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Things I Liked 2024
Things I Liked 2024
Another unsorted list of things from this year.
Health and happiness to you and yours in 2025.
-MJG
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Heartbreakingly soft, with some real gut punch lyricism, Big Thief frontwoman’s solo album release of the year is packed with some great songwriting. Songs about love, death, heartbreak, all set to sometimes haunting sometimes jaunty folk tunes.
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Mk.gee’s sound is hard to define, which is partly what drew myself (and many others, I’m sure) into the debut album. Super distorted guitars, synth pad ambient spaces, programmed drums, influences that one can hear range from Frank Ocean to Prince to Grouper to Hendrix. Inventive guitar playing, muted and garbled catchy lyrics, and an ethos and aesthetic shrouded in mystery.
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The first big release from Lenderman didn’t grab me, but after hearing him on the Waxahatchee single Right Back To It, this year’s album stuck with me. Lyrics that get stuck in your brain for days on end (“I’ve got a houseboat parked at the himbo-dome”) and some slick guitar work and songwriting that give you just enough to keep your ear’s attention but not something totally unfamiliar. Folk-rock-Americana ain’t dead yet.
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Apparently this one was pretty divisive, among friends and critics alike. I point the fault partly at the marketing and trailers for the movie, which made it out to be a Call of Duty/Saving Private Ryan-esque war flick set against our divided political status as a country. This movie is not that. It is a study of the role of the media and journalism, and individual journalists, in conflict zones, politics, and the rise of violent fascism. The film punches up and down at legacy media and makes room for interpretation. Watching it mid-day, in IMAX, with too much coffee in me nearly fried my nerves. The film builds tension for long stretches of time counterpointed with some (sometimes off putting or oddly timed) needle drops, beautiful cinematography to couch some otherwise upsetting content within.
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On a recommendation from a friend, I borrowed her copy of Hyperion, a 1989 multi-award winning sci-fi novel and was through it in about a week. A Canterbury Tales story of space pilgrims on their way to a death cult shrine on a mysterious planet, a story of time travel, Jewish mysticism, space battles, and intergalactic politics. The second book in the series, The Fall of Hyperion, is told in a more traditional format, but tackles much of the same themes. My only fault is a chapter/section in each that becomes unnecessarily horny, but hey that’s 80’s/90’s sci-fi for ya…
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(Left, shot with native iOS camera and right, shot with Halide on “Process Zero” mode)
I spent the last few months experimenting with Halide, a camera app that earlier in the year added a feature (or more accurately, a mode) called Process Zero, which in effect removes all the post-processing computational photography stuff Apple has spent likely millions of dollars and man hours alike creating and perfecting in the latest iPhones. Basically, I can use my iPhone camera the way I really found my way to digital photography all those years ago with a Canon PowerShot camera somethingoranother. The images no longer try to push highlights and lowlights, creating a near HDR effect, colors stay more true to what you see with your eyes, and you have a bit more fine control over the focus, white balance, and exposure settings that are otherwise hidden from you. If you know your way around manual camera controls, it is at least worth trying out to see how it allows you to reutilize your most accessible camera.
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I wrote in my wrap up last year that Bluesky was “still finding its legs,” and now I think most would say that it has firmly arrived. Though, to be sure, it is not a “new Twitter,” but maybe thats for the best? The election this year saw another spike in folks leaving Twitter and a nearly equal spike in signups for Bluesky. Twitter being temporarily banned in Brazil also saw another huge active internet contingent join the platform. Just recently, it felt like for the first time I was able to follow a breaking news moment (the South Korean near-coup and martial law declaration) live on the platform, from people, politicians, and reporters on the ground, with photos and videos. It is still not the all-in-one Twitter replacement but it has become my most checked/used social media platform.
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Cafe Music
After kicking the idea around for a while during visits to the various “listening bars”, “hi fi bars”, and other watering holes with big sound systems, my friend Elliott and I decided to try our hand at hosting our own more idealized version of what a night of active listening might look like. Each night has included a selector picking three albums, to be listened to in full, with a theme or notes on how they relate or what to listen for included. Some snacks or lite bites, some beer and wine. Nothing crazy. We’ve held three so far with more in the works, but it was a relief to see that not only were people interested in what we had to offer but that we’ve hit capacity on each event so far. It feels very good to bring a group of folks together for a more “adult” night out, finding like minded folks commingling over shared deep interests in music and production.
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Look, you do in fact have to hand it to them. What started as a joke post on Bluesky (see mention above, it has the juice), led to now CEO of The Onion, former NBC reporter Ben Collins working to team up with Everytown for Gun Safety and the parents of those who were killed at Sandy Hook to buy Infowars out of bankruptcy. In the midst of a year of bad news, global tragedy and genocide, and more right wing fascism, it felt really good to see a leftist satirist site really be able to get one over on notorious conspiracy nut and hate spewer Alex Jones.
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There is a genre of game called MOBAs, short for “Multiplayer Online Battle Arena” which is just all to say “you control a guy on a team and you click around a lot trying to defeat a team of other guys.” There are lanes, there are towers, there are “mobs,” there are “jungles.” I know these terms just from basic gamer cultural osmosis. League of Legends, the biggest MOBA in the world is, in turn, one of the biggest video games period (and cultural juggernaut among a certain demographic.) I had tried to get into these games years ago and bounced off them. Too much clicking, too toxic of a community, too many systems and metas to learn. Earlier this year, a friend in the gaming industry DM’d me on Discord to see if I wanted to check out a new thing they had some work involved in. I said sure, it was an invite to the then still secret game now quite publicly known as Deadlock. Taking the gameplay mechanics of a MOBA and applying them to a more traditional shooter instead of top-down clicking somehow made it work for me. That it was still early days and the community was small enough that sometimes there would not be enough players to start a match in the limited playtime windows meant that everyone was pretty civil in matches. Word got out quickly and the game, though still very much in a “private” beta, has been at the top of the charts for most of the year. Being able to play from the get go and roll with the many many balancing and feature changes the dev team is rolling out has made it an enjoyable game to pick up with some friends or just drop into solo matches for a bit.
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It does feel like we’re on the tail end of “peak TV” but the latest season of Industry felt like it had taken all the learnings of the shows that came before to craft a really great arc of episodes. The drama has, in many ways, left the trading floor of the fictional financial giant the show started with but has developed characters and conflicts that help it stay one of the smartest and sharpest cultural critiques around.
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I picked this up shortly after hearing of the passing of Steve Silberman. I’d recently spent a few hours listening to Steve talk with, and about, David Crosby while doing research for a writeup on Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name for the first Cafe Music event, so it was a bit of a gut punch to hear that someone whose voice was still fresh in my mind had left us. Skeleton Key, published in 1994, shows its age. Written as a dictionary and reference book, the authors are keen that you can just as easily read it front to back or as a Choose Your Own Adventure, hopping between linked definitions and terms. It goes deep, with interview snippets and quotes from the Dead and their extended network of businessmen, fans, musicians, and other extended heads, interspersed throughout. It pokes fun at its own culture, noting the tribal beefs (See: Toucheads) and traveling circus nature of “going on tour.” It is also filled with a true devotion to not just the band as figureheads, but the community around the band that has made the culture of deadheads such a lasting presence through to today.
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Dead Forever live at The Sphere
I have already written extensively on my trip to see Dead and Company at the Sphere. So have many others. I am not a gambler, I don’t particularly jump at the chance to go to Las Vegas, let alone in the middle of summer. We ended up in the middle of a heatwave with advisories to stay indoors. The day I am writing this, the band has announced they’re returning to Vegas early next year for a run of spring shows and I’m cajoling my friends into getting a group together to go again. As anti-Dolan-MSG-Entertainment as I want to be, the venue truly is something special and I’ll try not to miss a chance to go see (the current iteration of) one of my favorite bands play there.
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The Power Broker has always been one of those books I’ve seen people smarter than me talk about or reference in passing as a “must read.” Robert Caro’s tome on how Robert Moses then (and still) lasting effect on New York stands as the pinnacle of what a biographic book can be. My listening to 99% Invisible has waned over the years but for whatever reason, I downloaded and listened to the first episode of this book club they were launching, featuring some pretty great and remarkable guest hosts along the way. I still have not actually read the book, for what it's worth, but it was still enjoyable to listen along and get a sense of the overall arcs, and the work Caro put into the reporting of Moses’ life, along the way.
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It's hard for me to find a way into another jam band, to be honest. I spend a lot of time combing through Dead recordings as is. I dipped my toe in and out of the Goose catalog a few times, going through official releases as well as a few standout shows (as they put out almost every show on Bandcamp, usually within two or three days) on the recommendation of friends. As with all bands of their ilk, the common refrain is “oh you’ve really gotta see ‘em live!” And so, when the chance came up for some free tickets to go catch them on tour at Forest Hills earlier this year, I took it. They sounded pretty good, bordering on great. What dragged it down for me was the audience and fanbase that they’ve seemed to attract. What at Dead shows are now pointed to as “Co. Bros”, partying fratty types who, with tall boys or smuggled alcohol (or both) in hand, aren’t really there to see the band, but instead just to “have a bitchin’ time.” There was a guy basically right in front of me who spent most of the show trying to watch a live UFC fight on his phone, couldn’t get good enough service to do so, and instead watched the fight through clips on Twitter, all during the show. Anyway, the band has continued to get the co-sign of basically every jam/-adjacent act out there, and their prolific output of live shows continues to impress. I don’t know if I’ll go running to the next stop near New York that I’m around for, but will at the least keep up with any standout shows as people in my heady corner of the internet call them out.
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What a truly delightful little game. You control a little blob, you are dropped into the titular Animal Well with little direction. From there, the game becomes a bit tricky to talk about without spoiling things. It is in the style of old Metroid games, you can’t access everywhere yet until you find some more tools that help you access a new area where you can unlock a new tool… The game plays with expectations and stacking of abilities in a fun way. The game itself is really more of a big puzzle made out of smaller puzzles. More than once I’d hit my head against a puzzle, leave that area, stumble into an entirely new thing that suddenly makes the previous puzzle click, figuring out a new mechanic or trick. There was more for me to do and discover in the post-endgame state but after “beating” the main game I was satisfied. Worthy to pick up if you’re looking for something to keep you busy this holiday season.
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It’s hard to talk about ambient music without sounding a little… woo-woo? I don’t know. Sinephro is a producer, composer, and performer, who’s latest release Endless is treated as one continuous track. 45 minutes split up into different numbered “Continuums.” Organ, strings, synths, piano, samples, loops, however the album leans more towards jazz than the purely ambient soundscapes of the previous release Space 1.8. Extremely blissed out, and more approachable than some other new ambient releases, I found myself returning to Endless for getting work or writing done, taking a walk in the morning, or winding down for the evening.
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Ok, so to get it out of the way, Balatro is my game of the year. I sunk hours and hours into it on Switch ahead of it coming out on iOS and being added to Apple Arcade, where I’ve sunk countless hours again into the game (even though it meant I’d have to unlock everything all over again.) A few years back I wrote about Neon White, which the developer had described as “a game for sickos.” I think the same applies for Balatro. It is a roguelike deck builder, meaning no two plays will be exactly alike and that you will over time unlock things that make runs more varied and in some cases easier. The scoring and progress is based on poker hands, (pair, two pair, full house, flush, straight, etc.) The game then throws in joker cards, which you can purchase in between rounds, that can add to your score. Some jokers give you an extra hand per round, others add multipliers to your score, others affect other jokers or specific suits or types of cards. If you are the type of person who plays games and likes to see the numbers go up, Balatro is a game for you. It is a finely tuned puzzle game that, due to its randomness, is endlessly replayable.
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I caught a screening at Angelika with a few friends who had a spare ticket and walked in knowing next to nothing about this movie save for that the director's last film prior, We’re All Going to the World's Fair, had been described as deeply unsettling and intense. I Saw The TV Glow is a deeply beautiful analogy for understanding one’s self and how we find our communities and outlets through fandom. It also has some unsettling scenes, but on the whole should not be shied away from if you are, like me, not into horror movies.
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One of those TV shows that feels like it was formulaically developed: a historical drama set in Edo period Japan with a dark comedic relief bend. The show is expertly written and cast, quickly drops you into its semi-fictionalized universe, and keeps the action going balanced with enough political intrigue and surprise twists to keep things interesting. Well worth a binge watch if you find yourself with downtime this holiday season.
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I was surprised so many people vocally disliked this movie! I did not go into it expecting some large existential masterpiece of self reflection from Coppola. It is self indulgent, it is funny, it is bizarre (veering on camp.) There are some… odd performances and moments (“Go back to the club”) but overall I think the film (which, one day, should be adapted as a great stage play in my opinion), covers a lot of interesting ground. Through Greek tragedy and Roman epic lenses, it questions what greatness might cost, what art means in America, and how art is treated by those (politicians) in power. It kind of misses the point on most of those themes, but it does at least attempt to look at them, which is something. Its raw spectacle is worth sitting through the film alone, in my opinion.
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It now seems clear that perhaps nobody could have returned to Dune on screen without Villeneuve attached. The second part of the Dune saga took the visual and directorial style of the first film and amped it up even further, to great success. Action sequences look slick, cinematography expertly feels alien but familiar, and further strong casting choices make for some great performances (even if just for a few scenes.)
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“A podcast for and about the internet” is an apt tagline for the show that, with rare exception, feels like a fresh take on internet culture for me, someone who is professionally logged on. Bringing in experts, academics, and first person accounts of what is going on online and how it affects us, our politics, and the world from a group of producers and hosts who you can tell truly care about the state of the web makes for a good and informative listen. Highly recommend following along as the show enters its second year on what I hope is financially stable footing.