2024 in Review
2025 January 13A lot of people are saying 2024 was awful, and well, I caught covid right as the spring semester started so yeah, that's about right. But I'm here to recount various things about 2024 you might be interested in seeing.
Books
I didn't read as much this year as I usually do. It looks like I completed a total of 45 books. Last year, I completed 86.
In February of 2024 I caught Covid. Between the long recovery of that -- and I may still be getting some effects, I'm meeting an allergist soon to determine if Covid made my allergy reactions worse -- and a sequence of prescriptions I was on and off of, I dealt with a lot of fatigue and brain fog throughout the year. I just couldn't read as much as usual. I've watched a lot of youtube videos, as it happens.
I'm also slowly resculpting my reading. I just don't think I can take reading books I'm not really enjoying in some way. I stopped reading Tarot Deciphered, a book I would actually recommend, just because I know all that stuff in there. It's a compendium of Golden Dawn and Thelema symbolic layers on tarot cards, and I read a lot of books like it already, and listened to the authors' podcast, Fortune's Wheelhouse. So I'm glad to have it as a reference, but I just couldn't take reading it cover to cover.
It's difficult though, because even though I'm stuck in a dead end adjunct job and basically gave up on getting a research job in academia, I don't want to give up on my reading entirely. People seemed to like my Gothic Library series. And a lot of the books I read for my magical practice aren't enjoyable to read, but they're useful. So finding a balance between all those forces has been tough, and it's ongoing.
Here are some of the highlights of my 2024 reading in no particular order:
James Thurber: I read the Library of America edition, and after it got past his really early shit work that hinged on tired jokes about women, it became just really excellent stuff. There's a fantasy novella in there that's really good, of all things.
Pratchett: Any Pratchett novel will be a highlight of my year, of course. This year I read The Truth, which is his book coming out of his journalism career, and Monstrous Regiment, the one about gender which whips ass, and is the reason you can be assured the terfs who invoke Pratchett's name are full of shit.
Primo Levi: I got the collected works, which is steep, but it's been well worth it so far. I've read four of the books in it, and I'm nearly finished with a fifth at time of writing. I taught The Periodic Table last year, which is a collection of chapters themed around elements (Levi was a professional chemist), and it does this amazing structural thing: half the book is before WW2 and half is after. Levi is best known for his book If This is a Man, about his experience as a Jew in the Nazi death camps, so the entire time you're reading Periodic Table you're like, haha, shit, it's coming, oh no, and there's only a single chapter in the camps -- about how he stole from the chemistry lab to make lighters so he could buy more food in the underground markets the prisoners maintained. Apart from the obvious ut brilliant survivor story, Levi's work is brilliant. It's like reading a very grounded Calvino. One story was about a man who bottles scents that remind him of times of his life; another story was about a party that plays a new game where you put your hand in a tray and it prints a thing of some sort that is in some way you, and what they all try to make of the mysterious, inscrutable objects that appear. He's funny, and Natural Histories should be required reading in our days, it's got chapters about computers writing for us, 3D printing gone haywire, and the effects that we see when salespeople are determining out technology rather than anyone else.
Dexter Palmer: I read his latest, Mary Toft, or the Rabbit Queen. I struggled just a bit in the middle, not because the book nods, but because I did. I was still trying to juggle too many books, as above. I put it on the back burner, finished a few books, and then devoted myself to reading it. I ended up reading the last third of the book in a day. It's a historical novel about the woman who claimed to be birthing rabbits, and the strange world of early 18th century England, seen mostly from the grounds' eye view of the original physician's apprentice. It's also about the way people and society others the grotesque, while cleaving to it in order to feel better -- something I'm read about a lot in my gothic studies. It was fascinating to see it just laid out. CW it's quite accurate to the 18th century, so expect body horror and animal abuse.
Manchette: I picked up a number of books during a sale of French and Italian "noir," and it included three books by Manchette, a well-known French author (it turns out) who wrote several noir books which are considered genre redefining. He's apparently also the person who did the French translation of Watchmen when it was published there, even though he was semi-retired. I read Fatale, about a woman who became a professional killer after making it out of an abusive marriage. It's short, it's very good, and while it's not quite "girl power, murder people," it bears a lot of resemblance to Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. None of the people in "Doughville" are any good, it seems.
Haruki Murakami Pontifus likes to joke that "Murakami keeps writing his one novel, but I sure want to keep reading that one novel."
book | end date | genre |
---|---|---|
James Thurber LOA | 2/20/24 | humor |
Kase-san and Cherry Blossoms (Takashima) | 1/1/24 | manga |
The Iliad (Wilson trans) | 1/20/24 | poetry |
Etidorhpa (Lloyd) | 1/23/24 | fantasy |
Dame Fortune's Wheel Tarot Pictorial Guide (Huson) | 1/13/24 | magic |
A Walk Through the Forest of Souls (Pollack) | 1/28/24 | magic |
First Occult Tarot (Place) | 1/23/24 | magic |
The Clicking of Cuthbert (Wodehouse) | 1/30/24 | fiction |
Spectrum Fari (Meleen) | 2/27/24 | magic |
Laid Back Camp 9 (Afro) | 1/30/2024 | manga |
Compleat Ankh-Morpork (Pratchett) | 2/29/2024 | fantasy |
Laid Back Camp 10 (Afro) | 2/3/2024 | manga |
Laid Back Camp 11 (Afro) | 2/5/2024 | manga |
Laid Back Camp 12 (Afro) | 2/7/2024 | manga |
The Truth (Pratchett) | 3/3/2024 | fantasy |
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou 4 (Ashinano) | 3/29/2024 | manga |
Changewar (Leiber) | 4/6/2024 | science fiction |
Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Hogg) | 4/22/2024 | fantasy |
Lost Envoy (Allen et al) | 4/25/2024 | magic |
Greatest Hits (Ellison) | 5/7/2024 | science fiction |
The Periodic Table, Levi | 6/7/2024 | nonfiction |
If This Is a Man, Levi | 6/10/2024 | nonfiction |
Titus Alone, Peake | 6/12/2024 | fantasy |
Practical Art of Divine Magic (Dunn) | 6/12/2024 | magic |
The Truce, Levi | 6/18/2024 | nonfiction |
The Sworn and Secret Grimoire, Stratton-Kent | 6/19/2024 | magic |
Settling the World: Selected Stories (Harrison) | 7/18/2024 | fiction |
Geosophia 1 (Stratton-Kent) | 8/1/2024 | magic |
Cyprian's Offices of Spirits (Stratton-Kent) | 8/7/2024 | magic |
True Grimoire JSK | ? | magic |
Godbody Sturgeon | ? | science fiction |
Monstrous Regiment Pratchett | ? | fantasy |
Hakumei and Mikochi 7 (Kashiki) | 10/3/2024 | manga |
Grimorium Verum (Peterson trans) | 10/6/2024 | magic |
Sauron Defeated (Tolkien) | 11/12/2024 | fantasy |
Fatale (Jean-Patrick Manchette ) | 11/15/2024 | noir |
Mary Toft, or, the Rabbit Queen (Palmer) | 11/18/2024 | historical fiction |
Tatami Time Machine Blues (Morimi) | 11/21/2024 | fantasy |
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou 5 (Ashinano) | 12/6/2024 | science fiction |
The City and Its Uncertain Walls (Murakami) | 12/15/2024 | fantasy |
Natural Histories (Levi) | 12/18/2024 | fantasy |
Hakumei & Mikochi v8 (Kashiki) | 12/26/2024 | manga |
Dracula in Istanbul (Seyfioglu) | 12/27/2024 | fantasy |
Delicious in Dungeon v12 (Kui) | 12/31/2024 | fantasy |
Video Games
Taiyaki Fabulous Museum of Fish: I loved this game, which you should consider grabbing over here. I hadn't really seen this puzzle style until Pokemon Picross on the 3DS, but I loved it there, and this game's art and funny earnest writing sold me immediately.
Tiny Rogues: Looking at my Steam Replay, I played a ton of Tiny Rogues. The developer admitted to using ChatGPT to make it after I'd sunk tons of hours into it, so I uninstalled it. I'm assuming it's mostly coding and writing, not art, but then again, why do even I feel like there's a difference there? Especially as my friend the coder hates it when people use chatgpt for coding, since it fucks things up and introduces errors and vulnerabilities all the time, as it happens. I'm writing about it more to vent than anything else, obviously I'd prefer it if you didn't give this asshole any money.
Satisfactory: I played a demo of a different game with adventuring and Factorio-style automation with some friends. Two of them hated it even though they totally ignored the factory stuff. My third friend and I gravitated to that part, so we decided to get into Satisfactory. It's been great so far, though we got sidetracked by the next game.
Elden Ring: I have historically hated Dark Souls. I genuinely think the first one is bad, like I mean badly made, but I tried 3 and it was a big improvement though I got bored. Elden Ring on the other hand has held my attention. We started in seamless co-op, and at the moment I've got two different co-op characters and a single player character I play in seamless co-op anyway so invaders are turned off. It mostly feels good to play and I like some of the characters. I could do without all the women being sad and in some cases literally blind, but ok, it's not like the men are that much more interesting. Except Alexander of course.
I will say I have no idea why people think the setting or writing are good. The setting is fine, the writing is passable. My friend who's played a ton of it is constantly baffled that I want to hear every line of dialogue from a character but skip every bit of "lore." I like characters. I hate worldbuilding.
Final Fantasy 14: I finally finished the main Shadowbringers expansion, and liked it more than all the rest so far. I like ARR better than it seems most fans do, but on the other hand it is weird and uneven, and the setting of Eorzea is uneven as a result. Norvrandt feels like a Final Fantasy setting, and I like all the characters. I'm in the patches now, fucking around mostly, getting all my crafters to 80 and doing all the society quests I've put off for so long.
I played some games for not so much time but should have written some about the experience -- see my comments above about the fatigue and brain fog. I finally figured out why the original Deus Ex is good. I watched HBomberGuy talk about Human Revolution -- which I like, for what it's worth -- and he says in it that people keep saying Deus Ex is bad when they skipped the tutorial. And holy shit yeah you gotta do the tutorial huh? My pc at the time wouldn't run it so I didn't try it until long after, that's my excuse.
I replayed some of Fallout: New Vegas also influenced by HBomberGuy. I don't like it as much as he did, but I do like it better now. Honestly, at the time I thought 3 was better, and I still think both that 3 is better than everyone says and NV is worse than everyone says (though still good). I don't particularly care if I can walk around and find every water source for every group of people in the wasteland. I care if the game's going to make a big deal about factions and how I can choose between them that one of the factions shouldn't be literal fucking evil nazi sexist shitheads. I think I've seen a few writers and game devs discuss this problem now, that games make big elaborate decision systems and then there's clearly one right answer and the companies' own numbers demonstrate nobody picks the wrong ones. I'm sure plenty of people anecdotally have gone with Caesar, and I'll bet you two fake dollars that most have done so on second playthroughs or by using carefully managed save files. I did accidentally kill the dog in the first town (for real, she jumped in front of me during the big fight) and the whole town glitched, where most everybody was still "friendly" but nobody would talk to me. And while that's big Bethesda glitch energy, I approve. Also obviously I reloaded.
Monster Hunter Rise: I continued this off and on with friends. We're nearly finished with Sunbreak. I like it, it finally make me really like MH. It also helped me finally learn to like Dark Souls 3 / Elden Ring, as I fought the first optional boss in 3 and said, "Oh, this is Monster Hunter" and killed it on my first try. Not a huge accomplishment, but it was miles away more fun than DS1.
Splatoon 3: I have always loved Splatoon in small doses. My game crew prefers it over other shooters nowadays because the matches are so short. That's what bothers me -- I feel like there's no chance to strategize, come back from setbacks, and so on. I especially miss Team Fortress's thing where you go switch classes to deal with emerging situations. But don't get me wrong, I really like Splatoon, and 3 is an excellent iteration of it. We had a somewhat emotional weekend when the big end of splatfest festival happened, though that was partly because, as I'll discuss below, it happened shortly after Cohost announced it was shutting down. So things I really liked all seemed to be ending at once. The blow from Splatoon has been softened by its continued normal splatfests, which we hadn't expected.
Control: I didn't really get into SCP stuff but it works well in this game, which is just funny enough to make me invested in the serious parts. Play is ongoing.
Music
Japanese Jazz: I got into Japanese jazz a few years ago, but with the record player, I've bought a bunch of it and gotten more invested. It's mostly the same stuff you're getting suggestions for on youtube, I'm not trying to be a hipster about it. The sound is really compelling to me. I've talked to a friend about it, as I've always had a hard time getting into traditional jazz, and his theory is that I prefer music organized along the melody, and traditional jazz was a platform for improvization, so the music is there to support the improv. Therefore, it's not written in such a way that everything comes together towards the melody. I don't know enough music theory to say if that makes sense or not. I do know I read a review of Jiro Inagaki's Funky Stuff that was kind of disgruntled and said it was weird that the perfect jazz funk album came out of Japan and not the US. So I'm not alone, even if I'm perfectly grunted about it.
I've also been listening to some dungeon synth. I also got into a band that's from the general area I live in, Wussy. Apparently they're an indie darling that's gotten coverage from big media outlets? I hadn't heard of them before I tuned into the NPR rock show from where I used to live, on Boxing Day, and heard them. I picked up some vinyls, including my first 33.3 EPs, which are hilarious and small.
Record player: I bought a record player. It's good..
TV/Movies/Anime
Frieren: We got into the exam arc and kind of took a break, but I personally loved this show, and probably should read the manga. The deep, persistent sadness that permeates everything before the exam arc really works for me, as it doesn't deny happiness or optimism. It feels very "adult" in an actual way, not that it's pornographic, but that it's addressing how our life adds up as we go and it's just always still there, adding up as we go.
Godzilla: Invasion of Astro Monster: I have little to say except these movies kick ass and have wonderful set design. This one had an American playing an astronaut who delighted everyone watching.
Maleficent: I sort of put this off for a long time, given my general sentiment about both Disney and unnecessary remakes. But it goes hard, damn. I was not expecting a sexual trauma scene in my girl power glow up villain movie. I remember my partner and I sort of stopped watching the netflix Castlevania because we kept saying, well, Dracula's right though. Maleficent is premised on that outright. Good for her.
Deep Space 9: We only watched a few episodes, but I'm happy to see it's Star Trek. I had shied away from it for years because people kept saying it wasn't like all the other shows.
Kyoryuger: we rewatched a bunch of our favorite sentai, which more people need to check out. Kyoru Gold is I think it's safe to say my favorite and my partner's.
Online
Cohost: Hahaaaaaaa fuck. I've written about cohost a lot already, but it sure fucking sucks that it's gone. We've all tried to make a go at blogging traditionally and staying connected with existing social media, but it doesn't feel like it's working great. The blog sometimes feels like I'm hurling words into a void, since it's so much more difficult for people to respond and react to it -- and it's not as though I'm commenting and sharing as much as I would have on cohost, so I'm not blaming people, I'm just aware of how the different system works differently.
My blog (you're here arrow goes here): I went through a whole mess, from neocities to finally landing on paid hosting, and I'm happy with it I think, though obviously the site still isn't done. I kind of wish I'd just started a Bear blog or something, since I miss being able to fire off short posts from my phone. But I'm experimenting with using Dropbox's native text editor to make post drafts on my phone. I'd still have to "publish" them from pc, since that requires Eleventy and Github, but it's better than nothing.
Magic
Grimorium Verum: I meant to write this up in more detail, and still hope to do so, but I managed to do a fairly close traditional rendition of the Grimorium Verum operation -- with very fancy paper replacing the goat skin. I believe it worked, but I've asked for so little since that it's not easy to demonstrate one way or the other. This is part of my ongoing project to find a new way to practice after the tradition I was working in kind of blew up in my face in an annoying way.
Tarot: I spent 2023 buying tarot decks like a crazy person. This year I mostly bought vinyls that way. But I did get a few nice decks, and I ran a brief course on discord where people in the HHoL server joined in. I set up "lessons" but I learned as much as everyone else, if not more. It kind of petered out, but I want to think everyone got something out of it. Except for maybe the one person who joined right before everyone sort of gave up. He probably didn't get much out if it. I've got a few more tarot spreads in the works, and the one closest to completion just read me to abject filth last week, so it's looking good!
I submitted a spread to a jam, which you can find here. It's free even!
Other
Bifocals: I last got an updated eyeglass prescription literally as businesses shut down in March of 2020. They were kicking folks out of the place if they didn't already have something to pick up.
Late in 2024 I began to feel some eye strain so I thought it was probably time to suck it up and brave the unmasked yet again. And the optometrist suggested bifocals. They're fine. What the real story is I suppose is how the people at LensCrafters upsold me to progressive lenses, which were shit. The salesperson assured me they would be perfect for reading, long distance viewing, and working at a computer. They were somehow bad at all of those things. My neck hurt because I had to tilt it to watch TV. I had to turn my head back and forth to read sentences on my monitor. And then they made me schedule a recheck at the optometrist's, who was duly baffled why I was doing a recheck when I was getting my glasses that day. It was a huge waste of time.