Is it even a blog if you don’t do an end-of-year round-up the last day of December? If we don’t look back on the last twelve months of our life and cherry-pick a handful of things we liked, does the year exist at all? Are we human, or are we dancer?!!

With those hard-hitting questions out of the way, have a few favorites off my list:

Movie: When I looked back over my list of Stuff I Watched This Year, I was really surprised at how little of it came out in 2023. Turns out most of my movie nights were either rewatching longtime favorites or watching old-but-new-to-me flicks. But the handful of 2023 movies made such an impact that it felt like an absolute banger of a year; despite the little I watched, there was not a dud in the bunch. Which makes it so hard to pick a winner!

One just barely eked out the lead, though, in a photo finish alongside Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse:

I loved Nimona. I loved it a legit embarrassing amount. While I went in with only cursory knowledge of the comic, I’ve had an enormous affection for ND Stevenson’s work for years, ever since he was on Tumblr posting The Broship of the Ring in the early aughts. (His newsletter, I’m Fine I’m Fine Just Understand, is also a lovely heart-on-its-sleeve exploration of his many and varied journeys – gender, mental health, family, and otherwise – in his 30s.) And not only is Nimona basically the tiny weird gremlin child that’s lived in my heart for decades, not only is the whole film joyous and heartbreaking and just fucking fun, but to have an animated movie this unabashedly queer, with a trans allegory so high-key that an opera soprano couldn’t hit it, in a year when queer and trans rights felt more precarious than ever? I cried. Also an embarrassing amount.

Since watching it, I’ve read the comic, and it’s fascinating to see how the movie leaned into an explicitly hopeful ending versus the comic’s angrier, more bittersweet conclusion. Sure, it could be marketing; it could also be a reflection of Stevenson’s journey as he realized he was trans and settled better into his own skin. I don’t know. But someone on Tumblr remarked, “the comic is the call; the movie is the response,” and I feel like that’s the perfect summation.

Runner-up: Across the Spider-Verse, both for the spectacular animation (HOBIE!!!) and for hitting all my favorite narrative buttons about being aware you’re trapped in a story, choosing how you break free of it – and if you even can break free.

TV Show: I’ll be honest, I was ready to write off this year in TV. A lot of the zeitgeist-y shows didn’t pique my interest, especially when I’m still feeling too soft and bruised to handle the darkness of Yellowjackets or the everybody’s-just-awful-ness of Succession. Meanwhile, the shows I knew I’d like were… well, the less said about Our Flag Means Death season two, the better.

But then, less than a week before the close of 2023:

BY GOD, IT’S LETTERKENNY WITH THE STEEL CHAIR!!!

Letterkenny dropped its twelfth and final season on Christmas (or Boxing Day, depending on where you get your episodes), and good buddies, it stuck the landing. I’m not Canadian, but enough of my family lives in the upper Midwest that I can’t describe the patter at anything other than comforting: the accents, sure, but also the rapid-fire back-and-forth, the way every idle musing gets stretched into deadpan absurdity, the in-jokes and repetitions that weave into a performance knitted so tight you could make a sweater out of it. And it has so much heart, my god. The hicks, skids, and hockey players squabble all the damn time, but when it matters most, they know that when a friend asks for help? You help him.

Except for maybe if they fucked an ostrich.

(Allegedly.)

Runner-up: Not a single show, but an entire network! Ah, Dropout, what would I do without you? I mentioned getting hooked on Um, Actually… a while back, and since then that’s expanded to Make Some Noise, Breaking News, and basically anything Brennan Lee Mulligan DMs on Dimension 20. It’s also a streaming service that got where it is by focusing on what it does best – niche nerd comedy – which: respect. This nerd appreciates the pandering and the laughs that got me through a lot of rough nights this year.

Book: I went outside my SF&F wheelhouse with my pick this year. I’m as surprised as you are!

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin is an absolute queer hot mess of a novel, and I say that with the utmost admiration. It follows Greta, a medical transcriptionist working for a dubiously effective therapist/sex coach, who gradually develops an infatuation with one of his clients: the titular Big Swiss, whom Greta only knows by her voice. Being in a small town, she hears that voice at the dog park one day, and what follows – like I said. It’s a hot mess.

Considering the book’s a jumble of infidelity, trauma (sexual and otherwise), repression, and the kind of HIPAA violations that made me whisper oh noooooo over and over in horrified, strangled tones, it feels doubly strange that it’s my favorite book of the year, cf. all that stuff I said earlier about gravitating toward softer media. But here’s the thing: Big Swiss is also delightfully weird. There’s a specificity to the weirdness that startled multiple laughs out of me; the precision with which Beagin describes a massive beehive in Greta’s run-down farmhouse, or the most awkward dinner party ever between Greta, Big Swiss, and Big Swiss’s husband, gives the whole story a lived-in quality, even at its most ridiculous. Plus, Greta herself is dryly hilarious as she throws herself headlong into all the wrong choices, digs a hole, and somehow unearths an even worse choice at the bottom of the pit.

A fun final note: the audiobook uses the medium perfectly by having multiple actors read the transcripts Greta’s writing, as if we, too, were listening to Om the therapist’s audio files. I loved it.

Runner-up: Years behind everyone else, the release of Martha Wells' System Collapse finally got me to dig into the Murderbot series. Understandably, I’m lost in the quagmire of library holds, patiently waiting for each one to reach the top of my list, but from the three novellas I’ve read so far, I am kicking myself for not picking it up sooner. May 2024 bring more copies to my library and more free time to enjoy them.

And may all of you have a happy 2024, too! I’m not gonna be the dumbass who gasps “I think we lost them” as the awfulness of 2023 vanishes behind us, but may the new year bring us all a few sparks of good, and may we find them easily when we need them most. Kick its ass, y’all.

About six weeks ago, I was here:

The Tetons as a rainstorm rolled in, Grand Teton National Park

And also here, and here, and here:

Top to bottom: Castle Geyser, the Morning Glory Pool, a view of Yellowstone Lake

During the height of the pandemic, I turned into a bit of a national park nerd. I live at the nexus of so many parks and monuments that it became an easy outdoor alternative to… well, anything indoors and not socially distanced. The National Park Service even makes a passport you can get stamped at over 400 parks! (Nerrrrrrrrrd.) So I’d putter around to all the historic spots in the DC metro area, plus a few outside it, to collect my little stamps and go “ooh, aah” at the scenery.

When 2022 rolled around – the 150th anniversary of the creation of Yellowstone National Park, the first national park in the U.S. – of course I had to go.

…Except Mother Nature had other ideas, and literally a week before I was set to head west for ten days, massive floods decimated the park. So when 2023 rolled around, I made a second attempt – throwing in a road trip from Denver to West Yellowstone so I could stop at a few other parks along the way – because BY GOD I WAS GONNA SEE SOME BISON.

It was exactly what I needed.

I got to see a lot of crows and elk, too! (And once, a moose, but I couldn’t pull over for a picture in time.)

I grew up with a literal state park in my backyard, so forests and wilderness have always been my happy place. I still think “forest bathing” is a ridiculous phrase, but there’s some truth to it, y’know? I breathe easier when I’m surrounded by trees and green things. And I’m fascinated by the interplay between humanity and nature when we try to impose ourselves on places like this.

Yellowstone is the national park everybody goes to; I saw literal busloads of tourists unload at the Grand Prismatic Spring, and the area around Old Faithful felt like being at Disney World for all the crowds and restaurants. Growing up where I did gave me a healthy understanding of, and respect for, how badly nature can fuck you up if given half a chance. You don’t touch the snakes with triangle-shaped heads, you don’t eat the berries if you can’t 100% identify them, and if you see a raccoon acting weird in the middle of the day, you go get Mom so she can call Animal Control about the rabid critter in the backyard. But that isn’t the case for a lot of folks. And while I didn’t see anything super-egregious that would’ve earned someone a spot on Tourons of Yellowstone, going to the biggest attractions made it very clear how many people viewed Yellowstone as a theme park, not a national park. How much they expected a semi-wild place to be 100% clean and orderly and sanitized, just because they didn’t have a lot of experience with nature as a whole – or because they don’t believe they need to give it the respect it deserves.

Also, you’re literally on top of a massive volcano, which can be easy to forget until you visit Mammoth Hot Springs and it’s like you stepped onto the surface of the moon.

(I could insert a whole paragraph here about how this exact topic is part of why last year’s Nope stuck with me for so long, but somebody on Tumblr already wrote up a bit of meta about it, so I don’t have to.)

Which is not to say I didn’t have my own dumbass moments! I know nature, but despite an eight-month stint in Denver fifteen years ago, I don’t know altitude too well, and altitude not-so-gently reminded me that a steep switchback at 8000 ft will fuck you up as much as those giant fluffy cows they keep telling you not to pet. It was worth it to see the waterfalls at the canyon, but whew.

Top: the Lower Falls at Yellowstone. Bottom: the view as your sea-level-living ass sits gasping for breath a quarter of the way up the switchback that takes you to the top of the Lower Falls.

Anyway, if you’re also interested in how nature and humans collide, I cannot recommend Mary Roach’s Fuzz enough; I’ve also added Death in Yellowstone to my TBR, because hearing about how those beautiful hot springs have literally dissolved people who fell in is exactly the kind of morbidly fascinating stuff I enjoy. I promise to report back once I’ve finished it, gruesome details and all.

“I’ll make this a weekly feature!” I said. Two months later… uh.

But here are some things I’ve enjoyed recently!

What I’m Hearing: You’re Wrong About recently did an episode about how the New York Times has fallen down on the job when it comes to reporting on trans people. That led me down a tiny rabbit hole to Gender Reveal, which has been a fantastic listen as somebody whose nonbinary egg only cracked a couple years ago. I am always down for people talking about gender and pushing back against the binary!

What I’m Reading: The Archive of Our Own, a major fanfic website, is undergoing a reckoning over how it handles complaints of racism; #EndOTWRacism (OTW = Organization of Transformative Works, the org that runs AO3) has been trending in fandom circles ever since a concerted pushback campaign began earlier in the month. On Dreamwidth, chestnut_pod wrote an impressively detailed, thorough post about actions OTW could take that balance the needs of communities of color with the anti-censorship “maximum inclusivity of content” ethos AO3 was founded on. The comments have a ton of lively and incisive discussion going on, too – both about the End OTW Racism campaign and OTW/AO3’s ongoing issues.

(I also wrote a Dreamwidth post of my own, from the perspective of somebody with a library preservation/book conservation background, in specific response to people insisting “it’s an archive, it HAS to collect everything!” Related: there’s a new play that just opened in DC, “Here There Are Blueberries,” based on a true story of how the Holocaust Museum handled the inclusion of reprehensible content in their archives.)

What I’m Watching: I watched… all of ten minutes of Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves with my girlfriend last weekend before her TV crapped out, and now I’m just patiently sitting on my hands, waiting for when we can watch the rest of it. Even just the tiny bit I saw was as fun as everyone’s been saying. I’m not a fan of how Everything Is IP nowadays, but look: if you’re gonna make a movie based on existing IP, a roleplaying game that allows endless flexibility in story and character is 100% the way to go.

It’s gross and rainy here, and it’s been a really tough week for a lot of people I love, but here are a few things I’ve been into lately:

What I’m Hearing: Hozier released a new EP this week, which got me going through his back catalogue and revisiting one of my favorite (criminally underrated) songs of his: “Almost (Sweet Music).” It walks such a perfect tightrope of grief and hope; it’s a story of moving on even as the tides of the past keep tugging you back, a novel’s worth of emotion packed into three and a half minutes. Frankly, it’s the kind of shit I hope to write someday. And somehow I’d never seen the music video for it, which made my pandemic-bruised heart bawl – look, after the last three years, anything that has groups of people in seeming isolation coming together in shared joy is going to wreck me.

What I’m Reading: About a month ago, Vulture published an oral history of Kings, one of the most ambitious, over-the-top primetime epics of the past decade and a half. I’ve got a soft spot for things that go big and fail spectacularly in the process, and damn, that show went big. Of course, it was also a lot easier for me to love it back when a blatantly theocratic United States felt like just another fantasy setting, not a depressing reality… but still, the article’s a great look at a mostly-forgotten TV epic and the weird space it tried to make for itself.

What I’m Watching: I can’t remember what made me click over to Um, Actually one weekend, but by now I’m four seasons deep and it’s become my default background TV while I’m puttering around the house. The premise: host Mike Trapp reads off an incorrect statement about a beloved piece of pop culture, and contestants have to buzz in to correct him – starting, Jeopardy-style, with the statement, “Um, actually….” And yes, I have totally screamed IT’S CALLED THE TWELVE COLONIES OF KOBOL, NOT THE TWELVE COLONIES OF HUMANITY!!!! at my TV in a righteous nerd anger. You probably will too!

I’m going to spoil the ending of EO for you: The donkey dies.

Picture sitting in a theater. We, the audience, have spent the last hour and a half following Eo (the titular donkey) as he wanders in and out of the lives of a dozen humans – some heartlessly malicious, some terribly kind. Every act of cruelty, or grace, is balanced by its opposite. A beating by a group of football hooligans is followed by a veterinarian choosing to help Eo recover rather than euthanize him. Strangers who find him take him in, then use him as a beast of burden for a job slaughtering minks at a fur farm. And then, in the last five minutes, Eo wanders into a herd of cattle, who are in turn herded into a pen… then up a winding, gradually narrowing path… and we realize with horror Eo is walking straight into a slaughterhouse.

There’s a moment when we think another act of grace is coming, as a slaughterhouse worker spots the out-of-place donkey among the sea of cows. But rather than pull Eo aside, she gives his hindquarters a halfhearted swat to keep him moving along the path.

You don’t see him die, but you hear the loud thud of the killing blow as the screen cuts to black.

And gang, I have to tell you: I was not ready for that shit. The pandemic’s left me out of practice with going to theaters – I didn’t even think to check Does The Dog Die?, which doesn’t just tell you if the dog dies but if any animal gets killed – and, more than that, out of practice with sad endings.

My 2020 story is a lot of the same old song everybody’s sung. You know how it goes. My world shrunk to the size of a small house with a small backyard; a computer monitor filled with tiny boxes of my friends' faces; a trail I walked every day, where I was too scared to smell the lilacs because it’d mean taking my mask off for ten seconds. I desperately wanted to make it larger, but finding an escape that didn’t yank me violently back to the present proved difficult, when what I really wanted was to live out a fantasy of no surprises and few uncertainties. That meant a whole lot of gentle, low-stakes, silly media, so for a minute or two, I could pretend the world wasn’t dying outside. (Which only lasted as long as it took to check Twitter and fall into another doomscroll of covid fatalities, of Trump and the upcoming election, of George Floyd, of – )

When I shed that cushion of softness, I got used to the feel of a mask on my face, staying six feet away from all my coworkers, and outdoor visits with my mom in a church parking lot. I got used to holding my breath when I hugged her – which ended up being her big Mother’s Day present that year. Just a hug from one of her kids after two months without physical contact. We both cried.

But as the pandemic dragged on, that unbearable weight started to feel almost ordinary. And nowadays? I can lift things that would have crushed me before. No anxiety can touch will my elderly mom die if I give her a hug? and no depression will ever sink to the nadir of months and months with only my cat for consistent, non-virtual company. Yeah, sometimes my lizard brain still scampers out of control – that’s the nature of clinical depression/anxiety – but I feel worlds tougher and more capable after getting fired in the kiln of the last three years.

Except when a donkey dies on the big screen. Then: here I am, in tears, easily cracked if I’m struck the wrong way by the wrong story.

I still want that soft predictability, no matter how much resilience I’ve gained. I guess after three years of keeping my guard up around death and despair, I need those little moments of escape more than ever: places where I can fully let down my guard and let a gentle fiction wash away reality. Every hurt will be healed. Every cruelty will be met with grace. Every community will come together and stay together, a shield to protect its most vulnerable. Every donkey will escape death, once more, and wander free into the world.

…actually, you know what, this does seem like a great social media economy for taking up the whole “personal website” thing again.

When Twitter started collapsing on itself with all the majesty of a deflated souffle, I realized I’d pinned way too much of my online life to a place that could disappear at any moment. Honestly, I should’ve known better; I’ve spent enough time in library preservation to know that going 100% hands-off your digital assets is a crappy preservation plan. So here I am, wresting at least a few of my digital assets back from places that might vanish if a techbro decides it’d be hilarous to press the big DO NOT PRESS button at exactly 4:20p.

I don’t have any big, grand plans for this space yet. It’s going to be pretty much what it says on the tin: “weird things, cute things, stuff that makes me happy.” I might talk about something I’ve read lately. Or something I’m writing. Or a cool bookbinding project I just finished. Like a lot of stuff I’ve made over the years, it’s probably best just to let it sprawl outward a while, then trim back the leaves here and there like I’m sculping one of those fancy topiaries shaped like a rabbit. Until then, it’ll be a little messy and overgrown, and that’s fine. We’re in a weird, messy online era, anyway, and hopefully we can all embrace that a bit.