Notes from 2024

Villeneuve's adaptation earns its scale. The film is patient in a way blockbusters rarely allow themselves to be — it trusts that the strangeness of Arrakis will register if given space to breathe. Hans Zimmer's score is doing a lot of work here and deserves more credit than it gets.

The second film is better, but this one does the necessary and unfashionable work of world-building without apology.

Martyr! is familiar and totally alien, an articulated empathy of what it feels like to be of this place and that, and of rediscovering what it means to be of the homeland. Kaveh Akbar brings characters that are real and instantly recognizable, and puts them in uncanny landscapes that seem alien while they shouldn't be.

A short piece that reframes design systems as a social and organizational artifact first, a technical one second. The components are easy; the conventions, shared language, and trust between teams are hard. Kholmatova is good at naming things that practitioners know but rarely say out loud.

The point about governance being the most important and most neglected part of a design system has aged well. Most failed design systems I've seen failed because of people problems, not technology.

Chana Porter's novella is a beautiful reflection on memory, form, permanence, and loss. "Tips for Attending a Dinner Party When Your World Has Ended and Another World Is Just Beginning" also might be one of the most heart warming openings to a book I've read in a while.

When I think about this book, I think about my dogs and all the people I've lost in life, and how their memory isn't just their passing but all the moments that led up to it.

Body horror meets the male gaze.

Monkey Man expertly blended mythology, fascism, gender, and class struggle and deserved a lot more flowers. Zakir Hussain's cameo in the second act is perfect, a nod to classic Bollywood. Dev Patel in this (as in the Green Knight a few years ago) shines as an actor.

The streaming era has been terrible for television in many ways. However, a show like The Curse wouldn't exist in any other era. A consistent background hum of discomfort highlights this part-parody, part-reflection of HGTV-esque reality, with scattershot yet brilliant critiques of gentrification, white savior complex, the camera gaze, and so much more.