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THINGS I LIKED - 2021
THINGS I LIKED 2021
The below is an incomprehensive list of things/content/stuff/etc. that left an impression on me in the last year. Notably, a large archive of most articles/stuff online that I read can be found here instead of the list below. Beyond that, I don’t keep a record of everything I do/see/read/eat/and so on but there is enough of my own personal data floating around that I’ve tried to piece together what has stuck with me the most.
So, in no particular order, probably plenty of stuff I’m forgetting in the moment, and linked out where I can, here’s my year.
Health to you and yours for the year ahead
-MG, December 2021
Spotify said this was my second most listened to artist and album this year.
Quite possible, though dwarfed by an amount of live Grateful Dead I’d prefer
not to put a public number to. Just unbelievable energy from this record front
to back. The kind of hardcore I wish existed back when I thought I was into
hardcore as a teenager. The live videos are also unbelievable. Looking
forward to seeing them next year.
I don’t
think there is more about this documentary I could say that hasn’t been better
phrased by smarter people. I was Beatles obsessed as a kid and this is by far
the most human I’ve ever seen them. Smokin’ cigs, making dick jokes, goofing
around, and then suddenly McCartney is pulling
the chorus of Let It Be out of thin air. Doesn’t matter how many times
it gets caught on video, watching the process of a legendarily good song come
together is magic still.
One of only a few books I actually managed to finish this
year. Dense as hell at times but an incredible perspective of how it’s all connected.
From climate change to rampant capitalism to immigration crises to class war.
Food is history is culture is commerce, exceptionally told.
Season one of this podcast was fantastic, then Coe went dark
for a while. He came back with an exceptionally researched, wonderfully
rambling, in-depth biography of country music legend George Jones. A story of heartbreak,
excess, the birth of the Nashville Sound, but also bullfighters, ancient Rome,
and Hemingway. I can not recommend this podcast enough if you have any interest
in American music as a cultural artifact and/or business.
Most notable here are the episodes on Auto-Tune, Swedish
songwriters, and Britpop. Stories of the seismic shifts in pop music from those
who were there.
Well, its basically the same show as above, but with Mark
Ronson as host and produced by Apple TV. Episodes on Auto-Tune, reverb, and drum
machines are good though!
The 2021 Formula 1 Season
I got into watching F1 around the time the first season of Drive to Survive came out. For
a myriad or reasons, this season caught a lot more peoples’ attention. I’m
writing this the night of the final race of the season. What a bizarre and
kinda dumb note for things to end on. Anyway, it took some arm twisting but I
got most of one of my group chats into the sport, and a Discord server I’m in
mainly for gaming ended up watching most races together in voice chat. I did not
grow up watching sports at all, really. So, having a sport to follow with friends and have favorites
in now is a nice change.
I think, by hours, my most played game of 2021. Flashbacks
to middle school days of late-into-the-night CS1.6/CS:GO sessions. High highs,
very low lows, but also a way to keep in touch with a few old friends and made
a few new ones. Followed along with a fair amount of the esports scene around
the game too, it really does help when you actually know how the game works. Doing well in this game feels really good, and the feeling that you’re getting better at it is also very good.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Technically I started watching this right before 2021, but
the final three seasons lasted me through the end of winter so I’m counting it
here. I was never a Trekkie, I still don’t think I am, but once I got over some
gripes with the aesthetics of the show, it really is just a good office drama set
in space
The world of capital-F Finance makes less sense than ever. I hope to never be asked to explain cryptocurrencies, NFTs, or anything like that ever again but I know it’ll continue to happen. With meme stocks and inflation and government spending and Elon Musk continuing to exist, Levine approaches the whole shebang with a healthy dose of skepticism (and a tinge of cynacism sometimes) that helps make sense of it all.
I don’t know. How do I even write about this? Discord is a chat
app originally designed for use by gamers to talk to each other while playing video
games. It has since become a company now valued somewhere in the ballpark of $15
billion. It has easily become my most used app on my computer this year and is
likely in the top three on my phone (behind Twitter and iMessage.) Group chats,
chatrooms, forums, newsfeeds, and a few other digital social spaces have all
been replaced by Discord. I’m logged in to something like 16+ servers right now
but I’m probably only regularly active in two of them. One of my group chats
started and only exists on Discord. Earlier this year I had started writing a
thing about how Discord has helped me maintain a healthier relationship with the
internet and avoid doomscrolling but I never got around to finishing it. The
gist is that when something is going on, I go to Discord before I go to
Twitter. Better? I don’t know, but it feels it for right now…
Specifically, probably, Artist Point. We took a
family vacation to Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Jackson Hole in August. We
drove, a lot, in a minivan (SLC to Idaho Falls, Idaho Falls to Yellowstone, a
few days around the park, through the park to Grand Teton, through Grand Teton
to Jackson, from Jackson back to SLC.) Seeing hundreds of bison was cool, Ol’
Faithful was a bit of a letdown, but Artist Point was truly the picturesque
view of the park that made it worth going, in my opinion. Apparently, the
national parks have had a huge surge in visitors over the pandemic (can’t travel
internationally so we may as well go see the natural splendors of our own country,
so the thinking goes.) Which, great! I can only hope this increase of hikers,
sightseers, campers, and the like will spur an increase in concerns over
natural preservation and climate change as well. We’ve taken family trips to a handful of national parks at this point and I can say with certainty that the size, variety, and accessibility of Yellowstone sets it apart from any of the others so far.
Another incredible music documentary that it feels like a
lot less people saw than then ones I talked about earlier. Just insane footage
and a wild story of a huge festival that we just… never heard about.
Tyler is just truly on top form
here. Bombastic production, DJ Drama(!), catchy hooks, smart as all hell
verses. The works. Again, the
live show, he really manages to tie it all together and carry a whole
festival set on his shoulders.
Brutalist and harsh, like Talking
Heads and Joy Division thrown in a blender, but it works. Produced some really cool music videos too.
Beautiful stuff here.
Your indie darlings’ favorite
indie darling.
This was maybe the first new big single
player game I was excited to play, and my first dive into the work of Arcane
Studios. Not quite the most immersive of immersive sims that the developers are
known for, but some excellently done art direction and game design, fun to
play, a good mystery to unravel, thought about it for like two weeks after I
finished it.
On another hand, Steam says I’ve
played roughly 100 hours of this game which I only started playing over the
summer. It’s one of those things that gamers have been talking about for, I don’t
know, since online games became a Big Thing? 50 versus 50 First Person Shooter,
except the teams also have a commander who get to see the entire battle as if
it was a Real Time Strategy game. It only recently hit 1.0 and had some rough
spots during the early access period but it is a game with a definitive look and incredible sound design and grit to it. Intricately balanced systems, real teamwork, for whatever reason it was the right game at the right time to really get its teeth into me. I also wrote a whole thing about
this but never finished the last few paragraphs. TL;DR: It’s a visceral experience that
is, with a fair amount of rarity, interrupted by white supremacists and Nazi fanboys.
Online gaming! What’re you gonna do, right?
Ryan’s newsletter is probably the
single source of internet culture reporting I recommend to people the most.
Ryan has a singular and unique relationship and perspective on how the web is
shaping our lives and vice versa, plus he looks at all the gross/weird/neo-Nazi
stuff so his readers don’t have to. Memes to crypto to internet radicalism.
Good stuff. Must subscribe if your work directly involves the internet, in my opinion.
My second “read every time”
newsletter is Tabs. Just a full rundown (and often dressing down) of the media
discourse that day. Great for the days where I’m too busy to look at Twitter too
often, and even better for surfacing the origin of the discourse or the most
relevant reaction I probably missed.
Niche, nerdy, but truly excellent Content. Chris Remo is a composer and designer working mostly in video games. He also has an absurd record of solving the New York Times crossword puzzle, every day, without any assists and at some point began recording himself talking through how he solves them. This in turn helps you learn the “language” of crosswords (some things specific to how the Times does its clueing) and got me trying some of the easier ones when I find the time and wanting to do so. Wholesome stuff, feelgood energy, very low stress, highly recommend if you like trivia, wordplay, and general knowledge party facts.
Dune (2021)
I still don’t get how people didn’t like this one. True (in the right ways) to the book, beautifully shot and directed, looking forward to part two.
It’s pretty fucked that we started the year with a literal
insurrection, right? I think it was hard to grasp the scale of what was happening
on the day of, or at least it was for me. It was scary but unsurprising, radical
but predictable, a grand gesture of just how warped and broken our political
system has become. This documentary gives a tic-toc of the day, with some eerie
on the ground footage. Worth watching and digesting.
Lunch Sandwiches from Hart’s
A lot of restaurants in New York City, prior to the 2nd? 3rd? Great Reopening (real George W. “Mission Accomplished” vibes) did the thing where they convert into a fancy market with some prepared foods and bottles of wine and stuff. Hart’s is one of my neighborhood restaurants (admittedly on the spendier side than sister restaurant The Fly which is/was just a good spot to be a regular at) did this model extremely well! Luxurious Italian groceries, good fresh affordable bread, booze, snacks, whole chickens, and during the spring and summer, prepared sandwiches for lunch. They were so dang good. I miss those sandwiches.
Deeply personal look at the literally extreme sport of big wave surfing, centering around legend of the sport Garret McNamara. Reality show meets sport doc meets freak-of-nature big waves in Portugal.
I make a LOT of playlists. Like a lot a lot. On top of the weekly one I put out with Liam for OK Mondays, I also have big never ending playlists as well as a bunch of other ones. So I’m in Spotify a lot, clicking and exploring related artists and tracks. The last year I moved away a bit from the algo driven Spotify-core music and got back into some good old fashioned internet radio. I’d say NTS specalizes in electronic and dance music but also has shows with psych, rock, jazz, classical, ambient, and more. The “endless mixtapes” (blends of genre specific-ish shows) have been a go to whenever what is live on either of the two channels isn’t matching my mood. Truly just a wonderful independant and unique radio station to support if you can. Honorable mention to the local heroes at The Lot Radio, too.
Look, yeah, I know, its a computer mouse, okay? But it’s like the computer mouse. I, probably like you, ended up working from home for a vast majority of this year (roughly 76.35% of the year to date, according to my work calendar.) And so, like many of us, I invested in my WFH setup. Sit/stand desk, new mechanical keyboard (Ducky Shine 7 Blackout with MX Silvers), the works. This mouse is by far my favorite thing I’ve purchased for working and every other computer task. Ergonomic, good scroll wheel, a fun squishy little macro button under your thumb. Trust me, if you’re starting to get wrist strain or just want the better mouse, it is this one.
By cruel twist of fate perhaps, I am professionally tied to the whims of the major social media platforms. This kinda felt like a big splash with small ripples. The Facebook Files maybe will not turn out to be the big reckoning that whistleblower Frances Hougan or the Journal had initially hoped for (though, as time goes on, it has become more clear that it isn’t really clear what Hougan wanted out of all of this anyway.) Still, to have all the stuff that has been whispered about or semi murky secrets that the industry has known about for what feels like forever now be verified, reported on, and become the subject of congressional hearings? That was something, I think? Props to the team over at Gizmodo for working to publish source files, too.
A Lot of Natural Wine
Not really exclusive to this year but a carryover from last year, too. Not going out and spending money at bars and restaurants for longer than I can remember since moving to New York City meant I had some extra dollars to spend at my nearby wine shops. Too many standout bottles to list here but do support your local wine weirdos. Mine happen to be Thirst, Leon & Son, and Radicle.
Getting Vaccinated (and a Booster Shot)
Duh.