The Traditional End of the Arbitrary Calendar Year Roundup
At the end of each year, I look back on my blog post about the end of the previous year and see what I hoped would come to pass in the future… and most of the time it’s me saying “Next year, things are gonna happen, and it’ll be great!”. (Narrator: “It wasn’t.”)
This year, I look back on last year's “end of the year” post which I wrote on Christmas Eve 2023, and see I was (as usual) disappointed with the way the year had turned out. 2023 wasn’t bad, but I was hoping for bigger and better things in 2024.
Of course, that didn’t happen either. 2024 sucked. I felt like a miserable hamster on a wheel, going around and around and not actually getting anywhere. Just when I got some speed up and thought, ‘you know, this is actually okay!’ then something came along and tripped me up so I fell onto my face, smashing my stupid grin into a bloody mess.
It’d be great to get that project off the ground
Nope, didn’t happen.
At least nothing bad happened
Bad things did happen. Far too many funerals this year.
The one thing I talked about at the end of last year that I actually DID do was keep track of all the stuff I watch during the year. So, with that in mind, let’s look at what held my interest throughout the year.
January:
Top Watch: Star Trek Prodigy (Season 1) - went in with very low expectations only to discover that it was brilliant. Great crew, great animation, intelligent story that didn’t talk down to its target audience. Phenomenal.
Honourable Mentions: Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Lupin (Part 3)
February:
Top Watch: The Creator - blimey, that was epic wasn’t it? Original, cool, and amazing special effects. It felt like it was part of the same universe as Blade Runner, and watching that while playing the Blade Runner RPG just made it even cooler.
Honourable Mentions: True Detective (Season 4), A Shop for Killers (Season 1)
March:
Top Watch: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Season 1) - c’mon, let’s face it. While I enjoyed Star Trek Discovery, my favourite part of all of the seasons was the introduction of Captain Pike and the Enterprise. So, getting their own series was perfect. Great cast again, really great Trek stories. Loved it.
Honourable Mentions: Star Trek: Lower Decks (Season 4), Will Trent (Season 1)
April:
Top Watch: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire - first time back in the cinema since the last of the Star Wars movies, and it was a perfect birthday treat. Love the characters, especially the new generation, and it punched me in the nostalgia feels all the way through. Not as emotional as Afterlife, but still great.
Honourable Mentions: Three Body Problem (Season 1), Star Wars: The Bad Batch (Season 4)
May:
Top Watch: Sugar (Season 1) - I like me some weird stuff. Colin Farrell, before his amazing transformation in The Penguin, is a cool noir detective with a love of classic cinema, investigating weirdness in Hollywood. I’m not going to spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it, but it has a couple of seriously good twists.
Honourable Mentions: Destined with You (which would have ranked higher but there’s a scene with an octopus that’s unpleasant), Star Trek: Discovery (Season 5)
June:
Top Watch: Dark Matter (Season 1) - Once again, I like me some weird. This was good, maybe a little too long, but in a world of stories where the ‘multiverse’ is the ‘in thing’ this was pretty darn good. Apple really knocking it out of the park with their series (I mean, the Monarch TV series is easily the best of the Monsterverse media, and don’t get me started on how amazing Severance and Slow Horses is).
Honourable Mentions: Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, Enemy (Denis Villeneuve)
July:
Top Watch: Shogun (Season 1) - Stunning. Brilliant acting again, visually stunning, and I can’t really fault it. My memories of watching the old Richard Chamberlain one in my youth with my dad may have surfaced a couple of times, but really good.
Honourable Mentions: Star Trek: Prodigy (Season 2), A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (Season 1)
August:
Top Watch: Travelers (Season 3) - Started watching this for an RPG that didn’t quite work, but the series itself is stunning. Genuinely heartbreaking, moving, and smart sci-fi and a great take on the ‘coming back from the future to save the world’ plot line.
Honourable Mentions: No One Will Save You, Travelers (Season 2).
September:
Top Watch: Ludwig (Season 1) - I really love murder mysteries and police procedurals, so this quirky little series was a complete delight. And some great acting in here too. Really clever use of the obsessive consideration of detail being used to solve murders. Highly recommended.
Honourable Mentions: The Batman (movie), Will Trent (Season 2)
October:
Top Watch: The Devil’s Hour (Season 1 and 2) - Watched a lot in October, I don’t know why, but the standout was The Devil’s Hour. Really original ‘time travel’ series (and I use the term in quotes as it’s not really about time travel, it’s time loops). Capaldi on top form, but Jessica Raine was amazing in this. Season 2 builds upon the genius, though not as amazing as season 1. Really intrigued to see where it goes from here.
Honourable Mentions: The Black Phone, Ouija: Origin of Evil
November:
Top Watch: The Expanse (Season 1, 2, and 3) - Late to the party, but I thought I’d see what all the fuss was about, and it was well worth it. Great and interesting characters (Amos kinda stole it for me), and the realistic interpretation of ‘space physics’ was really cool. I could so easily see how this was created as an RPG setting before it became books, and a TV series. Can’t believe it took me so long to get around to watching this.
Honourable Mentions: Arcane (Season 2) - so good, so very good, Fargo (Season 5)
December:
Top Watch: The Expanse (Season 4, 5, and 6) - I watched a LOT in December, and while seasons 5 and 6 were not as cool, The Expanse was better than a lot of the nonsense I watched this month. Frustrated that we haven’t had the rest of the series to complete the books’ story.
Honourable Mentions: Squid Game (Season 2), Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Gaming
I know most of the people who follow this blog and Substack are here because I write tabletop RPGs, so Gaming needs to be mentioned. This year I continued the long-running D&D game with my old gaming group from 40 years ago, as well as my other group finishing off the epic Aegean game we’d been playing, shifting the setting from Ancient Greece to Mythic Vikings. We did some more Blade Runner RPG, tried our hands at FATE for the first time, and have returned to Aegean in a whole new setting.
Next year, I’m hoping we get to try Deathmatch Island, Mothership, Slugblaster, and a few other games that are brewing in the background.
In May I went to UK Games Expo, which was MASSIVE and exhausting, but great fun. Met loads of publishers and people I knew, and was kinda overwhelmed by how huge it is. I’m really hoping to do the full three days for UKGE 2025.
There was the second Norwich Gaming Convention, which was cool if strangely laid out - but that wasn’t the convention organiser’s fault. The location used before was under repair so it was held in a temporary home in the University of the Arts in various parts of the campus and nearby buildings. It’s certainly growing and should only go from strength to strength.
In September was Tabletop Scotland which was our first time attending, and I helped on the stall with Stoo and the We_Evolve games, and had part of the table for my wife’s Etsy business of cool gothy wares from Misery Makes. It was cool, huge, slightly damp and very foggy, but good. Didn’t make any money after the expense of going to Scotland, but the trip was great fun, and got to see lots of cool people.
And in November it was Dragonmeet, which again was great and exhausting.
Gaming Experience of the Year?
Mothership. Which is weird, because I haven’t played it. Stoo bought a copy at Tabletop Scotland after we watched a review on Quinn’s Quest, and after thumbing through the various books in the basic set my mind was racing with ideas. I’ve always loved the ‘small book’ format and wanted to bring back the feel of Traveller, and Mothership really scratched that itch and beat me to it. It’s not so much the subject matter, but more the execution. I couldn’t stop thinking about it all week and ideas and plans were hastily jotted down…
One day I’ll get around to doing something with them…
Other Media
Finally, just a quick look at some of the other media I’ve been absorbing. I read some books, as always not as many as I’d have liked - I’m a terribly slow reader, I like to try to absorb it, and I often get distracted and start something else. Just my brain at the moment I guess. I read the new X-Files book, Perihelion - which was good, and great to see what happens after the 11th season. Had some issues with the ‘Charles Xavier School for alien hybrids’, but I hope there’s another one coming. I read the X-Files Origins books (though I’ve not quite finished Devil’s Advocate) which are pretty cool.
I started Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword and then got distracted by having to read something for work - speaking of which, I did the first seven Laundry Files novels by Charles Stross over the last year, which were cool. I must get back to The Bright Sword, but Debs bought me I’m Starting To Worry About This Black Box Of Doom by Jason Pargin, so maybe after that. It did remind me that I haven’t read the latest in his “John and Dave” series…. I also read Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, which was great, gripping, and genuinely terrifying, but not the happiest of reads.
Music-wise, I’ve been mostly listening to the usual Nine Inch Nails music as always, along with some metal like Bring Me The Horizon, Falling in Reverse, Ice Nine Kills and the new Poppy album. However, real discovery for me this year has been Night Club.
I’d not heard of them before, but this electronica duo are the perfect, dark, synthwave, retro-80s cool that I needed right now, and it has been on constant loop for weeks.
—
And that’s it. What a crappy year. Let’s hope 2025 is better. What do I want to get out of the coming year? That’s easy… CHANGE. A change in what’s going on, what I’m doing, everything… I’d post that video of The Stranglers singing “Something Better Change” but I do that every year and yet everything stays the same.
May you have a brilliant new year, and all the very best for the future.
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