2018 was a hell of a year that was somehow also lasted a decade? I finished and submitted a novel, left the job I’d been in for over five years, and so on. The political hellscape was especially loud, so I found myself diving deep into media for respite.

Here are a few things that brought me joy or at least blissful distraction during 2018:

Games

• Blades in the Dark – I got in on Blades early but only finally got to playing it this year, when I ran a game for Speculate. I explain the game in the podcast episodes, so just head over if you’re interested in hearing my thoughts.
• D&D 5th edition – I played more D&D this year than I have in probably a decade or more. 5th edition is for sure my favorite edition even though I still have some problems with it. We’re two games into a three-game miniseries on Speculate. Shout-outs to Dave, the DM of the ongoing game where I play my good good boy Faelar the Windwalker, Bard With Change-the-World Political Aspirations
• Slay the Spire – A rogue-like deck-builder dungeon-crawler game. Great to play in 20-40 minute chunks as a break from the world.
• Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – as good as advertised, even if I didn’t enjoy it as much as some. Never finished b/c the two times I tried to enter the endgame, I got frustratingly stuck.
• Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle – this is too zany to work, but it does. Mario meets the Rabbids in an X-Com-style cover shooter with strong movement mechanics.
• Destiny 2: Forsaken — this got me back into Destiny and playing with friends. I haven’t played as many different games this fall into winter because Forsaken had enough material to keep us going.
• Hollow Knight – Soulslikes and Metroidvanias aren’t really my bag, but the art direction and gameplay design on this is so strong it carried me through (also b/c I was playing the game alongside some of my favorite games journalists, which meant a lot)
• Battletech – I’ve enjoyed most of the different versions of this universe, including the Clix game, the CCG, and the cartoon, so it was no surprise that I got into Harebrained Scheme’s revitalization of the property as a campaign-driven tactical RPG. I need to finish the campaign at least, and am interested in the Flashpoints expansion’s Campaign Mode for a second play-through.
• Marvel’s Spider-Man – I just got this for the holidays but am loving the version of Peter Parker/Spider-Man it provides. The swinging feels *so good*.
• Mysterium – I’ve only played it twice but I’m already in love with the great art, the strong thematic design, and the collaborative play style.
• The Banner Saga 3 (though I replayed 1 and 2 also this year) – Very dark, but in the “keep fighting because every life saved is worth it” style that I can appreciate in The Current Era (TM).

Books

• The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente – An angry feminist analog to something like Kurt Busiek’s Astro City, The Refrigerator Monologues lays bare the epidemic of misogyny and erasure that superhero comics have perpetuated over the decades through a series of sharply-written first-person accounts from women in a superhero world. Highly recommended for anyone wanting to think critically about the supers genre and especially anyone that wants to write in the genre.
• A Hidden Hope by Laura Ambrose – Delightfully fluffy F/F starring two writers in a Reunited Exes structure, set at a SFF convention.
• A Conspiracy of Whispers by Ada Harper – An excellent dystopian SF romance that delivers excellence in SF plotting and romance character arcs.
• Wanted & Wired by Vivien Jackson – Like A Conspiracy of Whispers, this one impressed me both as SF and as romance. This one is set on earth in a grimy climate decline future, between a post-human fixer and an augmented cyborg cyberpunk runner. Very steamy in terms of the sex scenes.
• The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal – This alt-history opens with a blockbuster movie-grade sequence and just gets better from there, though it slows down into an exciting but also thoughtful story of a woman involved in an accelerated space race to allow humanity to escape climate disaster caused by a massive meteorite’s impact in 1952.
• Exiles: Test of Time by Saladin Ahmed, Javier Rodriguez, et al. – I liked the old Exiles, and this new series is the same kind of fun, with a great art style and fun characters. I’m sorry the series won’t be running for dozens of issues, but I look forward to reading the rest.

Music

• Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae — I was already a huge Monae fan, but this album might be my favorite one yet.
• “Becalmed” from the game Sea of Thieves — Most of my experience of Sea of Thieves is watching the Waypoint team play, and they finished many of their streams by playing this song in the game, making this song my internal theme song to the game.
• The Battletech game OST by Jon Everist – This OST goes a long way to making the game feel like the Game of Thrones in space that it is trying to be.
• Rainbow by Kesha – I liked several of her earlier songs and genuinely enjoyed this album. I’m especially pulling for Kesha after all of the crap she went through.
• The Born to the Blade theme (because how cool is it that there’s a theme song for one of my books)

Movies

• Black Panther – my take on this movie isn’t important. But I loved it and am so glad it’s in the world.
• Into the Spider-Verse – Do not sleep on this movie. It’s probably the most stylish superhero movie I’ve ever seen, and absolutely makes great use of the animated medium.
• Avengers: Infinity War – An incredible feat of cinematic storytelling that I have big problems with even after several viewings.
• Dumplin’ – adapted from the Julie Murphy novel. Delivers a positive message with strong performances.
• Thor: Ragnarok (yes it came out in 2017 but I watched it a bunch this year and love it) – Exactly my kind of ridiculousness and an inspiration for the direction I took the space opera novel in later revisions. I heart this movie forever.