Ever get frustrated when the one movie everyone is talking about just came out on a streaming service that you don’t have even though you are currently subbed to 20 different streaming apps? Youtuber Dunkey has a new video that is the ultimate representation of that frustration. It’s a video that made me laugh and also kind of triggered some kind of Manchurian Candidate response in me that has me googling if UTorrent is still a thing.
During our holiday travel my wife and I were talking about how bloated our streaming budget had become. How were we still subscribed to Paramount Plus? We don’t even watch Yellowstone. I can’t even recall how many conversations I’ve had with people about how cutting the cord is no longer cheaper than it was just a few years ago. The rush of every major rights holder in Hollywood to get their IP on some kind of service so they could milk another $10.99 a month our of the general public has made even the luddites among us at least a little curious about piracy.
Dunkey isn’t offering any solutions here, just pointing our how ridiculous it is trying to watch content in the year of our lord 2024. Finding Die Hard on streaming last Christmas was basically impossible without a VPN in the States. After doing multiple Google searches my best guess was that it was streaming on STARZ at some point in December, but not all of December. I ended up watching the movie on a grey market streaming service that my 60 year old father uses because of how often he can’t find stuff on any of the 20 services he shares with the family. If the streaming complex has driven a man who still watches episodes of Deadliest Catch as they air on cable to piracy, what chance do they think they have in keeping the rest of us on the hook?
There are few things I enjoy more than reading Colson Whitehead. From the first time I read Whitehead talk about his experience playing in the World Series of Poker for Grantland (pours one out), I knew that I had found a kindred soul. The way he talked about poker and the people who played the game had a rhythm and wit that I found captivating.
When his next novel, The Underground Railroad dropped and set the literary world ablaze I was not shocked. One of the most thoughtful writers we have turned his sights on our nation’s history of slavery and racism, and all of that brilliance and intellectual sharpness was on full display.
The Underground Railroad and his follow-up, The Nickel Boys – a book about the abuse and murder of black children at a reform school in Florida during the 1960 – both won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Whitehead was now a household name in the literary world.
In 2021 Harlem Shuffle came out to strong, if not a little muted acclaim. Harlem Shuffle is the story of a man named Ray Carney whose day job is owning a furniture store, but moonlights as a fence for the neighborhood’s thieves and other ne’er-do-wells. The backdrop of the story is the Harlem of the 1960s. Carney’s life is filled with people who have connections to a criminal underworld, and the story explores those relationships to great effect. It’s an awesome read.
Jump to 2023 and here comes Crook Manifesto, a direct follow up to Harlem Shuffle set in the 70s. This is something new for Whitehead, who up until this point would typically jump from genre-to-genre between books. Now we know that the Ray Carney series is set to be a trilogy, and having just finished Crook Manifesto, I’m delighted to hear it. I feel like this novel takes so much of what Whitehead had learned about the crime epic in Harlem Shuffle, and made something that both stands out from and exemplifies everything I love about crime stories.
In Crook Manifesto you are presented with a New York City that seems engulfed in flames. While the city’s firefighters are scrambling to keep up with the chaos, everyone else is trying to find a way to get theirs before nothing is left to steal. Carney is doing everything he can to stay on the straight-and-narrow but a chance encounter with a crooked cop, over a pair of tickets to see the Jackson Five, kickstarts a tale of violence and revenge that becomes the catalyst for much of the story.
East Harlem, 1975
Whitehead brings back a number of characters from Harlem Shuffle who all have to reckon with the world they are living in. The city’s corruption has seemingly made it all but impossible to lead a normal, straight life. We get to know the people who are setting Harlem ablaze, as well as those bankrolling arson on a city-wide scale. What I love about Crook Manifesto is that you can see and feel the motivations that are driving all the characters. There are no throwaway henchmen in this story, everyone is being driven by the same crooked machinery at the heart of the tale.
You can easily read Crook Manifesto as a straight crime story and have a great time doing so. There’s a propulsion to the action that will have you on the edge of your seat. I’m not one to visibly emote while reading, but I actually gasped at a plot point late in the story that I will not spoil here. Whitehead has really sharpened his ability to tell a great action story. What’s also here are the same big questions we expect out of (Capital L) literature. Can we truly escape our past? Can we trust the institutions that are put in place to protect us? How do we live in a world that seems so cruel and unjust?
As much as Whitehead may have been trying to escape into genre, he couldn’t help but bring his world with him. What we are left with is something wicked, smart, funny, and true. The New York of Crook Manifesto is constantly evolving. You can never hold it down in your mind. The same seems to be true of the book’s author, who can’t help but upend any genre he steps.
I can’t start a list of my favorite things to come out in 2023 without just addressing the elephant in the room. Baldur’s Gate 3 was the best piece of culture I interacted with, full stop. It’s a triumph. Most people would agree that last year was one of the best years in gaming history and all I want to talk about is playing Baldur’s Gate 3.
I have to admit that I had never played a game by Larian Studios in the past. I had always heard great things about the Divinity: Original Sin games but up until a couple of years ago I never had a PC that was up to the task of playing either of those games well.
When I heard that Larian was going to be bringing back the Baldur’s Gate series that was originally developed by Bioware, it piqued my interest. Not so much that Larian was developing a game based on Dungeons and Dragons IP, but because Bioware has made some of my favorite games. If a developer could replicate the magic of old Bioware games like Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2, games that have great dialogue, interesting characters and meaningful player choice, I had to play it.
When BG 3 dropped the reviews felt like a coronation. This was indeed the game that would take RPGs into a new era. When I booted up the character creator and spent multiple hours creating my rogue/ranger character with stats that would define my playthrough I was already hooked. Within a few hours of roaming around the starting area I had already met a slew of memorable characters, and was almost overwhelmed by how much choice I had both in how I was playing the game and how the story unfolded by choices I was making in dialogue. For me an RPG lives or dies by how interesting and meaningful dialogue choices are. In Baldur’s Gate you are just as likely to lose a beloved character by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time as you are in a difficult combat encounter.
All of the characters that you bring into your party in BG are complicated and dynamic companions who have their own political interests. Throughout the game you go on quests, exploring these characters’ upbringings and helping them face down their own demons. Just like in Mass Effect 2, these quests are often some of the best content in the game. There was a moment in my playthrough where I had to choose between having one of my favorite character leave, or bringing on what I thought was the apocalypse, and it was honestly one of the more heart wrenching decisions I’ve ever had to make in a game.
The combat in BG 3 is also top-notch. The game is just a giant sandbox that allows you to bend and twist its rules to your bidding. I played the game as a ninja-like rogue who could at any moment backstab an enemy and escape into the shadows before anyone noticed. As I leveled up I was able to use my bow to take out enemies at range, then hide so well I could take down difficult bosses on my own. But it’s in the moments where you synchronize your abilities with your party that the game truly sings. Say I find myself up against a mob of enemies surrounded by oil barrels. I would shoot the barrels with my bow, have my wizard throw a giant fireball to set everyone ablaze, have my cleric bring any dead bodies into zombies, and so on…
The developers at Larian set out to create the most open-ended RPG ever made and I feel like they hit the mark. The game has thousands of endings that depend on both how you play the game and what decisions you make in dialog trees. I’ve never felt more overwhelmed by the sheer amount of possibilities a game could throw at me at a given time. By the time I got to the city of Baldur’s Gate I couldn’t move more than 50 feet without getting myself into a seemingly benign sidequest that would turn out to be a multiple hour long adventure with meaningful payoff in both gameplay and story. I’ve never played anything like Baldur’s Gate 3, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Here’s a list of my top 10 games from last year.
Baldur’s Gate 3
Alan Wake 2
SF 6
Hi-Fi Rush
Armored Core 6
Super Mario Bros Wonder
Dave The Diver
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
Resident Evil 4: Remake
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Moonlight
Moonlight is a service that uses Nvidea GPUs to stream games over the internet to whatever device you want. I used Moonlight a ton this year to play games from the PC in my basement office on my TV in the living room. There are plenty of cloud streaming services out there right now that do a shockingly good job, but since Moonlight is running games off of your own hardware and sending the video out to any device on your personal network, there is almost zero lag when playing games at home. We’ve used Moonlight to play everything from Mario Kart (via Yuzu) to Baldur’s Gate this year and the experience has been pretty flawless. My kiddo spent a couple weeks home from school this year sick and being to chill with her on the couch and still play something like Slay the Spire on my iPad via Moonlight was awesome.
Killers of the Flower Moon/Oppenheimer
The first movie I saw at the cinema since the pandemic was Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and for the next four months I was sure that Killers was going to be my favorite movie of the year. Scorsese’s unflinching epic about the massacre of the Osage Nation left me speechless. I was not a huge fan of The Irishman, and honestly I did think an 80 year old man would be capable of making one of the most daring, horrifying and deeply moving films of my lifetime, but I was so happy to be wrong. The performances by Lily Gladstone, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are all extraordinary, and Gladstone almost certainly deserves an Oscar for her portrayal of Mollie Burkhart.
The cinematography is beautiful, and Scorsese uses his camera to stunning effect. This is a long movie. The camera will linger on the grief displayed by the Osage members of the tribe being systematically murdered by sycophantic white men trying to extract every dollar the tribe has come into due them finding oil on their lands. It’s a difficult movie. We come to Scorsese to live vicariously through his characters doing bad things. Whether it’s Henry Hill in Goodfellas or Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street. You can’t help but be enthralled by the sins of those protagonists. In Flower Moon you are brought face-to-face with the consequences of the actions of evil men. Scorsese has always been interested in what can happen when corruption allows for bad people to prosper. Killers of the Flower Moon feels like an exclamation mark at the end of his life’s work. It’s a masterpiece.
My biggest regret of 2023 was not seeing Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus in theaters. I didn’t watch the movie until Christmas night when my beloved 49ers were getting worked over by the Ravens, and I needed to flip to something else. I’m a fair weather Nolan fan. The first two Batman movies and Inception are great films, and I liked Dunkirk quite a bit as well, but I wasn’t really into Interstellar or Tenet. When the Barbenheimer weekend happened our kid was sick and I couldn’t make it out for the double feature, but I was excited to hear people I trust have good things to say about both films.
When I did get around to watching Oppenheimer for the first time (I’ve watched it four times since Christmas) I couldn’t help but think about another film I love – The Social network. Much like my favorite Fincher film, what I love most about Oppenheimer is how propulsive and smart the dialog is throughout. I’m a sucker for movies that put a bunch of great actors in a room, give them something interesting to say, and don’t take their foot off of the gas.
We all know Christopher Nolan is the best in the business at spectacle, and the detonation of the atomic bomb is breathtaking in this film. I can only imagine what it was like to see it in IMAX. Nolan and his effects team using every trick in the book to create all of those images without resorting to computer generated special effects is an achievement.
What makes Oppenheimer Nolan’s best work to date is how he was able to navigate multiple, parallel timelines within the life of one the worlds most important people. Nolan has been playing around with time in his movies since Memento, and has relied on this mechanic more and more in movies like Inception and Tenant to varying degrees of success. In Oppenheimer this effect works incredibly well. It helps us understand how the defining moment of a man’s life can haunt him forever.
The performances in Oppenheimer are great, and there are just so many great moments from a murderers row of great actors. Cillian Murphy just kills in the lead role. His face is just so damn emotive and Nolan’s Imax cameras are right there to capture every single detail in those expressions. You often hear how so-and-so was born to play a role, and as much as that’s a cliché, this certainly feels like a career defining role for Murphy.
It was so damn exciting getting to watch Robert Downey Jr. dive headfirst into a challenging character that is very much the antithesis of the roles he’s been playing the last decade plus. He’s a revelation in this movie. Then there’s Matt Damon, who brings the film levity, and Jason Clarke who is just an all-time great prosecuting asshole. For a movie that is about a huge explosion, Nolan is celebrating what can happen when you put a bunch of brilliant people together for a cause bigger than any single person.
While I think that Killers of the Flower Moon is probably the better movie, and certainly feels like it’s more important, I know that Oppenheimer will be the movie that I come back to most in the years to come.
MJ Lenderman – And The Wind (Live and Loose)
I didn’t listen to a ton of new music in 2023. My Spotify Wrapped was not all that interesting, and most of what I did listen to was music suited to the gym. However when people started talking about their year-end favorites I couldn’t help but notice that MJ Lenderman kept popping up, as a member of Wednesday and their exceptional album Rat Saw God, as well as his live album And The Wind (Live and Loose).
Lenderman is a singer/songwriter who plays a mean guitar and reminds me a lot of a young Kurt Vile. His last LP, Boatsongs, made him a big name on the indie scene, but for some reason left me a little cold. It was only when I gave the live album a listen that a lot of the songs on his last album started to really click for me. From the first couple riffs on “Hangover Game” I just knew that I was going to be into this record. Lenderman’s songs range from a number of topics from Michael Jordan’s infamous flu game, to Tables, Ladders, and Chairs wrestling matches, to joining the priesthood. His lyrics are sharp and playful, and a great match for the ramshackle guitar solos that run rampant throughout Live and Loose.
Indie music has been ruled by the singer/songwriter type for almost half a decade now. Most of the year-end awards have gone to the Phoebe Bridgers, Angel Olsens, and Waxahatchees of the world. We even had what I felt was a culmination of that movement in Boy Genius’s superb album, The Record, earlier this year.That said, I’ve welcomed the return of more guitar-heavy, garage rock in 2023.
Those were some of the things I really enjoyed last year! If you noticed that I didn’t mention any books, just know that I feel bad about that and I’m hopefully going to read a bunch more this year! In a lot of ways 2023 was the year of playing a lot of games, watching some movies and trying to keep myself sane in what’s a pretty crazy world. Hope you all found some things that kept you whole last year. I’m excited to see what defines my year in 2024!
To blogging that is. If there was a theme to whatever-the-hell 2023 was, I would say it was the year when the social internet started to fracture. While it’s easy to assign most of the blame on one belligerent billionaire for destroying Twitter, I think there has been a growing malaise within the public arena online that made spending our entire days there unsustainable. We’ve all known for years that places like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are weaponized to keep us starting at our phones by any means necessary, but it feels like this was the year that all of these monoliths started to crack with features nobody wants, algorithms that will take you from puppy photos to extremist propaganda in seconds, and a general blandness that has made these places just feel not great to hang out in.
In the months since Twitter essentially broke I’ve found myself a bit of an internet nomad. There has been a mad dash by social networks like Blue Sky, Threads and Mastodon to fill the void left in Elon’s wake, but none of these would-be successors seem to have what it takes.
As much as I love Mastodon’s plucky, indie spirit, their basic onboarding and UI was too obscure to gain traction within the broader Twitter using public. Those in the techsphere who I follow were quick to jump ship to Mastodon, and pretty much everyone who has made their home there seems to love it. Every time I log on it seems like my feed is full of fun, clever posts that are mostly about apps and podcasts. It feels a lot like the early days of Twitter, before the politics, sports and culture writers jumped aboard
I deleted my Facebook account in 2016 for reasons I probably don’t have to explain, but I kept my Instagram because it was still a pretty pure and enjoyable photo viewing experience. Now Instagram is basically a place for older people who don’t want to download TikTok to watch Reels. I’m guilty of this. You have to choose which devils you want to dance with. I chose mine.
I thought it was smart for the Meta Corp to leverage their huge Instagram user base to create their own Twitter competitor in Threads, which came out of the gate with the basic structure of a microblogging platform that most Twitter users could easily pick up. Creating a sign-up process and friend finder that uses your existing Instagram account makes getting up and running fairly seamless. Threads has been the number one free app on iOS for a while now. I’ve honestly been impressed by how quickly Threads has been able to improve in every way except…
The algorithm!
My god the For You section of Threads is a tire fire that makes even Twitter’s algorithm based feed seem good in comparison. It’s not just that Threads defaults you to a feed of suggested posts, it’s that 90 percent of these posts either have no bearing on any of my interest, or are genuinely offensive content that shouldn’t be allowed on any social network. It’s truly baffling how bad their algorithm for suggested content is given how good it seems to be on Instagram. Whenever I start scrolling through my reels I’m immediately shown a buffet of old wrestling promos, food videos, Barry Sanders highlights, and whatever other random marginalia that fits my interest almost to a T. Since most of my follows on Threads are the same as my follows from Instagram, I’m not sure how my For You page is such a dumpster fire. Meta really needs to get it figured out. They have a ton of momentum right now. Even people who seemed extremely loyal to Mastodon and genuinely seem to hate Facebook have been dipping their toes in.
Then there’s Blue Sky, the project started by former Twitter founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey. If you’re the type of person who spent way too much time on Twitter you may remember how excited everyone was when Blue Sky was announced. The promise of just going back to a stripped down Twitter like we used to use seemed too good to be true. It was. The rollout of Blue Sky has been excruciating slow. They are using an invite only sign-up process that has been hilarious to watch as people from Twitter with enough klout try to jump ship, but since their audience is still in the old place, they can never truly be free. When I finally got my hands on an invite code I found the Blue Sky to be the new home of the Reply Guy, and since all replies to people you floor seem to show up on the main feed, the entire reading experience on Blue Sky is a nightmare. Maybe there is an option to turn off the replies, but I honestly haven’t been interested enough in the platform to dig around the interface.
Then of course there is still Twitter, or X, but I’m going to keep calling it Twitter until that place is burned into a pile of ash. I know that I look back on the history of Twitter with rose colored glasses. I have been using the site since 2007, and for almost a decade truly loved spending time there. It quickly replaced my RSS feeds as the way I took in the internet. As politics and public opinion started to mix heavily with social media, it became clear that a place like Twitter was probably going to do more harm than good. A site made to share links and clever quips is no place for heated political debate. In the years since late-2015 I’ve really soured on Twitter being anything other than a place to keep track of whatever my favorite writers are working on. When Elon took over and immediately ripped out Twitter’s heart – their API that allowed apps like TweetDeck and Twitterific to provide pure feeds of people you follow without ads to operate – I knew the end was nigh. These days Twitter feels like the desert hills of Mad Max. Just users that refuse to go to a different social media site for whatever reason posting into a barren sea of ads for sex toys, prepper shelters, and the most obnoxious Blue Check users on the planet.
So where does that leave me, dear reader? Well I’ve been spending considerably less time on social media. I will check in on Mastodon, Threads and Twitter a couple times a day, but it’s no longer my go-to distraction throughout the day. In the wake of Twitter’s collapse I’ve also found myself going back to browsing the web like the good 2000’s era blog boy that I am. Most days I’ll head over to the NY Times to take in some news, play the Crossword as well as Wordle and Connections. After that I’ll run through my go to news sources NPR, Washington Post, BBC, and I’ll listen to something like NPR’s Up First podcast to fill me in on anything I may have missed news-wise from the day before. There’s a ton of other podcasts that I listen to throughout the week but that’s probably a subject for another day.
The thing I still love most about the internet are the blogs that have somehow survived through the Web 2.0 era. Places like Daring Fireball, Kottke.org, Waxy.org and Defector (formerly the OG Deadspin crew) are truly a joy to visit. These sites are run by people who have something to say in more than 170-500 characters. I love blogs because they give the space needed for a person to be three dimensional on the internet. When you read a good blog you know that the person writing it has taken some time to get their thoughts together. There’s a level of care that it takes to jump into a word document, scribble something down, then jump into a CMS before you get to the shiny red launch button that is “Post.” Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s art in firing off a perfect Tweet. It just pales in comparison with the sincerity of someone taking the time to explain why they love… or hate in a longer format.
I’m not so naïve to believe that social networks are going to go away in the next decade. I get that people’s lives are full of a million things that make it difficult to sit down and read thousands of words online everyday. I do hope that while we try to figure out what the hell social media means in 2024, we take back some control of how we both try to consume and create online. I would very much love it if the conversations we chose to have with each other in these virtual social spaces had a little more meaning in these turbulent times.
I got into a lengthy discussion today about the merits of chasing a creative life well into adulthood vs. starting a family and settling down. My contention is that it’s perfectly feasible for some people to both have a fulfilling creative life – in any of the arts – and also start a family, but that is just not something I see for myself at this stage. I spent far too many of the last ten years trying to suppress the feelings I’ve had about writing out of fear that I would somehow be looked at by society as a failure. This is without a doubt the biggest regret of my life so far, to let fear stifle my any creative ambitions that I’ve had in the past decade. In a lot of ways I feel like I’m just now emerging from a waking nightmare, and now I’m trying to get my life back on track.
I was asked what would happen if I met a girl that knocked me off my feet, and I really didn’t have an answer for that. I’m just now back at a place in my life that I would even imagine going up to a girl I found attractive and striking up a conversation. This is what happens when you don’t take care of your mind or body for a decade, you find yourself completely out of touch with the opposite sex. It’s also not something I spend a lot of time thinking about between marathon writing and reading sessions. I’ve spent the last couple of years living an almost monastic lifestyle. It’s been a very slow, arduous process getting back into the grove of being a sociable human being.
I’m a bit of a romantic, so of course I would like to eventually be in a sustainable relationship with a brilliant, beautiful woman. I’ve been told by many of my girl friends that I need someone who can call me on my self involved bullshit on a daily basis – and I couldn’t agree more. The problem is that I really have no idea what I’m looking for in a significant other. I’ve been out enough in the last couple of months to know what kind of person I am not looking for, but I have yet to meet someone who has knocked me off my feet, so to speak. This probably has more to do with my own self-consciousness when I’m in public than the relative quality of women in my geographical dating pool. It’s not as if I think I’m a great catch. I’m the kind of guy who says things like geographical dating pool.
What gets under my skin is when people who are married and/or have kids tell me that they would love to do more creative things but can’t because they have real responsibilities now. It’s the tone in their voice when they say, “real,” that bothers me; as if they are dressing me down for not making the same life decisions they have. In my small corner of the world it is almost a social norm to be married and to have at least one child by the time you turn 25. When I tell people I am working my ass of to become a better writer I get a lot of patronizing stares and dismissive responses, as if I told them I was training to be a Jedi Knight. This isn’t something that I have to deal with a lot, but it’s becoming more and more of a thing in last year or so. These tend to be the same type of people who post endless photo streams of their children on social media and have really pithy, canned status updates.
When I decided that I was going to throw myself into creative work full-heartedly I knew that I would have to have a develop a thick skin. The first couple months of writing have been up and down. There are days when the writing goes so poorly that I want to throw my computer against the wall and be done with the whole process. There are few people in my personal life who can relate to the difficulty of trying to produce creative work on a consistent basis. Most people can’t fathom how I could go an entire day without getting any writing done, because they have jobs in which – no matter how shitty their day is – there is always a tangible product made or service fulfilled when they punch out. It’s such a blessing to have a couple of close friends who are constantly supportive of what I am trying to do, and to live in a era where I can talk with dozens of people online about my work.
I’ve talked to a lot of older people who regret not chasing their passion when they were my age. It’s not that they regret having their children or being married, but there comes a time in everyone’s life when we realize that time and attention are finite resources, and some people do not have a full grasp of this concept until they are already knee deep in the cement of their own lives. I’m getting to the age where I can start to feel cement harden around my own legs. There is now a fire that burns inside me whenever I sit down to write, a sharp sense of urgency. There is some truth about the world that I desperately need to expose, and it’s something I think about with every waking breath. This is why, when people ask me about marriage and children, I have nothing to offer other than a shrug. You might as well be asking me about when I plan on landing on the moon.
I desperately want to make a connection to the world through my writing in the same way that most people are desperate to find that sort of connection in a significant other. It’s been years since I could say that I had a zealous passion for anything, and the only thing I can think about is the process of writing, because I am terrified that the even the slightest distraction will extinguish this newly kindled lust for life. Maybe someday I will meet a girl who inspires the same kind of feelings that I have for the written word, but until that day comes I am going to keep my head down and continue the hone the craft that I feel I was put on this Earth to do. You can call it a fools love, but it burns with the same ferocity of any Shakespearean romance.
Justin Jacobs 