2024 shoutouts

Lists of cultural works can feel overwhelming. There’s so much great culture, and trying to keep up with everything that’s interesting can be like drinking from a fire hose.

To help people keep track of the things that are most appealing to them, several sites offer a feature for saving things for later. Netflix has “My List,” Goodreads has the “Want to Read” shelf, and Prime Video and Letterboxd have the “Watchlist.” Regardless of the name, this type of feature helps users remember the things they wanted to do. It can also help streaming services display content that is desirable to customers, thus demonstrating the value of the service.

While I find this functionality useful, it has a problem: it starts to feel like a to-do list. Watching movies or reading books can become a task you’re doing so you can remove an item from the list and feel a little more cultured.

I’ve been thinking about these lists this year, and I’ve tried to shift my mindset away from a sense of obligation. I’ve found it helpful to rename or create a list, where possible, called “intriguing,” and to just use that as I would normally use the default list. This helps remind me that these are just possibilities that I might want to consider later, not things that I necessarily can, should, or will actually do. Customized list naming isn’t available on all services, but using this name at least part of the time has reminded me to consider my mindset as I navigate these lists, and to remember that I need not use these services at all.

Using lists with different names has helped me to feel more open to different possibilities. I hope that it will be helpful to some readers of this blog. As you view my own list of things below, I hope that you will not feel overwhelmed, but excited for the possibilities of a new year.

P.S. Imagine if we could transfer or sync this type of data across services. For example, I could just connect my Letterboxd and Netflix accounts and “My List” could get populated automatically!

P.P.S. I read Four Thousand Weeks this year, and I think its suggestion to embrace the limitations that come with mortality influenced my thinking in this post.

Without further ado, here is the list!

Music

• underscores, especially her fishmonger era
• brat by Charli XCX

Books and comics

• Matchmaker by Cam Marshall
• Blackouts by Justin Torres
• Family Style by Thien Pham
• The work of Anna-Laura Sullivan (@annalaura_art on Instagram)

Movies

• Call Me By Your Name (2017)
• All of Us Strangers (2023)
• Dìdi (弟弟) (2024)

Food

• Rainbow Plant Life (Nisha Vora’s food blog)
• Origins Grocer (a sustainability-focused grocer in San Diego, California)