Things I liked in 2024

An edit: I forgot to actually say that my short story "The Buried House" is out now in The Colored Lens's Winter 2025 edition! You can buy the physical edition or e-book here. Their Spring 2025 issue is also now out. I love the cover.

It’s May 2025 and last year now feels like a distant dream. I meant to get this out in January, but then Trump got inaugurated and everything immediately got really bad. But the sun is coming back to Chicago now, and despite everything, I’m determined to appreciate and protect my happiness wherever I’ve been able to make it.

I’m also donating to places and causes that fight Trump’s fascist policies and support Palestine and trying to get more involved on a local level. I’m typing this right now from Nabala Café, a Palestinian-owned café in Uptown that supports local causes. I want to get to know my neighbors better. I want to help them tend the community garden along the Metra tracks.

So here you go. Some things that made me happy last year. I hope they might make you happy too.

My own damn podcast

That’s right, my friend Emmi and I have finally started a podcast about video games like we’ve said for years we wanted to do. We're called Emmi & Annie Talk Indie. The audio quality is iffy at first, but we’re getting better all the time, and I had so much fun through the end of 2024 planning it all with Emmi. We published our first episode in January 2025, and we’ve stuck with it since. We post (mostly) every other Tuesday and if you like video games and our expert opinions on them, the podcast will be for you.

If you haven’t listened yet, I’d either recommend starting with the intro episode, which will let you know a bit about Emmi and me, or the Death of the Reprobate episode, which the game’s creator Joe Richardson endorsed in this Bluesky post:

Emmi and I also talk about how it feels frivolous In These Times to spend so much time playing games, which does hold true. But we’re living in the real world as we do this, too, and it has felt very good to set aside time for ourselves and make something. It’s more dire every day but we have to find a way to live, too, and this is helping us live. We hope it can do the same for listeners.

Our most recent episode was a deep dive into the early access experience of Hades II if you’d like to check it out!

I also made this cute-ass pixel art of Emmi and me for our cover, and I will give you $1 if you can guess what game sprites I used as a base:

Hollow Knight

I’ve had Hollow Knight on my Switch for ages, playing it briefly and then putting it down again when I first bought it. I don’t know why I ever put it down. This year when I picked it up again, spurred by a friend’s replay and another’s recommendation, I fell down the well into the Hollow Kingdom and still haven’t quite resurfaced.

Hollow Knight is a moody metroidvania with punishing combat, transportive music, and a story that will stay with you. It’s populated by many little guys. The main character is a (genderless) little guy, a bug possessed by a shadow. He wears a cape. My precious child. By the end of the game I wanted to give them a hug so bad that I asked my sister to buy me a plushie of the Knight (she thankfully complied).

In the first ten hours of the game, so many gorgeous things happened that I kept thinking to myself, “Is this it? Am I playing an all-timer?” and I was. Hollow Knight is going to stick with me. Team Cherry can take as long as they like to finish the supposedly forthcoming sequel, Silksong. I’ll be there even if it takes another ten years (though it was recently confirmed for a 2025 release by a Nintendo Switch 2 Direct).

Dungeon Meshi (the manga)

Dungeon Meshi (Delicious in Dungeon in English) exploded in popularity last year with the release of season one of the anime, and that was how I found out about it. My Tumblr dash (my quiet graveyard home) was suddenly full of a socially graceless tall blonde man that everyone swore they’d die for. So I was intrigued.

The premise: a party of adventurers, including Laios (a human knight), his sister Falin (human healer), Marcille (elf mage) and Chilchuck (halfling rogue), seeking fortune in their island’s dungeon, run into a dragon and fail to defeat it, with Falin getting eaten in the battle as the others are teleported out to safety. But the dungeon is enchanted, and death in the dungeon is not permanent as long as you perform a revival ritual in time. Laios and Marcille want to go back in to revive Falin but, penniless and starving after the failed expedition, some members of the party decide they can’t go back. However, Laios is determined to save his sister no matter the difficulty, and he goes back in with Marcille and Chilchuck, who’s motivated by profit more than concern. When they meet Senshi, an odd dwarf who seems to live in the dungeons, he reveals how to survive by eating the monsters they encounter instead of just fighting them. Laios, a monster obsessive, is thrilled (the rest of the party less so). Senshi joins them, and the game changes: they’ll fight and cook and eat whatever they have to as they get through the dungeon to the level where they lost Falin.

I decided to check out the manga because it was complete, and I spent most of last summer walking back and forth from the library to pick up volumes as they came in. I really couldn’t put it down. The art was great, and the characters were all such weird little guys that I always wanted to hear what they’d say next. Bless Marcille for being so prickly and ambitious and selfish and still a hero. Bless Chilchuck for being such a deadbeat dad despite his adorable appearance. Bless Laios for his wide-eyed goodness and grim determination. I love them all.

It was also a lot darker and more complicated a story than the bright and funny marketing makes it seem. It had a lot to say about power – who should have it and who shouldn’t, what it does to you when you find it. What an honor and curse and responsibility it is to make decisions that affect others. The pitfalls of ambition and desire. The importance of respecting and understanding other living beings, even in an eat-or-be-eaten world. How sharing food and especially making food for one another are essential parts of building a community.

Without spoiling it, Dungeon Meshi sticks the landing beautifully. You don’t see that often. A gorgeous, nourishing, and complete meal.

The Bayan Ko Diner

Bayan Ko has been a well-regarded Cuban-Filipino fusion restaurant in my neighborhood for some years. Last year, they transitioned the main restaurant to a prix-fixe reservation-only menu and opened up the Bayan Ko Diner a few doors down for more reasonably priced a-la-carte options. It seems Bayan Ko is following in the footsteps of other Chicago restaurants like Kasama where they’re gunning for Michelin stars for dinner service while offering still-delicious daytime options for the regular crowd. I did eat at Bayan Ko for dinner once before the change, and I’m still thinking about their perfectly juicy grilled duck skewers. But the Bayan Ko Diner is on another level.

When the diner opened up right across from the Montrose Brown Line stop, a ten-minute walk from my apartment, my friends and I tried it on a whim. We were seated immediately, and the restaurant was half-empty. As soon as we took the first bites of our food – pork sisig shishito hash, beef empanadas, puffed French toast – we asked each other, staggered, how could there have been no wait for this?

It couldn’t last. Instagram found out, and now there’s a 40-minute wait for brunch every time I walk by unless you’re willing to sit at the counter (which I am). “BKD time, you think?” my friends ask every time we hang out at my apartment. I hardly ever say no.

My favorites: the aforementioned pork sisig shishito hash, ube pancakes, and the fried rice from the dinner menu. The lumpia are also amazing. I’m just so grateful someplace so delicious is so close. I hope they’ll share the pancake recipe with me one day.

The Last Dinner Party

They’re angry British rocker women/femmes and they should’ve blown up with Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan last summer. They did play the late night circuit and enjoy a lot of popularity in the UK, so I’m hoping their time for global domination is still to come.

Favorite songs of theirs: Nothing Matters, Sinner, Portrait of a Dead Girl.

Hundreds of Beavers

When your looney-tunes-inspired old-timey slapstick beaver hunting epic begins with a quote from St. Augustine’s Confessions, you know you’re in for a good time.

The film Hundreds of Beavers features a simple protagonist with simple goals. In the first act, our hero is a drunken applejack salesman who accidentally blows up his own orchard and must face the winter with no food, shelter, or companions to help him. After a time flailing in the woods to survive, he meets a fur trapper who shows him what he knows. In the process, he falls in love with a merchant’s daughter. The merchant demands that he bring him HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS to earn his daughter’s hand, and our trapper gets to work. The simple goal: trap and kill HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS to be with the woman he now loves.

But the beavers are crafty bitches, and while the goal is simple, the path there is not. Hilarity, I promise you, ensues.

Marketing for the film had talked already about inspiration taken from silent era slapstick films and Looney Tunes-era animation. Those influences were absolutely there in the aesthetic; it’s grayscale and film-grained, and all of the effects appear deliberately hokey and low-tech even when they’re not. Though there are plenty of foley effects and musical backing, there’s hardly any dialogue, most communication being conveyed through over-wide gestures and insert-cards. (The couple of words spoken out loud are timed for the best comedic payoff, I assure you.) As for the Looney Tunes influence, that’s nowhere clearer than in our protagonist himself. He’s this film’s Wile E. Coyote, and all the woodland creatures – rabbits, wolves, skunks, and of course, beavers – are merely Road Runners. Except this Wile E. Coyote learns from his mistakes, and starts to win.

An influence that also felt very clear on the film’s structure is that of video games. Whenever the trapper approaches the fur merchant, the merchant stares and waits like an NPC while looping shop music plays in the background. Merchandise is available for purchase and displayed in a paneled menu, which the trapper seems to mouse over in his brain. His currency (beavers and other woodland creatures) are displayed in a UI over the screen, and a sound effect plays when he purchases an item. As in a roguelike, defeat generally sends him back to base, in this case the merchant’s home. He goes back out into the world to fight enemies and bring home spoils, though often has to retreat, wounded, having lost what he went out there for. Slowly, he purchases enough permanent upgrades to navigate the sometimes-changing landscape with confidence, and eventually is able to confront the final boss – the hundreds of beavers in a beaver-shaped fortress they’ve been building in the nearby river.

There’s toilet humor (literally). There are surprisingly few dick jokes, but there are dick jokes. The violence is at times gratuitous.

Though the film’s writers, directors and producers have cited many slapstick comedy influences on their film, especially Buster Keaton, I thought most often of Charlie Chaplin’s One A.M. while watching. In One A.M., an inebriated Charlie Chaplin also has a simple goal – get in bed and go to sleep. But this simple goal has simple obstacles which prove large challenges. A locked front door. A table in the middle of the foyer. A threateningly lifelike tigerskin rug. Stairs. Chaplin is mostly on his own for the forty-minute runtime of this hilarious and too-relatable comedy, and he shares a lot with our hapless trapper – the drunkenness, the struggle against a hostile environment, and the Rube-Goldberg-machine-like series of events that send them back to the start every time. (If you’re curious, you can watch One A.M. here!)

My own first encounter with Hundreds of Beavers was at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, which had a late-night screening as part of the movie’s circuit around indie theaters throughout the country. Producers were present dressed in beaver suits, posing for photos with people in a line that stretched around the block. There was a hilarious pantomime set to the Music Box’s live organ music before the show started in which one of the producers confronted a beaver. Here’s the dramatic conclusion:

It was absolutely elevated by watching in that space, with a packed crowd primed to have a good time. The laughter was infectious; the goodwill an inhalant. The collective effervescence of the audience experience was so strong that I haven’t been able to make myself watch the movie alone since then, even though I now own the Blu-Ray (though unfortunately not the wooden slipcover edition, which was too expensive for me and is now very sold out and EVEN MORE expensive). This will be a movie-night movie – best shared with among drunk friends willing to throw popcorn and roar with laughter.

Can’t wait for the inevitable roguelike video game adaptation of this roguelike film.

Honorable Mentions

This post was getting long so here are a few more no less important things I enjoyed in 2024:

• The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman (yes I DID sob over the ending of this book, anything King Arthur guts me every time)
• Big Mood starring Nicola Coughlan and Lydia West (featuring an extremely funny cameo by Tim Downie, the voice of Gale from BG3)
• LearnedLeague (online trivia league which keeps me sane even though I’m bad at it, let me know if you want a referral)
• I Saw the TV Glow by Jane Schoenbrun (deserves its own post tbh)
• This song specifically from the Challengers soundtrack (yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah)