It's January 2025, which means it's time to reflect a little about 2024. Last year, I wrote about some video games I liked in 2023, and I thought that for this year, I might expand and just talk about a few things I liked. After all, the world is currently a burning hellscape looking forward to a fascist overthrow of government and a series of apocalyptic wars on a planet no longer suitable to human life and we don't even have the best president in the last 50 years around to help out any more — seems like a perfect time for some consumerist escapism.

Games

I spent a lot of time this year hiding from the world in video games. In no particular order, here are some thing I liked:

The Remedy Connected Universe

At some point early this year I searched the Internet for something like "good single-player Xbox games" and came up with a review of Control, which I proceed to play and loved. So, of course, I had to go back and play Alan Wake (great, but dated), Quantum Break, and Alan Wake II (amazing). These are narrative video games by studio Remedy Games that take place in an interconnected universe. They're sometimes a little full of themselves, but the gameplay is solid and the music is great¹. I assume everyone else played Alan Wake and Quantum Break 10 years ago and I'm just behind the times here.

Star Wars Outlaws

It's Assassin's Creed in spaaaaaacce Star Wars! The core gameplay loop is fun but way too repetitive. The story is fun and relatively short. Worth playing for free on Xbox Live, but I wouldn't want to try to 100% it given the number of random collectibles.

Dishonored, etc.

Another series that I'm sure everyone else played 10 years ago: Dishonored, Dishonored 2, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, and Deathloop. Apparently the source of a lot of common stealth-game mechanics from the last 10 years or so. Pretty standard steampunk-fantasy setting and a plot so predictable an LLM could've written it, but still fun.

Movies

I did not watch many movies this year. Some arbitrary things I'll give a nod to:

• Dune Part Two is as good as is possible of a cinematic adaptation of Dune (one of my favorite books as a kid²). I'm really curious to see how Villeneuve handles Dune Messiah.
• Alien: Romulus copies a lot from the original Alien but imitation flattery blah blah. It's a fun movie with a few genuinely novel bits. Way better than Alien Resurrection...
• I made my wife watch Scrooged with me this holiday season because I had fond memories of it from earlier in life. This was a mistake, because it doesn't hold up that well. Even an awful Bill Murray movie is like a B- though.
• The Lord of Catan is an amazing 14 minute short film starring Amy Acker and Fran Kranz. It reminds me a lot of when Eva learned how to play Catan.

Television

Star Trek Lower Decks

I can't fucking believe CBS Viacom Paramount Skydance Paramount canceled Lower Decks. It's a fucking animated series with a tiny budget, and it's the first Star Trek series in like three decades that understands anything about the utopian vision of TOS and TNG. Yes, there were moments of Discovery and Picard that were good, but they had no soul. Lower Decks is fun! Lower Decks is fanservice-y, but also contributes meaningful new things to canon! Lower Decks respects all of its characters and doesn't just forget that half of them exist for the finale³. The last season was perfect, and I hope that after Paramount is done serially merging with every other company on the planet, it finds the time to sell off the rights to this show to a network that can revive it.

A Man on the Inside

A Man on the Inside is a light-hearted dramady set in San Francisco starring Ted Danson, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, and Stephanie Beatriz, and created by Michael Schur. That should probably be enough to get you to watch it. Fun fact: it's set about two blocks from my old apartment, and you can routinely see my apartment building⁴ in exterior shots.

Bad Monkey

Apple TV+ has had a good run of great shows, and this is one of them. Bad Monkey starts off slow (and I almost dropped it after one episode), but somewhat slimy cop in Florida is really the role Vince Vaughan was born to play. This show was developed by Bill Lawrence and sometimes the dialog gets a little too quippy, but it's a bunch of pretty people⁵ in pretty places doing awful things, which is usually a recipe for good TV. Eva and I watched basically the entire series on Election Night after we realized how it was going to go down and that we needed to do something lighthearted/distracting.

Shrinking

We can't talk about Bill Lawrence projects on Apple TV+ without covering Shrinking, which is almost certainly the best show on TV right now. Who knew that Jason Segel could be so depressing? Who knew that Ted McGinley could be so charming? Who knew that Jessica Williams was so great? Can Christa Miller play other characters or is this it? Season 2 aired this year and season 3 is already green-lit.

Electronics

LG C3

My son threw a fork through our TV this spring, so we had to buy a new one. I decided to go for the high end and purchased an LG C3 OLED TV. It's a lot better than our previous Vizio P55-F1. If you have the money and a reasonably-dark space, I strongly recommend a modern OLED TV. Jon Siracusa prefers the Sony A95L, which might be a bit better than the LG, but it's also twice the price, and I'm pretty happy with this LG.

Ringconn (Gen1)

I get some small value out of sleep tracking, but I hate wearing an Apple Watch to bed. It's way too bulky and it's so annoying to charge. This year I decided to get a smaller decide to do fitness tracking and stop wearing my Apple Watch 24x7. Main goals:

• Work with HealthKit
• No subscription
• Not too ugly

I settled on the RingConn Gen1, a $169 smart-ring. The battery lasts 6-7 days (for real), and all of the tracking matches the metrics on my Apple Watch reasonably well⁶, and it puts everything into HealthKit. I'm a little skeptical about the first party app⁷, but otherwise the device seems cool. The Gen2 is probably better, but the Gen1 is a lot cheaper! There are also a bunch of essentially-identical things on Aliexpress for ~$30 if you are interested in this category of devices.

Rakuten Kobo Libra Color

Fun fact: my first Kindle⁸ was a birthday gift in 2009 (almost 16 years ago). I've gone through a series of Kindles since then, but a few things happened this year to make me want to jump ship:

• The Kindle Oasis was discontinued, which was the last Kindle with hardware page-turn buttons
• The new Paperwhite has basically nothing to offer
• Jeff Bezos came out as a huge chickenshit
• No, really, Jeff Bezos is a huge chickenshit

Anyhow, the main alternatives are the Boox Go and the Kobo Libra series⁹. I decided to go with Kobo, even though the Kobo Libra series is only available with a color screen, for which I have little use. I know that Jason Snell doesn't really like it, but I'm very happy with the Kobo Libra Color so far. The contrast is a little lower, but it does bring me some joy to see color book covers.

I migrated all of my Kindle books onto the Kobo and am greatly enjoying it¹⁰.

Books

Service Model

Service Model is the latest Adrian Tchaikovsky book and there's a reason it's on top of everyone's list for 2024 — it's great. Very fun. A short and enjoyable read about the aftermath of the robot revolution. Think The Road if it had been written by Douglas Adams.

The Murderbot Diaries

I decided to read through all of Martha Wells' Murderbot books this summer. They're also all super-light and fun sci-fi. Who can't sympathize with a protagonist whose main goal is to watch more bad TV?

The Interdependency Series

John Scalzi is always a good choice. He finished the Interdependency series a few years ago with the The Last Emperox, so I decided to read it all. Not as light as Redshirts but still a fun bit of space opera.

The Mountain in the Sea

This novel by Ray Nayler picked up a lot of awards in 2022 but I didn't get around to it until this year. Reminded me of Neal Stephenson a bit: lots of big ideas, but sometimes the plot fell down in service of the ideas.