The Best of 2024

My Spotify Wrapped said I listened to 10,000 different songs this year. Spotify doesn’t even know what I play on Youtube or Bandcamp, so that’s not even the whole story. The point is, I don’t spend a ton of time on any particular thing, because there’s a lot of music that makes me happy. It also skews the numbers a bit, because several things wound up on my top songs list that weren’t necessarily my most liked songs, but happened to be on my car playlist or come up in shuffle a lot.

Without really trying, I find that only about a fifth of my posts this year were this year’s releases, and a little over a third are from the 2020s. That’s left plenty of room to revisit some old favorites this year, as well as uncovering some past gems that I hadn’t gotten to before.

My interest in vaporwave / chillwave / future funk really took off this year, as well as (thanks to my daughter) my interest in Indian music. I’m still not much of a Spanish speaker but I’ve certainly found a lot of Spanish language music I’ve liked. I notice there’s a lot less classical in my diet than there used to be. Maybe I’ll try to remedy that in 2025.

Non-music things I really enjoyed in 2024:

Things I spent a lot of time on this year

• My own brain, doing a lot of self-examination (see my reading notes below)
• drawing by hand, as well as learning AI art systems. I’ve also greatly enhanced my Photoshop skills to further manipulate what the AI models can do. I don’t think of myself as an artist unless I’m gaining control over what’s being presented, which I can’t count on AI for. The images on these end-of-year posts are my creations. Penguins are kind of my default thing to put in images. I don’t know what to tell you.

Thinking more deeply:

• No Bad Parts - getting okay with myself
• The Artist’s Way - A creative kick-start
• Existential Kink - Very cool
• A Brief History of Everything - cuz it wouldn’t be a year that didn’t expose me to a revolutionary new way of conceiving reality

Stories and fiction (with pictures)

• The Nice House On The Lake - not new this year, but new to me and it destroyed me.
• Beneath the trees Where Nobody Sees - utterly brilliant kids book-looking tale of murder and obsession
• Hexagon Bridge - A newcomer to comics, as far as I can tell, with an architectural detail and an amazing imagination
• Nights - my favorite new ongoing
• Rare Flavours - writer Ram V is a favorite of mine
• Black Cloak - fantasy-set police procedural

Stories and fiction (without pictures)

• The Dispossessed - a very savvy look at how people conduct themselves
• Babel - Such a fantastic magic system
• A Psalm For The Wild-built - light and affecting
• Starter Villain - hilarious
• Gideon The Ninth - haven’t finished it yet but I’m loving it

Some TV I really enjoyed

• Shogun
• The Penguin
• Disclaimer
• Blue Eye Samurai
• Fallout
• Mr And Mrs Smith
• The Gentlemen
• Dark Winds

TV I dug but it got cancelled because I can’t have nice things

• Outer Range
• The Big Door Prize
• Dead Boy Detectives

Youtubers I Have Watched A Lot Of

• Crash Course - their new series on world religions is fantastic
• Newel Of Knowledge - Better communication and general self-improvement
• PixImperfect - mad photoshop skills
• Thaeyne - a whimsical AI Art lover
• The Living Philosophy - dense philosophy that often takes me a couple of watches to get my head around