The Year Gone By and the Year to Come

Crystal Pite’s The Seasons’ Canon (photo by Rosalie O’Connor)

2024 was a fine year for me, personally—I am healthy, gainfully employed, happily partnered, and securely housed, and I got to travel a bunch, including to Mexico, Portugal, and Colombia. I went to film festivals in New Orleans and New York, too, and watched something like 130 movies—mostly old ones, but 40-ish new releases, of which Conclave, Nosferatu, and Nickel Boys were the best big ones. Loved a lot of the indie horror I saw at those festivals too: Cuckoo, Dead Mail, I Saw the TV Glow, Timestalker, Dead Talents Society. Hated Civil War so much I might have to write a whole blog post about it. Adored the Fall Experience at the Boston Ballet; Crystal Pite’s The Seasons’ Canon was overwhelming in the best way, one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen on stage. I've written a bunch already about the books I read in 2024, but I'll shout out three short stories from the New Yorker (all published within a month of each other, as it happens) that I really liked: “Autobahn” by Hugo Hamilton, “Ambrose” by Allegra Goodman, and especially “My Camp” by Joshua Cohen.

But I'm gonna not do a whole big cultural review roundup like I did last year. 2024 was not a year of culture. 2024 sucked. It feels like the whole world is going down the tubes; my benighted country certainly is.

What am I going to do about it? I don't know. Maybe it depends on how bad it gets. Maybe I shouldn't let it depend on that. Certainly I'll kvetch. Maybe I'll start attending DSA meetings again. I'll volunteer. I'll write. Writing probably isn't worth much more than voting, but at least it gives me a sense of activity, a sense of control. I can always kick myself for not writing enough!

I started this blog last January with a flurry of activity, but lost steam after June. I posted 33 times in the first six months of 2024, and then only 11 times in the second half of the year. July and August were very busy for me—three weddings on three continents in a five-week period, plus a move across Boston and a subsequent comedy of ISP errors that kept me mostly offline until September—but I didn't do a great job getting back on the horse in the fall. My plans to participate in a couple more jams (Anne's Summer LEGO RPG Setting Jam and CLAYMORE's FIST: JAM OPS V, to be specific) halted at the doodling-in-a-notebook stage and then dissipated. My Lore24 effort fizzled out. I still haven't finished any of those Traveller-inspired lifepath tables.

But some things did turn out well! My little Flyover Country recap, as much as it lags behind the game itself, has been fun to write, valuable for running the campaign—it helps me keep the big picture in view and reminds me of loose threads and fun ancillary characters I can return to—and hopefully useful to a few people new to, or curious about, Stars Without Number. The one jam I did get myself in gear for was fun, and I was quite pleased with the result. My satirical/fantastical take on the ridiculous Saudi megaproject THE LINE was a hoot, if I do say so myself.

So what do I want to accomplish in 2025? Definitely carry on with the campaign recap; after some fits and starts and a holiday hiatus, Flyover Country is set to resume this Monday, the 13th, and I still have lots of catching up to do. Finish entries for multiple jams this time—let's say three this year, at the very least. Work on that little lifepath project. Flesh out some of the ideas I threw at the Lore24 wall, because there's a lot I like about that setting (or meta-setting). Write some fantasy stuff. Write something for FIST (and play more FIST). Write something that feels like Quake.

And, hey, maybe I'll actually publish a Quake map this year. Hopefully I'll publish some short fiction too. Maybe I'll flee into exile. Who knows!