media and me in 2024

i played a lot ¹ of games this year and also consumed media a bit differently this year, so let’s write about that for a bit.

mainly, i imbibe the following mediae (in order of amount): youtube (too much), podcasts, games, radio, fan fiction, social media (reading), books. youtube, podcasts and radio are constants, games happen in phases and books very rarely.

how do i consume these and what kinds of content? things in italics are new this year.

• youtube: main entertainment medium, from tech/gadget news to music gear to art to video podcasts to anything that might be interesting.
• podcasts: mainly evening entertainment/company, mainly about games.
• games: constant interest, but actual playing happens in phases. a bunch of my youtube time is about game reviews and industry news, for some reason i quite like following those news and knowing what’s up in general. always on my steam deck ², i love that thing.
• radio: morning bathroom/coffee accompanyment, to have a general idea about what’s going on in the world.
• fan fiction: archive of our own, sometimes on the site, sometimes as epubs in an app.
• social media: bluesky, tumblr (through numblr), mastodon
• books: pretty much only when i make myself really focus, this year mostly because i gifted my sister a year of the library so she gets reconnected to it. (which also reconnected me and showed me a couple neat books.)
• cinema: went 3 (?) times this year, which was nice, but don’t watch movies or tv series at all other than that. not sure why, just haven’t had any interest in the last few years.

some game highlights

games i have opinions about. in chronological order, games picked up again are in italics, favourites are bold, games i’ve seen the ending of get a gold star.

• shadow gambit: sneaky games are fun, i had played one of their earlier games and the demo for this one. then bounced off pretty early because it got too complicated.
• immortals: fenyx rising: really fun for a couple hours, then it was too big/ubisoft for me
• crypt custodean: played the demo, then picked up the game when it released. really cute metroidvania, stuck on a boss, should pick it up again and try another boss first.
• tents and trees: awesome puzzle game (picross style?), liked it so much that i tried some similar ones one the playdate for train rides.
• ghost of tsushima: most “A”s this year, very stylish. like the sneaking, but got a bit tired after arriving on the second island/act and the camps got a bit too similar to each other. would like to see the story out though. (and still have that sneaking itch.)
• ✨ animal well: prettiest game this year! awesome pixel graphics combined with ~modern lighting and effects. puzzle game. saw the first ending, then got tired searching for more eggs.
• no rest for the wicked: 2d-soulslike, cool vertical level design, dropped after getting/being too difficult.
• elden ring: wanted to play the dlc, so had to actually get there. was quite fun, i got farther than ever (erdtree burned, radahn and mohg killed, dlc touched) and then got tired because too difficult. might be is my most-played game on steam (~160 hours since 2022), not sure if i will ever finish either the base game or the dlc. but it seems i like it.
• ✨ fez: had this for ages, played it again on a whim and got until the first ending. plus some of the easier secrets. fun!
• ✨ dungeons of hinterberg: lovely mix of friendship sim and dungeon exploration. played it all the way through, really liked the art style and the relationship parts. dungeons were quite fun at the start and got a bit annoying in the end, but they did have a bunch of variety! might quite like a more open version that has mostly the relationship stuff?
• hades: tried it again on a recommendation of my brother, got a bunch further and enjoyed it, then bounced off because it was too difficult again. did get to fight zag’s dad and lose, which is when i stopped/bounced.
• ✨ citizen sleeper: very neat story-heavy dice-based game, as cool as they say. want to see people i know play this and re-experience it through them.
• hyper light drifter: restarted this on the steam deck, also have owned this for years. still really fun, love the music by disasterpeace and general style. looking forward to hyper light breaker, although i am a bit skeptical if it can keep up. this one might be one of my all time favourites, at the very least style-wise.
• ✨ caravan sandwitch: cute little thing! soft game about a sort of abandoned planet? bit similar to sable, but less open. exploration + story + puzzles might be my thing. (sable is probably my actual all-time favourite game.) was nice.
• metaphor: refantazio: played 10+ hours of the demo (?!), then got a bit tired. basically anime as a game? plus more of that friendship/relationship sim stuff? and an interesting twist on turn-based combat, which i usually don’t like, but did like here. the full game seems to be 60-100 hours, so very unlikely that i would ever finish it.
• wayfinder: dipped my toes in for a couple hours, then got bored by the grind. liked the experience as a live-service-lite, to see what that’s like. but wanted more story and less repetition.
• spirittea: spirited away x stardew valley does describe it well. bounced off it on my own, loved playing it with my partner commenting. so i only played the start.
• ashen: souls-lite. like the style and systems, bounced off when it got too difficult (dying in the same spot 3-5 times). would like to continue though. could be a neat starting point for getting into souls-like games, or a friendlier/easier version in between souls-likes.

so that’s the games i remember/want to talk about. maybe i should put these opinions on bluesky as i play these games. i did play a bunch more games and demos, but did not play much of them for one reason or another.

a thing that keeps confusing me is that i like to play these “difficult” games, but then eventually stop playing them because they got too difficult. not sure if i could push through and finish them, if it’s “my fault” or if these games could be designed in a way that would make it more possible to finish them.
for example, often i don’t really know what i should try/improve and the games themselves don’t really help with that. rather than having difficulty options (which some designers oppose) i could imagine them either offering targeted accessiblity options (e.g. increased parrying windows after dying to the same boss a couple times) or alternatively telling/hinting me what i am doing wrong. part of it could be me having trouble with timings and recognizing visual indicators though, but there i could also imagine that more hints and slowdowns could help.

next/this year i’d like to revisit more games i already own, finish some of them and maybe only buy one game at a time, even if they are not on sale. oh, and i would like to use refunds more often, no sense in keeping games i did not like.

the other things

regarding youtube, the main new/changing thing this year was more videos about music gear (and sometimes even music making), which was probably part of the reason why i bought a bunch of (electronic) instruments as well. see below for some details.

indieventure, stealth boom boom and the crate and crowbar are still my main podcasts. i also watch/listen to the friends per second podcast, but that has a youtube version with video and i also prefer it that way, so it’s more of a video show than a “real”/vintage podcast.

fan fiction comes back a couple times every year. sometimes new things (often via tumblr), sometimes stories i already know. sometimes both at once.

books: i did read actual books this year and did not finish some others. the ones i finished were: Chor der Pilze by Hiromi Goto (very cool and slightly surreal) and Die Rückkehr der Kraniche by Romy Fölck (little kitsch-y, but a nice simple cross-generational story). i did try to read a bunch of other books and also some non-fiction, but they don’t seem to work for me. maybe i should try “read 10 pages every day” as a habit.

what about music?

good question, i mostly listen to music i already know, apparently. i have a bunch of music on my phone and other than that a little “playlist” etherpad with links to bandcamps and some youtube videos.

i should buy more music this year, maybe start with those links.

and for discovery, i found the live kexp concerts nice in december, i enjoyed the Glass Beams session, for example. (did not know them, now want to hear more.) i used to find a lot of music via FIP, but don’t seem to listen to much music at the moment in general. maybe more music + various crafts, but this year i preferred podcasts for that. (which is maybe not that healthy, similar to watching youtube videos all the time.) i did enjoy music while walking or biking places though, that seems to be a continuous thing for me.

come to think of it, i did listen to a bit of new music this year:

• Rabea Masaad’s new band: Vower
• Bent Knee’s awesome live concert from 2022 ³
• Oncle Jazz by Men I Trust ⁴

maybe something like Andreas’ list from 2021 is in my future.

making things!

this year was the first year i consistently made things, mediae even! jeremy of red means recording highlighted weekly beats 2024 just before the year started, which i made a thing for in week 1. and then week 2. and then… all other weeks of the year. which pretty much means i’ve made infinitely more music than any other year.
which is pretty awesome. what was also nice about weekly beats is the community of listenining to each others’ songs and commenting each week. i still don’t know how to interact online (always been a reader + occasional writer of a blog nobody knows about), but i did interact a tiny bit there and that was a really nice/cute part of weekly beats.

that doesn’t mean i’ve made good music, or even music i like, but i’ve made some things. some of them i like and will probably compile into something soon. but they are all available at weekly beats; extravagant timing, missing song structure and all.

habits seem to work quite well on me. for now i am glad to be done and having some time “off”, but i want to make and record more music this year. and maybe i’ll rejoin weekly beats for the next iteration in 2026. we shall see.

i started out with my guitar, an op-1f and an op-z as my instruments. and then started the year by buying a flute. which i can sometimes play basic melodies on now. and then throughout the year i bought a deluge (fun, but not for me in the end, want one?), a bunch of smaller things, an osmose (awesome! my “first keyboard” now. mainly an instrument for playing though, not for sound design) and then an op-xy (neat and very pretty, too expensive to keep in the end) near the end of the year.
i think what i was looking for was a sequencer (deluge and op-xy both do neat sequencing), but also a deeper sound-design thing. which is why i replaced the op-xy with a digitone 2, which does both of those things.

so that’s a few thousand euros in musical instruments. that’s what an it/developer salary is for, i suppose. it is really weird though, unless you know someone who has the instrument you want to try, the 30-day-money-back-guarantee (thanks thomann) is pretty much the only way to actually try out an instrument. i did try shops around me, but they don’t have much available to test in-store and i don’t know enough people. maybe meetups to try each others instruments could be a thing. videos and reviews help a bit, but in the end they don’t seem to tell me much about if i will actually enjoy an instrument.

that’s it

pretty much.

i’d like less constant youtube for entertainment and intentional consumption for this year. maybe via time-boxed “sessions”, which i’ve tried sporadically already. i’m not really sure how to get that consistent though. part of my media consumption feels a bit unhealthy, but part of it also doesn’t and i don’t really know how to figure out which is which and how to balance it.

talk to me if you have similar issues and tips related to this. :)

new years are funny, but i guess it makes sense that humans like arbitrary markers of time that make some sense.