Things I enjoyed in 2024

I suppose it’s natural to look back at January from the perspective of December and feel you’re looking at something from ages ago, like a dream or another life. 2024 was a packed year, full of change and unexpected surprises of every variety.

A ton of this year was positive, especially the stuff having to do with my son. He graduated pre-k and started kindergarten; he played his first team sport (basketball); he’s grown in every way, and he’s the source of a great deal of the good things the year brought (even if parenting is also the source of many of the year’s challenges).

We got to know our neighbors better. We’ve met lots of new people since our kid started school, and it feels like we’re starting to develop a little bit of a social network for the first time since moving to Kansas City two years ago. (Or at least, our kid is, and we’re tagging along.)

Thanks to kindergarten, my wife and I have been able to resume going to the gym on a regular basis (a habit that had been decimated by the 1-2 punch of our son being born followed by the pandemic), and that’s been a major positive change. I was generally healthier this year, and felt that change mentally as well.

Work-wise, I got the opportunity to travel to both San Diego and Dublin on work trips, and took part in launching a lot of cool projects. In my first full year at Deno, I helped to redesign, rebuild, and launch a new deno.com homepage twice; revamp most of the rest of the website; launch JSR; take on Oracle over the JavaScript trademark; remake the Deno Docs site; and—probably biggest of all—released Deno 2.0.

At the same time, though, 2024 brought a lot of personal challenges. This list is meant to be positive, so I won’t dwell on the parts of the year that weren’t. Still, I have mixed feelings on my year, and it would be disingenuous to ignore that.

There were losses, setbacks, and closed doors. Some of those challenges are in the “done” column; some might not ever move out of the “in progress” column. Some are ultimately trivial (like incompetent contractors—if you live in the Kansas City area, I’ve got a fencing company to avoid at all costs); some are more deeply personal. Among other things, my wife lost her grandpa this year, and I lost a respected and admired friend.

I have a good life. Better than good. Still, I feel like I’m just barely keeping my head above water a lot of days.

You’re going to see a lot of video games on the list below. It’s quite possible this was my most gaming-heavy year ever. That’s because I was frankly in a slump; with everything else going on, I rarely found my motivation this year.

I didn’t create as much in 2024, and while I regret that, I don’t know that I could’ve done anything about it, either. It’s just something I had to work through, I think. I hit a long dry spell with blogging, and although I tinkered with side projects on and off, I never really found one I wanted to stick with. If it weren’t for WordPress drama and the election, this would be my first blog post in over half a year.

But, I say all this only to acknowledge it. The year held many bright spots for me, and I’d like to spend the rest of this post talking about those, from the trivial to the meaningful, and everything in between.

Gaming

Things I played and loved this year in the world of video games include the following…

Balatro

Balatro has, at this point, become my most-played game ever. I put in over 300 hours of Balatro this year. While most of that time was on Switch, I also played on Steam and mobile (where it’s actually surprisingly good, i.e., dangerously distracting).

Balatro (latin for “jester,” and no, nobody else knows how to pronounce it either, so just pick a way) is an unbelievably fun roguelike deckbuilder. But in case those words don’t mean anything to you: Balatro could accurately be described as poker solitaire.

That is: you play with a standard four-suit, 52-card deck, and use limited discards and redraws to assemble poker hands, in order to score ever-increasing amounts of points. The more difficult the hand is to make, the more points it’s worth, naturally (e.g., four of a kind is worth far more than a pair). The game is nothing like poker aside from the hands, however; there’s no betting or bluffing, and you’re only playing against yourself, really, to score the required number of points per round. Like I said: almost a kind of solitaire.

The fun comes in with the jokers: each of the game’s 150 joker cards act as a permanent power-up that adds a twist to the game’s rules. Some impact cards of certain suit(s); some give bonuses for certain hands or play styles (and possibly penalties for others); some have wild, game-breaking effects, like multiplying your score, growing more powerful over time, or altering your deck. You can generally have five active jokers at a time, which makes this a game about assembling the perfect combo and watching it go off like a satisfying Rube Goldberg machine. There are lots of other ways to alter the rules and the deck, too, so you’re constantly making interesting, strategic decisions in this game.

You “win” at a certain point, but if you like, you can keep going just to see how far the point-scoring machine you’ve assembled can go. Either way, eventually you’ll hit a number that’s too big to reach, and you’ll start the whole thing all over again—possibly unlocking some new jokers for next time.

It’s difficult to describe how weirdly fun Balatro is, but trust me: you should play it. (Just maybe not as much as I do.)

Animal Well

My first playthrough of Animal Well, I made the mistake of thinking I’d mostly done all there was to do, and put the game down with a contented but underwhelmed shrug.

I thought I’d just finished a short but interesting Metroidvania, and I stopped. But I misjudged Animal Well severely.

You play as a cute little blob-like thingy, just trying to find its way through a mysterious and beautiful retro world chock-full of various kinds of animals (some friendly, some not), with the help of fun items you gradually discover, like a yo-yo, frisbee, slinky, and bubble wand. Each item has multiple uses, and allows you to explore new parts of the world, until you eventually reach the “final boss.”

That’s Animal Well at first glance, and you could finish that first round of it and be left with a perfectly satisfying (if somewhat short) Metroidvania experience.

The genius of Animal Well, however, lies in what happens after you finish the game: you’re dropped right back into it. And this is where I made my mistake.

As in its obvious inspirations Fez and Tunic, you can complete the main goal in Animal Well without ever discovering everything the world has to offer. The map is full of easily missed riddles and surprises, and there’s a whole second goal of the game after you beat the game’s so-called final boss the first time. Follow far enough down the rabbit hole (that is: collect all 64 of the eggs cleverly hidden throughout the map), by unraveling many of the game’s harder puzzles, and you’ll eventually reach the “true” ending. (And if that’s not enough for you, there are even deeper and more deviously cryptic puzzles quietly waiting, but most players probably won’t be compelled to go quite that Pepe Silvia.)

It’s got some rough edges here and there, and it might not be for everyone. But if you’re at all a fan of games that which drop you into a world full of clues to puzzle over and assemble yourself—what does this item do? Why is that animal moving like that? Am I supposed to know what this inscription on the wall is for?—you owe it to yourself to try uncovering Animal Well’s secrets.

Neva

Neva is a bit like if Studio Ghibli made an interactive silent film about a girl and her pet.

The story is beautifully told without any words at all: you play as Alba, a young woman who rescues an orphaned, dog-like magical creature named Neva. The story follows the pair as they survive and travel together through Neva’s strikingly gorgeous world, which is under siege by a mysterious dark energy that took Neva’s mother. The narrative unfolds in four discrete chapters, one for each season of their first year together.

As the seasons change, Neva also changes. As Neva grows, so do her abilities, often in completely unexpected ways. The pair’s relationship—and how they tackle the challenges in front of them—continuously evolves as the game progresses, and you can’t help but feel for both of them as you guide their journey.

You could call it a game about survival, or redemption, or a grand quest. But at its heart, Neva never stops being a story about the love between a girl and her pet companion. I gasped, I smiled, and I had tears in my eyes at least once or twice.

Neva isn’t a very long game—I think I finished it in around 4 hours (though there are some optional achievements after that)—but every minute hits perfectly. It’s like a brief but beautiful novel that you can’t stop reading; it will stay with you for much, much longer than the afternoon you spend together.

As I posted on Bluesky the moment I finished the game: if you are in possession of both a gaming system and a heart, you should play Neva.

Chants of Sennaar

Chants of Sennaar is more of a pure puzzle game than Animal Well, and probably more accessible as well. Its riddles are more straightforward, and most of the game’s challenge is mental. In fact, it’s pretty close to being a point-and-click, or a Myst-like.

In Chants, you navigate a massive Babel-like tower/city, where all the inhabitants speak in inscrutable runes. Your job, with the help of a trusty notebook, is to decipher what each rune means, so you can understand the lexical rules of the language, and in turn, the people and signs of the level, in order to solve puzzles and progress.

There are five levels in the tower, each with its own unique class of inhabitants who have their own language. Each language has its own runes and syntax. So once you’ve gotten one floor’s language figured out, you start another, slightly more complex language, until eventually you reach the top of the tower. It might sound academic, but it’s engaging and highly rewarding to put together the clues of each language, and have that “ah-ha!” moment of finally understanding what that thing you’ve been staring at actually means.

Chants has some flaws; there’s a lot of backtracking, and the game’s occasional stealth sequences, though forgiving, can also be tedious. But it’s another intriguing puzzle game with a “good” ending waiting to be discovered for people who are willing to delve fully into solving its mysteries, and I found it to be the perfect blend of accessible, but satisfying and highly worthwhile.

(One note: you regularly type in this game to make notes for yourself. This wasn’t an issue for me in the Switch’s handheld mode, but it could be cumbersome docked, or on any other standard console without a keyboard or touchscreen.)

Arranger

Arranger, which bills itself as “a role-puzzling adventure,” is a short but delightful puzzle game built on a mind-blowingly simple premise: what if, instead of your hero moving around the world, the world moved around your hero?

It’s tough to explain, but: Arranger takes place on a grid. Whenever you move, you actually stay put as the ground turns into a conveyor belt that just shuffles you (and anything else on your row or column on the grid) over to the next spot.

This means moving around is really all you do (there’s no combat or other reflex-based gameplay to speak of), but you have to figure out what way to shift the world around to get obstacles out of your way, or occasionally, move an object so that it interacts with a static enemy blocking your path.

It’s a fresh new branch of Sokoban-style puzzles, and an ingeniously clever mechanic that makes up the core of the gameplay. Although the game introduces a number of interesting twists on the idea, there are far more possibilities than this brief adventure has time to fully explore.

It’s a short, highly accessible gem of a puzzle game, with memorable characters and story, plus some lovely hand-drawn artwork. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys puzzle games, or just a good story about a misfit who finds their place and saves the day. (There’s more depth to the ending than that, though, but I’ll let you discover it for yourself.)

Prince of Persia: the Lost Crown

I’ve never played any other game in the Prince of Persia series, but I picked up The Lost Crown up on a recommendation, and I’m glad I did. It’s a reboot of sorts—no previous serious knowledge required—and maybe the year’s best pure Metroidvania, with a huge world full of secrets to explore and interesting abilities to use and upgrade. You’re constantly finding new areas, and upgrading both your combat and movement abilities.

There’s a perfect blend of exploration, puzzle solving, and combat to be found here, and Sargon (the protagonist) moves through the world with satisfying speed and agility. The story and characters are memorable, and the parry-driven combat is top-notch, even though I found the late-game difficulty a bit frustrating. (In fairness, I was just trying to brute-force my way through to the end before Animal Well came out, though.)

There’s plenty to find, and lots of ways to customize both the hero and the gameplay to your personal preferences. If you’re at all a fan of the genre, this one’s well worth exploring, and I’ll likely replay it myself at some point in the future. I know I didn’t find nearly everything the world has to offer, and it would be a pleasure to explore it again.

Thank Goodness You’re Here!

From the publisher of Untitled Goose Game comes another silly game about running around and checking off tasks as a goofy protagonist, but this time in a northern English village full of offbeat weirdos.

Thank Goodness You’re Here! is legitimately the funniest game I’ve ever played. The dialogue, jokes, and quirky illustration style combine to create something like if Monty Python made Adult Swim cartoons loosely inspired by the idyllic village in Hot Fuzz (and featuring the voice talents of Matt Berry, among others).

It’s a short game that requires virtually no reflexes or other traditional gaming skills—all you actually do is move around and slap things until something happens—but when it does, it’s always funny. Almost more like a goofy interactive movie than a game, you could easily clear Thank Goodness You’re Here! in a couple of hours or so—but it’s still absolutely worth the journey. I was laughing at the game’s bizarre, hilarious absurdity the entire time.

The Plucky Squire

The Plucky Squire is a beautiful blend of heartwarming, nostalgic, and experimental. It’s a great family game, and one I would’ve gone absolutely nuts over when I was a kid (though I still enjoyed it as an adult).

The Plucky Squire takes place in a storybook, and plays like a classic top-down Zelda (the pages even turn when you enter a new area). That would be fine enough on its own, but early in the book, the hero, Jot, discovers he has the magical ability to leap out of the pages and explore the real world in full 3D. Jot might find items in the room to take back into the book with him, or he might solve puzzles by tilting the book’s pages to interact with the world in inventive ways, or jumping back in at a new position in the book.

The game also regularly changes up the action to pay homage to genre classics; you might play a Punch-Out!! style boxing match with a giant honey badger, tackle a side-scrolling shooter segment, or do battle with a Rock Band-like rhythm challenges, keeping things fresh and keeping you on your toes.

Story-wise, there’s a charming meta-narrative about the meaning of stories we love as kids, and the inspiration we can draw from them even after we’re grown. It’s nothing deep, but it’s hearteningly wholesome to watch Jot and his friends team up to tackle whatever’s in front of them, for the sake of the young book owner who’s also Jot’s biggest fan.

The game’s difficulty is a bit on the low side, and a lot of the game’s sequences, particularly early on, can be a little uninteresting because of it. But the memorable story and characters keep Plucky Squire afloat, and—trust me—the endgame payoff makes it all worthwhile. There’s a twist I didn’t see coming, and the final sequences tie together everything you’ve done so far in a highly satisfying way.

(Note: the Switch version has some pretty severe performance issues, particularly late in the game. It’s not bad enough I’d recommend avoiding the game, but do be prepared for some severe lag in places. If you can play on another platform, I’d recommend you do.)

Cocoon

Cocoon is from the lead gameplay designer of Limbo and INSIDE, so if you’re familiar with those games, you’ll find a similar puzzle-platformer formula here, albeit with some radical twists.

Cocoon takes place in 3D, for one thing, taking a top-down perspective across a series of surreal alien worlds.

But the twist at the heart of Cocoon is: all of the worlds you’ll explore are contained in small marble-like spheres. You jump into each sphere to “warp” into the world and do things there, and then jump back out to the outer hub world. You can carry spheres around to do things like unlock doors and solve puzzles, and that’s where things get interesting; each sphere also grants you a different ability while you’re carrying it around, so it’s a clever and challenging juggling act figuring out which sphere you need and how to get it where you need it (and an interesting mechanic, literally carrying part of the world map around with you).

On top of that, you can take spheres into other spheres, going two or more levels deep, to overcome the obstacles in front of you and keep progressing. It’s mentally challenging, but not unapproachably so, figuring out what worlds you need to bring into other worlds to solve their challenges.

It’s a little tough to explain, so the trailer on the Cocoon website probably helps. But if you’re at all a fan of puzzle platformers—especially with interesting, mind-bending mechanics—Cocoon is an easy recommendation.

Songpop Party

Songpop Party is a pure party game based on a dead-simple premise: listen to a short clip of a song, and name the song or artist as fast as you can. The faster you answer, the more points you get.

Initially, several categories are available (hits, kids, ’90s, movie themes, and many more), but the more you play, the more you earn points to unlock other expanded and often more specialized song lists. You can go deep on your favorite decade, a specific artist, or just choose playlists like “bad songs.”

Easily enjoyable for just about anyone of any age, gamers and non-gamers alike, Songpop Party was a featured staple of many gatherings this year, and I expect we’ll keep playing it for a long time to come.

Playing Mario Kart 8 with my kid

My kid’s never really played video games much before, but he’s gotten way into Mario Kart recently, after watching me and my brother play together.

My son is too young to really handle the game’s controls, so he needs smart steering and auto-accelerate on to play. But he knows how to use all the items, and manages to finish in the top half of the racers now most of the time (on 50cc, the game’s lowest difficulty, at least). It’s fun playing with him and watching him figure the game out, and I hope we can play many more games together in the future.

Circling back to unfinished games

I hit a gaming dry spell in 2024, and so I went back to my stack of partially completed games, and managed to check a bunch of them off:

• The Talos Principle - a great Portal-like 3D puzzler with some interesting philosophical details added in.
• New Super Mario Bros. U - I’d actually finished it before, but I’d never gotten to 100% completion until this year.
• Resident Evil 4 HD - I’ve also finished this one, many times and on many consoles, but this was my first completion on Switch. An all-time-great action game.
• The Last Campfire - another heartwarming puzzle game that feels a bit like a warm hug and a cup of tea.
• Undertale - I get it now.
• Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp - I ended up turning the difficulty down for the last three battles in each campaign, but I figure I’ve earned it, since I finished both back when they were on Game Boy Advance. Classic tactical RPGs that my brain can still appreciate, even if I can’t play them as well as I did ~20 years ago.
• Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze - one of the best platformers of the last ten years, but one I couldn’t ever get into before. Super annoying last boss, but incredible level design.

Replaying old favorites

• Hollow Knight - I made at least a couple of trips through this gorgeous masterpiece this year (up to maybe 17ish total?). The world of Hallownest is a beautiful place, and wandering its lonely, labyrinthine ruins is something I always enjoy.
• Hades - in my mind, Hades is the epitome of the roguelike formula. Somehow, Supergiant’s made a game with a compelling narrative, a huge cast of memorable characters (full of exceptional dialogue and voice acting), and yet, the whole thing’s just based on randomness. Unlike other roguelikes, though, luck plays a part in Hades, but it never really seems to be the reason you lost. It’s perfectly balanced, and I can’t wait for Hades 2.
• Metroid Dread - while the EMMI sequences are more annoying than scary, Dread proves that Metroid belongs in the name of its own genre.
• Celeste - There’s not much to say about this game that hasn’t already been said; it’s an all-timer platforming masterpiece.
• ElecHead - if I ever design anything as elegantly simple yet deviously ingenious as this cute little puzzle-platformer, I can die a happy man.
• Braid, Anniversary Edition - there’s sadly not a lot of reason to pick this up if you already played Braid on another console—unless you’re just a huge fan, that is, and I qualify. One of the most ingenious puzzle games of all time.

Tackling extreme challenges

Look, I’m a nerd who’s been going on about games for several dozen paragraphs now, so I’m just gonna embrace it and brag on a couple of extremely difficult gaming challenges I completed this year.

The Pantheon of Hallownest (Hollow Knight)

Hollow Knight has been one of my absolute all-time favorite games for years, and I replay it at least once or twice a year. I’ve finished it well over a dozen times, and have completed every challenge the game has to offer (most several times)—

—every challenge except for one, that is: the Pantheon of Hallownest, a ~45-minute boss rush where you have to defeat every boss in the game back-to-back. It had long been the one thing in the game I hadn’t ever completed once, and finally, during a span in late summer where I was burned out on the randomness of roguelikes, I thought “you know what? A challenge that isn’t luck-based feels like what I need right now.”

It took me a few weeks of practicing in my spare time (I’d guess around 15–20 hours total), but the final Pantheon is checked off my list. Honestly, that sounds brutal—and there were certainly some extremely frustrating moments where I got so close before losing and being forced to start all over again—but it was actually kind of fun repeatedly retrying, and watching my progress as I just got a little bit better every time.

The Jokerless challenge (Balatro)

The second challenge is the Jokerless challenge from Balatro. It’s the final of the game’s 20 challenge runs, and one so ridiculous it likely appears impossible at first glance. There’s a ton of strategic decision-making involved, but I still believe the challenge is more about persevering until luck is eventually on your side than it is skill. Either way: I did it. It was the worst thing I’ve ever done in a game, I’m glad it’s over, and I’ll probably never do it again. (I even rage-quit so hard I deleted my save file at one point, and started all over again.) But I did it.

Tabletop games

Bearing in mind that my tabletop gaming mostly revolves around games that can be enjoyed by adults and five-year-olds alike, here are some of the games I and my family really enjoyed this year:

• Splendor - accessible enough for my five-year-old (though a touch trying for his patience at times), it’s a great 30–45-minute tactical card game that’s deep enough to be interesting, but not enough to be daunting.
• Chicken! - a quick and easy dice game with gorgeous design. Gamble with your points and take another roll? Or pass to another player, and risk them getting even more points than you?
• Pass the Pigs - a bit similar to Chicken!, in that it’s a risk-vs.-reward type of dice game (bank your points for the turn, or risk them to roll more?), but with a twist: you’re rolling a pair of pigs rather than dice, and your points are determined by their landing position. Obviously, luck is a heavy factor here, but the silly simplicity of this game—and the wild things that can happen when someone gets on a hot streak—have made this one a hit for all ages for many years in my gaming groups.
• Patchwork - a deceptively deep two-player game where both players try to complete their quilts using Tetris-like patch shapes. It’s short and simple enough for kids, but with enough depth and strategy to keep things compelling for adults, too.
• Skyjo - a quick and casual card game where you try to zero-out the 12 cards in front of you by replacing them from the deck. Not deep, but easy to play in any group and with other things going on.

TV shows

Honestly, most of what my wife and I watched in 2024 was background shows; things to just have on and loosely pay attention to while doing other things. (Critics seem to think this was a down year for TV, and whether or not that’s true, it certainly was for us.)

This is also probably partly due to 2024 being our first year without Netflix. We didn’t set out to go without for the whole year, but motivated by rising prices and tightening sharing restrictions, we’ve begun cutting down on streaming services. Most of the year we only had Disney+/Hulu (the former mostly just for movies to watch with our kid), and it turns out we never really missed Netflix much.

Anyway, here are the standouts from the shows we did watch in 2024.

Severance

It didn’t come out in 2024, but Severance is easily my favorite thing I watched this year. The premise is cleverly simple: people who work for Lumon Industries are “severed”; their work memories never interact with their personal memories. The moment they go down the workplace elevator on Monday morning, they forget all about their outside lives. When they leave, the inverse happens, and they have no memory of what they did at work.

In effect, Lumon employees are two separate people, each unaware of the other’s life and relationships, and this tension creates some mind-blowing narrative reveals.

Wrapping the human story is the Lost-esque weirdness of Lumon itself, which leads to a group of employees trying to discover exactly what’s going on at the company—and who they might be on the outside.

It starts slow, but trust me: the slow burn pays off. This is a journey well worth taking.

Shrinking

Shrinking was easily my favorite show of 2023, and the second season keeps everything I loved about it moving forward (so far, at least; I haven’t finished it as of publish time). Jason Segel serves as the series’ de facto star, playing a therapist who’s helping his patients deal with their trauma in unconventional ways, as he learns to deal with his own along the way. But Shrinking is really more of an uplifting ensemble comedy than anything—albeit one that isn’t afraid to examine its characters’ pain, and mortality.

The cast is comparatively large in the second season, thanks to some new additions, but every actor is at the top of their game. Dramedies can sometimes swing too far one way or the other, and end up either being too silly to take seriously, or too serious to laugh at, but this crew—and the writing behind them—are far too good to let that happen. Immensely enjoyable and deeply human, shows rarely pull off the balancing act this perfectly.

What We Do in the Shadows

This is apparently the final season of WWDitS, and as of this writing I haven’t quite watched far enough to find out how it all ends. I almost don’t care, though; for the show to have lasted these six seasons and remained this funny throughout is more than enough for me.

The show follows the exploits of four lazy, out-of-touch vampire roommates who’ve been living together on Staten Island for the last few hundred years, and who (like most long-term roommates with lots of history) don’t always get along. They argue, they form alliances and break them, they get up to all kinds of weird nonsense, and then mostly forget all about it and move on to the next thing—usually thanks to Guillermo, the human familiar (and sole self-aware character) who manages to repeatedly save the housemates from themselves.

It sounds weird, and it is. But it’s a perfect formula for a serial comedy, and the perfect cast and perennially solid writing were easily solid enough to last another six seasons (and a movie).

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

The title, and the fact that it has to do with secret agents, are about all this show has in common with the 2005 movie of the same name. I almost didn’t even give it a shot because of its association with the film, but I’m glad I did; everything about this series is on a level far above its origins.

The series follows the titular secret agents, who are strangers assigned to live together as husband and wife as part of their cover. They don’t know much about the company they work for, why they’re sent on the missions they are, or who the mysterious contact they both report to might be. They mostly just know: there will be a severe price to pay for failure.

Naturally, that means there’s plenty of danger, suspense, and action (and a bit of dark humor), but the show somehow manages not to really be about any of that. Instead, it’s a deep, uncomfortably intimate look at the arc of the couple’s relationship, as they go from strangers to coworkers to lovers to…well, other far more complicated entanglements that aren’t easy to label. (The episodes are even titled things like “First Date” and “Couples Therapy.”)

Donald Glover’s and Maya Erskine’s performances are central to the show, and they both nail the assignment perfectly. They feel like a couple you already know in real life; you aren’t sure who to root for, you alternately love and hate them both, but ultimately, you just want these two flawed people to succeed in spite of themselves.

Fallout

For my money, Fallout is the second-best video game adaptation ever, even though it’s a distant second behind The Last of Us.

I was turned off by the gratuitous, extreme gore (no doubt inspired by the original games), especially in the first few episodes, but I’m glad I stuck with it. It’s an interesting tale of a handful of survivors and wanderers doing their best to navigate the post-apocalyptic wasteland they all inhabit.

Nobody is a good person in this cutthroat world—except for our hero, Lucy, an idealistic vault dweller who leaves the relative safety of her underground home to search for her father. But even she soon realizes the benefit of moral compromise in this harsh environment, even as she stubbornly clings to her own privileged idealism.

The characters, each with their own values and motivations, bounce off each other in engaging (and often violent) ways as they all chase the same MacGuffin across the show’s world. Eventually, they each discover things aren’t exactly as they thought, and hero or villain, we find out every one of them is more complicated than they first seemed.

Oh, and don’t worry: the (often dark) humor of the game series, along with its charming retro vibe and music, are all very much intact.

Say Nothing

Say Nothing is a brutally impactful show. It’s a film adaptation of the book, which chronicles true events in Northern Ireland, during the time of “the Troubles,” mostly during the 1970s and ’80s.

While we see the conflict from many angles, the story mainly focuses on IRA member Dolours Price, who we see as both a brazen young zealot robbing banks and planting bombs for the cause, and as an older woman, reflecting on the catastrophic damage she and her compatriots caused. She’s a complex character who’s both the hero of the story, and in many ways, its central villain.

The show presents the impossibly complicated morality of war and oppression, but doesn’t bother trying to clean up the mess it’s made before the series wraps up. It just leaves you with a lot to ponder for yourself.

Day of the Jackal

I’ll be honest: this isn’t top-tier TV, as much as Peacock wants it to be. In fact, I probably wouldn’t recommend it, unless you’re just a big fan of the genre (that being: relentless MI6 agent chases elite shadowy assassin across Europe).

Despite it being somewhere between watchable and laughable, though, I appreciate that Day of the Jackal regularly makes you question your allegiances to its characters. You don’t want the “bad guy” to succeed, really, but you don’t want him to fail, either. The show makes you wonder who you’re really rooting for—and for that matter, why.

Eddie Redmayne’s eponymous Jackal is a handsome, fit, charming, wealthy white man. His pursuer is a reckless, brash, upper-middle-class Black woman. Both characters are precariously balancing their own personal lives with their careers, and both fail their families regularly throughout the season. They both casually endanger others, and rarely do we see remorse from either one.

I don’t know if the show set it up this way on purpose, but I think it’s interesting and worthwhile to think about how race, class, appearance, and gender play into the perceptions of these two characters, and whether we’d feel the same way about the two of them were the details reversed—even if that exercise might ultimately be more interesting than the show itself is.

True crime docuseries, but not about murders

I lump the shows on this list together because they share a common characteristic: they’re all true crime docuseries, but unlike the majority of the genre, nobody gets killed in these shows.

Instead, these series focus on a con of some kind; some huge web of lies that eventually unraveled. Collectively, they offer a fascinating look into some truly twisted and damaged minds—just, you know, without the murder. (Warning: most of them do talk about abuse of various kinds, however, sometimes involving minors.)

• Perfect Wife: the Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini chronicles the disappearance and eventual rescue of a kidnapped housewife, and the long search for her abusive captor in the aftermath. But there’s much, much more to the story—and Sherri actually knows more about what happened than she’s letting on.

• Anatomy of Lies tells the story of Grey’s Anatomy writer Elisabeth Finch, the lying “trauma vampire” who covertly steals the tragedies of others in order to win attention and sympathy for herself (and to write into the show as her own stories). Among other things, Finch fakes having cancer; falsely accuses a former boss to gain #MeToo fame; and inserts herself into the life of abuse victims before finally being discovered for the shameless con artist she is.

• Betrayal - both season one (subtitled “The Perfect Husband”) and season two (subtitled “A Father’s Secret”) tell the stories of women who make the shocking discovery that their husband has been leading a horrifying, deviant secret life.

• Rossi: A Fugitive Faking Death is the story of Arthur Knight, a UK man mistaken for a wanted criminal from New Jersey…or, is it the story of a fugitive faking his death, fleeing the country, and adopting a new identity? (Look, you know which one it is. It’s still fascinating.)

• The Most Dangerous Animal of All follows a grown adoptee who believes he’s found his biological father—and that his father is none other than the infamous Zodiac Killer. The first half of the series is convincing; the second poses some difficult questions to shake your established beliefs, and it leaves you with uncomfortable truth. Worth watching just to examine your own journey of belief and skepticism.

Reading

I didn’t read as much this year as I did last year (and what I did read, I didn’t always enjoy), but here are my highlights:

A Closed and Common Orbit

Although I nearly didn’t give this second book in the Wayfarers series a chance after the first (the author’s debut, which could explain why I wasn’t a fan of the writing).

I’m glad I got over that first impression and gave this one a shot, though. I was wrong about Becky Chambers.

This entry tells two different stories in parallel: one of a young human girl growing up nearly alone on a harsh planet where she’s managed to escape slave labor; and one of an AI, given a body and the freedom to figure out life for herself.

Both protagonists learn, grow, and make a lot of mistakes as they come to find and rely on chosen family. The two stories orbit each other poignantly, echoing the same coming-of-age themes from opposite angles before eventually intertwining. It’s full of heart, it’s very human, and well worth a read even if sci-fi isn’t necessarily your thing. (For what it’s worth, it also has very little to do with the first in the series. One could easily read this one on its own without missing a lot.)

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

I love books that help the reader better understand why humans think and act the way they do, and few are as enlightening to that end as Being Wrong.

It’s a tad dense, but the author makes up for it with a wry sense of humor and utterly fascinating stories of people, groups, and even entire societies who were famously, stubbornly, unswervingly wrong. If you’re at all like me, you’ll be repeating anecdotes from this book at every opportunity. (You’ll also be surprised how often you’ll think “well, yes, of course other people are like that, but not me.” The book points out that this is natural; we readily see others’ reasoning as flawed, whereas we view our own mistakes as rare aberrations of our unassailable logic.)

It’s part psychology, part philosophy, and part dry, borderline-misanthropic observation. It’ll change the way you think, for the better, and help you understand that yes, you, too can be wrong, about just about anything.

The Murderbot Diaries series

Most of these I read in 2023, but I kept up the series this year. Fun, short sci-fi novels with a misanthropic sense of humor, and even a bit of a heart.

The “History of Nintendo” series

Florent Gorges’ unofficial series has some awkward translations, but they’re a fun and interesting nostalgia trip nonetheless for anyone with fond memories of the NES/Famicom, Game Boy, and others. (Like this guy. 👍👍) More than a tribute, these books offer a look into the company and its politics, the business decisions, and the international marketing and events that shaped the games and systems we all know and love.

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

Robin Sloane’s intro novel is a fun, casual read that takes a number of unexpected turns. The stakes are never particularly high, and if I’m being honest, I found myself skimming towards the end (the lengthy epilogue begins around 80% through), but although I didn’t find it particularly deep or thrilling (and although its moments of Bay-area techno-optimism haven’t necessarily aged well), I did enjoy the style.

An I.V.F. Mix-Up, a Shocking Discovery and an Unbearable Choice

This lengthy New York Times Story (gift link) about two couples who ended up in an unthinkable situation together was one of the best things I read all year. It’s tough, it’s harrowing, at times it’s heartbreaking, but it’s ultimately uplifting and wonderful.

Any Percent

I don’t even remember how this short story originally came across my radar now (I think maybe Chris Coyier recommended it in Discord?), and I don’t know anything about either the site or the author. But Any Percent is a brief, memorable, wild ride worth taking.

Gear and tech

The MoErgo Glove80

I’ve written two blog posts about the Glove80 now (an initial impressions post and a followup), so if you’d like more thoughts, check those out. But it’s been my daily driver for the full year, and I never for more than a moment switched. That’s how amazingly comfortable this keyboard is. I have some minor quibbles, but for my money, it’s the absolute best and most ergonomic option available.

Svelte 5

Svelte has long been my frontend framework of choice, so you’d think I’d be jazzed about 5. For me, the jury’s still out a little bit, though. I’m still getting used to the changes, and I’ll admit, there are things I still don’t love. But hey, at least Svelte 5 still supports all the old syntax, right? You don’t have to migrate any faster than you want to.

There are some minor details I don’t love: I think some of the compiler warnings are annoyingly pedantic, and in my professional design opinion, the new serif body font on the official website is a bad choice (though you can change it, and that alone is pleasantly novel). The rigid rules around global state also feel like a bit of a step backwards at times.

Those nits picked, though, I think it may largely be a matter of time and comfort level. I don’t want to be the guy who hates something just because it’s unfamiliar, and I don’t think I’ve put in the time yet to give Svelte 5 a fair shot. Some of my initial frustrations started making sense once I understood the reasoning behind them, and I think more things will likely fall in place in that same way.

Things I definitely do like right off the bat: upgrading to Svelte 5 was an instant performance boost, and nobody makes upgrades easier than the Svelte team and their comprehensively helpful migration scripts. While some might criticize the new runes system as being “too React-y,” I can see, having spent extensive time in both frameworks, how runes bring a predictability and universality that was previously missing. (Before, how you managed state depended heavily on what type of file you were working in; now, state can be created and shared much more consistently.) Components are much more predictable with the new $props rune, among other things. And, of course, the dead-simple templating syntax at the heart of Svelte is still intact and, if anything, even closer to HTML.

One of these days, I’ll actually begin a side project in earnest again, and when that happens, I look forward to diving deep in to Svelte 5. (I do know it runs great on Deno.)

An electric toothbrush

Somehow I’ve never actually had an electric toothbrush before now, but it’s a life upgrade worth making. (I got the Oral-B model, which is a touch on the loud side, but which I like better than the others because the head actually rotates. Others just use some kind of vibration.)

Greenworks lawn tools

Just upgraded my trimmer this year, and got an edger attachment to go with it.

I’m not a lawn guy. But my yard looks better than it ever has, and I’ve gotten more than one compliment on the edging from my neighbors, so…you know, I’m a pretty big deal out here in the suburbs.

MocPixel

mocpixel.com offers some extremely fun (and very not-exactly-legal) knockoff Lego sets that make great desk/shelf displays. The sets are often taken from popular games, movies, and TV shows, but cost a fraction of what an actual licensed lego set would. (And, free from US copyright law, span a much wider range of IPs.) I’ve ordered a few sets now, for display on the shelves in my office, and have had a lot of fun assembling them with my kid. The directions can be inscrutable at times, and one of my sets had issues with missing pieces, but these sets are nonetheless an enjoyable activity on your own or with kids.

Food and drink

Owala water bottle

Did this one belong in the last section? Maybe. Anyway, I guess these are trendy? I don’t know. All I know is: one member of my family got one for some reason, and raved about it so much that now everyone has their own.

I get it. It checks every box. It’s easy to clean; it’s easy to carry; it doesn’t leak; it has a straw but you can also drink from it like a normal bottle; you can open it with one hand; and, thanks to the straw, you can drink from it without tipping it up. It’s possible to refill without taking the lid off, but even if you do, thanks to the straw, you don’t have to find somewhere to put the lid down—all of which makes this bottle perfect for travel. I’m a big fan.

This one weird Chipotle trick

Ok it’s not really a trick at all, but here’s the deal:

• Order a burrito bowl with a tortilla on the side
• Save half the bowl for your next meal, and roll your own burrito with the leftovers

Life-changing. Am I over-selling it? I’m over-selling it. It’s unbelieva-bowl. Nope, went the wrong way. Let’s just move on.

Purely Elizabeth Original salty-sweet granola

While the other flavors are good too, this original salty-sweet granola is the one you want. It’s expensive, but if you can find it at Costco or in a bulk deal, it’s not too bad. In any case: it’s my favorite granola ever.

Honey Smoked Fish Co. smoked salmon

Another Costco find, although it’s available in other grocery stores as well. (It’s available on the company’s website, too, but only in massive quantities, unfortunately.) I’ve never tried any but the original flavor, but it’s so deliciously smokey it’s almost like barbecue. Great on bagels, crackers, or—our personal favorite—in a poke bowl with avocado, cilantro, some pickled veggies, spicy mayo, and a savory sauce.

Personal, random, and other

Being a guest on Shoptalk Show

Shoptalk has been my favorite podcast pretty much since I started listening to podcasts regularly, and so it was naturally a massive honor to check “be a guest on Shoptalk” off my career bucket list back in February.

We talked quite a bit about Copilot and AI, and React (of course), along with a whole bunch of other random topics related to the web. I had a lot of fun and consider this a major highlight of my year.

Building our own patio stairs

My wife and I spent a few weeks this spring and summer building stairs for our patio door from scratch. We even cut the runners ourselves. We’re not pros, and if you look close, you can definitely tell it (that is: if you couldn’t already tell it by the fact that it took us weeks), but the end result of our slow, meticulous labor is something we’re both proud of. It feels great to work with your hands and make something tangible instead of digital sometimes.

Getting to do logo design again

Although I consider myself a hybrid designer/developer (whatever you want to call that role—design engineer, perhaps?), I don’t often get to do full-fledged design work these days. In particular, logo design is a rarity. So it was fulfilling and an honor to get the opportunity to develop (ha) two new logos for high-profile tech projects this year; Deno, and JSR.

Organizing my sock drawer

It sounds petty, but it’s wild how much of an impact it has on your mental state to have things neatly organized. My sock drawer was a chaotic black hole for most of my life, which regularly sucked in several minutes of my morning. But I bought some of those little drawer organizer boxes from Ikea and now I actually feel good about opening my dresser in the morning.

…Socks are a thing for me, ok? (I especially like Bombas.)

Getting back to the gym

My wife and I were regular CrossFitters before our son was born, but between his infancy and then Covid, suddenly, five years had gone by without either of us ever going back to a gym. But now that our son is in school, we actually have the freedom to leave the house at the same time again, and have been using our local community center to get back in the swing of a regular fitness routine.

Honestly, it feels like it’s done a lot more for my mental health than my physical health (although I’m definitely in better shape, too), but it’s great to be back. I’m always surprised to learn how strongly my physical health is correlated with my mental health. My workouts aren’t nearly as intense as they once were (my old PR’s remain well beyond my current reach, at least for the foreseeable future), but that’s fine. Turns out I’m basically just a sophisticated Labrador; I need exercise to feel good, and so getting back to a gym has been a bright spot in my year.

Chappell Roan

Sometimes I’m just a sucker for really good pop music, and Chappell Roan makes really good pop music.

Bluesky

The jury’s out on how long it stays the fresh oasis that I and so many others found it to be when we migrated, but Bluesky feels like the home we’ve been missing since one of the worst men in the world bought Twitter two years ago.

WordPress drama

Having spent several years of my career in WordPress, I followed the (still unfolding) WordPress drama of this September onward with rapt attention.

As I explain at length in the post (over and over again, in just about every way imaginable), Matt Mullenweg is the clear bad guy in this situation—and for now, at least, even the courts agree on that.

While it’s odd to say I “enjoyed” this—that wouldn’t probably be the best word, since he’s harmed users, undermined his own community, upended lives and careers, and caused irreparable disruption to an entire open-source ecosystem—I have to admit, watching this man-child repeatedly shoot himself in the foot has been entertaining, if nothing else. (It’s also been fodder for my longest and most-updated blog post, closing in on 20,000 words or so.)

Being a parent

I’m not one of those nauseating “isn’t parenting so amazing!?” types of people. This isn’t that. Having a kid is one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done. But, it’s also incredibly rewarding.

My son’s only in kindergarten, but looking back, it’s amazing how far he’s come this year. He’s reading, writing, playing basketball on an actual team in an actual league, making friends from both the neighborhood and at school, learning to play games that are supposed to be way out of his age range, and just generally making me laugh every day. He’s the brightest part of my year.

So ok, maybe I am one of those people, just a little bit.