THINGS I LIKED: 2023

Another annual entry of unsorted notable things from the year now coming to a close.
Thanks for reading and wishing you and yours a better year ahead.

Best,
Mitch 




boygenius - the record

In a not-so-surprising twist, emo indie went mainstream this year. boygenius went from indie darlings with their first EP to having near Taylor Swiftian levels of fandom. The album is very good! I do not think it is as good as the diehard fans make it out to be. C’est la vie.


Andre 3000 - New Blue Sun

I have long been a strong advocate of letting creatives of all mediums grow and change over time. One of the most toxic traits of massive fandom is that many fans will want you to make the same output over and over. In a hard left turn, via an album that sounds like a mad libs idea (“Andre 3000 will return to making music by releasing a mainly ambient flute record”), Andre has made maybe one of the best new age jazz and ambient records of the year. Funny how that works. Really beautiful stuff and I’m just glad the discourse of “why didn’t he just make another rap album” came and went (basically summed up by his quote “what am I supposed to do? Rap about getting a colonoscopy?”) went by quickly as the tracklist came out ahead of the album (“I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A “Rap” Album But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time”)

“Even now people think, Oh, man, he’s just sitting on raps, or he’s just holding these raps hostage. I ain’t got no raps like that. It actually feels…sometimes it feels inauthentic for me to rap because I don’t have anything to talk about in that way. I’m 48 years old. And not to say that age is a thing that dictates what you rap about, but in a way it does. And things that happen in my life, like, what are you talking about? ‘I got to go get a colonoscopy.’ What are you rapping about? ‘My eyesight is going bad.’ You can find cool ways to say it, but….” [GQ]

Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon | PlayStation (US)

Armored Core 6

It had been a long while since a trailer for a video game got me hype like the trailer for AC6 got me. (Shout out to Austin Walker for doing the dreams-and-nightmechs.mp4 edit) What can I say? I’m a sucker for big cool robots. That being said, I was wary given that I’d bounced pretty hard off most From Software games I’ve tried save for Elden Ring. I got stuck early on in Sekiro and the one time I tried a Dark Souls game at a friend's place it very quickly was clear it was not For Me. Thank goodness AC6 was not a “mecha souls” game (despite the plea for one from many fans.) Not to say you couldn’t see some classic From touches all over it (LOTS of shoulder button usage, skill check bosses, etc.) but it remains a far more approachable entry point to From games than any of the Souls games or even Elden Ring, I’m convinced.

From design elements to story and lore to just pure kick ass gameplay, the game had me hooked. Allowing customization and flexibility to support different approaches and play styles (to an extent), painting and customizing different loadouts, and a story that requires you to beat the main campaign three separate times to see everything, I am kind of surprised I only spent about 35 hours in the game this year. It was and is one of the games I thought about most this year, still.

Recreated Counter-Strike 2 cover using official assets from the site but I made the color behind the logo more readable : r/steamgrid

Counter-Strike 2

There is a group of friends I play video games with that more or less only play competitive/tactical shooters (Valorant is what first brought us all into one Discord server), which means that at some point, basically every one of us had a Counter-Strike phase. When word began to leak that not only was CS2 coming, but it was coming soon, there were mainly positive but some mixed reactions. I hadn’t touched CS:GO in years and years, let alone even thought about booting it up, but as soon as I saw dust2 in modern graphics, I was in. The fact that my muscle memory for map layouts still remained surprised even me. As soon as I got an ace (single handedly taking out the entire opposing team) on release day, I was so back (even though we still lost that match.)


Forza Motorsport

While this season of Formula 1 was a great watch, this year's official video game release, F1 23 (now fully under the direction of EA), did not grab me as much as past releases. I am still nevertheless a sucker for racing games. Enter Forza Motorsport, the more sim-leaning cousin to the arcadey Forza Horizon series, Motorsport had not had a new entry since 2017 (which is to say, I had never played one), but with hundreds of licensed cars and real world tracks, plus being included with my existing Game Pass subscription, I gave it a go and it very much scratched the racing itch I had been having.

There are some oddities (mainly both single player and online multiplayer racing series that only last for one to three weeks at a time, plus a grindy part unlock system), but on the whole Motorsport quickly turned into my “need something to turn my brain off working mode quickly” game this year.


How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm

Never before has a book made me want to quit everything I’m doing and go become an ecoactivist. (Within the first 100 pages, no less.) I don’t think I can give the book more of an endorsement than that.



Puzzmo

Over Covid-19 lockdowns, I started getting more into doing the crossword more as a way to fill the time than anything else. As I started commuting more, my crossword usage started slipping. Puzzmo from Zach Gage and company filled that with not only a replacement crossword but other quick hitting word and logic games. The light meta-game, largely in the form of both global and group leaderboards, allows for some friendly competition, but really the overall project feels like a fresh take for browser based games. To get into the early access period, I had to beat a high score at a random daily game in time to claim a key, and the key allowed me to get another puzzle sent to my home, the answers to which gave me my access code to create an account. A fun and engaging way to grow a beta audience, if I’ve seen one.


The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton

I finally got around to reading the principal text of Modern Monetary Theory at the beginning of the year, which I know sounds extremely dry but truly the book does a great job of dismantling the narrative that government debt is bad. The shortest simplest version of the argument is this: in order for their to be a deficit on one side of the balance, there must be a surplus on the other side, therefore if the government (the book largely focuses on the US government but does point to other countries as well) has a deficit, the surplus should exist on the public benefit side. Reframing the “government debt” as “citizens’ surplus” is an extremely helpful lens to reframe how we look at both the US and global economy. Well worth a read if you’d like to expand your view on what's possible in our capitalist hellscape. 

Oppenheimer, Barbie, Barbenheimer

I genuinely can’t recall the last movie event that took such a firm grasp of the zeitgeist. Merch, memes, t-shirts, SNL skits, and beyond. I really liked Oppenheimer, more so over time than right after I walked out of the theater. I don’t know if I’d consider it Nolan’s best work, but it is certainly up there. Originally, after seeing the trailers and reading early reviews, I thought Barbie was very much a movie not “for me” but nevertheless, smarter and funnier than I anticipated and approached its overall message from a new angle.

Past Lives

Past Lives

It feels like more and more, romance stories try to remove themselves from our day and age. Past Lives is a uniquely 00’s story. Reconnecting with a childhood crush thanks to a chance social media post, a blossoming relationship from afar via Skype, lives separated by a world a part but connected through our devices. A beautiful story, beautifully told.

My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross | ANOHNI and the Johnsons | ANOHNI

ANOHNI and the Johnsons - My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross

ANOHNI still has, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful singing voices in music today. Back with backing band the Johnsons, the latest album tackles grief, loss, love, hope, and existing in these times with songs ranging from slow dirge ballads to funk grooves.


Sagrada Família, Dali Theatre Museum

Our family vacation this year started in Barcelona. Our first full day in the city ended walking through Casa Batlló, one of the many Gaudi feats in the city, which felt more Disney-fied than I was hoping (rental iPads to experience AR “art” in each room, a rooftop bar, an “AI-powered” “digital art” video room,  a gift shop bigger than the first floor of the home…) Our second day we had a tour guide for Sagrada Família followed by walk through the Gothic Quarter. The history of the church and its construction aside, it is an overwhelming piece of architecture to take in (especially from the outside.) That, without ever seeing it anywhere near completion, Gaudi had already understood and planned (over 140 years ago) what would be needed to capture the light in truly mesmerizing ways is unreal. 

Another day of our trip we rented a car and drove out to Figueres to go see the Dali Theatre Museum, which also serves as Dali’s resting place. A truly astonishing amount of work displayed, covering most of Dali’s life, in an old theatre in his hometown that has you criss-crossing up and down the place to follow the flow of the works displayed. The sheer volume of output the man had over his life is admirable but the willingness to push boundaries and explore new ideas is on clear display as you go from one phase of work to another.


Jazz is Dead Presents: Arthur Verocai Live

As part of its free summer concert series, Lincoln Center hosted Arthur Verocai, backed by a small orchestra, to perform his 1972 self-titled album live. This was the first time Verocai toured the US, ever, despite the album being both a cult hit among Brazilian music fans and hip hop fans (samples appear on songs from MF DOOM, Common, Curren$y, Action Bronson, and many others.) Alternating between conducting, singing, and sometimes just silently dancing, it was a truly beautiful night of music.


Romy - Mid Air

Some real cry in the club music from the former frontwoman of The XX. Among a few other releases, vocal dance music has had a weird slow resurgence this year which I’m all here for. I missed out on seeing the live tour for this album but from the videos I saw, it looked like a blast.


Wednesday - Rat Saw God

Angry femme country twang infused guitar music also made a comeback this year (see also: Bully - Lucky For You), the latest release from Wednesday really seemed to capture a lot of the mood of the year. From trading trauma stories on first dates to self deprecating humor about everything, catchy hooks and witty wordplay helped put the album on heavy rotation for most of the spring and summer for me.



Dead & Company: The Final Tour

When it was announced this would be the final big Dead & Company tour, I (among many others) started doing the math to figure out how many shows I could reasonably cram in as someone who also has to hold down a full time job. The answer ended up being four shows in a span of six days. Both nights at SPAC, both nights at Citi Field. The irony was not lost on me (or many others; 1, 2, 3, 4) that after 200 shows and about eight years, the band had never sounded better. That a clip of Althea from one of the final nights at Oracle Park in San Francisco went viral beyond just deadhead Twitter was living proof. I know a few people who caught their first show on this tour and more than one expressed some sentiment of “why didn’t I start coming sooner?” There really is nothing quite like it. Sure, there will still be Dead-adjacent shows (I managed to catch Billy & The Kids as well as Bob Weir & Wolf Bros. later in the year), but there really probably won’t be anything quite like Dead and Company again.


Baldur’s Gate 3

I’ve never been a huge CRPG fan, at least playing them, but Baldur’s Gate 3 really deserves all the GOTY awards it is receiving. A truly well written and considered story with multiple different paths and endings, a gameplay system that feels as open as one would want a video game version of DND5e to be, and enough to keep one busy for hours and hours and multiple playthroughs. There has already been exhaustive discourse on the state of Games as an industry, so it shouldn’t be missed that Larian Studios sunk a lot of time, effort, and resources into making this masterpiece. The first act of the game (which is split into three acts, with a newly released epilogue that I’ve yet to get around to playing) served as an early access demo of the game that was iterated on and tweaked for three years before the full game shipped. The game was a best seller despite it mainly focusing on a single player experience. It is stuffed to the gills with menus, dialogue trees, and literal dice rolls. Yet, by the time I was at the final arc of my first runthrough, I was totally blown away. Friends who were at similar stages of the game had gone through radically different paths and were finding fairly different endings. Some of the scenarios I found myself in made me think I had maybe broken the game, until a fully voiced dialogue scene seemed totally prepared for what I had just done. The game is a new benchmark for fantasy nerdom experiences.


BattleBit Remastered

On the other end of the video gaming spectrum, we have BattleBit Remastered. Maybe one of my most played games of the year, BattleBit manages to capture the feeling, pace, and overall vibe of old Battlefield games all while looking like a Roblox mod. Proximity voice chat provides endless fodder for memes and bullshittery, the gunplay outclasses most other FPS games this year, and it is easy enough to boot up, squad up with some friends, and shoot the shit while running around trying to capture objectives (or, more often, not.)


The Replacements - Tim (Let It Bleed Edition)

Look, there are remasters and then there are just redoing an entire album from scratch. I was never huge on The Replacements, but understood Tim to be influential in its own right. The 2023 remaster by Ed Stasium is very clearly what this album could have been upon its original release. The vocals punch, the guitars sound great, the drums are… actually legible? It is an understated feat that one could take the raw tracks as they were from the 1985 release and squeeze a much much better album out of them.


The SBF/FTX Saga

I don’t even know where to link to for this one. That the patron saint of crypto and effective altruism would flame out so badly and so publicly was maybe the business story of the year, Michael Lewis book aside. The golden child of crypto and his company that was going to fix everything turned out to be a massive fraud! They were taking customer money to buy penthouses and sports cars! Come on people! 


Succession

Maybe the biggest TV show for coastal people working in and around media finally came to an end this year. A fantastically written season with some truly stand out episodes (namely the big swing of episode three which gave the biggest spoiler of the final season so early on), with an ending that felt fitting, even if it isn’t what most of the show’s fans thought they wanted. It felt like the rest of the year came and went without a prestige TV moment as big as the final few episodes of Succession and the buzz surrounding them.


Bluesky

The not-quite-Twitter-replacement platform is still finding its legs, but in a world where I scarcely even look at Twitter, Bluesky has become the best alternative in my opinion. A healthy mix of journalists, shitposters, weirdos, and normies provide fodder for whatever topic might be the internet’s focal point for the day. It looks and feels like one of the earlier peaks of Twitter (though maybe with a more visible and prominent community of furries), in so far that a post with any meaningful engagement at all gives some sense of dopamine rush that even tens of likes on Twitter no longer provide. As a professional internet person, it has been both annoying and entertaining to have to keep tabs on what was going on with Elon’s personal plaything of a platform, now home to more fascists, nazis, and white supremecists than before (and there were too many before…), so to have a place to go to at all that is easy enough to set up and use as well as have a healthy community of users across the spheres I populate feels… good doesn’t seem like the right word. My overall personal social media use continues to go down, but when I need a quick hit, Bluesky is now the first platform I’d pull up, so that's something I guess.