2024 was a blur. Ask me what happened prior to election day in November and it's all sort of fuzzy. But also, ask me what happened after and it's all just ear-ringing and fire. Which means now I'm sitting down on the next-to-last day of the year to capture some of my favorite things of the year and… it's all just a fog.

There are of course, any number of really terrible things that punctured that fog, not the least of which was the reelection of Donald Trump. But I don't want to leave 2024 focused on awfulness, but instead on the moments of good

So here's a look at some of the good things that cut through the fog for me this year.

Probably the quote that I've thought about the most this year comes from Real Madrid soccer star Vinicius Jr, issued after he won a court case against fans hurling racist abuse at him:

2025 is going to require a lot of tormenting of racists. Count me in.

As someone who's been in the digital wilderness for the last couple years after abandoning Twitter due to Elon Musk's takeover, it's been very heartening to see the burst of enthusiasm (and user-base) around Bluesky in the last two months. While I'm not sure why people waited so long, it's good to see a real critical mass of folks finally embracing an alternative platform (that said, there's a longer post to be written about how we shouldn't repeat the same mistakes of going all-in on a single site). It's fun and feels fresh in a way that Twitter hadn't in a very long time, even before I left. Find me there.

I listened to two podcasts this year that I've continued to think about:

• Tested, by Rose Eveleth. Tested is an incredibly well-reported podcast about the regulation of women's bodies in sport. It's an amazing listen, as much about right now as it is about history and the amount of work that Rose put into it is legit mind-boggling to me.
• The other podcast I was really obsessed with this year didn't come out this year, but was new to me: Dead Eyes. It's the story of host Connor Ratliffe trying to learn why Tom Hanks fired him 20 years earlier. But really it's a meditation on the entertainment industry and memory in pretty equal parts and once it really finds its footing it is stunning.

There were two games I couldn't stop playing this year:

• UFO 50, which I wrote about earlier this year, an incredibly dense collection of 50 different games from a vintage game console from the 1980s that never actually existed.
• Balatro, a deck-building game that uses the basic scoring of poker as the launching point for an unbelievably addictive game that I basically had to ban myself from playing for a while because it was getting in the way of actual work.

One book never left my nightstand this year: The latest by Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year. This was my most-anticipated book of the year and it did not disappoint. A meditation on aging and grief and basketball, it cemented my belief that Hanif is the best writer in the country. Every single word is resonant.

A couple things I've written about on this blog already this year have continued to stick with me:

• Extraordinary, a British show ostensibly about superheroes, but really about what it's like to not know the thing you're good at when it feels like everyone else does.
• Cabel Sasser's excellent talk from the XOXO conference about finding history, story, and genius in a rural Washington McDonalds.

Much of this year was spent working at home or traveling to Florence, Kentucky on reporting outings for Rebel Spirit, but there are two experiences from this year that are still resonating in my head:

• After the unexpected and deeply sad death of Steve Albini, his wife Heather Whinna gathered together a community of people who had been touched by Steve's life. I was lucky to be among them. Held on the shore of Lake Michigan in Zion, Illinois, it was a beautiful weekend of song and stories. Ever since I have thought a lot about the communities we engage with and the people we inspire (and inspire us) and how, at the end of it all, assembling those communities is perhaps the most beautiful act of closure imaginable.
• I spent election day at Disneyland, with my Says Who podcasting partner Maureen Johnson. It was the most surreal place possible to see out the stress of November 5 and, until the actual results started coming in, it felt like we'd found a cheat code for life. You know what happened next. But I will never forget ending that night in a teacup with Maureen, spinning ourselves into oblivion.

Finally, I thought I'd end with another quote I've thought about a lot this year. I glimpsed it briefly on a mural from the window of the E Line, while out in Los Angeles for that Disneyland trip: "Our Days Begin and End as Stories." It's by Canadian artist Brendan Fernades, and was part of a larger work called "I'm Down" that debuted in 2017, but the mural remains and, the day after the election when it flashed by my train, it hit me exactly where I needed to be hit.

Our days begin and end as stories.

The stories of 2024 are coming to a close tomorrow. The stories of 2025 will start fresh immediately after. We know that there will be stories next year that are hard, stories that will push us and test us. So, as 2025 unfolds, hang on to the stories that are good, that give you hope, that remind you to keep trying. Because those are the stories we need the most.