At the start of the year I had a couple of ambitions in mind for how to spend my time.

  1. Work on music more seriously
  2. Refine technical skills that I use for work
  3. Release a piece of interactive fiction
  4. Release an RPG adventure

I recognized at the time that any one of these things could consume a lot of time, so if I wanted to accomplish them it would require very serious discipline, especially since a lot of these goals are orthogonal to each other. And it turns out I still completely lack that discipline. So I ended up with a mixed bag of results.

Music

I only played a single show this year, which was a disappointment. I gotta improve my hustle in 2025. However I did release an album that I am proud of. In 2025 I hope to play with other people because I miss that.

Coming up with end-of-year music lists is annoying because while I am always up for checking out things I haven’t heard before, that doesn’t mean they came out this year, and I am not great at keeping track of whether something just came out or is older. Anyway, here are a few things I listened to this year that reverberated through the mind:

  • Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee. If I’m being real this is not my favorite Cindy Lee album, I like the previous albums’ blend of harsh guitar noise to pitch perfect wall-of-sound pop music. This is very much a Doug Yule vs White Light/White Heat affair… but just as the later Velvets is still essential listening, so is this, and while it has the advantage of having come out so early in the year, it is still the case that this is probably my most listened to album of the year.

  • The Green Child - Look Familiar. If previous albums of the Green Child felt like a pleasant if somewhat predictible synthesis of Total Control and Stereolab, this album really feels like them coming into their own and really stretching out and exploring the various reaches of kosmische.

  • Pissed Jeans - Half Divorced. It’s feels like a real honor to be on the thank you list for a record this good.

  • Black Eyes live at Comet Ping Pong. This set was half new material, and it all sounded like the logical extension from where they left things off twenty years ago, and so this is all deeply exciting, and so I hope they play more shows and record some stuff next year so more people can hear it.

  • Earthen Sea - Recollection. Jacob’s been doing Earthern Sea for nearly as long as Black Eyes first broke up, and its been a constant source of fascination and joy to see how things shift over time, often subtly, and then all of a sudden major tectonic breaks. This album features drums, and (I am pretty sure) electric bass rather than digital synths, and features tracks with a distinct trip hop vibe. In live settings he has been playing drawn out saxophone notes, and it has been cool seeing how this mixture of live instrumentation and digital signals gets assembled.

  • Relaxer - Break. Also feels like an older electronic throwback, something in the air for rediscovering lost bits of music history perhaps? Very much in the drums n bass sphere, but not so sanded and smoothed down to oblivion as I typically associate with the genre.

  • Universal Order of Armageddon. Numero Group gives this band the deleuxe treatment, and hard to think of a punk band from this era more deserving.

  • Young Ginns. Another essential punk reissue. Young Ginns might be my platonic ideal of perfect punk band, but the only way I had available to listen to them was a CD-R with the tracks at some crappy bitrate. So picking up this LP was never a question.

  • Ustad Noor Bakhsh live at Current Gallery was a show for the ages. An 80 year old master electric benju player from Pakistan blew everyone’s minds for an hour and a half playing out of amp powered by a car battery. One for the ages.

  • Hear The Children Sing The Evidence. Just mesmerizing.

Writing

In 2020 I got back into RPGs, that nerdy habit that I left behind by the time I was wrapping up jr high school. During the pandemic this proved to be the exact sort of social salve I needed, along with making electronic music, to keep myself sane during that mentally taxing year. With the benefit of hindsight I can see how many of the things that drew me to punk when I was in high school are the same things that are appealing about RPGs when you move outside of the world of dungeons & dragons: a robust DIY culture and ethos, transmission of ideas spread via zines, an emphasis on small tight-knit communities. Writing my own zine, and collaborating with my wife who did the art and helped with the design, was a really fun, intense month long process. I want to keep it up next year.

Travel

Compared to the previous year, this was a relatively light year of travel for me. Visited Mexico City early in the summer, did an upstate New York road trip in the late summer, and spent November in Bangkok where it was mercifully easy to tune out US election news.

I’ve been to Mexico City enough times that I don’t really know what else to say about it. It is still my favorite city in this hemisphere. The amount to see and do never ceases to be overwhelming. This trip I ate at Quintoinil, a two star Michelin restaurant. In general I am not so interested in most fine dining experiences at this point in my life. I get a lot more excited about eating pad kra pao from a market stand for $0.50 than dropping $80 on some well prepared piece of meat with an overtly fussy sauce on top. Quintonil was different though, it was exactly what I would want out of a fine dining experience, where they went to great lengths to educate you about the depths of Mexican cooking and ingredients. I learned about varieties of honey and how they are used, the seasonality of insects, the method behind the madness to mole. So much fine dining is simply about trying to wow and subdue a bunch of jaded rich people and foodies. It was edifying to eat somewhere that wanted to impart something about the wider culture, and treated high end Mexican food with greater care than deconstructed tacos.

This was my first time to mainland Asia, and Southeast Asia overall does feel like a very special place, but Bangkok can be an overwhelming city in a lot of ways, and I regret not trying to explore more of Thailand or maybe nearby countries like Vietnam while I was there, but this was my first time travelling solo so I stayed within my comfort zone of being in a place with a robust public transit system. The tourist highlights were the Wat Arun, and the weekend market (but also the 6 story mall next to the market that was all used/vintage shops where I picked up a handful of Sonic Youth cassettes). But Bangkok was also full of those little moments of surprises that you get in a city that size like passing by an old guy blasting blistering psych guitar music out of some overdriven boombox, waling through a crowded two person width market in Chinatown only to have to get out of the way because some dude on a motorbike decided this was a great route to take, browsing a random Junji Ito themed popup store, taking an edible and then going to a massive aquarium in the basement of a mall, feeling lost at sea in the swell of attendees of Loy Krathong.

Other Life Changes

I lost a lot of weight this year, and in general made some changes toward a healthier lifestyle. Exercising more, drinking less, and mostly sticking to the Mediterranean diet. I’ve especially gotten into Turkish vegetarian cooking.

I got a grill for the back deck. The back deck gets too hot during the summer, but it is great in the spring and the fall.

I also upped my espresso game which is one of the basic pleasures in life.

I did a lot more driving compared to any other year of my life, although still much less than most Americans, and hopefully I keep it that way.

Onto Next Year

Aside from what I already mentioned, I want to keep a tally of movies I watch.

I hope to spend more time visiting nearby East Coast cities. Amtrak is kind of a pain because it is really expensive if you don’t buy a ticket at least a month in advance, so I guess this is a way of saying I want to get better at planning to visit nearby cities in advance.

I want to get more politically engaged within the community. The election this year really demonstrated what a hollowed out husk the Democratic party has become. Under a Democratic President we saw continued mass deportations, funding for the most disgusting destruction of human life in our lifetimes in Gaza, the curtailing of abortion rights, an assault on trans lives. With all that in mind I don’t think the Trump years ahead are going to be that different, although I am sure there will be new forms of sadism and negligence on display. New blocks of power need to be formed and exercised if we want to live in a society worth living in.

And so on.