2023 Media Wrap-Up

“Ritual is valuable because ritual is an outward signifier of stability.” - Dan Olson

“Humans are very bad at experiencing time. A year has no innate meaning to our bodies, and traditions help anchor us.” - Dan Olson

I was watching Folding Ideas (aka Dan Olson)’s “Let’s Argue About Christmas Movies (ft. Movies w/ Mikey)” a few weeks before Christmas, and the quotes he said above struck me as especially poignant as I’ve been preparing to write up my yearly write-up blog posts. I joke a lot to my friends about my love of lists and data and I love telling new people about my obsessive tracking of self-data, but it’s taken me a few years to process why I love tracking data. I am a deeply anxious person, and I am also forgetful. In many ways, my love of keeping data on myself is an effort to anchor myself in time and place. If I can’t remember something, then did it happen to me? Did it matter? If there’s data, if there’s concrete proof that I exist and I have experienced things, then I can look at this data and remember where I was and what I was doing in my past. Some people keep photo books or journals. I write down lists of books I’ve read, games I’ve played, movies I’ve watched. I move from one cycle around the sun to another by dumping my experiences of the year out into the online ether as a proof of existence.

All that is an existential (and possibly pretentious) way to say… 4 years in and I’m still methodically tracking every piece of media I finish! You can find all the previous years’ lists here.

Before we start, a few notes on how I organize the lists:

1. I’ve ordered lists alphabetically, not in order of when I finished or what I liked most.
2. For tv shows, anime, comics, and manga, I marked down what chapters, seasons, issues, etc. I finished if I didn’t finish the entire thing. Since some are ongoing or very long, I figured it’s a distinction worth making!
3. If it wasn’t the first time I’ve read, watched, or played something, I’ve noted it.
4. If I explicitly decided to not finish something, I’ve marked it down in the completed lists but with a note of when I abandoned it.
5. Just because I finished something, it doesn’t necessarily mean I recommend it!

Books

This year was basically the Cradle + Year of Sanderson year for me. As always I will highly recommend Sanderson if you love good plotting and clever magic systems and worldbuilding. And if you want just good ol’ junk food fantasy (I mean this as a compliment), give the Cradle series a try. I got a bunch of my friends to all read it with me this year and we all had a blast!

• Blackflame (Cradle - #3)
• Bloodline (Cradle - #9)
• Dreadgod (Cradle - #11)
• Ghostwater (Cradle - #5)
• Reaper (Cradle - #10)
• Skysworn (Cradle - #4)
• Soulsmith (Cradle - #2)
• The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England
• The Sunlit Man
• Tress of the Emerald Sea
• Uncrowned (Cradle - #7)
• Underlord (Cradle - #6)
• Unsouled (Cradle - #1)
• Waybound (Cradle - #12)
• Wintersteel (Cradle - #8)
• Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

This Year: 16

Last Year: 8

Movies

I’m not as much of a movie person, but my roommate Zach decided he was going to watch 356 movies in 2023, 1 for each day of the year. Just from living with him I got dragged along for part of the ride (willingly), and as such watched way more movies than I normally do in a year. Zach was sadly 6 off from his goal (he got sick near the end of the year), but I enjoyed getting out of my comfort zone with a lot of these.

Some standouts for me were Alien, All Quiet on the Western Front, Coraline, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game, and Suzume.

• Abducted in Plain Sight
• Akira (rewatch)
• Alien
• All Quiet on the Western Front (2023)
• Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
• Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (rewatch)
• Batman Begins (rewatch)
• Borat
• Burn After Reading
• Cocaine Bear
• Constantine
• Coraline
• Devil
• Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
• Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (rewatch)
• Fight Club
• Final Destination
• Final Destination 2
• Final Destination 3
• Final Destination 5
• Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete
• Final Fantasy VII: Last Order
• Game Night
• Hannibal Buress: Animal Furnace
• Hannibal Buress: Comedy Camisado
• Hannibal Buress: Live in Chicago
• High Fidelity
• Hot Fuzz (rewatch)
• In The Mouth of Madness
• Inglorious Basterds
• Inside (rewatch)
• I’m Thinking of Ending Things
• John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous (rewatch)
• John Mulaney: Baby J
• John Wick (rewatch)
• Jurassic Park
• Ma
• Mandy
• Michelle Wolf: Joke Show
• Michelle Wolf: Nice Lady
• Midsommar
• Mike Birbiglia: Thank God For Jokes (rewatch)
• Minority Report
• Mission: Impossible
• Nate Bargatze: Hello World
• Nate Bargatze: The Tennessee Kid
• Never Get Tired: The Bomb the Music Industry Story
• Norm Macdonald: Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery
• Old School
• Over the Hedge (rewatch)
• Perfect Blue (rewatch)
• Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game
• Point Break
• Pokémon 2000
• Pokémon: Mewtwo Strikes Back (rewatch)
• Porco Rosso (rewatch)
• Pulp Fiction
• Scream
• Scream 2
• Sleepwalk With Me
• Snatch
• Stavros Halkias: Fat Rascal
• Suzume
• The Black Phone
• The Conjuring
• The Dark Knight (rewatch)
• The Dark Knight Rises
• The Final Destination
• The Killer
• The Mist
• The Pricemaster
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie
• The Thing (1982) (rewatch)
• The Tickle King
• The Venture Bros.: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart
• The Warriors
• Tickled
• Tropic Thunder
• Tucker and Dale vs Evil (rewatch)
• Vampire Hunter D
• WarGames
• Weathering With You (rewatch)
• Wicker Man (2006)
• X
• Zodiac

This Year: 85 (68 new)

Last Year: 20 (13 new)

TV Shows

Zach and I continued our slow watch through of King of the Hill, which continues to be an incredible show. Would highly recommend any of these shows, actually - I didn’t watch much TV this year, but it was all great. This was also the first year in recent memory I didn’t watch Over the Garden Wall on Halloween. The back half of this year has been a mess of holidays that don’t feel like they used to. I don’t know if that’s just me getting older and cynical, or if I just need to be more intentional about figuring out new holiday traditions to make them feel special again. I guess I’ll see if this is the end of a Halloween tradition or just a temporary break next Halloween!

• Jury Duty
• King of the Hill (season 6-9)
• Only Murders in the Building (season 1-2)
• Scott Pilgrim Takes Off
• Wild Wild Country (rewatch)

This Year: 5 (4 new)

Last Year: 4 (3 new)

Video Games

My list of completed video games always looks so small and sparse compared to the copious amounts of games I actually play in a year. I’m a bit of a magpie when it comes to games and drop games frequently to pick up others, so finishing a game is always a bit of a rare thing for me. If you play any game off this list though, make it The Case of the Golden Idol (and its 2 DLC). I haven’t had a game grip me like Golden Idol did in quite a while - I think I finished the game and the DLC over a period of 24 hours. If you like the idea of playing detective or enjoyed The Curse of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol is a must play.

• Chained Echoes
• Dredge
• Final Fantasy VII Remake - Episode INTERmission
• Golden Idol Mysteries: The Lemurian Vampire
• Golden Idol Mysteries: The Spider of Lanka
• Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
• Super Mario Bros. Wonder
• The Case of the Golden Idol

This Year: 8

Last Year: 8

Anime

Like television, I didn’t watch much anime this year, but all of it that I did watch was great. Bocchi the Rock I feel like I can comfortably recommend to anyone; Bocchi is such a sweet anxious wreck and watching her overcome her anxiety to shred guitar is incredibly heartwarming. Summer Time Rendering was an incredibly compelling and tense thriller about the sudden death of a teenage boy’s childhood friend, and the slow reveal of what’s really going on in his island hometown was such a blast. And of course, I finally got around to watching the adaptation of the classic manga Berserk, which was… a time. It was my first experience with Berserk, so it did prompt me to pick up the physical manga and I have been really enjoying that. HEAVY TRIGGER WARNING on it though. I knew going in it was a dark story but… woof.

• Berserk - Memorial Edition
• Bocchi the Rock
• Oshi no Ko (season 1)
• Recovery of an MMO Junkie
• Summer Time Rendering

This Year: 5 (5 new, 0 abandoned)

Last Year 11 (10 new, 0 abandoned)

Comics/Manga

Lots of manga again this year! Blue Box continues to be a favorite of mine in the cute/wholesome romance category. Spy x Family also continues to be an incredible mix of action and comedy. I finally read through Hunter x Hunter after years previously watching the anime adaptation up to the Chimera Ant arc and then… dropping it. Listen, I knew it was suppposed to be the best arc, but it had a slow start! After catching up on all of the manga, I am ashamed to admit that the fans were indeed right, the Chimera Ant arc rules. (I stand by the start of it being way too slow though.) I have now entered hiatus purgatory with the rest of the manga readers, so hopefully Togashi feels well enough in the next year to drop a few more chapters on us.

• Beat + Motion (chap 1-20)
• Berserk (vol 1-16)
• Blue Box (chap 82-131)
• Blue Giant (vol 1-10) (finished)
• Chainsaw Man (chap 1-97) (reread)
• Chainsaw Man (chap 117-151)
• Do Retry (chap 1-4)
• Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (vol 6-8)
• Gokurakugai (chap 1-14)
• Hunter x Hunter (chap 1-400)
• Jujutsu Kaisen (chap 209-239)
• Kaguya-sama: Love is War (chap 232-271)
• Kubo Won’t Let Me Be Invisible (chap 1-144) (finished)
• Moriarty the Patriot (chap 36-51)
• My Hero Academia (chap 377-410)
• Once & Future (vol 5)
• One Piece (chap 1071-1102)
• Oshi no Ko (chap 1-134)
• Romantic Killer (chap 1-38) (finished)
• Show-Ha Shoten (chap 1-22)
• Silver Spoon (vol 1-15) (finished)
• Space Brothers (vol 1-11)
• Spy x Family (chap 74-92)
• Tenmaku Cinema (chap 1-21) (finished)
• The Prince of Tennis (chap 1-42)
• Witch Hat Atelier (vol 10-11)
• World Trigger (chap 229-238)
• Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (Deluxe Edition) (vol 1)
• Yuyu Hakusho (vol 1-175)

This Year: 29

Last Year: 22

Board Games

I have continued playing Flesh and Blood pretty much weekly, as well as traveling for tournaments, so that again comprises most of my board game time this year. (A separate blog post on my Flesh and Blood stats will probably go up in a few days.) The Sorcery kickstarter finally deliverd though, and so I’ve been playing a decent amount of that with friends and it’s been such a joy. It really scratches my itch for jank, casual games that Flesh and Blood, as much as I love it, can’t really do. I’ve also dabbled in a few other TCGs for fun (like Grand Archive and One Piece), as well as continuing to play EDH with friends. Aeon’s End: Past and Future expansion also dropped this year, and continues to be one of my favorite board games. I played through that campaign solo, which from a “I need to play this now” stance was a great move, but I wish I had grabbed a friend to experience it with me. It’s also at the very bottom of the list because I played it literally once right before the New Year hit, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Earthborne Rangers for the past few days. The open world, hopeful post-“apocalypse” setting is something very special to have in a board game, and I’ve loved playing 1 day of the campaign per real day and soaking in the world and exploring. Very excited to see where the campaign goes and then maybe drag some friends along for a replay to see how different a replay can be.

Total Plays: 724

Friends Played With: 95

Unique Games: 45

Unique Locations: 29

New Games Played: 23

Estimated Time Played: 428 hours

Days Played On: 184

Note: Friends Played With includes myself in each of them :P

Thank you very much for reading! If you would like to discuss any of the media I finished this year with me, feel free to shoot me a message on Twitter, Bluesky or Mastodon (@luceleaftea@techhub.social), I’d love to chat!