Linkblog, 2024 Year In Review Edition
I was catching up with someone IRL recently and the blog came up, and they asked the very reasonable question, “what do you write about?” And I had to answer, “well, mostly I review movies and I’m rude about AI.” Sums the year up!
If you’ll indulge me, the Icecano tradition is to use the end of the year to do a little reflection and navel-gazing. First, some stats! The final score for the year was just a hair over 178,000 words across 177 posts. That was quite a bit more than last year, and it’s a funny coincidence for those two numbers to be so similar. This year feels like it’s going to end up being the historical high-water mark; I have some other things in mind next year to direct some of that energy towards.
The big project for the year was getting Software Forestry up off the ground. This was one of the projects I was kicking around a couple years ago before I realized I needed some more practice and lit off the blog. Of these 8 pieces, the last one was my favorite, but it kind of needs the series to built up to it. Software Forestry returns early next year.
I wrote a lot of movie reviews this year! They were fun, but also much, much harder than I was expecting, so I kept chewing on them hoping I’d learn how to do them and they would get easier. They never did, but they were still fun to do. I’ll let you be the judge if I actually got any better at it, but my absolutely favorite piece I wrote all year was this review of Legally Blonde. Of everything I wrote, this is one of the few that turned out exactly the way I was imagining ahead of time.
The tech side of the house was mostly split between making fun of Space Glasses and being mad about AI; my favorite piece I wrote on that front was the two parter of Crushed and Pianos, which weren’t technically inspired by either, but was extremely about both.
The nicest thing I can say about Squarespace’s analytics is that they have lots of room for improvement? The material from this year that got the most “organic” traffic (whatever that means with the decayed web of today) were the Software Forestry pieces and my reviews of the Tales of the Valiant core rules and Game Master’s Guide.
One of my highest-trafficked pieces continues to be last year’s What seems to be your boggle, citizen? 30 years of Demolition Man, which is extra funny because it has a 100% bounce rate after zero seconds. Somewhere, some search engine is turning up my review when people are searching for, presumably, animated gifs and that’s hilarious to me and I am so, so sorry, irritated visitors! Also still drawing traffic from last year was You call it the “AI Nexus”, we call it the “Torment Pin”, which people actually seemed to stick around and read.
I also got a real uptick in traffic the last month or so, mostly to seemingly random older pieces? Some SEO incantation somewhere must have sorted me a little higher. If you’re a new visitor, hit up the contact info in the Ahoy There! page and let me know where you’re coming in from!
With that all said, here are what I think were the year’s Greatest Hits; the pieces I wrote this year that I thought worked particularly well, or that I was extra pleased with, or that got a good reaction, in roughly chronological order:
Jan 7: I Had A Dream Last Night, And I’m Mad About It
Jan 19: Books I Read In ’23: Part 5—Planescape & Friends
Jan 26: X-Wing Linkblog Friday
Jan 31: 40 years of…
Feb 2: A construction site! We need that good feminine energy: Barbie (2023)
Feb 20: Playthings For The Alone
Mar 4: The Sky Above The Headset Was The Color Of Cyberpunk’s Dead Hand
Mar 7: “Hanging Out”
Mar 15: Nausicaä at 40
Mar 29: Getting Old
Apr 5: Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Wes Anderson 2023 Double Feature
Apr 10: Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Oppenheimer
Apr 12: Getting Less out of People
Apr 29: Movie Review Flashback: Zack Snyder’s Justice League
May 1: Movies from This Year I Finally Saw: Dune Part 2
The double feature of
- May 15: Crushed
- May 17: And Another Thing: Pianos
May 20: Hey Boyos! The Phantom Menace at 25
Jul 3: No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021)
I wrote a “trilogy of philosophical blockusters” about Douglas Adams:
- Jul 24: Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams (2002)
- Oct 30: Don’t Panic: Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at 40
- Nov 15: So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish by Douglas Adams (1984)
I wrote a quartet of reviews about “new kinds of D&D”, followed by what I’m playing instead
- Jul 26: Tales of the Valiant
- Oct 7: Dungeons & Dragons (2024): Trying to Make a Big Tent Bigger
- Nov 22: Tales of the Valiant: Game Master’s Guide (2024)
- Nov 29: Read This Book Next! Dungeons & Dragons: Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024)
- Dec 13: TTRPGs I’m Currently Playing: Cypher System + It’s Only Magic
The “Why is this Happening” trilogy is the thing I worked the hardest on all year. The end result of two years of stewing on “AI”, and fundamentally the sequel to last year’s Fully Automated Insults to Life Itself. I used a bunch of the prototype ideas I’d been kicking around for what became Software Forestry, so while this isn’t formally part of that series, this acts as a kind of opening act throat clearing:
- Aug 26: Why is this Happening, Part I: The Stuff That Sucks
- Aug 28: Why is this Happening, Part II: Letting Computers Do The Fun Part
- Aug 30: Why is this Happening, Part III: Investing in Shares of a Stairway to Heaven
Oct 16: Ten Years of the Twelfth Doctor
Nov 25: Older Movies I Re-Watched Recently: Legally Blonde (2001)
The entire politics tag is a real rollercoaster of what I was thinking over the last several months, but the final wrap-up is as good a summary as any of them:
- Dec 9: The Fumble