Best of 2024
I’m hoping to begin an annual tradition of looking back on 20 works I first discovered and really enjoyed that year. I like the idea that doing something for three years makes it into a tradition, so here’s my second strike:
Games
- Unicorn Overlord (2024) - Atlus’s take on Ogre Battle continuously surprised me with how thoughtfully it was designed. I ended up leading a 60-person army that did not contain any generic characters.
- Backpack Hero (2023) - What if inventory tetris was the entire game? This cute roguelike is just that.
- Animal Well (2024) - Spooky puzzle metroidvania with no combat besides bosses and a remarkably unique toolset. Animals are weird and this game really leans into that.
- DDR A3 (2022) - Finally appeared at my arcade this summer. I’ve been into DDR for 24 years and this has the consistently highest quality stepcharts I’ve ever played. Even more poignant knowing the 2024 release, DDR World, is awful.
- Metaphor: ReFantazio (2024) - I was very skeptical of “Persona 5, but it’s in a fantasy world”, but this iteration maintains its best-in-class style while delivering on its promise of an epic fantastical journey.
- Rise of the Golden Idol (2024) - More satisfying bite-sized mysteries, but being set in the 1970s instead of the 1770s really helps cement the series’s theme of “people with power do grotesque things with it” by making it more relatable.
- Dragon Age: Veilguard (2024) - Probably Bioware’s last epic. You manage an endearing crew of skilled misfits through a meticulously detailed world where it’s been 10 years, both in real time and in-game time, since the last installment.
- Caves of Qud (2024) - A traditional roguelike with the premise, “what if instead of more and more powerful magic items, you found more and more powerful technological items?” Wildly trans*. Like nothing else out there.
Books
- A City on Mars (2023) - Kelly and Zach Weinersmith research offworld settlement in great detail, only to come to the deeply unpopular conclusion that it’s not feasible any time soon. I learned a lot about the actual governance of international regions, like Antarctica and the ocean depths.
- The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021) - Alison Bechdel (of the eponymous test) writes a memoir about sixty years of fitness fads intertwined with professional success and concomitant romantic failures.
- Outlive (2023) - Peter Attia summarizes what we currently know about how to have the best chance of being active and independent when you’re eighty.
- Dopamine Nation (2021) - Anna Lembke offers advice on navigating a world of things engineered to be addictive and pleasurable, through the lens of a psychiatrist working with many different kinds of addicts.
Music
- Bella Poarch - Villain (2022) - Poppy and catchy.
- Wet Leg - Chaise Longue (2021) - Alt-rock and stuffed with innuendo, inspired by the feeling of being extremely horny while on tour.
- Otyken - Genesis (2023) - An incredible indigenous Siberian-inspired piece.
- dan paladin - Watermelon (2006) - Endearingly weird chiptunes.
- Hellzapoppin’ - Ambiguous (2024) - Japanese indie electro swing. I have heard this described as “the most Jesse song imaginable.”
Other
- Hymn of Breaking Strain (1935) - A Rudyard Kipling poem about engineering tolerances that I found incredibly moving.
- Make Some Noise (2022) - I enjoyed Whose Line is it Anyway? a lot in the 2000s. This is that but better, half of the comedians are women, and the host isn’t terrible at improv. The points still don’t matter.
- Pissing Out Cancer with Hank Green (2024) - Hank Green gets cancer and decides to learn how to do standup comedy in order to write a comedy special about it. He nails it. He includes errata at the end.
draught
The archaic term for a quantity of liquid draught predates English. It’s related to the Old English verb dragan, “to drag”, which probably comes directly from Proto-Indo-European dʰregʰ, “to pull”. The word started referring to a liquid quantity because for most of history, beer barrels were dragged to the customer’s table and tapped right there. This only started changing when John Lofting, a London inventor from the Netherlands, invented the “beer engine” in 1691, a system of flexible hoses that allowed bartenders to manually pump beer from the cellar directly to the bar.
The Middle English word was pronounced the way it was spelled, with the /gh/ sounding like the final consonant in loch, like the “gh” typically was in words like daughter and knight before the sound stopped being part of standard English and was typically dropped. In draught, instead of dropping the /x/ sound (as it’s written in IPA), it became an /f/ sound, and by the 1500s it was even sometimes spelled draft to reflect the pronunciation change. However, some of the derived meanings, like “air current” or “animal that pulls”, predate the variant spelling. While American English almost entirely uses draft unless intentionally evoking archaic language, British English still sometimes uses draught for those senses.
One sense I was surprised to learn about today is the game “English draughts”, which in the US is called “checkers”. In most other European languages, the game is called some form of dames, “ladies”, but in England it got the name draughts, probably because you drag the pieces when you move them. English chess moves were even called draughts for a few hundred years.
Anyway, that’s the story of how I pronounced “healing draught” as “drawt” until I was eighteen.
jeep
The vehicle type jeep dates to 1941 US military slang referring to specifically the Willys MB and the closely related Ford GPW. Willys-Overland Motors, its original manufacturer, had to license its design to Ford because it was unable to keep up with production. Ford’s model name came from a company template: G for government vehicle, P for 80” wheelbase, and W for Willys original design.
The alteration from GPW to jeep was likely strongly influenced by Popeye comics character Eugene the Jeep, introduced in 1936 as a strange animal with magic powers that could only communicate by saying “Jeep”. You can imagine how the impressive all-terrain ability of the jeep might have been evocative of those powers.
Willys-Overland eventually ended up with the Jeep trademark after some disputes in 1950. It merged with Kaiser in 1953, the resulting company was bought by American Motors in 1970, and that company was bought by Chrysler in 1987, which continues to manufacture Jeeps to this day.
cardinal
The bird cardinal was named in the late 1600s for its distinctive bright red color, which resembled the bright red robes Catholic cardinals wear. The name given to Catholic cardinals predates the English language, first appearing in print in the 700s. It was based on Latin cardinālis (root word cardō), originally meaning “pivot” or “hinge”, but by the 500s being used more to mean “principal” or “eminent”, so a natural metaphor for the most important priests.
I assumed on learning this that cardō was also the root for cardiac, but that’s Greek καρδία (kardía) meaning simply “heart” instead.
You can also see how the “principal” meaning gave rise to other uses of the adjective cardinal, like cardinal numbers and cardinal sins. Courtesy of wikipedia, here are some bonus facts I learned about the cardinal directions while researching. I actually had never noticed before that even in Romance languages, the direction names are Germanic.
My personal creed
People are amazing. Every person has inherent worth and deserves a chance to be happy. When people put their minds to it, they can do anything.