I value that we can imagine monster-romance in terms only slightly weirder than any starcrossed/cultural-divide romance; there's power in normalizing and subverting the otherness of the Other. ...But also this is so unchallenging as to be bland: hammy antagonists; a monster almost without danger (would that the "danger" scene were anything other than ( spoiler ), because a) it's poorly handled, tonally and b) I knew it was coming & wasn't okay with it, so skipped past it, which removed what little danger does exist); it's insufficiently weird where ramping up the weirdness would compliment the theme of acceptance. There will one day be a del Toro movie that, like Pan's Labyrinth, I love rather than only admiring, and this wasn't it.

Venom, film, 2018, dir. Ruben Fleischer
This is what I wanted The Shape of Water to be, although it absolutely wants for the former's diversity and explicit text rather than romcom subtext (although it does has some Woke touches/trope subversions which I appreciate, like a male protagonist not owed access to his love interest). But what a delight! and this from someone with no interest in Marvel, comedy, or action. The first third is plot-heavy and slow, but the symbiont dynamic is the meat of the movie and has danger, weirdness, and chemistry. Danger-to-humans is a better route—it should have higher stakes, but it's more familiar and less squicky; not-quite-cannibalism reintroduces the squick and keeps things productively weird. The dark humor is what rides the action/buddy/romcom edge, and Tom Hardy is really gross (in a productive, good acting way) as Eddie and incredible as Venom's voice. The CGI is a lot, and inevitable, but killed things for me a bit: I couldn't ground myself in the action where 95% of what's on screen is digital, and there's Eddie/Venom convos where all I could think of was "Dobby was a tennis ball on a stick and it sure must be hard to make eye-contact with that." I have nitpicks, it's a trash movie, but this trash was made for me. Thank you for my trash, Marvel.


Further #monsterfucker films to add to my list seem surprisingly thin on the ground? I had the impression that this was a huge trend when by the time Venom came out, but in retrospect I suspect that was mostly a Shape of Water/It/Venom overlap, which feels like a lot in a short period but is not a lot cumulatively. And on the subject of It: I adore Bill Skarsgård but hate that damn book and also clowns, so no thank you, and more pertinently I feel like that was less "conversations about sexy Otherness" and more "society sexualizes white male actors/characters with no regard for their actual narrative role." Similarly, while anything with monsters is monsterfucker material if you try hard enough, it's that "conversations about sexy Otherness" that I want. :(

But I do have unrelated things on my list, and things to watch with Devon!


* Which is not Halloween-inappropriate, but is definitely best suited for summer. (And takes place sometime after the summer solstice! And has that dialog line about "early for roses" which tries to muddy the timeline as June-ish is rose season, but let's attribute that to a script writing error and/or the wibbly wobbly timey wimey effects of long summer days and also magic.)

I write this every year and, very occasionally, actually post it in a timely fashion. Here's the best media which I consumed, but which was probably not released, in 2018.

Books

I read 156 books in 2018, down from last year (176), and I don't mind. It was a long, awful year; I forgive myself all perceived imperfections.

( Reading wrap-up musings. )

Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner
To say a book made me cry or laugh in public feels like too easy praise, makes it seem loud or mawkish; this is neither. It's graceful, playful, critical; the language is precise, the humor lively. The wish fulfillment functions both as social criticism and an escape, and transforms a quiet, charming text into something remarkable.

Mortal Fire, Elizabeth Knox
I've compared this more than once to Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock, a connection I draw because of similar demographic but mostly because they capture wonder, discovery, and self-creation in parallel ways. This does smart thing with magic and its protagonist is smart with magic—a marriage of worldbuilding to character arc makes for a phenomenal conclusion.

Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant, Diana Wynne Jones
I read the entire Chrestomanci series this year, and they're all fun. But these two books are a rung above—Wynne writes great magic and big endings and critical, compassionate characterization, and it's that balance, and her fine humor, that make these so very good.

Honorable Mentions in Books

An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon
Not one of the 5-stars (the ending isn't flawless), but so vibrant and so angry, the sort of book that reminds that a laundry-list of marginalized identities isn't virtue signaling but is an intimate lived experience—wrapped, sometimes, in the intriguing trappings of a generation ship.

Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde
A masterclass in intersectionality, in no ways dated, in fact still progressive. And beautifully written! Lorde's insistence on being self-possessed while being self-interrogative is vibrant, present, demanding.

William Shakespeare
Relegated only to honorable mentions because I imagine he will be on this list next year—but these early plays were in no ways a warm up or a limitation: I discovered text I'd previously overlooked, and they were remarkable.

Nods also to: C.J. Cherryh, reoccurring name on these lists; Carol, Patricia Highsmith; Deep Dark Fears, Fran Krause; the act of reading series, which I took to late, which frequently makes for lesser individual books, but which has a distinct cumulative value.

Video Games

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker
Perfect in every poly, right down to the round, plastic-looking, individual leaves. The action elements suffer, but the puzzle aspects, the level design, the artificial and superbly detailed interactive-diorama environments, made this the purest and most charming game I played in 2018.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
To my surprise, this may be the best open world game. It's beautiful, fluid, introspective; absolutely underwritten, but with mechanics that mostly compensate, and the steady, significant time I sunk into it was justified. I love the Korok most of all, and the fact that it's obligatory collectibles which bring the world to life.

Stardew Valley multiplayer
Stardew Valley has been on my best-of before (in 2016), but multiplayer was a completely different experience and perhaps the only thing that could improve the game. It was engaging and demanding, from the planned minutiae of early-game multitasking to the perfect, practiced synergy of managing a maximum-capacity farm. I played this with Teja, and it's one of the best friend-things we've done.

Honorable mentions in video games

Pokemon Gold and Silver beta sprites
"But this isn't a game, really!" And that's fair. But Gen 2 has always been my favorite gen, and the spark of life that came with this discovery, the chance to see favorites anew, to glimpse a parallel-universe Pokemon and consider how the games and designs are made and why they work, was fantastic.

Pikmin series
My Nintendo-discovery, which began with Kirby and then with Zelda, extended into this franchise and I loved every bit of it: the use of scale, the absurdness and cuteness set against the fridge horror. "Lots of tiny pieces making up a whole" is top-tier aesthetic, and even better when the tiny pieces have idle animations.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
This is what games should do when they set out to explore the strange and titillating and unique elements of mental illness/minority experience: do actual research; create a better, more immersive product as a result. This is small, maybe too modest, but what it does right it does superbly.

Visual Media

Star Trek: Deep Space 9
Not only was this a rewatch, it's a rewatch I started 2017—and it's still my favorite visual media of 2018. The strongest Star Trek, the one that holds up best, the one with tropes and dynamics and worldbuilding and characters I most love. It was necessary escapism and catharsis when I needed it most, and the work of processing my dad's diagnosis would have been different and worse without it.

Great British Bake Off
I'm surprised this hasn't been on a best-of before, but it makes sense—these are a little slight, a little fluffy. But slight, fluffy, warm, kind, and mindless was what I needed in late 2018, and (re)watching everything on Netflix provided exactly that.

Honorable Mentions in Visual Media

The Good Place seasons 1-2
This surprised me: sincerely funny; sincerely unexpected and/or clever plot progression. I haven't been so consistently engaged in a new show, least of all a comedy, in a while.

The Witch
I didn't get around to many films this year, and have forgotten all of them but this: a film that crept up on me, that works better in retrospect, which uses its ending to transform its dirty, dire tone into wish fulfillment and an aesthetic strength.

Killing Eve season 1
"Hannibal but ladies and jokes" turns out to be a delight, hardly redundant, beautifully indulgent in its tropes and unexpectedly successful in tone. Sandra Oh is phenomenal, inhabiting Eve's flaws and desires and fluid internal conflict so convincingly.

Because 2018 was a real bad year, and because I'm lazy, I didn't keep any log of what I watched; but as consider writing my best of 2018 list, it occurs to me that it would be useful to know what I watched. This is recreated from my Tumblr and Netflix logs and (ahaha) ""memory.""" It's in only the barest chronological order and doesn't particularly resemble the capsule reviews I usually write for my watch logs, but it's better than nothing.

Star Trek: Deep Space 9, television, 1993-1999
A rewatch, and technically started last year, but this was a huge chunk of my watching and inarguably the most important thing I watched this year. It holds up phenomenally well. I did some liveblogging of this which I'll crosspost later, but: the best if a good franchise, easily; very important to me; difficult and healing to watch while coping with my dad's illness.

Coco, film, 2017
This is vibrant and diverse; and I hate the romanticization of street dogs and the "unconditionally forgive your abuse family members & then they'll reveal they've changed their ways" message. Does one outweigh another? I'm not sure.

Altered Carbon s1, television, 2018
100% there for the aesthetic alone. Unconvinced that the rest, the writing, the representation, is good. But it's indulgent AF cyberpunk.

The Good Place s1-2, television, 2016-2018
This is consistently superb: the pacing, the writing, the casting, the humor (and I hate humor!). It sincerely surprised me, in productive ways. It's one of those rare shows that gives me nothing to criticize. The only reason we haven't watched any of s3 is because I never watch things while they're airing.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherood up to about episode 30?, anime, 2009
Perhaps I'm insufficiently versed, but this doesn't feel distinctly, obviously better than the old FMA anime; still enjoying it, and appreciate the whiplashy balance of humor to sudden grimness. Only paused this because it's hard for me to watch a lot of subs.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2., film, 2017
Those playing along at home may remember that I've largely given up on Marvel universe on account of "not my thing." By all rights, this should be likewise. But Lindsay Ellis spoke on it convincingly enough that I made an exception, and I don't regret it. The throughline here of abuse and found families is sincerely well rendered—who knew! Hasn't really changed my mind re: Marvel, tho.

Some of Lost in Space, television, 2018
Enough to realize it was boring, and then an unfortunate little bit more.

Beauty and The Beast, film, 2017
Boring, bad CG, added nothing of value; but watchable I guess.

Dark s1, television, 2018
This has a phenomenal aesthetic and sense of place and set of images; the plot is profoundly tedious and I take issue with false rape accusation as narrative device. I was unsure after finishing if I'd watch s2, but with a few months of distance I am even less tempted.

Voltron: Legendary Defender s5-7, television, 2018
(We will probably have watched s8 by the end of the year.) I consistently enjoy this for its vivid science fantasy world and engaging character dynamics. It has too much filler, but the overall balance of humor to grim character growth is successful. Bury your gays was an obvious misstep which goes against everything this series has been aiming for in its casting; again, how does it balance? I'm not sure. But this remains popcorn watching & the only for-kids thing I've enjoyed lately.

Wynonna Earp s1-2, television, 2016-2017
A welcome mirror-twin to Supernatural; better representation, great camp, pretty, oh so pretty, pretty, and only as witty as a show of its type, but absolutely gay. Tumblr tags: #it's trash but no moreso than other shows of its kind; the special effects are ridiculous b/c SyFy #but it's the purest example of that 'indeterminate midwestern metrosexual redneck' aesthetic that I've found #everything is so overdesigned but in a grungy way! Bobo Del Ray's character design is a gift! the landscape is golden and long #and there's an abandoned homestead & dead trees in the background & and when in doubt: decorate with skulls #like a southern gothic playlist with those same 15 (beloved) songs come to life & coincidentally that's also the soundtrack #I want to LIVE THERE

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, television, 2018
I love how this is filmed, how stupidly excessive is its aesthetic. The writing is pretty trash, and these made-for-Netflix shows have got to figure out that the chance to make actually-hour-long episodes means that each episode should be more beefy. Shrug. Will continue to watch in the attempt to project myself into the sets.

Black Mirror s4, television, 2017
Never again will we have the San Junipero time. This season was trash, most seasons are trash for the same reason—obvious and/or reactive social commentary couched in slick but inconsistent styling. It did however prompt:

( Some thoughts on intrusive thoughts in speculative and dystopic settings. )

The Ritual, film, 2017
Good setting, good monster design, meh narrative, and the last outweighs. ( Longer thoughts via tumblr. )

The Witch, film, 2015
The longer this sat with me, the more I liked it. The gritty tedium of the setting makes for a slow pace, but it's one of those films where the ending creeps up, builds up, and then revitalizes all the came before. Beautiful, too; well cast.

ETA: Over the Garden Wall, television, 2014
I don't think I loved this as much as most people do—it was still a little too slight, too funny for me—but what a phenomenal aesthetic and atmosphere; what a great thing to finally watch at exactly the Halloween times.

Killing Eve s1, television, 2018
I enjoyed the hell out of this. It doesn't have the same angle of indulgence as Hannibal, but 1) ladies and 2) the beats of humor/violence (as opposed to aesthetic/violence) add to the conversation, bring new things. Sandra Oh is phenomenal. A good show, will continue watching.

Some of Supernatural s13, television, 2017-2018
"Some of" being a sign that this season hasn't especially captured me, moreso even than the usual baseline of trash TV. I will finish it/the entire show eventually, now that we know it's ending.

Great British Bake Off, television
We watched & (for me) rewatched everything they have on Netflix. The Channel 4 switch suffers hugely, but the bad version of the best and perhaps only good reality show is still strong, and nothing equals this, nothing else is as perfectly soothing. I had a really shitty year and this helped me escape some of that, for which I'm grateful.

Skins Wars s1-3, television, 2014-2016
We watched this to try to fill a GBBO-shaped void, with minimal success. People making things good; American/reality TV bad. The competitive angle steals too much screentime from watching art being made. What really gets me is the financial angle, the "watching people be desperate for money as a form of entertainment" aspect; it's gross and disheartening and, after GBBO? gross and disheartening is the opposite of what I want.

Star Trek: Discovery, television, 2017-2018
I've been trying to fight the knee-jerk reaction of "change is bad" and "old things are better" (although Trek for me isn't just nostalgia—I rewatched them all [except Enterprise] within the last 5 years), and this certainly is watchable, but I'm unconvinced that it's good. Really strong cast; middling writing; weak aesthetic (so blue! the camera doesn't like it, my eyes don't like, it makes the universe so samey). & I feel like the desire to create a stronger, darker overarching story is not new to the Trek universe—is in fact DS9, and they should take pointers from it re: how to pace episodic and overarching. Also the Klingons are very bad. I dig that they speak in Klingon, but it's so slow & phonetic as to be glaring, and, again: work to bring depth to this race has been done! they should build on it, not undermine it! Discovery is fine and I don't regret that it exists, but it's not good, and I want good.

Moana, film, 2016, Disney
Came for Accessible Disney Emotions; largely received them. It's interesting the way that gender/racial choices reinvigorate traditional heroic quest arcs—because this is extremely by-the-book, but feels empowering rather than redundant; Moana's personal growth and the way it ripples out to supporting characters and the resolution is extremely satisfying. Interesting musical choices: when they started a song about coconuts I was underwhelmed, but there's—

(Now imagine a pause while I check Google to see if anyone else has made a link between the lyrical evolution/reiteration of Moana's "I want" song and the unique lyrical style of Hamilton, and then I discover that Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote that song, and that the link isn't influential but direct. I sincerely didn't know he was involved with this movie.)

—there's a beautiful lyrical evolution/reiteration in that main theme which is reminiscent of the self-referential wordplay of Hamilton; it's clever, and substantial enough to carry the film's emotional thrust. But while the denouement is fantastic, the resolution is flat, and that's all due to the design of Te Fiti—there's a dozen ways to conceptualize nature-as-humanoid/-goddess which is more evocative and less "vaguely fuzzy giant green lady" (even the willow tree in Pocahontas was better!), and what's rendered here undermines that final emotional resolution. I also hate the water tentacle—the hair is amazing! the natural water is beautiful! there are some great renders in this, but the nondescript water tentacle that shakes its head isn't one of them. Also: I sincerely don't get why anyone cared about the chicken, and the grandmother is one of the best characters I've ever seen and I both want to know her and want to be her, someday. I found this more successful than not, but the ending missteps.

Closet Monster, film, 2015, dir. Stephen Dunn
This is really good. It perfectly bridges its surreal/imaginative/symbolic aspects to its concrete events. It's sincere, convincing, compelling; accessible but also private; heartbreaking but cathartic, without being exploitative or simplistic. (The way it depicts violence is particularly successful, cutting away/using discretion shots in a way that simultaneously preserves tension, confers respect, and still conveys trauma). There are flaws (the hamster is heavy-handed; the final scenes too idyllic), but I'm sincerely impressed by what it achieves.

The Levelling, film, 2016, dir. Hope Dickson Leach
If I had thought about it, perhaps "vet student from a farming family" and "family trauma post-suicide" was not an ideal combination for me, in particular; but I didn't think about it, and did watch this through, and it was vaguely unlikable, if only for slipping "forgive and reunite with you abusive family members" in there at the end. I do this a disservice: the interstitial shots of an English countryside caught between the idyllic and the eerie and the muddy mundane, and the localized loss in the wake of a suicide, are effectively staged; the whole weight of the film rests on Kendrick's shoulders, and she can bear it. But it is absolutely about how awful suicide is for the survivors, and about forgiving/healing past familial abuse, and using violence against animals/the farming industry as psychological manipulation and metaphor: all tropes I deeply despise and shouldn't've put myself through.

American Fable, film, 2016, dir. Anne Hamilton
Honestly, pretty awful. There's an interesting story here, about poor rural white America's interaction with—well, Jewish bankers, the boogeyman of Jewish wealth, economic antisemitism and both sides of economic anxiety; you can't cast an identifiably Jewish person in the role of "wealthy man buying up farmland who is kidnapped and tortured by farmers" and then not address the Jewish issue—it creates a Jewish narrative in absentia and I have no idea: is that intended? is it just really poorly executed? is it just because of Schiff's casting? It doesn't particularly matter as the rest of the movie is forgettable, hamfisted plot development and campy horror pacing, with a beautiful setting, promising but undeveloped imagery, and some decent acting from Kennedy and Schiff that has no particular payoff.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, film, 2016, dir. Oz Perkins
I thought I would like this; I really did like this. April Wolfe of The Village Voice described it as "the most atmospherically faithful adaptation ever of a Shirley Jackson book that never existed" (thanks, Wikipedia)—and it's no Shirley Jackson, but it does have that feel to it: a strong sense of place and costume and set design, an investigation into women within gothic archetypes (and women's life as gothic) which isn't hugely robust but is largely successful, some gentle queer subtext, a plot which isn't hugely complicated but which does clever things with narration, and a really satisfying tone. It wasn't objectively perfect, but I wanted it to never end; I wanted those empty rooms and facile but appealing metaphors and mustard accents to last forever.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, film, 2016, dir. David Yates
Going into this already inundated by criticism helped, because it allowed me to recognize the problematic bits, know they had been engaged, and not sorry over them so much that ruined the rest of the experience. (That said: where are the Jews in this New York & cast of Jewish surnames?) I thought this was decent. I liked the characters, and thought the effects were charming; the conflicts, both overarching and localized "where to find them" plot, are less successful—predictably paced and too disconnected from one another. The worldbuilding falls somewhere in between: there's a fantastic sense of place but the adaptation of wizard culture is clumsy; the magical beasts could add such new life to the world! but their magical characteristics are gimmicks, and their behavior is subservient and anthropomorphized, which undermines ... everything, really. Ultimately, this provided what I came for, that Harry Potter-film escapism composed of rich visual aesthetic, larger than life characters, and just enough underlying emotional subtlety; but it wasn't great.

How to Get Away With Murder, season 3, 2016-2017
If this series is The Secret History of procedurals—the push/pull of exaggerated, idealized academia and intimacy set against the social breakdown fostered by secrets and murder—then this is the season of consequences, of the trickle up to Keating's career. I didn't know my respect of Viola Davis could grow more profound, but it has—she does an outstanding job of portraying a complex mix of vulnerability and strength. The plot elsewise is okay—the danger in a series with this premise is that it can grow too convoluted, undermining and/or overlooking previous events while chasing the next cliffhanger; but the way that things fall out, the in-fighting, the effect on extended cast, the hints of underlying intimacy (especially in Michaela's apartment!), use previous events to good advantage. I enjoyed this a lot.

Frailty, film, 2002, dir. Bill Paxton
This would have been a significantly better story given: 1) no twist ending—the twist is exceptionally predictable and could have even been written in, but wasn't, and as is it serves only to undermine the potential character study of brainwashing/abuse/delusion, 2) better acting—it's a small cast, and there's a huge burden on the child actors, and no one can stand up to it (Bill Paxton in particular has some cringe-worthy acting in high-value scenes), 3) better effects ... I didn't discover until this writing that this came out in 2002! I thought it was older ... the corny effects combine with the so-so acting to undermine the premise, to turn it from compelling and unsettling to a gimmick. Nice idea, but skip this one.

Tag, film, 2015, dir. Sion Sono
What a weird film! It's almost successful, mostly on account of the acting and because, in broad strokes, the feminist themes work: an intimate relationship between women, fighting the nightmare of gendered social expectations. The tone is certainly remarkable, if not successful: grindhouse meets arthouse, strange and humorous gratuitous violence played against surreal reoccurring imagery and dream logic. But here's the thing: it engages in an awful lot of objectification despite the feminist subtext, and the reveal is a bit of a mess, a lot of an anticlimax, and isn't awfully empowering. This is no Sucker Punch, but sometimes resembles one.

Sense8, season 2, 2017
I forgot, until viewing the S1 summary, how much of this show is ridiculously contrived action sequences, the motivations for which I'd largely forgotten—and few of which really matter because, as the summary reinforces, the heart of this show is 25% speculative concept/plot and 75% queer orgy found family feels. And I really love those precise feels, and I'm mad about the circumstances behind the show's cancelation for precisely this reason: it's so id, so gay, and there's not much else that does what it does—I want it to set president, not be quietly erased. I don't have a lot of feelings about plotting vs. interpersonal in this season (I don't, frankly, think it improved remarkably over the previous season), but I found it so engaging, as always: I love these characters, the film techniques, the voice and style; it's a consistent pleasure.

Dig Two Graves, film, 2014, dir. Hunter Adams
Phenomenal sense of time and place; a ... mixed handling of racial issues: uses g*psy slur, but it's period-appropriate; it acknowledges racism and its consequences, but also capitalizes on stereotypes for aesthetic and plot purposes. I have a lot of mixed feelings, here. It pushes the hell out of my Southern gothic aesthetic buttons, and I love the initial setup, the haunting use of liminality. But some of the "magic" evoked is pretty corny (as well as fulfilling racist stereotypes), and as the narrative progresses—spoiler spoiler spoiler warning—and everything is given mundane explanations ... mundanity makes for a tricky reveal: it's innately underwhelming, despite the substantial themes and the title drop. I liked this, and wanted to like it more, but kept running into caveats.