About
    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Search
Page Contents
Full

2024 Year End Review

01 Dec 2024 - 05 Jan 2025
Open in Logseq
    • State: rough version for New Years Day release, but I will be adding stuff as I review notes.
    • Will not be sad to see the end of this year. Working as a consultant, which has ups and downs. One client with a specific public project and another with vague researchy goals that is making me kind of crazy. It's almost but not quite a KnowOS. Messing around with AI which honestly does seem to have transformative potential but I can't quite figure out what I want to do with it.
      • From Feb:
      • Having a salaried job is like being a domesticated animal. You have a place in a large economic household, you do your best to fit in, but everything is pretty much taken care of for you. Being an independent is like being a wild animal. Can't say it is better but I feel much free-er and realer somehow.
    • Oh yeah the US decided to go full fash. The year we decided to stop being a serious country. Electing Trump once could have been dismissed as a fit of silliness, electing him twice means we are a lost cause (maybe not, we could spring back, many things can happen and I don't know the future.).
    • Screwed over by a shitty lawyer and shitty therapist. Don't ask

    • Health

      • Had appendix out, that was fun. Got Covid for the first time. Starting to get tinnitus, even more fun. Age is creeping up on me.

    • TV

      • Watch more than I care to admit. This list is biased towards streaming services that let you review your watchlist (Netflix).
      • Excellent: Dark, The Terror, Fargo (S5), Say Nothing
      • Good: Kleo, 1899, Slow Horses, Scavengers Reign, KAOS, Ripley, Three Body Problem
      • Soso: Disclaimer, Devs, Fall of the House of Usher, Your Honor, Bodkin, The Old Man, Black Doves
      • Bad: Silo, Las Palmas, Eric
      • Rewatches: Carnivale, Lost (while I had Covid), bits of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. And Severance which is in a class by itself.

    • Movies

      • Hardly any new ones. Rewatched some old classics: Nashville, Miller's Crossing.
      • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
      • Adventures of Baron Munchausen (rewatch)
      • Some old Bond flicks for some reason
      • Halloween and some of its sequels, because it was Halloween and John Carpenter had been talked up on WS. Didn't do much for me. I don't see the point of slasher movies.
      • Carry-on (awful Netflix filler)
      • We Have to Talk About Kevin (excellent, disturbing)
      • Deep Sky, documentary on the Webb telescope (in an actual theater)
      • Lynch/Oz
      • Run Lola Run (rewatch)
      • The Killing, Kubrick
      • Civil War
      • Mad Max Fury Road (rewatch)
      • Zone of Interest (thought it was overrated)
      • Exorcist (rewatch)
      • The Dead Don't Die (awful)
      • The Birds (rewatch)
      • Bone Tomahawk (disturbing)
      • The Other Side of the Wind and They'll Love Me Whan I'm Dead (Orson Welles)
      • Hudsucker Proxy (nth rewatch, love that film)
      • Kill Bill (rewatch)
      • Godzilla Minus One
      • Hundreds of Beavers
      • Eye of the Needle (rewatch)
      • Dune Part 2 (theater)
      • Anatomy of a Fall

    • Podcasts

      • So many interesting ones, but who has time? I sometimes wish I had a long commute so I could keep up.
      • Weird Studies of course, although getting less enamored (no criticism but maybe not my scene after all – too much longing after the supernatural)
      • The Big Dig, excellent story of the Last Big Infrastructure Project
      • Ultra pr 2, about fascism in postwar US
      • Others: Chris Hayes'Why Is This Happening, Know Your Enemy, Very Bad Wizards, but just occasionally.

    • Social Media

      • Reducing use of Xitter (like every conscientious person) and spending more time on Mastodon and BSky. Have also been hanging around around Substack which seems to have a high concentration of interesting people (with an somewhat worrisome amount of wingnuttery but so far not enough to repel me).

    • Deaths

      • Scanning the incredibly long Wikipedia list for names that matter to me. Seems boring and normie and weirdly obligatory. "There is only one god, death" – Game of Thrones. I'm picking out names that mean something to me, but feel like I am mildly insulting the 95% who are notable but not to me (sports figures, minor politicians, killers and mobsters and others (amused by the famous animals)) by skimming over them. Then there are the thousands of deaths of people who aren't notable enough for Wikipedia. Why am I doing this? Getting in line I suppose.
      • Jimmy Carter just a couple of days ago.
      • Phil Lesh, Zakir Hussain Saw Zakir a couple of times, most recently at an SFJAZZ show in April 2016
      • Frans de Waal ethologist, author of Chimpanzee Politics, Peacemaking Among Primates, many others. "The roots of politics are older than man". Survival of the Kindest. I heard him talk at Stanford in 2011.
      • Vernor Vinge Responsible for every use of the term singularity.
      • Richard Serra of Tilted Arc, which generated a controversy for being a deliberate ugly provocation to the normie office workers who had to look at it.
      • Shelly Duval
      • Bob Newhart, Gena Rowlands, Kris Kristofferson, Teri Garr, Martin Mull
      • James Earl Jones
      • Joyce Brabner (wife and coauthor to Harvey Pekar, so appeared as character in American Splendor)
      • Bruce Ames (invented the Ames test for mutagenicity, remember him appearing in WEC on occasion)

    • Travel

      • Went to Connecticut for father in laws 95th birthday, that's about it.

    • This thing

      • image.png