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What did I enjoy in 2023?

So. I sit down on the closing days of Twenty Twenty Three to do my third annual round-up of things I’ve enjoyed. This year went by in two halves for me. The first seven months were much like the previous year: very slow and depressive, as I looked for work to little success (and waited far too long for work when I did succeed). From August onwards, however, when I finally started my job working for the State and decided to move to Cambridge with two-weeks-warning, I simultaneously found more and less time to do interesting and new things, as I jarringly jumped from being quite alone to being very busy once more. Truly, a year containing the full spectrum from Flop to Slay. As previously, I’ll cover some video games first, then some table-top games, then some reading, films, and online media, before finishing with music.

I have to begin with Slay the Spire (2019). What a video game. I genuinely think it might be the best game of all time. It basically *made* the deck-building rogue-lite genre and still hasn’t been topped. I think this is in large part due to it having a good but limited amount of randomness. There’s about ten enemies for each of the three acts? And about fifty random events in total split between the acts? That’s enough variation that the runs are unpredictable, but there’s few enough possibilities that you can seriously bank on specific events or cards coming up to craft a perfect run. The other area where it leaves its pretenders in the dust is in aesthetics. I would not love this game as much as I do if it didn’t have the most creative and evocative set of enemy and item designs of any game I’ve ever seen. Lagavulin! Donu & Deca! Tingsha! The Champ! Just so good that it’s ridiculous really. Every game since, such as the dismal Cobalt Core (2023), is lacking in transparency, predictability, readability, and charm compared to Spire. My favourite deck archetype is power-stacking silent (getting five or so Footworks, and a bunch of Noxious Fumes and Caltrops and you're good).

From this point on, for the sake of time, I’m going to limit my thoughts on each game to the length of a tweet (240 characters).

Around Easter I began to hang out with a girl from a TTRPG group I was playing in called Mae. While I was stressing about interviews she watched me play four different games of her recommendation, all of which were very memorable.

What else did I play?

Now to games played on a table. My disillusionment with The Fifth Edition of the World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game has continued. I’ve found satisfaction by returning to and studying the older editions and explicitly ‘old-school’ products inspired by them: Tom Moldvay’s Basic, Ben Milton’s Knave, Gavin Norman’s Old School Essentials, Skerples’ Tomb of the Serpent Kings, Emiel Boven’s The Electrum Archive and DURF, Isaac Williams’ Mausritter, Rick Barton’s The Halls of Arden Vul, and Luke Gearing’s Wolves Upon the Coast. Wolves Upon the Coast! Wow! Now that’s an amazing system that I was introduced to by friends Aimée and Deryn - you play escaped viking slaves in a realistic-ish British Isles analogue, and you level up by boasting that you’re going to do something. Oh it is just incredible to play. My first character, a Muslim bounty hunter, was beheaded by a gryphon after leaping on its back, attempting to aid another character in their boast that they would land the final blow with a specific arrow. The whole table gasping and saying “Saleem! No!” was amazing!

Inspired by all this, I wrote my own basic-clone called Keyhaven, which I paired with an adventure demonstrating how the system should be run. The adventure was set upon the Isle of Keyhaven, this beautiful Mediterranean backwater and had a fun little hexcrawl and a dungeon. I ended up not being a fan of the system, and never finished the adventure. I ended up rewriting the entirety of The Isle of Keyhaven and converting it to DURF in a mad craze lasting twelve hours, publishing it as part of the DURF Jam 2023 ran by Emiel. Now that was rewarding - my first bit of published content on itch. I’ve started another one about a mausoleum hidden in The Canyons of Kerad filled with mysterious giant statues. I might also rework Keyhaven the system with a classless second edition, but I'm unsure as Aimée and Deryn might be doing something similar.

I also ended up getting into Magic the Gathering, playing it every Friday with friends in Cambridge. We started off playing commander format, and I arbitrarily chose to play mono-white (something I uphold to this day). It’s a very beautiful game, though the more complicated and abstracted the game gets from being about hitting creatures with other creatures (an idyllic state derogatorily referred to as ‘playing Hearthstone’) the more frustrating I found it. Diplomacy, and the real dank depths of Blue, in particular, I found hellish. I’ve been enjoying it a lot more playing draft, especially with the wonderful new Ixalan set. That was a good pre-release event to attend.

After encountering Tim Rogers’ Action Button in December last year, I exhausted the twenty-five-ish hours of video on the channel and then turned towards the Insert Credit podcast and his old articles (like the MGS2 one). From there, I found an old website and his medium, where he’s hosted a bunch of his old ‘essays’, which are essentially long and brooding memoirs. They were pretty fun and had a nice style of writing that his more recent stuff has obviously evolved from. My estimation of him dropped, however, as he basically describes himself being a twenty-something womaniser (one that might regret it, but still). A particular story of his really affected me in how awkward and horrible the events described are - a deep sinking feeling fills me even as I think about it now. I decided to get into the novels that he was obviously aping. The main one I can think of right now is Norwegian Wood by Murukami (Michael's girlfriend Gabija recommended this with a warning that it was “dangerous”), which is a wonderful book about both hanging out and working through stuff as you’re in your early 20s (in the same way that I quite liked The Letranger last year).

I watched a bunch of moving-picture media this year, both in the cinema and on the sixty-five-inch OLED television that Mae bought (which arrived scarily large, but soon became scary in that it stopped seeming excessively large).

Early on I saw the film which I would base my personality on for the coming year: Tár (2023) starring Cate Blanchett. What a ridiculously good film. A character portrait of a narcissist abuser whose tricks suddenly stop working. It’s very funny to watch. Lydia Tár is a beautiful character that does deserve tiktok fancams, and it’s because not only is she camp, but crucially it’s hilariously camp to idolise her. There’s been plenty of ‘sigma’ films about bad people ‘getting away with it’ (Nightcrawler is the one that leaps into mind). It’s finally time to have a film about a pretentious, abusive, lustful, scornful, prejudiced girlboss, and it’s finally time for people to say she’s ‘literally me’. Lydia Tár fills all the stereotypes of what the predatory ‘homosexual’ is, and to idolise or identify with her is to reject the poisonous mentality that one shouldn't act with queer desire to avoid the risk of being labelled as various dark and dangerous things (things the barbarous gays have - according to the classic liberal narrative - gained acceptance by successfully suppressing within themselves). In other words, Lydia Tár slays and I have no choice but to offer uncritical support for my maestro-in-exile.

What else did I watch? Nothing sticks in my mind as much as Tár, but rapid fire:

As I've had to be doing a lot of monotonous admin while working from home, I've been listening to a lot of podcasts and youtube videos. I've stopped going to Northernlion's own videos since he pivoted to exclusively streaming, instead now watching a lot of 'Library of Letourneau', a fan-run highlight/compilation channel which puts out 2 hour summaries for most of his streams. They're very high effort and often have cutaways to the relevant twitter video NL is bantering about. Big fan. I shudder when thinking about the kind of psychopath it takes to run that channel. Another thing I've been sticking on in the background is Film Critter's 'Processes...' podcast, where two immensely likeable people hang out and critically discuss some film for 50 or so minutes, with the conceit that one of them (they swap each time) is lying on a chaise-lounge talking to their therapist (the other). They usually drop it after a few minutes but it's a delightful little joke that enhances the hang-out-itude of the podcast. They've also exposed me to a lot of cool films – I watched Pulse, for example, because of them.

Another person I've gotten into is Tangomushi, who does features on PS2-era survival horror games that aren't Resident Evil or Silent Hill (Haunting Grounds, or Rule of Rose, for example). Wonderful little videos that, although doing the classic video essay plot summary, do actually have a good quantity of analysis and discussion of the game's context. Probably the best videos I've seen this year, though, are Warlockracy's Morrowind mod highlight videos, which take a brilliant form: they don't aim to holistically cover all of the mod's features or content, instead depicting the journey of a single character (with role-played narration) through the new area or quest. Check out the one about Tamriel Rebuilt – it's a very fun little narrative.

I haven’t listened to much new music this year: I’ve mostly been re-listening to comfort classics or playing the stuff I have found on repeat. It’s a big change from the last two years but probably makes sense in light of the vast amount of effort I put in during that period of experimentation and discovery. I do luckily still have ten good album recommendations to cap out this post though, which I’m happy about. As always, I do wish everyone reading a wonderful 2024. I am truly hopeful for this coming year, which seems likely to be a turning point for me, many of my peers, and the country in general. Let it be a turn for the better.