In Media Review – 2023

Years-in-review are all the rage, when the years are waning. In my case, I had to get this website up & running, buy real estate, and engage in any number of further excuses before I finished compiling my own. Still: better late, we hope.

Now, what the heck was I up to? In brief, and with some highlights…

2023 in books

• The Cairo Trilogy
  • An absolute stunner. The times are historic, the scope & depth are remarkable, and the characters are miserable & beautiful & human.
• Cooking As Though You Might Cook Again
  • Meditative & humble, an argument for simple foods appreciated with a kind of secular grace. Also plenty of legumes.
• Spelunky
  • Extremely considered & insightful look at the creation of a masterpiece. Fascinating stuff.

2023 in film

• Roma
  • One of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen.
• The Vast of Night
  • Watched with my dad, who has a reputation for throwing on any old thing, but this was surprising. Great performances from the leads, palpable tension.
• Wait Until Dark
  • Hep kills it, Arkin chills it.

2023 in games

Games are a weird one, spread over so many platforms and affordances, each one vying for your Engagement, each with their own year-in-a-walled-garden-in-review.

Here are a few games that weren’t necessarily the best of the year, but that did leave the strongest impressions on me.

• Colossal Cave – A fair number of issues with this one, but interesting in a theoretical sense, to see a venerated creator revisit their own inspirations.

• Disco Elysium – Sigh. Like nothing else.

• Endlight – Tempest 2000 by way of House of Leaves and vice-versa.

• The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening – My first time playing this one; hard to call the game formulaic when it created the formula.

• Northern Journey – Incredibly beautiful and frustrating. Extremely Norwegian.

• System Shock 2 – My first playthrough as an OSA recruit, documented here.

• Thousand Threads – A strange and emergent postal purgatory.

2023 in music

The best part about never having been cool, is not having to try to be cool. Most of what I listened to this year was old video game music (primarily from the tracker era), or drone, or electronic, primarily to help me focus while working on other things requiring a rudimentary attention to some kind of language or another.

Shouts out to Mary Lattimore’s Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, and Ki Oni’s A Leisurely Swim to Everlasting Life for being particularly tuned-in to my exact wavelength – beautiful music in its own right, but also a calming presence over my shoulder.

I also have to mention LCD Soundsystem’s “how do you sleep?”, whose rising action and absolutely pulsing energy is going to keep me moving for years.

Oh, I also listened, as always, to a lot of Elder.

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That was my that year, with our this year half over. Here’s hoping that this next half year brings a year’s worth of joy to all of us here.

In the meantime, you can see what’s keeping me going on any of my usual hauntings.