So it’s come to this: Another lap around the sun, another year over. Before the calendars flip over to 2024—a year so hilarious that I can’t believe it’s not a typo—I thought I’d share some of the stuff I...
So it’s come to this: Another lap around the sun, another year over. Before the calendars flip over to 2024—a year so hilarious that I can’t believe it’s not a typo—I thought I’d share some of the stuff I really enjoyed in the year gone by.
Favorite apps
I got to travel quite a bit more this year, and Flighty was my companion on those trips. Flighty provides up-to-the-minute information about upcoming and in-progress flights. It lets you add in the flights of friends and family, so you can get updates on their status, too. I used it to track everyone who was flying in for a family Thanksgiving from all over the West Coast, to plan my attack for airport pick-ups, and to know how much time I would need to move between gates for a plane change. It even kept me up to date while I was in the air via invisible push notifications over iMessage-only airplane Wi-Fi. This year brought a Flighty Apple Watch app and complication, which I’ve used a lot, too. At $48 a year, it’s not priced for casual travelers—but I hear from a lot of people who just pay $4 for a week of Flighty whenever they’re about to take a trip. For the last few years, it’s been my constant travel companion.
Cheers to Mimestream, the native Mac client for Gmail, which exited beta this year. I’ve never been a fan of Apple Mail, and as a Gmail user, I’d been using Google’s web view (filtered through the excellent MailPlane app) for ages. When MailPlane was discontinued, I despaired, but Mimestream arrived just in time. It’s a real, proper Mac app that does email right. I didn’t want to go back to Apple Mail, and I’m glad I don’t have to.
A thumbs up to Final Cut Pro for iPad, which arrived (along with Logic Pro for iPad) this year. I can’t say I’ve edited a lot of videos in FCP for iPad, but after years of complaining about Apple not supporting the iPad with its pro-level tools, it finally happened… and I was able to transfer my Final Cut Pro skills relatively quickly from Mac to iPad. Yes, there are a lot of rough edges, but it feels like Final Cut Pro is a legitimate app that’s got room to become something great on iPad.
Early this year, Twitter silently murdered third-party Twitter clients. Since my primary method of using social media was via Twitterrific, I basically saw my social media usage cut to a fraction at that moment. However—is this a good thing?—I’ve had a little bit of a rebound due to Ivory from Tapbots. It’s an iOS, iPadOS, and macOS client for Mastodon, and it’s now my primary window to social media. I see a lot of people talking about how social media sites don’t need anything except web pages and maybe an iPhone app. I guess we speak a different language: without dedicated Mac and iPad apps, my usage of any social media drops to almost nothing. Ivory is where I spend most of my social media time now, and it’s very good.
Hooray for Bartender, a venerable Mac menu bar organizational utility that reached a new milestone this year. Bartender 5 added design flourishes and automation features, but for me, it’s a must-have utility primarily because it lets me dramatically reduce the amount of clutter in my menu bar.
I come to praise OpenAI’s Whisper, which I used a lot this year to transcribe podcasts. I’ve primarily used Georgi Gerganov‘s C++ implementation, but Apple recently came out with its own accelerated example, and several Mac apps—most notably MacWhisper and Aiko—seek to provide a pretty Mac interface atop the basic power of Whisper. Whisper has its limitations, to be sure—most notably a lack of speaker detection—but it’s a staggeringly accurate technology. It’s entirely possible it will be utterly supplanted by some other AI model between now and next year, but 2023 was the year of Whisper for me.
After prodding from Myke Hurley, I got into the Marvel Snap strategy card game this year. I spent… uh, way too much time playing Marvel Snap. Like, 95 percent of all my recreational game time this year was probably flinging Carnage onto Wolverine and Nova and Deadpool and watching things explode. Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m about to reach the end of the road with Snap. But it’s been a fun ride, and they can’t take that away from me.
The excellent iOS album-focused music app Longplay came out with a big update this year. I have been trying to listen to more albums (rather than playlist shuffles) this year, and I admire Longplay’s focus on creating an attractive space to search through albums and then play them in their entirety. My only real complaint is that I do most of my music playing on my Mac, and I’d love a Mac version. Maybe next year?
Favorite movies and TV
My favorite movie of the year was “Oppenheimer.” (I’m not a Christopher Nolan die-hard, and in fact have disliked a lot of his films, but this was the perfect story for his style and talent.) Other favorites: “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” (which had a very tough act to follow and did not disappoint!), Kenneth Branagh’s gorgeous memoir “Belfast” and “Air“, an amazingly entertaining movie about (believe it or not) basketball shoe sponsorships.
This was a great year for television, so let’s go to the hail of bullets:
“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” (Paramount+) managed to one-up its amazing first season with a new clutch of standalone episodes that explore different tones and genres while being undeniably “Star Trek.”“The Bear” (Hulu/Disney+) also one-upped its first season, including three very different episodes that could all be strongly argued were the best single episode of TV all year. I know it’s got a weird name (It’s not about a bear; it’s about a bunch of broken people who are trying to work at a restaurant!), and on its face, it might not seem like your cup of tea, but if you like great television, you need to give it a chance. (For the record, my favorite episode of the season was “Honeydew,” which featured baker Marcus going to Copenhagen.)
“Slow Horses” (Apple TV+) provided another stellar season with Gary Oldman as a spymaster who’s more than he appears while also being exactly who he appears, and his ragtag group of failed MI-5 agents who don’t have the common sense to accept that their careers are over. British spy drama at its finest.
“Foundation” (Apple TV+) is the closest thing I’ve ever seen on TV to a wide-screen space opera novel. (Not Asimov’s books, on which the show is very loosely based—the really wild modern space opera stuff I read these days.) Season one started out a bit slow, but season two is just bananas sci-fi from start to finish. Yes, you will need to pay attention—the canvas is large, and the show doesn’t really hold your hand—but this is one of the most daring and visually interesting sci-fi series ever. Apple’s money is being well spent.
“For All Mankind” (Apple TV+) returned this year with another strong season of alternate-universe space exploration, as NASA and the Soviet Union jointly operate a Mars base and consider mining a valuable asteroid. There are colossal accidents and a whole lot of dramatic situations, as you might expect. I love every minute of it, and you can hear me (and Dan) talk about it weekly on our NASA Vending Machine podcast.
“The Last of Us” (HBO/Max) managed to take the classic video game with the familiar zombie apocalypse premise and make it absolutely worthy of a prestige HBO adaptation. I’m not sure what season two will bring, but season one was about as good as it gets, most notably episode 3, “Long, Long Time,” a digression from the main storyline featuring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett.
“Reservation Dogs” (Hulu/Disney+) wrapped up its final season this year. It’s a bittersweet comedy-drama about a bunch of kids coming of age on a reservation in Oklahoma, and as with “The Bear,” I’d recommend you try it without any preconceptions because it is almost certainly not the show you think it is. It is hilarious and will make you cry. It’s sweet and ridiculous. It’s one of the best shows of this century.
“Mrs. Davis” (Peacock) — Look, I don’t know what to tell you about “Mrs. Davis.” It’s an eight-episode miniseries by Damon Lindelof (“Lost,” “Watchmen,” “The Leftovers”) and Tara Hernandez (“The Big Bang Theory”)—and if those credits seem a little wacky, you haven’t seen anything yet. “Mrs. Davis” is about a nun who is hired by a rogue Artificial Intelligence to find the holy grail. And it just gets weirder from there. I loved it. Try an episode, and you’ll know immediately if you’re in or out.
Favorite books
Every year, I read all the award nominees for the best science fiction and fantasy novels of the year for The Incomparable Book Club. The best of the bunch this year was The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. It’s a book about the nature of sentience, the threats of artificial intelligence, ecological disasters, and first contact with intelligent octopuses. Especially that last one.
The best book that I read this year that was published in 2023 was probably My Murder by Katie Williams, which is a credible sci-fi mystery in which a woman is resurrected by modern technology and begins to doubt if the neat solution to who killed her is really accurate. Along the way, there are questions about identity, a discussion of how technology is applied to favor some people over others, a fascinating depiction of the future of virtual reality, and one of the weirder support groups you’ll ever see.
My nonfiction pick is Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski. He’s maybe our greatest sportswriter, and if you love baseball, you should read this book.
I also read two older books that I loved: The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1974 novel about two very different worlds and one person who travels between them. I always loved LeGuin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness” but had never read the other famous novel in the loosely connected Hainish series. I finally changed that this year, and I’m glad I did. Uh, yeah, that book that everyone says is a masterpiece? It pretty much is. I just got there a little late.
The other book isn’t quite so old: 2012’s The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. Fans of Sir Terry seem to dislike this book (and its sequels) because, well, they don’t feel much like Terry Pratchett novels. I get it. I really do. But I loved these books, and yes, I read all five books in the series in a matter of weeks. They are a real vibe. The premise is that people learn to travel across parallel Earths, all of which are lined up in an infinite sequence along a chain. Near ones are very much like our Earth; far ones are very different. Some have life, but very few have intelligent life. It is fair to describe The Long Earth as a book in which two guys float in a blimp, traveling slowly across parallel earths. I loved the sense of exploration and, very slowly, the picking up of intelligence that things may be much more complicated than anyone imagined.