Welcome to the end of 2024. It’s been a hell of a year, quite literally. I’m sure none of us need reminders of all the crazy and terrible and overwhelming and treacherous things that have happened this year. I think perhaps the best day of the year was the total solar eclipse. Remember the one good day in 2024 when everyone went outside just to stare at the sun?

As is the tradition when every year comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting on this year and everything I’ve done. I’m now 26 years old, and have managed to have a very good year for myself despite the circumstances. I feel privileged and lucky to be able to say that I’ve only continued to grow and change in ways that expand my curiosity for the world rather than diminish it. I have more essays I want to write for this newsletter and beyond in 2025, but for now I want to take a look at the things I was up to in 2024. I’ll also be sharing what I watched, read, listened to, etc. and what my favorites of the year were. 

Some Highlights:

For the past few years I’ve identified myself as a writer/critic, filmmaker, and music producer. This year, I very confidently added game developer to that list of creative nouns I can use to describe myself. My friends and I started an indie game studio in late 2023, and in 2024 we pitched our game to Ubisoft Toronto for their Indie Series competition. We ended up winning 1st place, technically making us award winning game developers before our game has even come out. We also won $50,000 in funding for our debut game, which is still shocking to think about. With working on this game combined with everything else I’ve gotten up to this year, I don’t think I can ever have impostor syndrome ever again. Learning the processes of game development and narrative design has been an amazing experience and given me a new appreciation for all of the games that I love. Our game is still unannounced, meaning I can’t share any details here yet, but I’m excited to update all of you in 2025 with more information as we continue development. 

I also started this newsletter this year. My original goal was to write 1 post a month on average, for a goal of 12 posts this year. I’ve ended up with 10 including this one, which given how busy of a person I am, I’m quite proud of even if it wasn’t my initial goal. Ultimately this newsletter is a way for me to consistently be practicing executing my ideas onto the page, especially when there might be lulls in my free time where my freelance pitches aren’t getting published yet. I do feel like this newsletter has helped me improve at my craft, getting me in the groove of being able to very quickly and consistently generate ideas worth writing about and then effectively communicating them. Thank you to everyone who is reading these, and who lets me know when a particular essay lands well with them. I really do appreciate it. Like I mentioned earlier, I want to keep writing for this newsletter next year, and I hope to have more pieces of mine to share with all of you that are published in other places as well. 

Another thing I’ve been working on this year is an album's worth of music I’ve been meaning to share for who knows how long now. It’s actually very close to being done, which I’ve been saying for over 2 years but I’m very confident about it this time. I’m currently in the “getting album art” part of the process now, with the music of the album being essentially completed. I’m hoping to release this album in 2025.

This is all to say that I’ve been working on and making a lot of stuff this year, and I want to continue this trend for next year. Thank you to those of you who have been paying attention to all of it so far. 

My Stats:

This year I have been voracious in my hunger for the arts across all mediums and genres. I can confidently say that I’ve engaged with more art and media in 2024 than any other year prior. While I definitely have certain art forms I concentrated more of my time into (mostly movies), I feel good about the spread generally, and I hope to do even more next year. Here’s to more movies, games, books, shows, and music in 2025. 

In 2024 I watched:

• 113 Movies

• 37 TV Shows

In 2024 I listened to:

• 74 New Albums (51 of them released in 2024)

• 7 Podcasts

In 2024 I played:

• 15 Games

In 2024 I read:

• 6 Books (4 Fiction, 1 Nonfiction, 1 Historical Text)

• 3 Serialized Manga

• 5 Comic Book Series/Graphic Novels

• A lot of articles, reviews, essays, etc.

The Best of the Best:

It wouldn’t be a year-end round up without a best-of list. 2024 was a great year for good art, and anyone who says otherwise didn’t get around to seeing enough of it. While it is impossible to get to everything that comes out in a year, here are my favorite things from 2024 that I got the chance to experience.

Best Movies of 2024:

• Look Back dir. Kiyotaka Oshiyama

• I Saw the TV Glow dir. Jane Schoenbrun

• Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga dir. George Miller

• All We Imagine as Light dir. Payal Kapadia

• The Brutalist dir. Brady Corbet

• Nickel Boys dir. RaMell Ross

Best TV Shows of 2024:

• The Sympathizer

• Dungeon Meshi

• Abbott Elementary (Season 3)

• Game Changer (Season 6)

• The Penguin

Best Albums of 2024:

• “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD” by Godspeed You! Black Emperor

• Endlessness by Nala Sinephro

• I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU by JPEGMAFIA

• King of the Mischievous South by Denzel Curry

• Opus by Ryuichi Sakamoto

Best Songs of 2024 (that aren’t on those albums):

• Black&Blue by Vince Staples

• Eusexua by FKA twigs

• Goddess by Laufey

• tv off by Kendrick Lamar

• Love Is Everywhere by Magdalena Bay

• Cinderella by Remi Wolf

• Slow Burn by Baby Rose

• A Dream Goes on Forever by Vegyn, John Glacier

• Garden of Eden by Rachel Chinouriri

• Love is Blind by Ravyn Lenae

Best Games of 2024:

• 1000xRESIST

• Nine Sols

• Balatro

• Animal Well

• Neva

My Favorite Pieces of Writing From 2024:

• The Invisible Man (My Life As a Homeless Man in America) by Patrick Fealey

• Good Ghosts and Bad Fathers: The Story of a Haunting, a Kidnapping, and an International Incident by Helen Vogelsong-Donahue

• Perfect Days: Where the Light Comes Through by Bilge Ebiri

• This Is Life in America’s Water-Inequality Capital. It Might Be About to Change by Elliot Ross

• Maggie Cheung Walked Away From Acting 20 Years Ago, but Her Legend Endures by Raymond Ang

• How CoComelon Captures Our Children’s Attention by Jia Tolentino

• Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art by Ted Chiang

• The Work of the Witness by Sarah Aziza

• The Legend of the Nintendo Switch by Joshua Rivera

I guess that’s it for now. Thank you all again for reading the things I’ve put here over the past year. I’m excited to continue growing, learning, and changing alongside everyone else. See you next year!