On Being Eleven

It's that time of year. As in, the end of it. What a strange one it's been.

We've never been New Year's Eve people. My family didn't celebrate it much; we had a family loss associated with it, and so it wasn't a day to rejoice in, necessarily. More a day of quiet pause and reflection. My parents would make an effort for my sake: we'd get party food, or we'd try to stay up until midnight to watch the fireworks on the TV. But that's about all they could muster, and having since experienced loss, I'm amazed they managed to do anything at all.

Except for one year, in which we stepped from one millennium into another. That one, we couldn't ignore.

It was, obviously, the last day of 1999. I was tremulously excited about being on the cusp of everything. Being eleven, but having one foot still firmly stuck in childhood, I'd received a strange mixture of presents: nail varnish and clear mascara and a cinnamon-flavoured lip balm that singed the skin of my lips, alongside a collection of toy Pikachus and cuddly toys. I remember lying underneath the Christmas tree with all my presents, arranging my one Raichu on top of my new nail polish dryer. The king of the castle. I was about to tip over into my teen years, and we, as a collective whole, were about to tip over from one era into another.

I have a small handful of dresses that stand out in my memory, more than any other items of clothing, as making me feel almost unstoppably powerful. One of them was from that night. It was navy blue, and short, but with a sheer navy overlay with a long split up the middle. If you're thinking this:

Then you're almost on the right track in terms of the shape of the outer layer. Only I didn't have a cool weapon on my wrist. But I may as well have done, for the level of power I felt. For one night, I was an absolute queen.

I wore it to a party someone was hosting on our council estate. I have flashes of memories of the actual night: playing with some kids who were way younger than me, listening to my parents laughing in the kitchen downstairs, cringing at some of the adults dancing and behaving like large, unruly children in the way that adults do when they've had a bit too much to drink. I felt, at the time, a sense of great excitement. Of possibility. I felt extremely lucky to be able to witness such a monumental leap from one age to another. The internet was still fresh and new, technology felt exciting rather than horrifying, and there was a kind of anticipation in the air. When the time ticked over to midnight, there was a collective intake of breath.

What could happen? Where was the world going to go? What was ahead of us?

I couldn't have known it at the time - being small and tired, surrounded by yelling adults and the noise of dozens of party poppers exploding at once - that in one year, we would move to the opposite side of the country. In four years, I would meet someone who would nearly cost me my life. And in six years, I would meet the actual love of my life, the man I would go on to marry and have children with. Six years seems like nothing to me now, you know? Six years feels like the blink of an eye.

I want to talk about the stuff that got me through this year. As I alluded to in my previous post, it's been a tough one at times. There were moments in which all that was getting me through was the thought of being able to dip into another world for a little while. And I love everybody's GOTY lists, but often, I find the things that have moved me the most are a little bit older. So this is, as always, a personal list: stuff I've enjoyed this year, old and new.

Games 🎮

Still Wakes the Deep was one of my most anticipated games this year, as a die-hard fan of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. And while I do understand the criticism of it being very 'on rails', it's an incredible and genuinely scary experience to wander around the doomed oil rig. The performances are excellent too. And I am quite partial to the Scottish accent.

Control was my main 'I must finish this game' game in 2024. Did I finish it? No. Did I get good at it? Also no. But I love the Alan Wake/Control universe they're building over at Remedy. I will finish it in 2025. Definitely.

Also sneaking its way onto my list this year is Alan Wake 2. Is this cheating? No, because I'm in charge here, boyo. We finished AW2 at the beginning of this year and my god, I loved it. You can read more about it here.

In fact, I've written about a lot of my favourite games this year, including Lil Gator Game, The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, Neva, Tell Me Why, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. (I also wrote about the story of the latter on Thinky Games, but it's a spoiler-heavy article.) All great games.

This year was a bumpy, up-and-down kind of ride, and when the news got tough to watch, I played a lot of Powerwash Simulator to calm down again. (I also fell asleep playing it but that's not a criticism, if anything it's a bonus.)

I was also baptised into the world of Ace Attorney this year. I fell out of it when I had review games to play, but I'm converted: expect me to be banging on about how ridiculous these games are in 2024.

Last few! Little Kitty, Big City properly delighted me this year. And now, because I own cats, I think I love it even more in retrospect. I've weirdly played a lot of cat-related games this year, but LKBC is my favourite. It might look cartoony, but they really nailed the fine art of being a cat.

I sank quite a few hours into Graveyard Keeper this year. It was really meant as a stop-gap while I waited for the Stardew Valley update to drop on the Switch, but actually, I really enjoyed this strange and weird little world, to the point where I might finish this before diving into Stardew again. It's like a cosy game, but it just happens to revolve around death. Gruesome, but comforting.

And finally, I need to mention Botany Manor: I actually think this was one of my favourites this year. It has a genuinely interesting story that it kind of delivers to you by stealth, while you're busy working out how to grow weird exotic plants. And maybe I have an extra soft spot for it because I am deeply in love with the location it's set in, but hey. I'm allowed to be biased here. I think it's a fantastic game.

Books 📖

I won't lie, it's been a bad reading year for me. I was studying literature which was interesting, but not exactly relaxing, so my 'fun reading' time has been minimal. But I really enjoyed:

• Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith - this is a fantastically weird and surprisingly visceral story linking two missing women. An interesting dive into Vietnamese folklore too.
• Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield - one of my absolute favourites this year (to the extent that I already wrote about it). A hauntingly eerie story that is, ultimately, about love.
• The Twat Files by Dawn French - I got this from the library and it was just so good. I have a soft spot for Dawn French but this really is great. Funny, uplifting, and joyous (and will make you feel less alone in being a bit of a twat sometimes).
• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman - I think this book will stay with me forever. A group of women are kept in a cage, guarded by men. It's a genuinely strange and haunting book.
• A Curious History of Sex by Kate Lister - a fantastic, funny, and genuinely interesting insight into our (sometimes very weird) perceptions of sex throughout history.
• Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith - a short and beautiful retelling of Ovid's Metamorphosis. And a surprisingly forward-thinking exploration of our rigid ideas about gender and love.
• Chapters by Tim Key - a tiny little book of poetry that made me cry-laugh on the train.

• Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty - I listened to this on Audible. A woman walks the length of a plane and points to each passenger, announcing a) their cause of death and b) how old they'll be when they die. The book examines the fallout, and how each character deals with it. It was compulsively listenable.
• Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés - this book, I feel, has the power to change my life. I haven't finished it yet because I'm reading a chapter at a time and really thinking about it for a while before I move on.
• Lobster by Hollie McNish - I love McNish's poetry and this is yet another excellent collection. Funny, sharp, and honest.

Music 🎵

I've also been a bit slower on the 'new music' front this year, but here are some highlights:

Petals for Armour/Vases for Flowers by Hayley Williams have had a fairly big influence on me this year (as you can tell because I've written about her music not once, but twice). I won't go on about it again. But I think she's a really strong lyricist (as well as an incredible singer) and it's been good for me to see a woman go through such a huge personal transformation.

Our family continues to worship Aurora, so What Happened to the Heart was probably our most anticipated album of the year. I'd recommend watching this interview about her creative process; this album touches a lot on what it means to be human, to be flawed flesh and blood in the age of AI.

Chromeo's Adult Contemporary has been on repeat, especially in the run-up to seeing them live (our only gig this year). It's a brilliant album. And also, this was one of the best nights of my whole year.

Carly Rae Jepsen's The Loveliest Time (a companion piece to The Loneliest Time) dropped last year, but I've been really appreciating it this summer. So Right is a banger.

And shoutout to some songs from my playlist this year, even if they didn't come out in 2024: Begging for Rain by Maggie Rogers, Hopeless Romantic by Julie Pratt, IDGAF About Pain by Honne, Violently With Love by Amy Studt, Lowdown (part i) by Michael Kiwanuka, We Don't Give A by Nao, Scantily Clad by Haute & Freddy, Human Sacrifice by Childish Gambino, and Bookstore by Chris and Tad (bit of a family in-joke).

It's been a weird year for me, with some incredible highs (finally moving house) and some personal lows. It's also been yet another year of political upheaval, and a devastatingly bad year, yet again, for creative industries.

The reason why I write this newsletter is because, despite the incredible challenges, there's still so much good shit being made.

But I'll never sit here and blindly celebrate it without acknowledging the terrible reality that is late-stage capitalism. Creative work is, more than ever, massively underappreciated (or outright scorned in some circles), workers in all fields are being used and discarded, and CEOs continue to make unbelievable profits while merrily laying off the beating heart of their workforce. It sucks. Everywhere you turn there are people losing their jobs, being drastically underpaid, or even not being paid at all. A lot of the games industry - including games media - runs on passion, and unfortunately, that sometimes leads people to take advantage.

And sometimes I allow that feeling to wash over me. There are times this year when I've felt so cynical about everything that it's had a real detrimental impact on my mental health, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Only for something to come along and snap me out of it. Books, games, music. Something will hit me in a way I wasn't expecting; whether it's a song that builds into an intense crescendo, or a game that wows me from start to finish, or a tiny little poetry book that makes me laugh like an idiot on a train. And I appreciate these things more knowing how many small, draining battles have been fought just to get that thing in front of me: how many layers of disappointment and rejection that person or team have faced, how many unexpected setbacks they've had to contend with, and how resilient and dogged they must have been just to get their work out there into the world. It's good shit, not just because of the way it's made me feel, but because of the sheer effort it's taken to exist in the first place.

So anyway. I'm determined to get a bit of my eleven-year-old spirit back. Not because I think the grown-ups will take care of everything. (Obviously.) But I still, stubbornly, believe in the unknowable possibilities of the future. And if this year has taught me anything, it's that humans will persistently make beautiful things. So I'm choosing to look forward to seeing what comes next.

Happy New Year to you all. Thanks for sticking around. And I'll see you in 2025. <3