Favorites of 2024

It’s been a year since my 2023 year-end favorites roundup. Here’s my favorite stuff from 2024!

Favorite Podcasts

• No Such Thing as a Fish is a hilarious trivia podcast where four quiz show researchers each share their favorite fact of the week. Only four facts per episode? Sort of—after each person shares their fact, the rest of them share facts that they found related to the seminal fact. These are interesting and enlightening (and usually way too specific to help me in at my local library’s trivia nights), usually funny, and the hosts are just a delight to listen to. I’m clearly late to find them, as the latest episode when I started listening was episode 530, but that just means I’ve got a huge, fun backlog to catch up on. I’ve listened to every episode since then as they’ve come out, and I’ve loved every one.
• History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps hasn’t caught me up quite like No Such Thing as a Fish, but it’s still been a really pleasant surprise. I’ve never had much interest in philosophy at all, finding it annoying when people bring up Plato, Socrates, etc., but I’ve always felt like I should learn more about them. This podcast has been a great way to learn the history of philosophy so far, and it’s delightfully easy to listen to: each episode is about 20 minutes long and the author/narrator, Peter Adamson, is never stuffy or boring. It’s a fun listen.

Favorite Books

I read or listened to 33 books this year. My favorites are:

• Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin is the most convincing material on why natural birth is worth doing and how to do it that I’ve read. I’d recommend it to anyone considering a natural birth (or even something more natural than what US hospitals generally offer), and I think even for those who have no interest in that, it would impart a more level-headed perspective of natural birth than you’d get in American media and culture.
• Heidi by Johanna Spyri was just a delight to read.
• God’s Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembène was assigned reading in an African Humanities class and is second piece of modern African literature I’ve read. It’s a deep, complex book that covers an amazing variety of characters, human experiences, and emotions and makes the complexity and violence of colonization (and revolution) in Africa more personal and real to someone who is far removed from it.
• Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett was a fantastic memoir/anthropology/linguistics book. See my review on Goodreads. I’d love to read books like it.
• Postwar by Tony Judt is the only book here that I haven’t actually finished. In fact, I’ve only read about ⅓ of it (it’s a long book), but I’ve loved what I’ve read so far. It’s very approachable and well-written, with clear, dignified, and flowing prose that I really enjoyed reading. Despite being a relatively easy read (as far as history books go), it’s absolutely packed with information and insights that are just fascinating. I’m looking forward to finishing it.

You can see all the books I read (or listened to) this year on Goodreads.

Favorite Movies

• Safe made me want to avoid chemicals, but it also made me wonder if we obsess over “toxins” and “chemicals” too much.
• How To Blow Up a Pipeline made me want to blow up a pipeline.
• Tampopo made me hungry, although I didn’t love the food/sex interludes.
• Civil War made me scared. It’s probably my favorite war movie because it seems so effective at showing how quickly things can go bad, even in a rich, seemingly stable country like the US.
• The Iron Claw made me cry. I thought it was going to be funny (because pro wrestling has always seemed comedic to me)!
• Aftersun didn’t make me cry, but after I talked about the fairly confusing ending with my wife, I wanted to.

You can see all the movies I watched this year on Letterboxd.

Favorite TV Shows

• Mr. & Mrs. Smith was an amazing mix of comedy, action, romance, and drama. If you watch it and get disappointed at how quickly the romance builds, don’t let it deter you. There’s a lot more to it. A second season is reportedly in production, but I don’t have any interest in watching it. The first season was essentially a miniseries.
• Slow Horses is hilarious, thrilling, and unique. It’s great to watch a show about screw-up spies (but not goofy screw-ups, like Get Smart or something) who somehow manage to get things done.

Favorite Music

• This Could Be Texas by English Teacher Fits the gap left by Black Country, New Road not releasing anything this year.
• Brat by Charli XCX is her best release since Pop 2. It’s brat summer winter.
• Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay is a great album that I enjoy despite the singer’s voice, which I find annoying. Favorite tracks: Vampire in the Corner, Death & Romance, Angel on a Satellite.
• Favourite by Fontaines D.C. My favo(u)rite track of the year. It’s wonderful: Energetic, driving, nostalgic, and emotional. Give it a listen!
• Lithonia by Childish Gambino just rocks.

You can see all the music I listened to this year on Last.fm.

Favorite Video Games

• Metroid Prime Remastered felt like the original Metroid Prime when I played it as a kid. I think that means it’s a perfect remaster. This was my first time finishing it, and though I loved it, I have no interest in trying to 100% it. Too much backtracking gets old!
• Slay the Spire is a deck-building roguelike that fans of either genre are probably already familiar with, but I finally got it this year. I’m not even close to beating ascension 20 on each character, but I’ve beat it at least once with each one. It’s a time sink, but a really fun one.

Favorite Technologies

• fzf’s command-line keybindings — I think I’ve been using fzf (a fuzzy-finding tool) for a while now, but learned about its command line keybindings this year. I love them. I used to edit or view files with a command like less $(fzf), but those characters are a bit of a pain to type, and it didn’t save the file I looked up in my shell history. The CTRL-T keybinding, when configured, makes it a much nicer interface, so I instead type less , then press CTRL-T, find the file I want, and hit ENTER and I’ve got the command with the filename filled out. Shell history-friendly!
• LunarVim has helped me find and use a bunch of cool plugins for NeoVim that I might not have used (or properly configured) otherwise, for features such as auto-complete, Treesitter, a fancy file explorer (with good hotkeys!), project management (which I find mostly useful for maintaining a consistent root directory), integrated terminals, indent guides, and code context. It now appears to be abandoned, and I’ve switched to LazyVim (to learn more Vim plugins!), but I’ll probably quit using that for a bespoke configuration at some point. I can’t say I recommend either as-is, but I think they can be great for learning.

Favorite Articles

• The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertise — Marc Brooker shows that each hobby can be split into four sub-hobbies: doing the hobby, doing stuff with the equipment used in the hobby, discussing the hobby, or discussing the equipment. I think I’ve way too often been guilty of being mostly in the discussing parts. I think I’ve spent more time looking at lenses I could buy for my Zenit-E camera than actually taking pictures with it, and that’s pretty lame. Meta-hobbies aren’t always a problem, but personally I’d rather be someone who is in the “doing the hobby” quadrant. I find that to be much more rewarding but less natural for me. This article has made me consider my own hobbies a lot more.
• 95%-ile isn’t that good — An exploration of the idea that it’s probably easier to be in the top 5% of people who do something than it might seem, as long as you genuinely want to improve and seek opportunities to improve. Coaching is also explored as a very valuable tool. I think I would benefit from a more careful approach to improving my own skills, especially with outside feedback.

Favorite New Experience

• Being a father of two. My older daughter is now 21 months old, and my younger is 3 months old. The younger one isn’t old enough for them to play together yet, but I know it’s going to be a beautiful thing to see them become best friends. Having two is definitely harder than having one, but it’s amazing to see my kids be so similar to and different from the other. Also, I’m grateful to Deloitte for giving a very generous parental leave.