Making the best of 2023
What shaped me in the year gone by
As is becoming my tradition, for my first Substack post of the year, I will be recounting my past year in review in terms of media consumption and personal goals. Like in previous years, the categories are somewhat nebulous and may change from year to year depending on how I spent my time. I hope you can take away a few potential recommendations for your own viewing/listening/gaming pleasure, or at least get a better idea of where I was coming from in 2023.
Movies
As usual, I wrote my top 10 films of the year list for my old paper, The Forest Lake Times. You can read the list here (at the time of this writing, it’s still accurate. Usually I sneak in a bit of awards bait after my deadline, but since I recently got over a bout of COVID, I haven’t been to the theater in a few weeks). Also as usual, when Oscar season gets closer, I’ll write up my version of who would come away with the above-the-line awards if I ran the Academy.
I saw what one might academically call a shit-ton of movies last year, at least for me: at 313 logged watches on Letterboxd, I’m certain this is the most films I’ve ever watched in a calendar year. Of those, about 68 (I think) of them were in a movie theater. Watching movies has become a meditative practice for me in a year where it was hard not to get overstimulated by everything on my plate.
I continued my director watchthrough efforts this year and finished up Spielberg, as well as completing watches of all David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Park Chan-Wook, Buster Keaton, and M. Night Shyamalan features (my wife also got on a Coen Brothers kick, so I watched several of those as well). I filled in a lot of blind spots this way, and some of the best films I saw for the first time this year included Schindler’s List, Sherlock Jr., No Country For Old Men, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.
One very fun thing about this year across many areas of my life was watching my sons grow up and develop more unique personalities and interests. My younger son, Ben, is becoming quite the movie fan himself, in particular favoring gross-out and horror-lite entries. This year, I had the privilege of taking him to see, among other things, The Birds, Godzilla Minus One, and the original King Kong, and it was a joy to watch him absorb the movies and chat with me about them afterward.
Gaming
Last year, my second category was TV, which had replaced gaming the year before that, but I barely watched any TV this year outside a couple of shows I was already following (I Think You Should Leave still rules), so gaming has made a triumphant return. I played a lot of video games this year, including the highly-acclaimed new Zelda and Baldur’s Gate 3, although both of those left me somewhat cold. Baldur’s Gate 3 is good and I’m sure I’ll play more of it, but it is not particularly robust from a combat standpoint (and its inventory management is so bad that I’m mentioning it here, even though that’s not the kind of thing that would usually bother me). That’s OK; it’s a very good tabletop RPG simulator, and I’ve had a lot of fun with it in a multiplayer setting. However, for my money, if I want a D&D inspired turn-based strategy experience, Wildermyth’s combat and simple progression hooks are a lot more engaging when I’m playing alone.
Zelda, on the other hand, I may try again at some point, but it felt kind of like doing chores.
The two games that came out in 2023 that I had the most fun playing were Super Mario Wonder and Metroid Prime Remastered. I’m a sucker for a good side-scrolling Mario game, and while this one isn’t particularly difficult (even though I haven’t beat Jump, Jump, Jump yet), it’s so inventive and goofy and genuinely funny that it was just a joy to breeze through. Metroid Prime Remastered, on the other hand, is a perfect remaster of a game, recreating how playing the original felt rather than what it actually would be like to replay it all these years later.
Though those were the games from 2023 I had the most fun with this year, my two favorite gaming experiences both come courtesy of the last couple of years: 2021’s Inscryption and 2022’s Case of the Golden Idol. Golden Idol is a murder puzzle-solving game (think Return of the Obra Dinn meets 1990s pixel-hunter adventures) that I absolutely ate up over the course of three days in September, and Inscryption is a strange and creepy ARG/Escape Room/Deck-building hybrid. Both were tons of fun to the emerging puzzle gamer in me, and a great, bite-sized way to end the year before I dive headfirst into Persona 3 Reload in February.
It was on the gaming front that I got to see the developing personality of my older son, Reggie. He’s a sharp kid and loves to figure things out and solve problems, so he loved sitting with me while I played Golden Idol and Inscryption. He often noticed things or pointed out aspects I wasn’t seeing in both games, which made me very proud. I want my kids to surpass me, and they’re well on their way. I just have to not fuck it up.
Music
2023 was the year boygenius blew up, and it couldn’t happen to a cooler trio. Their first full-length album, the record, is really good, blending the poetic lyricism of Lucy Dacus’, Phoebe Bridgers’, and Julien Baker’s solo careers with the lovely harmonies and inspired musical collaborations first glimpsed on the band’s 2018 EP.
Probably my favorite find of 2023, however, is It’s Never Fair, Always True, by Jawny. I’d never heard of this 28-year-old, mortality-obsessed indie rocker until his latest album, but it’s clever, funny, and eminently danceable.
On the concert front, I also got to check off a personal bucket list item this year when I went with my brother-in-law to see The Postal Service’s Give Up 20th anniversary tour in Minneapolis. I’m a semi-depressed white man who went to college in the 2000s, so it’s virtually a given that Give Up was a big album for me, and watching the band perform it live was so fun and cathartic (Death Cab for Cutie, Ben Gibbard’s main band, was also on the tour playing the 20th anniversary of Transatlantacism, and while that’s not my favorite Death Cab album, it was fun to see nevertheless).
Podcasts
According to my podcast app, I have spend almost 42 days listening to podcasts this year. One of those days was spent listening to my own podcast, Out of Contreks, for audio quality checks, but that still leaves 41 unaccounted for.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, my most-listened to show by far this year was movie podcast Blank Check, as the two hosts, David Sims and Griffin Newman (along with their great producers, Ben Hosley and Marie Bardi-Salinas), have done director series on several of the people whose filmographies I binged this year. I also subscribe to the podcast’s Patreon feed, so I listened along to several of their franchise commentaries as I watched the Mummy, Alien, Star Trek, James Bond, and Austin Powers franchises. If you enjoy movies, I’d definitely recommend this show: Griffin and David have an easy chemistry and an encyclopedic knowledge of movie that makes the podcast informative and fun even if I don’t agree with their movie opinions – and I often don’t!
Beyond that, Chapo Trap House has had a very good year, even with co-host Matt Christman temporarily (I hope) leaving the show this fall when he suffered a serious stroke. Best wishes to Matt and the rest of the gang; as always, they somehow manage to effortlessly slingshot back and forth between topics both serious (their outraged and informative coverage of the Israel-Gaza war) and stupid (New York politicians like George Santos and Eric Adams – on the latter, Chapo’s There Is No Self To Kale might be the hardest I’ve laughed at a podcast all year).
Reading
I gave up on reading Dune this year. Didn’t like it! On the other hand, I read several books I did like this year, but perhaps my favorite experience was reading The Man Who Heard Voices, a first-hand report on the making of M. Night Shyamalan’s disastrous Lady In The Water. In some ways, my interest was preordained; I was so perplexed by the film’s existence that when it was over, I googled “Lady In The Water making of book” not expecting to find one, and lo and behold, there it was!
At the time (2006), the book was dismissed as a puff piece sanctioned by Shyamalan at the height of his wunderkind hubris, but with the benefit of hindsight, I think author Michael Bamberger’s short tome is a little more than that. Yes, he speaks very highly of Shyamalan’s personal charm, but I don’t think the acclaimed and then derided director of famous twist-ending thrillers comes off as a lionized figure at all. You see his mercurial moments, his inability to crack what he wants his movie to say, his refusal to take feedback from anyone who seems perplexed by the movie or why anyone would want to see it. It’s also pretty educational about how the movie (and the movie-making process, at least for a feted flavor-of-the-month filmmaker, which Shyamalan was at the time) came together. My one regret about the book is that it was published right after Lady In The Water debuted, which means it has nothing to say about the movie’s terrible box office reception and even worse critical drubbing. It would have been interesting to see how Shyamalan, a director whose work I often really like, handled the barrage of (in my opinion, justifiable) criticism lobbed in his direction after the film premiered.
My essay/article reading really fell off this year, which I blame largely on the fall of Twitter and the increasing reatomization of the internet. Noah Kulwin wrote some good pieces for the New Statesman this year, and I’ve been enjoying Dave Wiegel’s politics work for Semafor. Alexandra Petri continues to write goofy fun for the Washington Post, even though I’ve become increasingly disenchanted with Jeff Bezos’ paper of record as of late.
Personal Goals
I wrote 16 original pieces for the Substack last year, same as the year before (but down still from my top output of 20 in 2021). Given life circumstances I’ll get into below, I think this is a pretty damn good number, and I think I did some of my best work in 2023, including this piece about the Oscars, this one about Liam Neeson movies, and a five-part series about the making of the latest Too Many Bones board game, which I was heavily involved in. I was down one article from 2022 in The Times, but that was due to the aforementioned life circumstances and a dead period where we were getting almost no movie screenings to attend (I imagine the writers and actors strikes were possibly to blame, which is A-OK with me; I’m very happy those groups got what they wanted).
My co-host Brady and I also released 31 podcasts last year, tying our annual best. As the show is coming up on five years of existence, we may still have very few listeners, but we’ve never missed a scheduled episode release date, which gives me a lot of personal pride.
Outside of the “Ryan Produces Written And Audio Content On The Side” front, I finally burned out on dieting about a year ago, but fortunately I’ve been able to (mostly) maintain my weight. When I started really dieting and working out in a major way in 2020, I had a goal weight I wanted to get to, and I was almost there when I stopped, so I may try to restart things again in 2024 – or I may just try to be more OK with the body I have (no promises, but it’s good to have dreams, right?). The biggest new thing of note I did this year was finally get back into community theater, a former hobby of mine that my old job, young kids, and eventually the pandemic made unfeasible for many years. I think I might write a piece about it in 2024, so I don’t want to wax too rhapsodic about it now, but I was in two shows and was extremely fucking busy but also incredibly fulfilled, and I’m very happy for all the people I’ve met and the opportunity to get back on stage again (even if I hamstrung myself in one of the shows by adopting a pretty iffy Cockney accent).
Finally, work was an absolute killer. I love my job, but in my 2022 wrap-up, I mentioned that my work-life balance had been “a little out of whack” and that I hoped to reorient myself in 2023. That did not happen! I was extremely fucking busy for what felt like the entire year as we pushed to finish making the biggest project the company has ever taken on, and that, combined with the increased outside-of-work load of the plays and some personal/family issues, really sapped a lot of my energy, particularly in the second half of the year.
I am proud of that project, but I am also very tired of it, and I can’t wait to move on to the next thing. So, in 2024, I hope to feel creatively refreshed, both personally and professionally, and continue to try new things. I also want to be mentally present for and appreciative of the people in my life. 2023 was a big year for my sons; in addition to what I mentioned about them above, I have seen them maturing and learning better coping skills as they age, and cliche as it may be, it’s really warmed my heart. Kim and I took them on a camping trip this summer, and it was the most fun I’ve had with them on a vacation; I know one day I might miss the way they were when they were younger, but so far, that’s not the case. They’ve just gotten cooler (read: less like me) as they’ve aged.
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Follow me on Twitter @RTHowitzer (although I’m seldom there anymore), Bluesky @RTHowitzer, read my Letterboxd reviews @mrchumbles, listen to my Star Trek podcast at outofcontreks.podbean.com, or email me at outofcontreks@gmail.com.