quantifica 2024 rundown

hey team! happy new year. this is the final installment of this weird project I did for 2024. I'll give you the updates, some new data, some reflections, and some recommendations.

END-OF-YEAR FINANCIALS

we hit our target. a video that was planned for December is waylaid until next week by a winter cold (I think you're gonna like it!) so my hopes of overshooting in December were dashed. but we exceeded our financial target by 1.2%.

:D

a lot of that came from supplemental sources the channel didn't have a few years ago - Nebula, AdSense, miscellaneous gigs and fiats - but 57.4% of my income was you folks here on Patreon. it's sobering to see how much additional hustle I've had to do to make ends meet, but the main feeling is gratitude. thank you all, once again, for making this job possible. I, mathematically, couldn't do it without you.

FINAL BINGO CARD

we got a line! vertical along the I.

FINAL MINI MIX

more tunes!

Paris 1919
- found a human-curated chamber pop playlist after last month's algorithmic fiasco

Bargain Hunt
- exploring an act I found earlier this year while on an IDM kick

Monster
- Discover Weekly

DYWTYLM
- clicked on a random album because the cover art looked cool and I thought I'd heard the band's name before

DEATH ROLL
- rec from a metamour

The Apollo Programme Was A Hoax
- found a cover album of Refused's The Shape of Punk to Come and was mostly underwhelmed, but this screamo version of the album closer blew me away

FILM RANDOMIZER LIST

had to watch 2x as many movies from the list as previous months, but we reached a successful completion!

READING LOG

paused several books to bang out a bunch of novellas in December, bringing the total page count for the year to 5,395. for some of you, that is unimpressive; Jon the LitCrit Guy has already finished his first 600-page novel this year. for me, it's more than either of the last two years, so I'm pretty stoked about it.

FINAL BINGO CARD DETAILS

the winning tasks were: non-holiday visit with my bestie, get a tattoo, don't have a sciatica relapse, full-stack lat pulldown, and ride a bike trail. (these were not too personal, so I don't mind sharing.)

FILM RANDOMIZER LIST DETAILS

the full list of films from the randomizer list is depicted above, in order of star rating (you can also look at the list here).

the randomizer list made up 43% of all my movies watched in 2024 (not counting rewatches).

if I cull this year's viewing habits down to the films I'd consider great, we get a list of 26 films:

All Of Us Strangers
The Five Devils
Dream Scenario
EO
Love Lies Bleeding
Anatomy Of A Fall
Nimona
The First Omen
Monkey Man
Furiosa
Challengers
The Blind Man Who Did Not Want To See Titanic
Little Women
Mouthpiece
The Zone Of Interest
Rebel Ridge
The Deep End
Hundreds of Beavers
Joint Security Area
The Fall
Nine Days
Robot Dreams
Violation
To Me, The One Who Loved You/To Every You I've Loved Before
Nosferatu
The Tragedy of Macbeth

here, the randomizer list is slightly over-represented, making up 46.2% of the total.

if we cull this down further to my Top Ten Films Watched In 2024:

Love Lies Bleeding
Anatomy Of A Fall
Monkey Man
Challengers
The Blind Man Who Did Not Want To See Titanic
Little Women
The Zone Of Interest
Rebel Ridge
The Fall
Violation

here the randomizer list is under-represented, making up only 30%.

Past Ian who created the list found a lot of great movies, if not a ton of masterpieces. I think that's a good function for a list like this to serve.

RECS

here are my recommendations from this weird project I did. I'm copying the text of the reviews above for anyone who wants to read them not in PNG format.

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SOLUTIONS, AND OTHER PROBLEMS, by Allie Brosh, was the best book I read this year. a graphic novel memoir from the creator of Hyperbole and a Half (of "I'm sad, Alot" and "DO ALL THE THINGS" meme fame), this is, somewhat unexpectedly (and also not so unexpectedly) a book about utter psychic catastrophe. Brosh's method is and remains anecdotes about her life rendered with fuckin' hilarious illustrations and a deeply idiosyncratic writing style, but, in the recent years of her life, most of her stories are absolutely devastating. this is a very funny book about living through and only-just-barely recovering from horrendous grief, near-suicidal depression, and a string of self-destructive failures. the book was meaningful to me when I read it, and became more and more so as my career, country, and life started to fall apart in the year's back half. I adore her ability to respond to powerlessness with absurdism, summarized in the line "if you can't win, start playing a different game and score just as many points," which works as personal, political, and artistic manifesto. and the final chapter about having no one left but yourself and having to be your own friend was one of the most powerful things I've ever read, and it still looks like it's illustrated in fucking MSPaint.

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THE LAST DAYS OF NEW PARIS, by China Mieville, was also a book I read this year. my reading habit tanks every Autumn (thanks seasonally affective depression!), but I made the incredible discovery that, when I can't make any headway on the three or four books I've started since August, sometimes... sometimes I can handle a novella! this isn't exactly Mieville's best work (that's Embassytown) or his best fantasy (that's Perdido Street Station, though Iron Council is showing promise). but, laid out on the couch post-Christmas, alone but for the cats, not quite ready to digest this putrescent assemblage that called itself Two Thousand Twenty-Four, I read a little slice of alt-history where French Surrealists fought the Nazis by bringing their art to life, and that was the right book at the right time. "leftist art collective as best defense against fascism" may be wish fulfillment, or maybe it's a literalization of the processes by which radical politics and experimental art intermingle. that, perhaps, they tap adjacent sources. there's also a climax that reminds you, for everything that has been said against Hitler, "let's not forget he was a SHITTY PAINTER" is the one that would hurt his feelings most.

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THE BLIND MAN WHO DID NOT WANT TO SEE TITANIC was my second favorite movie from the Film Randomizer List. (the best was THE ZONE OF INTEREST, but I made a whole experimental video about why.) this is simply filmmaking of a kind I have never seen before. it attempts to depict the subjective experience of blindness with a shallow-focused camera pointed directly at the actor's face for 90% of the movie. not showing what the blind protagonist "sees," but attempting to show where his attention is. he knows his own body, so we can see his expression, see in close-up what his hands touch, have some general awareness of movement in his proximity. even glimpses of how the wheels of his chair, the end of his cane, become extensions of his perception. it makes what is, in basic structure, a stock and low-stakes plot into a goddang THRILLER just by changing how we see it, and making us think about how we see. cannot vouch that it isn't #problematic - it does lean on the idea that the world outside a disabled person's front door is too dangerous for them, and I will probably chat with my blind brother-in-law about it one day. but, as a novel aesthetic experience, there's nothing like it.

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LOVE LIES BLEEDING was the best movie of 2024. no, I did not see every movie this year, not even a statistically significant fraction. yes, my opinion is subjective. I stand by it regardless, because I love pulp and haven't seen pulp this good since KISS KISS BANG BANG. and you KNOW I love KISS KISS BANG BANG. might even snatch the belt from KKBB for hard left turns that drag the plot in batshit new directions. how do you even pitch this thing? it's kind of about fitness culture and subsets of feminine beauty standards with a body-horror bent, and kind of about small-town crime as a parallel to traumas we carry with us, the skeletons in your closet as bodies in the ravine. but it's just as much about how awesome it would be to meet a hot lady who could benchpress you with one hand. friends, no camera loves a woman as much as Rose Glass' camera loves Katy O'Brian. the male gaze has nothing on sapphic lust. between this, The Substance, and Strange Darling, 2024 set a high bar for coocoo-bananas movies about women, but those two were not my favorite movie. this? this was the best movie of 2024.

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THE FALL was the best movie I saw this year. it is, in fact, one of the greatest movies ever made. it's been inaccessible for ages, with no DVD release, carried on no streaming services, until finally this year MUBI untangled its distribution rights and brought it back to theaters in anticipation of a new 4k restoration. on the rec of a friend with EXQUISITE taste who said it's their favorite movie, I hoofed it to the new Alamo Drafthouse in Seaport and caught it on the big screen. and, look, you can read about Tarsem's incredible imagery, and the unprecedented way he improvised the story, and the wild-ass production process of sneaking time while on-site for commercial gigs. I don't want to write all the things that have already been written. you can google that. (and you should - it's fascinating!) I want to tell you that the moment when a little girl looks to the main character with tears in her eyes and says simply, "I don't want you to die," and that brings a broken man back from the edge... it might be the most life-affirming moment I've had in a movie theater. so simple, but so honest. it's everything. one of those moments you think, "this is what movies are FOR."

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LAWNMOWER, by Bent Knee, is my song of the year. this is a little embarrassing: I discovered two bands in 2022 - Bent Knee and Zeal & Ardor - who dominated my Spotify Wrapped two years in a row. I started the musical portion of quantifica to broaden my horizons, because my top song could NOT be Catch Light by Bent Knee again. but, look, it's not my fault Bent Knee released a new record this year, okay??? and Twenty Pills Without Water is an odd and rickety album. the name of the band, "Bent Knee," is a portmanteau of the band's founding members, Ben and Courtney. and, after their previous album - a jarring pivot into 100 gecs-ish hyperpop - Ben left the band, along with their bassist, Jessica. in some ways, Twenty Pills is a return to form, the band sounding more like the cabaret/prog/artpop act of old. but there is clearly something cleaved out of them. singers play bass and violinists play guitar and the drummer sings a song about being a cowboy. it's... off. and the album is at its best when it embraces this reality - Lawnmower is a song about loss, about having to accept yourself as a pale imitation of who you used to be. it is beautiful and sad, and it got me through one of the hardest summers of my life. the highlight of my year was seeing Bent Knee live and getting to tell Courtney at the merch table how much this song has meant to me.

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GREIF, by Zeal & Ardor, is my album of the year. YES THEY RELEASED A NEW RECORD AS WELL. and, like Twenty Pills Without Water, GREIF is both continuation of and disjunction from the band's previous output. Zeal & Ardor mashes up the sounds of black metal and antebellum slave spirituals to pose the confrontational question, "what if enslaved Africans had turned to Satan instead of Jesus?" and that seemingly edgelord question keeps proving more and more compelling with each song they release. how much of what we imagine of "Satanism" is just folk practice of the diaspora? how many "witches" hanged for dancing with the devil were just Africans practicing their own damn religion? these are the kinds of things fans of Satanic metal will say when pressed, but few are actually interested in relationship between race and Christianity. (also Satanic metal has a longstanding Nazi problem.) but GREIF sits oddly in the band's own canon - where each album has felt like a chapter in a story, being, inasmuch as they can be decyphered, about revolt, then escape, then life on the run, GREIF feels more like a collection of short stories in the same universe. the band's exploration of sound has shifted from "how many kinds of heavy can we do?" to include more moodiness, a quiet that is not just the space before the next blast of noise. an album more expansive by being less focused.

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Ruby My Dear and Acrnym were my favorite musical finds. whatever you wanna call this genre - IDM, braindance, drill and bass - I've missed it. getting exposed to Aphex Twin and Squarepusher in high school - and, a few years later, Venetian Snares - was one of those moments where my notion of what music could be expanded haphazardly. that juxtaposition of melody - sometimes pretty, sometimes mellow - against ABSOLUTELY CHAOTIC sped-up breakbeats, with vibes and volumes shifting wildly every few seconds, was a defining sound of my teens. and it just felt good to dig up more of it. I can't say either act is doing anything the aforementioned titans of genre haven't done - both feel like a fusion of all three, with Acrnym especially using the core sample of Squarepusher's Come On My Selector A LOT - but it is a sound they have mastered. Ruby My Dear comes at it with an almost pop sensibility, like a glimpse of what Top 40 sounds like in Space Hell. and both acts are happy to throw in more distorted guitar samples than any of their predecessors, which comes close to my longstanding fantasy project, "what if Squarepusher started a band with The Fucking Champs?" if you like the soundtrack to Ultrakill... this stuff might be for you.

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THE SIGNIFIER is the only Tasting Menu game I went back and completed. I never did a write up on The Signifier, or the other games on that menu. sorry about that. the Tasting Menus were an unambiguous failure. failure was expected; it was built into the project. but I can tell you about The Signifer now: it, too, is an interesting failure, and is also ABOUT systems that fail interestingly. a near-future story where a scientist works on a VR device that can recreate memories from human brains, which results in breathtakingly bizarre navigable spaces. the subjectivity of human memory, the impossibility of machines understanding it, and the still-in-alpha nature of the tech, combine to make something glitchy, hallucinatory, yet somehow the best rendition of how memory FEELS I've seen in any medium. there's a part where a walk down a hallway, a ride in an elevator, a cab ride, and stepping into a club are depicted as one, single, morphy corridor because that's how the person remembers it... it's genuinely astonishing. around this brilliant hook is a mediocre mystery plot, a lot of interesting themes the devs aren't sure what to do with, some weak puzzles, nonsense plotting, voice acting that peaks at "decent," and a lot of obviously cut corners. it's not a good game. but it's a game that does a single thing better than I've ever seen it done.

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plans for 2025 are incoming. take care, folks. <3

-I