Not-the-Tonys 2025

 Look at me actually keeping up with this in consecutive years!  This time it's even more self-serving, as I also want to have content for this blog, which can sometimes seem a little neglected.  Anyway!

MOVIES

My favorite movie of 2024 ended up turning out to be A Complete Unknown, which helped explain the rest of why Bob Dylan has been such a fascinating adult discovery for me, a little like if Yesterday really had explored one dude inexplicably writing a bunch of genius songs one after the other with no effort...because that's really what Bob Dylan's done all his life.  Also heavily in the mix, Conclave, which pleasantly is another critically-acclaimed movie I also happen to have loved, which doesn't happen overly often these days.

BOOKS

My favorite book of the year was also, coincidentally, a critically acclaimed (read: Nobel Prize for Literature) work, Jon Fosse's Septology, which I read after learning about its dubbing, hoping to find another great work of literature, and I did.  That was gratifying!

MUSIC

This one's kind of tough unless I cheat and just pick a song: Billy Joel's "Turn the Lights Back On."

My brother long identified himself as a huge Billy Joe fan, and by extension I listened to a lot of his music and then became a pretty big fan myself, which was immeasurably gratifying (apparently the word of the year) when he dropped this new song at the start of the year, a career statement unlike but similar to what Johnny Cash did with "Hurt."  Brilliant video.  Among albums from favorite artists, Vampire Weekend's Only God Was Above Us probably proved most satisfying, but I was really spoiled for new additions to my collection.  

TV

Ghosts, the CBS version, continues to be my favorite show, but I did finally finished a complete watch for the original BBC version.  I also caught up on 1883 and 1923, the Yellowstone prequels, and finally got to watch some of Disenchantment, the Matt Groening Netflix show that came and went, and I think deserves the same kind of cult following as Futurama.  

WRITING PROJECTS

I wrote The Children's Crusade at the start of the year, which turned out to be, well, gratifying.  I hope to write Collider this year and if I'm really ambitious And A Centaur Died. but certainly next year.  It all depends on how things turn out!  There were other things I wrote throughout the year, and plenty of things I'll tackle this year, too.  2024 was also a kind of 20th anniversary for my first novel, and I celebrated that by issuing a long-awaited new edition, which I'm still waiting on Amazon to ship the copies I've ordered.  Kindle Direct Publishing has had a hardcover option for a couple of years now.  I wonder if it's still a bit more complicated than Amazon thinks.

FAMILY

I was fortunate to again have two family vacation experiences in 2024, one once again with the Burrito and her ever-expanding family (new baby sister! new dog!), and then later a whole family reunion, which hadn't happened since 2015 (which, not incidentally, also marks this year as the decade anniversary of my mom's death, which is astonishing), in which I got to catch up with my nephews up in Maine, since I stayed with them for the trip.

WORK

The job was a series of unfortunate complications throughout the year, starting with an awful nasty experience I'm certainly not discussing here (even a personal writer's blog, for me, doesn't have room for such things), but happily, there were plenty of happy babies and other assorted young youth I had the privilege to spend time with, and during one of two rounds of inspections I got singled out for praise, so that was (you guessed it) gratifying.