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?

In 2022, I reread 57 books. Below are not 57 reread notes: some I hadn't previously reviewed, so they got "real" reviews instead; some, mostly the manga, are multi-volume series; a few are simply here unaccounted for. I like to chart my rereads, my changing relationship with texts ... but rereads are also an escape from the self-imposed responsibility of a cogent review, and over this long, busy year of not wanting to communicate, I took the occasional break and just ... didn't record anything.

That's okay. It was still a year of phenomenal rereads, and I still plan to prioritize rereads for the indefinite future. Honestly, one of my new favorite parts of the reading process is when I slide a book directly from my To Be Read list and on to my To Be Reread list. Past-me has great taste in my favorite books.

These appear in order read.


( Alternate Realities, C.J. Cherryh )

( Imperial Radch series, Ann Leckie )

( Bloodchild and Other Stories, Octavia Butler )

( Tokyo Babylon and X, CLAMP )

( Amatka, Karin Tidbeck )

( Black Iris, Elliot Wake )

( Strange Grace, Tessa Gratton )

( A Deadly Education, Naomi Novik )

( A Phantom Lover, Vernon Lee )

( Piranesi, Susanna Clarke )

As with 2020, I really meant to post this in batches or at least quarters, or halves; and really did not. I reread 60+ books, so I assumed there was a lot missing from this list—but it turns out that the other rereads were books I'd never reviewed before, so they ended up folded up in my normal reviews. The only exception is: elisions/groupings mentioned below; Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Spell Sword/The Forbidden Tower, because I'm not up to unpacking the whether/how of separating the work from this author; and a lot of toki pona texts that I reread in whole or in part.

The obvious trend in 2021 rereads was comfort reads. Sometimes I reread to see how my reading of a book has changed; these I reread because I already knew I loved them, for their energy or for one specific trope or for their unusually intimate relationship/poly dynamics/queer coding. I wrote about this here:

Surprising no one that's ever talked to me, the vast majority of my comfort rereads are "chewy, indulgent, weird interpersonal dynamics, probably with some sort of strong atmosphere." [...] Basically anything that hits the overlap of unusually intimate relationship + favorite is something I've reread or will reread. It's hands down my favorite ... trope? genre? defining characteristic, and id-fic that I've read before has already been vetted for (subjective) quality so I can switch off my analytical brain. It makes for guaranteed absorbing escapism—like a daydream, but better.

That was 2021 in a nutshell, and so help me if I don't want to do the same for 2022.


( Silently and Very Fast, Catherynne M. Valente )

( Alphabet of Thorn, Patricia A. McKillip )

( The Tea Dragon Society, Kay O'Neill  )

( Dreadful Skin, Cherie Priest )

( The Summer Prince, Alaya Dawn Johnson )

( A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick )

( Dust, Elizabeth Bear )

( Chill, Elizabeth Bear )

( Grail, Elizabeth Bear )

( Grass, Sheri S. Tepper )

( Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer )

( Dracula, Bram Stoker )

( The Vampyre, John Polidori )

( Ghosts in the House!, Kazuno Kohara )

( Coraline, Neil Gaiman )

( Hemlock Grove, Brian McGreevey )

( Lives of the Monster Dogs, Kirsten Bakis )

( Red Dragon, Thomas Harris )

( Xenogensis series and Fledgling, Octavia Butler )

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.

Late to the bandwagon, but this is my wander though James Davis Nicoll's 100 SF/F Books You Should Consider Reading in the New Year.

Some thoughts: A great number of women! Otherwise the diversity is pretty standard, at least within the realms of what I read/circles I follow. Nicoll has more tolerance/love for well-intended early SF/F and the way it influenced the genre. Laudable! I do this for tropes I care about! but I can't and wouldn't want to do it this generally, probably because I don't like most genre tropes. Very little that was entirely new to me is an immediate must-read, complicated by the fact that the library doesn't have most of them in ebook. That said, where we overlap on slightly quieter/more obscure SF/F, like "obscure Cherryh" and "obscure Giffith" and "Elizabeth Lynn <3," is delightful. I suppose my standards for more obscure things still work seeking out is, predictably, arbitrary.

Not for me a profoundly useful list, but a fun one, particularly as a meme.


Bold = read it. (37)
Underlined = read something else by the author and/or on TBR. (46)
Strikethrough = no, ty. (8)
* = I may add this to my TBR because of this list. (13)

( The list )

I fell down a rabbithole that began with "crosspost my Corpse Party liveblog from Tumblr" and ended somewhere around "crosspost everything of substance that I've ever written." Some of these were added to old posts, including archiving favorite quotes alongside reviews; the rest were posted directly to my DW (not to reading pages). Some highlights include:

Interpersonal relationships, trauma, hurt comfort, and socio-political commentary in CJ Cherryh

A recommended list of recommendations lists (of books)

On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, particularly OT3 feels

"Apocalypse" in The Path (some of these posts are super old, ergo poorly written; I also like to reference my own essays like the big loser that I am. they're important writing, to me)

AI, bond animals, and the relationship between technology and projection

A lot of feelings about Deep Space 9

How to write fourth-wall-breaking meta game narratives

Too many things about books, featuring mental illness as plot twist and James Tiptree Jr. and Joanna Russ

Cosmic horror in Mass Effect and breaking down the divine in Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

The optimism of Dark Souls's pessimism

In further blogkeeping, I'm tempted to add by-author tags; an intimidating prospect because I have a lot of backlog and when I set out to organize, I tend to be exhaustive in it (although if that's the case, I should probably also update links on my list of book reviews which I ... very much have not done). This is a project I will schedule for another time, because there's a lot of projects right now:

Yuletide releases! Flight Rising's Night of the Nocturne, which is yearly my favorite festival and which this year has fantastic apparel. (Speculating the day before it started, I told Devon I hoped it was something with ornate jewelry—and then we got exactly that, with bonus! semi-transparent, layer-able pieces.) Overwatch """holidays"""" event, which has still yet to give me either of the skins I want! I & my overtasked wrists are busy enough.


Christmas was about as hard as I should have expected, had I thought about it in advance. My dad's birthday was the 21st; they did a friends-of-the-family get together thing, very casual, a sort of mini-wake I suppose; I didn't get an invite, but more because they knew I didn't want to attend wake-like things than because I was forgotten. Mum & Allie & Devon & I did homemade pizza Christmas evening, which is the traditional family event food, but this was the first time making it entirely without Dad there. It went fine, and panicking while practicing a skill for the first time counterbalanced the mourning and sense of absence to relative neutrality.

But Dad always liked Christmas as a family event, and his absence was noted. And as I recoil more and more from Christmas in this, our era of cultural Christianity and fascism, while I come to terms with which experienced I've granted/denied, and why, I make Christmas increasingly non-joyful—but I still have cultural expectations that it's supposed to be joyful and that if it's not, it's because something is Wrong. Things are wrong! things are very wrong, on multiple axes, only some of which are "because I'm being sort of silly about it." And it's made a season already prone to melancholy and navel-gazing that much more so.

A pity, too, because winter in itself is as always fantastic. I love autumn, but appreciate almost as much the apparent-endlessness of winter's cold, the constant sound of rain, the want (human-body and cat-body alike) for blankets and snuggling, the cold walks and cold fingers, the excuse to live in my ragged hoodie. This year I've managed even managed to pick up winter-set reading in the appropriate season! So Christmas is as always is problematic, but there's always the long cold of January.

I've recently run into a lot of stories about robots, androids, and artificial intelligence, an umbrella of tropes in which I am ridiculously invested. Here's a few of them, with thoughts about how they explore the trope. Lots of them are short form and super accessible!



"Everyone Will Want One," Kelly Sandoval
Young woman unable to successfully socialize with her peers is given an intelligent artificial pet that analyses socialization and prompts her to act in personally beneficial ways. There's a lot going on here: social normativity (with a sidenote of neuroatypicality), toxic socialization, companion animal tropes, the effect of social media and technology on socialization, and a bit of a cop-out ending; but it's a ridiculously effective combination of companion animal and personal assistant AI feels.

"Eros, Philia, Agape," Rachel Swirsky
Woman purchases an AI companion with malleable programming which is able to adapt itself to her desires as it matures; falls in love with the AI, and gives him the ability to control is own maturation. Intelligent sex robot involved in mundane family drama is well-intended but not always successful—the erstwhile normalcy, while set up as intentional contrast, is so normal as to be boring. But! these AI brains! they're brilliantly imagined. Toggleable malleability is a lovely speculative concept: relatable enough to function as commentary, alien enough to be mind-broadening; the formation and ownership of consciousness is taken to some unexpected places.

"For Want of a Nail," Mary Robinette Kowal
A small technical difficulty with a family's recordkeeper AI snowballs into a family drama. This AI isn't conceptually groundbreaking, but it's so well integrated, from the archaic search for a hardwire to the internet-outage-writ-large metaphor of unconscious dependency. This AI is simultaneously viewed as human and machine, both by character and narrative, and the violation and unreliability of programmable consciousness is at the core of the story.

"Ode to Katan Amano," Caitlín R. Kiernan
Summary is effectively a spoiler, oops oh well: An android in an abusive relationship with a human explores a similar power differential with a life-size doll. The sliding scale from subservient entity to autonomous intelligence is what makes AI so compelling, both as thought experiment and wish-fulfillment—like companion animals, they are intriguing because they have the potential to be the perfect companion, slightly less than us, created for our use; but they carry the threat of sapience. (I've discussed this conflict before.) Kiernan's story is a pointed look at the power imbalance of manufactured companionship; it's intimate and unsettling.

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie [future Juu: and sequels!]
Previously a ship with dozens of subsets and hundreds of potential physical bodies, able to interact independently but forming a cohesive conscious whole, this AI is now reduced to a single human-bodied instance. This is one of the most mind-broadening AI I've encountered, literally: to learn to think laterally, to engage the multi-instanced, tiered-but-united, pseudo-omniscient first person narrative, is a rewarding bit of mental gymnastics. It raises questions of identity and then integrates them into the plot: which level or aspect of a multi-instanced entity is "self"? Is self ever static, ever united, regardless of form?

Wolf 359, Gabriel Urbina
Hera is simultaneously a personality, part of the crew, and a piece of technology, inseparable from the ship as physical object. She's a restricted omnipresence, programmed for availability, vulnerable to physical tampering and injected code; the show's emphasis on communication and interpersonal relations gives voice to that experience. 1.11 "Am I Alone Now?" is one of my favorite first person AI narratives (and reminiscent of the honestly in Cortana's disintegration in Halo 4): "It's so funny when you ask if I can hear you. Every single time. I don't think you've ever fully understood that I hear everything." Her voice gives her personhood, a personhood which her crewmates value and fight to defend.