What I Watched in 2023

I watched more TV than I originally thought in 2023, though the list looks long because a good amount of it was shorter series than I usually get into. There were a few movies as well, but I have not seen Barbie (or Oppenheimer) yet. Here are the highlights, a lowlight, and some quick-ish reviews.

Movies:
Thor: Love and Thunder – I know people hated this movie, but I liked it. It was ridiculous, which I’m fine with after the conclusion of the Infinity Saga with Avengers: Endgame.

Knives Out and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery – Enjoyed both installments. The plots held up well enough, and the casting was solid.

Galaxy Quest – A movie making fun of Star Trek that could only have been made by people who love Star Trek. By Grabthar’s hammer, never give up; never surrender.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves – A good adaption of a tabletop RPG to a movie, with enough nods to D&D mechanics without getting bogged down in dice rolls and rules lawyering. The “speak with dead” scene was particularly funny.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. – Though I never read the book, I thought the movie was good.

Jungle Cruise and Sonic the Hedgehog/Sonic the Hedgehog 2 – Perfectly fine adaptations of a Disney ride and a videogame. I like watching them even if they’re a bit forgettable.

Blue People Avatar 2 Avatar: The Way of Water – The cinematography was great; I hate Jake Sully so much I wanted the comically evil antienvironment military zealots to turn Pandora into a strip mine and/or desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland.

TV shows:
Jane the Virgin (S3-5) – Especially liked the telenovela aspects and Petra’s character arc, but Rafael’s role too often felt like “hot rich guy” with no other personality traits, and I wanted more for Michael.

Star Trek: Lower Decks (S2) – It’s growing on me; I’m mainly just annoyed that of all the ships in Starfleet, Mariner ended up on that specific ship with that specific captain, when their personal relationship clearly affects the professional lives of the rest of the crew.

Wednesday – Wednesday’s teenage angst would have been an interesting jumping off point for the show, but part of what makes the movies so good is that everybody around the Addams family is completely, 100% normal, and they’re weird, but not edgy. It was too much of a character departure for me to fully enjoy the show.

Somebody Feed Phil (S4-6) – More food, more travel.

New Amsterdam (S5) – A not-entirely satisfying conclusion to the show. The main character was marginally less annoying than in previous seasons; the supporting characters were generally more interesting.

Game of Thrones (S1) – The books are better. Same amount of incest and decapitations, less backstory and details that fill out the world of Westeros.

The Chair – The parts about women in academia were good, but it felt like they tried to do too much with the rest of the show.

Derry Girls – Catholic school shenanigans in 1990s Ireland. One of my favorite watches of the year.

Bojack Horseman (S1) – Don’t like the animation style, also a bit depressing to watch for too long, but I might come back to the show because of the character development.

Heartstopper – Good adaptation of the comic.

Friday Night Lights – I do like a good sports movie/show. More optimistic and less racist than the book.

Heartland (S15) – Continuation of the series; more settled than the previous season.

Grey’s Anatomy (S19) – The drama at Grey Sloan just keeps on going.

The Baby-Sitters Club – Never read the books, but I liked this series.

Pokémon Indigo League – Surprisingly clever writing for a kids show, even if the plotlines are nothing to write home about. And Team Rocket make excellent dumb sometimes villains.

Great British Bake Off (S14) – A more grounded season than they’ve had the past couple years.

XO, Kitty – A spin off series from the To All the Boys movies featuring Lara Jean’s younger sister Kitty. The drama was sometimes a bit over the top, but overall a cute show.

Anne with an E – Inspired by the Anne books, an exploration of the darker aspects of Anne’s story. I thought they stayed true to the characters, if not the plot, and I liked the depth they added to some of the characters, particularly Diana and her Aunt Josephine.

The Dragon Prince (S1/2) – Often recommended after watching Avatar (A:TLA), but I’m still not sure how I feel about this show, and using Sokka’s voice actor as one of the main characters is distracting if you watch it right after A:TLA.

The Good Place (S1) – Another show I’m withholding judgement on until I get farther into it. The last episode of season 1 makes it worth it, but I still haven’t really gotten into the show.

Overall, I was disappointed the most by Wednesday and The Dragon Prince, and my favorite watches of the year were Lower Decks, Derry Girls, Bake Off, and Anne with an E.

What I Read in 2023

2023 felt like another kind of strange year for reading. I read 38 books for the first time, reread another half dozen or so, and read some in print for the first time (originally read in webcomic form). I did read a single nonfiction book, plus two memoirs, three additional graphic memoirs, and a semi-autobiographical short story collection. There were 19 graphic novels, 4 romances, 2 short story/novella collections, an epistolatory novel, a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, and only one vampire book.¹ Goodreads tells me that I read over 12,000 pages (first time reads only), the longest book was George R. R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings, and my most shelved book was Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

¹Nonfiction: Mother Tongue (Bill Bryson)
Memoirs: Lab Girl (Hope Jahren), Crying in H Mart (Michelle Zauner)
Graphic memoirs: Sunshine (Jarrett J. Krosoczka), Almost American Girl (Robin Ha),
    ¡Ay, Mija! (Christine Suggs)
Semi-autobiographical short stories: A River Runs Through It (Norman Maclean)
(Science) romances: The Love Hypothesis, Love on the Brain, 

    Loathe to Love You (Ali Hazelwood), The Soulmate Equation (Christina Lauren)
Short stories/novellas: A River Runs Through It (Norman Maclean), 

    Loathe to Love You (Ali Hazelwood)
Epistolatory (email) novel: Dear Committee Members (Julie Schumacher)
Vampire book: The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner (Stephenie Meyer)

Some notable reads:
A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords (George R. R. Martin) (A Song of Ice and Fire [ASOIAF] books 2 and 3) – Westeros is at war – there are too many kings and their armies are wreaking havoc across the continent. The Stark children are mostly missing, scattered from the Wall to King’s Landing. Meanwhile, Daenerys plots from across the Narrow Sea and something’s brewing north of the Wall. Despite their length and number of characters/plots, the ASOIAF books (to this point) are surprisingly readable and not excessively convoluted to follow. I’ve enjoyed this fantasy series so far.

The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern) – The general consensus on this book is that the descriptive passages are magical, the plot somewhat less so. The premise is that there’s a travelling circus that appears, operates at night, and has the most incredible exhibits in its tents, then it disappears, perhaps not to return for years. The mystery of the circus is revealed throughout the book, and I do think the plot gets a little weird at the end, but the writing is worth it.

Daisy Jones & The Six (Taylor Jenkins Reid) – I’m a fan of mockumentaries, so I maybe shouldn’t have been as surprised that I liked this book as much as I did. Presented as an oral history, primarily featuring quotes from interviews of band members and those close to them, Daisy Jones & The Six follows the rise and fall of the band – how they came together, wrote a wildly successful album, and what led to them eventually going their separate ways. The author has talked about the story being inspired by Fleetwood Mac.

Mistborn: The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, and The Hero of Ages (Brandon Sanderson) – Less of a commitment than The Stormlight Archive or The Wheel of Time, Mistborn was a good introduction to Sanderson’s work. The (first) trilogy takes place in a world where plants are brown, ash falls from the sky, and mists come at night and certain people, Allomancers, can use metals to gain different abilities. The first book is overall a heist novel, the second is more political, and the third turns philosophical. The world is built well, with varied characters, though the conclusion is a bit deus ex machina-y.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Tales from the Café (Toshikazu Kawaguchi) – An interesting take on time travel, where patrons of a café are allowed to go back in time, but only at one table in the café that they can’t get up from, and their stay is limited to the amount of time it takes a cup of coffee to get cold. The books are translated from Japanese, so the writing doesn’t always flow perfectly, but that’s not necessarily a negative for a translated novel.

The Sandman: Season of Mists and A Game of You (Neil Gaiman) – The Sandman continues with Morpheus taking a trip to Hell to see his ex, only to find the realm abandoned and having to deal with the consequences of that, then New Yorker Barbie travels to her magical dream realm to save it from the Cuckoo. A step removed from the real world, as befits the Lord of the Dreaming.

Sunshine (Jarrett J. Krosoczka) – It’s about a camp for children with cancer and their families, so of course it was going to be sad, but also poignant. Based on the author’s actual experiences.

Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Promise, The Search, and The Rift (Gene Luen Yang) – After Aang saves the world, Team Avatar still has a lot of work to do. Aang and Zuko must figure out how to rule a Fire Nation colony in the Earth Kingdom, Zuko looks for his mother, and Toph faces her family. The author did a good job continuing the story and portraying the characters.

Star Wars – Heir to the Empire (Timothy Zahn), The Courtship of Princess Leia (Dave Wolverton), the Jedi Academy trilogy (Jedi Search, Dark Apprentice, Champions of the Force) (Kevin J. Anderson) – The Star Wars books I read in this year featured the emergence of Thrawn, Han chasing Leia to a planet of force witches, and Luke’s quest to establish an academy to begin teaching the next generation of Jedi. Everything was readable, if nothing spectacular.

1 Day, 1 Sentence [December 2023]

Made it to another December. The weather remained unseasonably warm, and life doing contract work continued, with busy weeks and less busy weeks.

Friday, December 1 – I needed to start using up PTO, so I stayed at work long enough to stop the reaction from the previous night, clean up the lab for the week, attend a meeting, and take a walk to the bagel place before heading off to buy craft supplies and groceries.

Saturday, December 2 – Worked on a jigsaw puzzle most of the morning before convincing myself to leave the house to stop by the library and then do some raking.

Sunday, December 3 – Figured I should probably start going through the year’s photos if I wanted to get a calendar together for 2024.

Monday, December 4 – Ended up spending most of the day troubleshooting our AKTAs, then had instant noodles for dinner for the first time in a good while.

Tuesday, December 5 – Supervised what should have been a relatively simple day of column packing that turned into a bizarre host of problems plaguing multiple columns and AKTAs, and finally got around to roasting a bunch of potatoes/carrots and making a sweet potato casserole (no marshmallows).

Wednesday, December 6 – Column packing continued, somehow turning into an all-hands-on-deck situation for the downstream team.

Thursday, December 7 – Finally got the columns packed and qualified.

Friday, December 8 – Another half day at work followed by Wegmans.

Saturday, December 9 – Finished the puzzle of a bottle of sriracha that I’d been working on since before Thanksgiving and baked a batch of dinosaur-shaped gingerbread cookies and a batch of snickerdoodles.

Sunday, December 10 – Wanted to make stuffed peppers without actually having to deal with stuffing peppers, so instead dumped a bunch of pepper chunks into the toaster oven and cooked rice and ground beef separately; also got the 2024 calendar ordered.

 

Sriracha puzzle

Monday, December 11 – Got pulled into a bunch of meetings at work.

Tuesday, December 12 – Had to update sampling plans and finalize batch records for the run I was about to lead, attended more meetings, then went home for a dumpling making class held via Zoom by the library and made dumplings.

Wednesday, December 13 – TFF (tangential flow filtration) day proceeded without major issue, but I ended up working late extracting the sampling plan from old batch records for our other project.

Thursday, December 14 – Played chauffeur again to collect my parents from the bus station.

Friday, December 15 – Bagel day – I tried a cinnamon crunch bagel with honey walnut cream cheese.

Saturday, December 16 – Stalked Amazon looking for a LEGO set that was about to be discontinued.

Sunday, December 17 – Worked on finishing cross stitch projects (cutting/edging).

Monday, December 18 – Started the first column of the run.

Tuesday, December 19 – Completed the longest unit operation of the run – 14 hours (7 am to 9 pm) from prep to clean up.

Wednesday, December 20 – Got to eat leftover pepperoni pizza for lunch (and performed the next two steps of the run).

 

Gingerbread dinosaurs and snickerdoodles

Thursday, December 21 – Managed to finish the last purification step before the company holiday lunch and Yankee swap, then decided to undergo another 14-hour day to finish concentration and wrap up the run so there wouldn’t be any lab work on Friday.

Friday, December 22 – Checked batch records and closed out the lab for the week.

Saturday, December 23 – Baked cranberry orange bread.

Sunday, December 24 – Had a Christmas Eve lunch of bagels and a Christmas Eve dinner of pork ribs.

Monday, December 25 – Celebrated Christmas by matting and framing most of the Christmas cross stitch gifts, working on stitching the last gift (almost caught up with Critical Role campaign 3), doing laundry, and using the chain saw on some trees that fell the previous week.

Tuesday, December 26 – Quiet day at work, giving me the chance to finally organize some files on the lab computers.

Wednesday, December 27 – Continued with the file organization and had a string cheese snack.

Thursday, December 28 – More PTO, so I cross stitched and started trying to catch up on the blog.

Friday, December 29 – Cleared out the last of my PTO that wouldn’t carry over to next year, and used it to go grocery shopping, take a walk, cross stitch, bake a flourless chocolate cake, and write some more.

Saturday, December 30 – Made the ganache for the cake, went to the library, and finished season 1 of The Good Place.

 

Cross stitch plant

Sunday, December 31 – Last day of the year – didn’t quite finish The Hero of Ages (the last Mistborn book in the first trilogy), had orange chicken for lunch, didn’t quite finish my last cross stitch gift, ate a small banana, and was up at midnight to bring in the new year not quite catching up on my monthly blog posts, so business as usual for my life.