I like the new year. It’s the time to reflect on the year gone by, and ask yourself: how did that go?

Usually the answer is not great! but one day it might not be. We’ve just got to keep living through them until we find a year that wasn’t not great! and, sure, some years that’s harder than others but the only way is forward. Time’s arrow never drifts.

The Culture

I Saw the TV Glow

Jane Schoenbrun said her goal with this film was to induce “contact high gender dysphoria” and she didn’t pour a lot of time and energy into making a film just to fuck around. I don’t think I have gender stuff. One time a visiting lecturer referred to me, 23 years old and shaven clean as the day of my birth, as “the bloke in the orange shirt,” and I think of this as one of the most gratifying moments of my life, but I think that’s pretty normal. Surely everyone else understands that gender is a prison.

The hot new Prince of Persia

The metroidvania is as close to perfect an art form as we’ve come up with in thousands of years of technological advancement. It’s hard not to imagine an early hominid, having daubed onto his cave wall a little stick figure, wanting to make that little figure move around to explore a seemingly-endless map of simple squares, finding a pair of boots that let him “double jump,” and using that “double jump” to find something back where he started in the very first square on the map.

The new Prince of Persia was an immediate contender for GOTY when it came out in January. It’s short. It’s sharp. You make a little guy run around.

The little guy is hot, now.

The final episode of The Curse (no spoilers)

The Curse was already the most horrible thing on television (complimentary) at the end of 2023 but the never-saw-it-coming finale wormed its way into my brain and hasn’t quite left. Emma Stone should get her Oscar for this.¹

Delicious in Dungeon

This is a great comedy anime about a group of adventurers who can’t afford the supplies to keep them alive while they delve into a dungeon to rescue their friend from the slow-digesting stomach of a dragon, so they have to eat the monsters they defeat on the way down, and maybe the main guy was just waiting for an excuse to do this. He’s weird about it. All of this is very funny. It never stops being funny.

Along the way it gathers some intense, heady stuff, not least of which is the Big Theme of the whole thing: to eat is the privilege of the living. If we can’t find the time to share a delicious meal with the people we love, what are we even doing here?

Delicious in Dungeon was my hyperfixation of 2024, for reasons that may become clear by the end of this newsletter.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

Sometimes, in the middle of a COVID lockdown, I’d be on the couch watching an episode of an old sitcom or somesuch and suddenly time would stretch ahead of and behind me, allowing a brief journey into the yawn of infinity, where every day was the same as yesterday which was the same as tomorrow. Months passed in minutes, hours in years, moments in eternities.

This is what I imagine Frieren, star of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, feels like, all the time. This is a show about a thousand-plus-year-old elf who walks away at the end of her decade-long journey to defeat the Demon King and finds that she learned nothing from it. Now she wanders about the world learning the stupidest magical spells she can find. She didn’t realise that for ten short years she was kind of in love with Himmel the Hero. She is a master of her craft who can never, in all her eons of life, resist the lure of a treasure chest which has a 99% chance of being a mimic in disguise, but oh boy, the pomise of that 1%. That’s where the living gets done.

Animal Well

I spent more brain-hours on Animal Well, a game in which you play an animal (?) in a well (???), than anything else this year.

ME, Don Hertzfeldt’s new film

I couldn’t tell you what was happening in this, moment-to-moment, but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t enthralled. Hertzfeldt’s gift lies in grounding the audience to an emotional reality even while the actual “events” amount to nonsense.

Astro Bot

Astro Bot brought me an enormous amount of joy. For three days straight, I made this little guy jump around my screen and I let him try to sell me a Playstation, even though I already owned a Playstation and was, in fact, playing Astro Bot on it that very moment. Janina wrote about it. It’s corporate synergy, but it tickles my brain in just the right place.

Nuclear War: A Scenario

Because I hate myself,² in the wake of the US election I read Annie Jacobsen’s minute-by-minute account of a hypothetical nuclear strike against the United States and the thousand obsolete systems, minor fuck-ups, interdepartmental dramas, etc., between our normal, everyday, arguably functional civilisation and total nuclear annihilation.

Conclave

It’s been a bad year for The Movies, coming off the back of the WGA strikes, but Conclave made me think that The Movies are back, baby! Do you hear that? It’s the sound of popping corn. That cloying, jammy smell in the air. The tappa-tappa-tappa of teens giggling on their phones two rows back. It’s Films in 2025; you mark my words!

Revisiting old favourites, maybe too much

I spent a lot of time in Red Ded Redemption 2 and The Witcher over the long summer.

I should explain.

The Intangibles

Worrying about your ageing body

In the tail-end of 2022 I got an ADHD diagnosis. I already wrote about this; why am I telling you about it again?

The other part of that whole story is that I had to get a blood pressure reading for the purposes of medication, so I strolled into the pharmacist’s office on my lunch break where the pharmacist took my readings, went bone white, and told me as calm as he could manage that he was going to write down some numbers on a piece of paper, that I was going to take myself to the nearest hospital as soon as possible, and that I was going to show them these numbers and that as soon as the numbers were read I would be taken very seriously.

It turns out that I’m fine but my blood pressure is extremely high. We’re still trying to figure out why, and how to get those numbers down to “not ideal, but workable.” It’s fine. It’s probably genetic.

Quitting your terrible job

The lunch break was from a job with a creative agency. It doesn’t matter which. The point is that I’d spent the last ten years working towards this position, something in a team, something where I’m not wearing down my ligaments all day every day, something where I can finally start to get a handle on this “career” thing, and it wasstressful. It shouldn’t have been stressful — I’d been doing this for ten years; I was good at it; I knew what I was doing — but thanks to the mechanics of the agency itself, I had been stressed and, maybe worse, feeling like I’d wasted the past decade on getting into a line of work I didn’t even really want to be in.

Maybe a whole career, too

I’m not a baby. I know my plans to become a world-renowned filmmaker were doomed from the start. Every dream is, by definition, at least a little unrealistic. I don’t have the education or the priors; it was always going to be an uphill battle. And things were pretty good for a while there, right? I paid the rent, at least. Not always on time, but it got paid.

Part of the problem is that while I wasn’t paying attention, the cons of whatever my “career” was (or is) had started to outweigh the pros. It had become more of a pain in the ass than it was rewarding, and it had been this way for a while. Since before the pandemic, maybe. Every outlet that hadn’t closed its doors was operating on a shoestring budget. Nobody was commissioning like they used to, and when they were, the jobs were going to the same three or four photographers they always went to. I can’t blame anyone for this. Like I said, I’m not a baby. I get it.

The bigger issue, honestly, was that I wasn’t really enjoying it any more. I needed — need — to step back, take a breath, make some sense of what it is that I want and if I was on the right road towards that, whatever it was.

Feeling adrift

Last year my grandma died. Thank you for your well wishes. The upshot is that there was, unexpectedly, a little inheritance money and my grandma had told me, on her deathbed, not to be “sensible” with it. So I wasn’t. The money worked out at about a year’s salary, so I took a year off. I’d work on my quote-unquote “Art.” Maybe write a little. Take a class or two. Go on a couple of trips, honour the memory of my grandparents’ eternal wanderlust.

The age-old question to be answered: what would I do, if money and responsibilities weren’t a problem? And briefly, they weren’t.

Were there better ways to blow this money? Probably. It hasn’t been as interesting as you’d think. Paris was incredible, Italy was crowded. I enjoyed the film development course at the Lewisham Adult Learning Centre; I’ll go back for the printing workshop. Mostly I’ve been revisiting old favourite books, movies, games, and feeling a little sorry for myself.

Swimming

If my blood pressure is bad, I need to exercise, and if I’m to exercise I need to find something that I enjoy. Running hurts my knees, I get bored on the machines at the gym, and if the trip to the gym is longer than ten minutes I’m just not going to make it. I know this about myself. I’m living my truth.

So I joined up with the leisure centre around the corner. It’s twice the price of the Puregym, just a ten-minute walk away in Greenwich, but there’s a swimming pool and it’s maybe ninety seconds door-to-door. I hadn’t been swimming since, maybe, secondary school, and it’s harder than you think it would be even to keep your head floating above water, but now there’s an hour of my day where my only responsibility is simply not to drown.

There’s also a sauna, where the ladies of Deptford gather to gossip. It really feels like I’m part of a sweaty little community, and it’ll be the idea of community that saves us.

Playing squash

Friend Adam asked if I’d like to play squash with him. It’s the first sport he’s ever enjoyed, he says, and when you’re in the court with him it becomes clear why: squash, a game about setting up your opponents for shots they can’t possibly return, is a dickhead’s game.

To win a game of squash you have to think like a dickhead. You have to run around like a mischevious little imp. When you serve, you’re setting up a joke; the punchline may be ten moves away.

Chess, too

Chess is also a dickhead’s game. Nobody tells you this. One of the revelations about my personality in 2024 is that when I play a board game I’m not playing to win; I’m playing to find the biggest dick move I can pull while remaining within the bounds of the rules. Friend Mike and I have been learning chess, probably the most ancient example of the form. What I’m learning is that you can play chess honourably, but it doesn’t get you very far.

Walking around with a friend, a cup of coffee, and a camera

My “little” camera — a Fujifilm X100v that fits in my pocket and has a million little settings I’m welcome to adjust to my liking — is the best thing I’ve ever bought. I’m walking around again. I’m conscripting friends to get a cup of coffee and walk with me. Actually, maybe I should switch to tea, with the blood pressure and all. The little camera and the companionship have led to wonderful new sights and fantastic conversations. Isn’t that what it’s all about, really?

Trying something new

Over Christmas, I’ve been working as a bookseller in the new Waterstones in Streatham. I’d suspected I might like it, but I was surprised to find I love it. I’m on my feet, I’m chatting with strangers, I get a 50% staff discount. I’m good at it. It’s really nice to be good at something. I’ve extended my contract until the end of January.

Remembering you had dreams, once

I’ve also been writing a lot this year. I used to write a lot, but it fell by the wayside when people started offering me money to take pictures. So I’ve been writing. There’s a whole space opera that exists in scattered notes and a half-baked first draft. Maybe I’ll come back to it. Maybe I won’t.

I don’t know, man. I wish this was more conclusive. I like taking pictures. I like working the bookshop. Maybe 2025 is about adjusting the balance.

The Ins and Outs for 2025

IN: novellas; novelettes, if we’re lucky; being horny on main; giving your friends new nicknames off the top of your head; The Movies, baby, I’m tellin’ ya!; speaking about inanimate objects using human pronouns, as a sea captain would his vessel; house parties; getting “involved” in your “local” “community”

OUT: sanding down the jagged edges of our Art until the Art is nothing but round corners; being afraid to ask about the logistics of your friends’ polyamorous relationships; feeling bad about our terrible bodies; contemporary literature with frictionless prose and no quotation marks; feeling ashamed of our crushes on cartoon characters

1  keen-eyed readers may note the lack of Poor Things on this list.

2  I also read Outbreak when the pandemic started.