2023 year in review
Reading time: 6 minutes
This year I’ve blogged less, instead working on some weekend side projects. I’ve started posting to Distinctive Quality, with posts focused on refined web design techniques. I'm still posting occasionally to Indie Aisle as I continue with its redesign. And other updates I’ve been putting in my monthly newsletter. These projects have been a great way to explore and experiment some design, some code, some writing.
Blocks Edit
Blocks Edit dev has been mostly quality of life improvements this year. We’ve been preparing for a pretty big step in the product which we’ll have the results of within the next couple of months. Along the way, I’ve been working on various updates to the promo site, and an extensive new template of email components.
Electric car six months later
It’s been about six months since I bought my Nissan Leaf and it’s been working out great. Regular urban driving is perfect for it and it’s felt nice not having my errands include stopping by the gas station, or doing an oil change. Electric vehicles are better on surface streets than the freeway for conserving energy as they use very little energy standing still in traffic and even add energy with generative breaking. For gas cars, it’s the opposite so a lot of gas is wasted just sitting on the road in traffic!
The AI in the room
You couldn’t read the news this past year without having heard about how AI is affecting everything we do. While it is a significant technology, many of its effects are blown out of proportion. It’s still early days. We’re still figuring out how to best interact with it, it's often limited and just plain wrong, and it uses other people's work without their permission. So there are some kinks to work out! And we’re nowhere near actual artificial general intelligence.
Here are some of the best videos I’ve seen throughout the year that cover how AI works well: its implications on art, its implications on music, and a fun take on the different types of AI.
Articles and videos
- We will fix climate change - a hopeful look at what we've been doing to fix climate change and how it's affected things for the future.
- Social authoritarianism - a Twitter thread on how ideas are treated by different groups of people in recent years and the potential consequences.
- The internet is about to get weird again the fallout of social media platforms is going to lead to a web reminiscent of the early days where people put up their own websites and blogs.
- CSS as a design tool - CSS has evolved in the last couple of years, with updates so significant that there's a trend where designers that can also code CSS have been designing directly with CSS as they run into limitations with using traditional design tools.
Books and comics
- Make Something Wonderful by The Jobs Archive - a collection of speeches, interviews, and emails by Steve Jobs on his views on making products, design, and life pursuits, the most interesting is his thoughts on leadership and running a company.
- Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It by April Dunford - offers a good model for analyzing your positioning (a fancy marketing term for talking about your product in a way that your audience understands its place among other products) to use throughout all aspects of marketing.
- The Neil Gaiman Library comic collections by Neil Gaiman - a series of short stories by one of my favorite writers, turned into comic book form and collected into three pretty, over-sized, hard cover books.
Movies
- Tar - with an awesome performance by Cate Blanchett in the lead role, on the surface, the movie is about a classical music composer, but it's really about art, career, relationships, power dynamics, and much more!
- Harriet the Spy - while not specifically a holiday movie, it's a feel good film that makes it feel like the spirit of the holidays.
- Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls - as fun as the 80's horror comedies that it pays homage to!
- Smile - if you want a really creepy horror movie, it's a good mix of psychological and disturbing and even pulls off some good jump scares!
- Drag Me To Hell - one of my favorite spooky season movies this year, it's a fun Sam Raimi ride.
- Howl’s Moving Castle and Kiki's Delivery Service - two Miyazaki movies I've seen this year and I'm becoming a fan!
Series
- The 100 - available in its entirety on Netflix, at exactly 100 episodes, The 100 is an interesting show in the sci-fi themes it covers and fun with the characters it develops.
- Twisted Metal - somehow based on the Playstation 2 video game of the same name, but I'm guessing they elaborated on the story a whole lot, or probably completely changed it.
- Castlevania - a nicely stylized, unique take on vampire lore.
- The Blacklist - always a fun ride no matter how much its story arcs are drawn out, the series aired its final season this year.
- Paul T. Goldman - a documentary series based on a story from a series of books that are based on a true story of Paul T. Goldman, that he wrote, and in which he stars as himself in the documentary. It’s as confusing as it sounds, but somehow told so well via the series.
Video games
- Firmament, the latest game from Cyan, the creators of the original Myst series. The puzzles are so embedded in the environment that it feels like they are a logical extension of it and hardly puzzles at all! And its story is also told very well through the environment. It's a nicely interwoven combination of great visuals and environmental design, interesting puzzles, a clever interaction mechanic, and a decent story that keeps you engaged until the end.
- Cypher 007 - only available on Apple Arcade, Cypher 007 has the classic original James Bond books vibe and is cool to be able to play on my Apple TV while using an Xbox controller!
Concerts and trips
- The Chemical Brothers - at a beautiful venue surrounded by mountains in southern California, with awesome stage visuals that went well with the music.
- The Crystal Method - part of a great smaller local venue EDM show lineup.
- Hyper - my recent electronic music favorite!
- Sundance - I got to see the premiere of Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls, the indie horror comedy earlier this year and really enjoyed it.
- Mysterium - a fan convention for the Myst video game series, in Spokane, Washington where Cyan, the studio that made the original Myst is located and opened up their doors to 250 of us to visit, giving us a tour of their unique office, and giving us a special presentation on the progress of the new real-time 3D remake of their most acclaimed game, Riven!
More of my favorites this year. This is my ninth year in review! Here are my previous years: 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015