On 2023
Thank you for being here, despite everything.
Hello. Long time no see, again. I didn’t feel super comfortable naming a piece “Things that got me through 2023” this year, or sticking to the structure of the last few years, abuzz with buttons telling you to subscribe for a year ahead. This is a silly little newsletter about the things I’m excited about in the here and now, and it’s been a lovely year personally; I got to go to a long-standing friend’s wedding on one of the hotter days of the year, I got to check seeing Beyoncé and Kylie Minogue off my bucket list, and I have made lovely new friends.
At the same time, it’s been a particularly hard year to get through. My physical and mental health have been really bad this year. I have felt like a horrible friend. The stench of decay in the state of things in the UK has been overpowering, and as I wrote the first draft of this the news on the radio was led by the conviction of Brianna Ghey’s murderers and the continuing genocide in Gaza.
Hope is in short supply, and as we edge towards the mid-2020s it does feel like this is the running theme for every year now; that any flicker of positive change feels further out of sight, as more people at home and abroad suffer while those in power idly watch on. As we celebrate a festival of light in the darkness, I hope — perhaps beyond hope — that things get a little bit better for everyone, and that you and yours have a peaceful year ahead.
This is normally the part where there’d be a button to get you to subscribe or share this newsletter, but in light of this year I’d like to make some other things more prominent.
2023’s Goodest Content
Before we get going, I want to stress that 2023 was a banner year for content consumers; multiple strong Game of the Year contenders, Barbenheimer, big artist tours, and a ton of great albums all made this year a bit more tolerable. But it’s important to recognise that the year was bad for those who make the stuff we love: thousands of game industry layoffs, the strikes in Hollywood that showed the industry’s true colours, and the clear profit-first motive of those running celebrations of game industry talent. Those at the top clearly feel they can get away with taking reckless decisions and disposing of other people’s livelihoods when the shit hits the fan, and it has been disgusting to hear every single time.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is my Game of the Year, a sentence that remains ridiculous for me to be typing in the year the Breath of the Wild sequel came out. I got tired of its combat, and I beat the game before they patched an epilogue in so I felt a little underwhelmed by how it wrapped things up, but it got its hooks in me with its wonderful characters and its ability to handle almost anything I could throw at it. Honourable mentions go to Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (more Breath of the Wild is great, though it doesn’t quite have the same charm as going into its predecessor blind), HiFi Rush (basically what I’d make if I had the budget and talent to make a video game), and Cocoon (so many puzzles in this game made me feel like a complete idiot, and that’s the best compliment I can bestow on a puzzle game, but it’s also just absolutely gorgeous). I also played Pentiment and Final Fantasy VII Remake for the first time this year and loved both on a ton of different levels, though neither released this year.
Boygenius’ The Record is my Album of the Year; it had me hooked from its first harmonies and I have cried to parts of it at least five times. I also loved Caroline Polachek’s Desire, I Want To Turn Into You (more albums should open with howls), Troye Sivan’s Something To Give Each Other (if this is the kind of music Troye makes in a hedonistic post-breakup phase, maybe he should stay single for the benefit of humanity), Arlo Parks’ My Soft Machine (she is just an incredible writer and it shows in every single one of these songs), and Mitski’s The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We — basically, I was sad and/or gay a lot this year.
The Bear was the best TV I saw all year; its first season grabs you by the scruff of your neck and just as you get the feeling it’s loosening its grip that Christmas episode happens in the second season, and you forget to breathe a few times. The Last of Us was also really good (a thing I have been saying since 2013), I had a lot of fun with the Doctor Who specials (Ncuti is going to be really good!), the BBC really nailed this year’s Eurovision Song Contest (serves me right, I guess), and the rebooted Big Brother was a lot of fun.
I saw fewer films than I would have liked, but I really enjoyed Marcel The Shell With Shoes On (I bawled my eyes out at its ending), Asteroid City (I watched this in the middle of a Bad Brain Time and found it endearing), Barbie (a gigaslay), and Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (mostly for its fun special effects).
My thanks of the year go to Tracey, Simon, Tina, Dan, Nicole, and countless other Monzonauts, for making my weekdays worth it; Karen, Manuela, Jay, Freddie, James, Carys, Cam, Barney, Tony, Joy, and the rest of St Nicks, for your love and hospitality; Mia, for our quarterly catch-ups that I will miss as you head for Bristol; Meghan, for cold beers and cold afternoons watching women’s football; Ilya, for giving me the courage to face the blindingly obvious; Cory, for being my absolute best friend; Dad and Jan, for putting up with me, despite everything; and Markus, for ever and ever.
