I have three main hobbies: watching movies (which I log on this site), playing guitar, and playing video games. Inspired by Matt Birchler’s post about every game he played in 2023, and Elisa Gabbert’s post about every book she read in 2023, I thought I’d share every game I played in 2023 and what I’d like to play this year — along with some commentary.

God of War: Ragnarok

I had a lot of fun with this, but it didn’t blow me away the original did. The hub-centric world of the original was something I really enjoyed, and its leaner running time made it feel a little more like a Metroidvania. In this game, the scope got larger, but I’m not sure they pulled it off as well as the first’s big story more intimate approach. 

I’d still like to replay this, though, particularly because of the free Valhalla DLC that just got released and partially because it feels like I rushed this one. I think I would enjoy the story more if I took it at a slower pace, but after waiting for years, I really wanted to see how this ended.

Mass Effect 2

This is my first time playing the Mass Effect trilogy. I adored the first game (I have the benefit of playing the remade version with less janky controls), but this one kind of burned me out. I thought I’d be fighting the Reapers, but instead it felt like I went on a very long series of fetch quests. 

I’m only a couple hours into Mass Effect 3, but it feels much closer to what my expectations were for the second one.

Red Dead Redemption 2

One of the best games ever made. I’ve been very slowly playing it through a second time since early 2021. I only have a couple story missions left, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours in this world and I still feel like I experience new things all the time. It feels very alive.

I didn’t like this game the first time I played it, probably because I rushed the story, but if you play this game slowly and really chew on it, it might be the best this medium has to offer. Plus, a buddy of mine and I occasionally play online together, and we still have a blast.

Tears of the Kingdom

I really liked Breath of the Wild more. I’m sorry. I am 80 hours into this and I’ve beaten three of the main dungeons, and it’s a great game, but there’s no comparison to the magic of BOTW for me. What drew me into BOTW was the focus on exploration and making your own story. TOTK has much less of both of those things.

Witcher 3

Playing it through again on modern consoles. This remains a great game. No notes.

Starfield

I actually liked this, and played a ton of it for a few weeks. But something happened around hour 60 or so where I just completely lost the desire to play. I don’t quite recall a game where I played so many hours and then immediately lost interest with no desire to ever return. It’s still on my Xbox, but I’m more likely to play Skyrim again than I am to return to this in any capacity. I know why everybody dislikes this, but none of that stuff really bothered me much, so I don’t know why I lost interest.

Sea of Thieves

I play this one online with a friend and we have a lot of fun hunting for treasure. No idea what else you can do in this game, and I know there is a lot of other stuff, but we honestly just go digging on islands. We’re simple men. We like shovels and gold.

Spider-Man 2

I loved this. It was possibly my game of the year. Beautiful, fun, great story that wasn’t too long. Can’t wait for New Game Plus. This series is the best reason to own a PS5 right now.

Alan Wake Remastered

Got this through PlayStation Plus. I genuinely don’t get the hype. I thought it was pretty bland, with bad combat, sluggish controls, and uninteresting characters. I finished it because I thought it might ​“click” eventually, but it never did. Thankfully it wasn’t very long. I played a couple hours of Control too, to give that a shot, and I disliked it for largely the same reasons. (I might give it another shot next year. We’ll see.)

Tunic

Wonderful game! Had a great time with this, but the final couple hours were a real slog. Once you reach the gauntlet of bosses you’ve already fought, it feels like the game has run out of ideas.

One thing I loved, though, was the in-game use of the instruction manual. Discovering a page and realizing you had a skill all along, but didn’t know how to use it, was a macial experience.

Forza Motorsport

Absolutely not for me. Driving every track for multiple laps before I can actually race on those tracks is an unnecessary level of realism for me, a person who isn’t into cars, but likes zoning out after a long day in a racing game. Horizon 4 and Horizon 5 are two of the best racing games ever made, though, and I’m back to playing them for the same fix.

Elden Ring

Second playthrough. Great stuff. Exactly my jam. No notes.

It Takes Two

This is one of my wife’s favourite games, and we replayed this over Christmas and immediately made plans to replay it again in the New Year. It’s just fun. Great voice acting.

Baldur’s Gate 3

I didn’t buy this until just before the holidays, but oh my gosh. Surpassed Spider-Man 2 for my game of the year. It’s easily my favourite game since Elden Ring, or perhaps Red Dead Redemption 2. Just a total delight. I’m almost done act 2 and will spend a lot of time in this over the next several years. I’m already planning a few more playthroughs with wildly different characters. 

This is the first video game RPG that has me interested in actual role play. We talk a lot about player agency in video games, but most video games have the same basic ending no matter how you play them. This feels like you actually get your own unique story. Maybe Mass Effect largely pulls that off too, but the scale that Larian is operating in here is unparalleled in my mind. I’m trying to convince my wife to play this with me and have a couple friends I’d like to play it with too. 

I nearly gave up on this halfway through the first act, though. I’m new to CRPGs and had a hard time understanding how to play. Once I got over that hurdle and it clicked, this went from a fun novelty to being one of the most rewarding games I’ve ever played.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is my game of the year at the moment.

2024 list

I’ve got a long list of titles I’d like to play in 2024. A lot of these were released recently and I just haven’t had time for them. Some of them are on in my backlog and I’m finally going to play them this year.

Most of these were games I played for an hour this year and went ​“Oh man, this is cool, too bad I’m already playing (insert another game here).”

Here’s the list:

• I plan on wrapping up Baldur’s Gate 3, RDR2, Witcher 3, TOTK, Elden Ring (unless I have something new to say about them, don’t expect me to mention these again next year)
• Star Wars: Jedi Survivor
• Ghost of Tsushima
• Metroid Prime Remastered
• Super Mario RPG (a couple hours in and this is hilarious)
• Super Mario Wonder (I’m on world 2 right now and this is delightful)
• Lies of P (played for a couple hours, but was already playing Elden Ring and my brain had a hard time adjusting to the very minor differences in combat)
• Dead Space (the remake)
• Mass Effect 3 (I’m a few hours in and can’t believe how much talking there is in between each mission. I’ll have more to say once I’m done, but they might as well have just made this a linear game with 20 minutes of cut scenes between each mission.)
• Control (I’m going to try it in the summer and see if those late summer nights suit the mood of this better)
• Plague Tale: Requiem (played the first in 2021 and enjoyed it)
• Death’s Door
• Hollow Knight (have started this four or five times and never finished it)
• Cocoon
• Dredge (this looked amazing)
• Resident Evil 4 (remake)
• Final Fantasy 7 Remake
• Avowed (I’ll be amazed if this actually releases this year, though)

It’s a long list. I won’t get to all of it. I’m truthfully quite grateful there aren’t a lot of 2024 releases that interest me, because most of this list is just me playing catch-up from last year still.

Here’s to a great 2024.

The PRS SE Silver Sky is Reverb’s best-selling electric guitar for the second year running. It’s amazing that any one guitar would sell more than Fender’s best-selling guitars. I have an SE Silver Sky, and while it’s certainly not as nice as any of my more costly guitars, I’m inspired every time I pick it up.

The Verge reports that Adobe and Figma no longer plan to merge, largely thanks to legal pressure from the EU.

First off, this is great news. Adobe acquiring Figma was obviously bad for the industry, at least from the perspective of the designers who work in it. Adobe has a history of buying and subsequently squashing beloved industry tools.

Figma is also the only player keeping Adobe from a total market stranglehold. Bohemian Code’s Sketch would be a player if they offered a Windows app, but they’ve chosen not to pursue that market (and I think missed a big opportunity in the past decade as a result).

For the most part, life now goes on: Figma gets to do their own thing, Adobe does their thing, and all the smaller players (of whom Sketch is probably the biggest) keep doing their things too.

That being said, it’s not all sunshine and roses here. Adobe sunsetted XD, their design tool competitor, shortly after announcing the Figma acquisition. That tool has been dead in the water for a year, with little to no updates in that time. 

I have colleagues who use and like XD who will now have to migrate elsewhere. And let’s not forget the XD team: the folks Adobe had working on XD over the years were all top notch and had great ideas (Khoi Vinh is one of my heroes). I don’t know if those folks are still at Adobe. While life goes on for most of us, this sideshow has caused some actual destruction for a few.

In classic Adobe tradition, nothing meaningful has been accomplished, and a lot of people got hurt along the way.

“Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful…be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.” 

— William S. Burroughs

I completely forgot to include CJ Chilvers’ article when I wrote about the benefits of messy desks. Better late than never!

Dan Mall’s recent post struck a chord with me when I read it. The whole post is worth reading, but in an effort to avoid quoting the entire thing, I’ll simply share his opening statement:

This past week, I finished making a small website for a family member’s business. I had an idea I liked for a subtle header animation. As I sat down to do it, I couldn’t justify how that animation would make the site any better at its job — attracting potential clients — than the static, non-animated version would.

It got me thinking: could I justify an animation for any website’s header? Can anyone justify an animation for a website’s header? A quick glance at the latest Awwwards Site of the Day nominees shows that lots of modern sites have animations in the header. But it is worth the effort to make?

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past few weeks. Dan acknowledges in his post that, of course, web design has changed a lot. These days, as he says, ​“we live in a world where a Kardashian or a Youtuber can launch a product or even an industry with a tweet or an Instagram post, a role previously dominated by The Website.”

I think there’s another change that happened: websites got a whole heckuva lot easier to make. If a designer’s primary job was to live at the intersection of art and commerce, that job has been eradicated at the low end by shrinking budgets and easy-to-use website builders like Wix and Squarespace.

The remaining websites are either vanity projects for large organizations (designed to attract attention and brand cachet), or they are designed as business tools for whom conversion is their primary purpose. If conversion is the primary purpose, there is less space for design. As Conversion Rate Experts says:

Some people ask why they shouldn’t optimize for function and aesthetics. Even if their visitors are perfectly happy with the current appearance of the website, what’s the harm in being beautiful regardless?

It’s like asking ​“What’s the harm in giving Usain Bolt an egg and spoon to carry while he runs?” They don’t realize that beauty, like an egg and spoon, tends to slow progress to a crawl.

If I’m being very cynical about my own work, I think Amazon has proved that web design is more important than ever, but beauty is less important than it’s ever been.

That doesn’t mean making something beautiful is irrelevant. I’m working on a highly-polished website for a non-profit right now. Their design has a lot of attention-catching elements (several are mentioned on this list), and even relies on a motif. That being said, the non-profit sector is a space where cohesive design goes a long way to generating goodwill from potential donors.

I don’t entirely know where I’m going with this, but I do know that web design is still a young field. I think the jury is out on whether or not good design can have a negative impact on conversion, which is really what people pay for. (If you spend a bunch of money on a site, but get no return on that investment, you are probably not getting what you pay for.)

That all being said, I think the days of being in this for the art — like a modern-day Andy Warhol — are mostly behind us. All that matters is the conversion rate. Usually, we aren’t hired to make art. I too hunt for those jobs, but I increasingly feel like a hungry lion in the jungle craving a penguin.

I love a nerdy blogging trend. I don’t remember where I saw this first, but I know I read Matt Birchler’s post, Manuel Moreale’s post, and Chris Coyier’s post in my RSS feed. Robb Knight has a list of others who have shared their app defaults. Here are mine:

• ✉️ Mail service: Fastmail
• 📬 Mail client: Apple Mail
• ✅ Tasks: Omnifocus (beta testing OF4)
• 📰 RSS service: Feedly, although I really ought to move to Feedbin
• 🗞️ RSS client: Reeder
• ⌨️ Launcher: Alfred
• ☁️ Cloud storage: iCloud and Dropbox
• 📸 Camera: Usually my iPhone 15 Pro, but when purposefully shooting, I bring my Canon R6
• 🌅 Photo editing and library: Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, and Apple Photos
• 📆 Calendar: Fantastical, but if it weren’t for the quick even creation, I’d use Apple Calendar.
• 🌐 Web browser: Safari for personal, 1 Chrome window for each active work projects. (John Siracusa is my browser window and tab collecting spirit animal. Right now I have 89 tabs open across five browser windows — and I’m still collecting links for this post.)
• 🔖 Bookmarks: Pinboard for text, Eagle for interesting visuals (I highly recommend Eagle)
• 🗄️ Backups: Time Machine and Backblaze on every Mac, Synology for cold storage (also backed up to a remote Mac), iCloud for iOS devices. (This is very overkill, but I lost 1TB of photos during my stint as a wedding photographer because multiple backup drives simultaneously died while I was away over Christmas vacation, so I’m hardcore about this now.)
• 🎙️ Podcasts: Overcast
• 🎶 Music: Apple Music
• 🎹 DAW: Logic Pro
• 🍿 Movie tracking: Letterboxd. I also share everything I watch on my own website
• 🧑‍💻 Code editor: Nova, with occasional Visual Studio Code usage
• 📝 Notes: Obsidian
• ✍️ Writing: iA Writer
• 🎨 Design: Figma for UI, Illustrator for some icons and logos, InDesign for print work, Apple Freeform for sketching
• 🔐 Passwords: 1Password
• 💸 Budgeting: YNAB (I can’t recommend YNAB enough. I hate talking about money, and YNAB has made planning and budgeting finances with my wife tolerable.)

A lot of software on this list hasn’t changed in many years — sometimes close to a decade. I am far more likely to change the physical hardware in my life than I am to change my software tools.

Additional software I’d like: Ulysses with backlinks. Notion without the fiddling.

The other day, during a conversation with one of my clients, we talked briefly about the messy state of our workspaces. I like to keep up the pretence of a clean desk (see my workspace tour from 2020 or my Sweet setup interview in 2018), but in reality, my desk is often a mess.

My desk is littered with guitar picks, some keys, a stack of receipts, a few USB cables, four notebooks, a couple microfibre cloths (not just for wiping monitors, but also for polishing guitars), coffee cups, a stapler, wire cutters, and a Swiss army knife. 

I should put some of this junk away, but one thing I realized in this conversation is that a messy desk is a productive desk, and a messy office or studio is probably the same.

Here are a couple quick, well-known examples of messy offices so we’re all on the same page:

Albert Einstein’s desk was famously messy.

Steve Jobs didn’t have a particularly organized home office.

I think this is also why I’m personally attracted to huge desktop towers (like the Mac Pro) and giant speakers. Part of what you pay for is the statement it makes when you walk in to your workspace: this is where the magic happens.

Recently, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of staring at audio professional setups. These rigs are typically filled with racks of studio equipment, musical instruments, and sometimes multiple computers. Even if you take all the clutter off the desk, these setups never look ​“clean.”

I love this setup from macprovideo.com’s review of the 2020 Mac Pro. You can’t hide this mess. When you walk into this room, there’s no way to hide its purpose. You’re going to get work done here.

I also love this marketing image for a sit/​stand music studio desk. There’s not one, but two Mac Pro towers (I’m jealous). Each rack slot is with gear. There is rack equipment on the floor. Cables everywhere. For minimalists, this is a nightmare. But I love it.

Austin Kleon (not a musician) keeps a messy studio too. I love the roll of paper towel. (I also love that his super-large L‑shaped desk has space for both making and visiting.)

If there’s anything to glean from this, all I’ve learned is that my desk probably isn’t messy enough.

Sounds like Adobe’s purchase of Figma might get blocked. I think this is good news: I have many things I dislike about Figma, but Adobe won’t fix any of them.

After years of rumours, PRS finally unveiled the MT 100, the 100 watt version of Mark Tremonti’s signature amp. I’ve heard some of the rumours and have been excited to see it get unveiled. Mark is one of the best working guitar players in rock music.

The MT 100 is a three-channel beast: a clean channel, an overdrive channel, and a lead channel. Mark gives a great breakdown of the amp in a 16-minute Youtube video that’s well worth your time, if you’re into this sort of thing.

This a very versatile, well-considered amp. The clean channel goes from pristine cleans with no breakup, to a nice edge-of-breakup sound. The overdrive channel picks up from there and goes from the edge-of-breakup channel to a supercharged Plexi. Mark is a huge amp nerd and compares the overdrive channel to a Dumble he owns, which probably isn’t the best comparison, since every Dumble is unique and only a few hundred were ever made. But I definitely hear the Plexi sound in this channel. Mark’s demo demonstrates how touch-sensitive this channel is. I’m a huge fan.

The lead channel is a different beast. I would describe the clean and overdrive channels as mid-rich, but the lead channel is extremely scooped, even with the Middle knob in roughly the same position. There’s a good chance the sound was EQ’d to death after the video was recorded, so the jury is still out until more people get their hands on this thing, but it sounds like the channels are voiced very differently. I can’t say I’m surprised by this, considering how scooped Mark likes to be¹, but to me it makes the amp a little less versatile than it could be otherwise. I can easily take away mids if I don’t want them, but I can’t add them in after the fact. 

Fluff’s fantastic demo did a good job of highlighting that it might be other way around: the MT 100’s overdrive channel might be too honky. I’d like to play one of these when they start showing up in stores and see for myself.

Generally though, I love the versatility of the MT 100. I think this is a great studio amp in particular. I also love the price. In Canada, it retails for $2500. Its biggest competition might be something like the Mesa Boogie Mark VII, which retails for $4800 — nearly twice the price. Even Marshall’s JVM210H is $3200 now. Tube amps have never been cheap, but their prices recently have hovered somewhere between eye-watering and impossible. PRS isn’t known for being inexpensive, but the MT 100 packs a lot of value into a small package.

I nearly fell off my chair when I saw the news earlier this week. Marshall has been a big part of Slash’s sound since the Appetite for Destruction days, and Slash arguably played a huge role in making the Les Paul and JCM800 combination the sound of rock and roll. They’ve been a part of his sound for 36 years. This is the end of an era.

I’m not a big fan of Slash as a person, and I don’t love a lot of his music either, but I think he’s got great taste in gear. I spent most of 2022 looking for a great Les Paul, and ended up with his signature model, which has some of the best-sounding pickups I’ve ever heard (and is shockingly close to a 1959 reissue in general spec). Similarly, his signature Marshall amp is one of Marshall’s best amps. 

As far as Magnatone goes, they make killer boutique amplifiers that sound more than a little inspired by the classic Marshall Plexi sound. In this British amp shootout, Magnatone’s M80 amp is, to my ears, the obvious winner, absolutely smoking Friedman’s Dirty Shirley. Slash is collaborating with Magnatone on a 100-watt version of this amp. I’m looking forward to hearing it

Just sent out my first newsletter since my new blog went up. Feels good! (But it would feel better if you subscribed.)

Three things struck me while watching Apple’s Halloween-themed M3 event last night.

The first observation: while Apple unveiled three chips last night, they did a better job clarifying who each machine is for than they’ve ever done before.

There are three new chips, unsurprisingly called the M3, the M3 Pro, and the M3 Max. Here’s what Apple said about the audience for each one when introducing the laptops that use them. 

For the basic M3, Apple said:

Whether you’re a student, entrepreneur, creator, or combination of all three, you’ll find everyday tasks lightning fast. And when you’re using pro apps or playing games, the advanced thermal system allows you to sustain the phenomenal performance of M3… It’s great for working with demanding content across a variety of workflows. Such as making intricate 3D models in Sketchup faster than before. Or viewing and interacting with large medical images in SurgicalAR.

This is pretty clearcut to me: machines equipped with the base-level M3 are great for aspiring creative pros, students, and entrepreneurs (which, in Apple’s parlance, I think means new business owners outside the tech sector).

For the M3 Pro, which is the next step up, Apple said the following:

(The M3 Pro) provides even greater performance and additional unified memory for users with more demanding workflows like coders, creative pros, and researchers… Stitching together and manipulating enormous panoramic photos in Photoshop is much quicker, working on large and complex data models in MATLAB is more fluid, and compiling and testing millions of lines of code in Xcode is even faster.

I think this is pretty clear too, but there are several caveats here that are worth mentioning a little later. (I look forward to Austin Mann and Tyler Stalman testing this machine though, since it seems aimed at photographers, designers, and developers.)

In theory, the M3 Pro is aimed at me. At first, I thought this was great news, because my current machine is an M1 Max, and it’d be nice to shift downmarket if I could. (Again, more on this later.)

Apple had this to say about the M3 Max:

For users with extreme workflows like AI developers, 3D artists, and video professionals, it’s an absolute beast… You can model and iterate remarkably complex 3D content in Cinema 4D with Redshift… And video post-production work on the highest resolution content is an absolute breeze thanks to two ProRes engines… M3 Max also supports up to an enormous 128GB of unified memory… This enables creators to easily work on large and complex projects spanning multiple pro apps and plugins, like Substance 3D Painter, Maya, and Arnold. Or compose huge film scores with Pro Tools, where entire orchestra libraries are instantly available from memory. 

This also seems clear cut to me. To be perfectly blunt, I am no longer the target market for these machines. The target market is well above what I do, even when I’m doing my own recording and video production.

The second observation: The configurations are weird. 

First, RAM comes in 18GB, 36GB, 48GB, 64GB, 96GB, and 128GB allotments. If you want 48GB, 64GB, or 128GB of RAM, you need the most expensive M3 Max chip. If you want 96GB of RAM, you need the least expensive M3 Max chip. It works out so that 96GB of RAM is only $100 more than 64GB, but you don’t get as many CPU cores.

This is very weird to me. Does Apple have multiple RAM providers or something? Why don’t these varieties match up? Why do I have to make this choice?

The M3 Pro, as I noted above, is the chip aimed for people like me: creative pros. But a lot of people like me need more than 36GB of RAM, which is the limit of the M3 Pro, and getting more requires a large upfront investment. The 64GB model is more expensive than my M1 Max, at least in Canada, so while you can order up to 128GB, the addition of the higher memory option hasn’t resulted in a reduction of prices elsewhere in the lineup.

I’m glad I’m not in the market for a machine right now, because I’d have to make some odd choices. This reminds me of the Intel Mac Pro configuration flow, and that’s not a compliment. It’s too complicated. I am grateful for the options, but I wish they moved in a straight line from the cheapest to the most expensive.

I’m looking forward to Anandtech’s review of these chips.

Finally, the third observation: The Apple event was shot on an iPhone. The footage looked great. Nobody knew until the credits rolled. But The Verge ran an article about how that marketing line is deceptive because of all the other pro gear involved.

On one hand, I get it. Lighting, drones, gimbals, and everything else you need for a pro setup like this isn’t cheap. There were also a wealth of special effects employed throughout the event.

But on the other hand, The Verge’s article seems to suggest that consumers will think their footage will automatically look that good without additional gear. I don’t know if that’s the case. Thanks to decades of marketing from Hollywood, I think most people who care even a little know that there’s a lot of gear involved in making stuff look good. The fog machines alone in the opening of Apple’s event make it clear that their budget goes beyond the average bedroom Youtuber’s. I don’t see how there’s a negative story here, apart from clickbait.

The bottom line is simple: the event looked great, and the iPhone is clearly a very capable videographer’s camera in the right hands.

“If you do enough bad writing, it is inevitable that some good writing will slip through.” Love what Seth Godin has to say in his brief 5‑minute talk about writer’s block and doing the hard creative work every day.

Just finished the story in Spider-Man 2, and I think this is my personal game of the year — over Starfield and Zelda, which are both extremely my jam. Insomniac is telling the best Spidey stories right now.