Hi fans, Happy 2025!
My team and I are currently stationed in Mount Hood National Forest up in Oregon, and should be here until the end of March. Thank you to everyone who reached out asking if we were helping support the firefighting and humanitarian efforts in LA! While Forest Corps was not called upon as a part of the national response, the work we are doing as a Corps in national forests across the country is all to prevent wildfire disasters from happening in the future. So while it may be slightly less glamorous/heroic work, it is still immensely important.
I’ll tell you more about everything I’ve done this year once my time in the AmeriCorps NCCC Forest Corps comes to an end. But another aspect of me starting a Substack was to share more of my thoughts on media/current events/whatever, and not just what I’m doing for work (as cool, picturesque, hot, and fun as it is).
You’ve already enjoyed my media list from 2024, but I want to share a little more about how my year went, what I loved, what I didn’t, and what I’m looking forward to this year!
What I Loved
Balatro
I marked this as a favorite on my last post, but I don’t think I really explained how much I loved it. It’s one of the best games ever made, and I own it both on Switch and iOS. I’ve convinced half of my team to play, and while the addiction has mostly worn off, there was a time where 4 of us would all be playing at the same time. For those not in the know, it’s a game loosely based around poker, where you create poker hands to beat a score requirement which gets progressively higher. Meanwhile, you unlock joker cards that give you bonuses for playing certain hands/cards, which builds synergies which helps you reach a higher score, so on and so forth. It’s worth every penny.
Challengers
I also marked this as a favorite. It’s one of the few movies I’ve ever seen that had me literally on the edge of my seat. Every scene I leaned in closer and smiled more as it became abundantly clear that the movie was made exactly for me. The last movie to do that for me was Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Thrifting
Back when I had a traditional 9-5 and a steady stream of income, I was working on improving my wardrobe from teenage boy to adult man. For a time, I was able to buy new clothes from J. Crew and Bonobos without feeling like I was absolutely bankrupting myself. Now that I make ~$20/day, that’s not really an option anymore. While many thrift stores tend to have limited men’s departments, and an even smaller array of clothes in my size, I’ve been able to add a few pieces to my wardrobe without betraying my credit score.
REI
Totally counter to what I just said above, I became an REI Coop member this past year and I love it there. I can’t afford anything there right now but it kinda feels like walking through a museum that you can take stuff home from if you want.
Libraries
We often have limited internet access, and we certainly don’t have the space to have a ton of books on us. Libraries have been an amazing place to get things done for the future (apply to grad school/jobs), as well as rent out books, movies, and shows. The smaller communities we’ve been living in tend to have vibrant libraries. Idaho City in particular had an absolutely bustling film section. I rented Challengers from there.
Washington, DC
When I left DC 14 months ago, I was bummed to be leaving the city where most of my friends lived, but I was excited to explore opportunities while no longer being confined to the constraints of my lease. Over the past year I’ve been able to explore some of the most beautiful places in America, from the Idaho Sawtooths to Oregon’s Crater Lake, to the otherworldly Redwoods. And while those places are certainly amazing, they simply don’t compare to the feeling I get when I land at DCA and get on the metro heading towards the city. Thank you to everyone who made my last trip to DC amazing, I hope to be back soon!
What I hated
Live-Action remakes/art for profit/increasing shareholder value above everything else
WHYYYYYYYYYYYY!?! What purpose does this new vision serve? And now they’re remaking How To Train Your Dragon! Why? The animated one is already a great film! The dragon is going to have to be animated anyways! I feel deep in my heart that the correct way is the other way around. There are so many pieces of media that were made with real people that could be shown in a much more artistic and driven way in animation. The Spider-Verse movies are absolutely proof of this. Scavengers Reign is proof of this. The Wild Robot, Puss in Boots, Shrek, even the Pixar lamp intro are proof of this. Art made for the purpose of making money isn’t art, it’s a product. I would never go to a museum to see a McDouble, why should I pay to go to a theater to see something made by suits in a room only trying to increase shareholder value when real artistic visions exist?
AI
I studied AI/ML pretty intensively in college. One of my final projects was teaching GPT-2 (a predecessor of ChatGPT) to write screenplays. I don’t claim to be an expert on anything AI, but I do know how they work. I honestly enjoyed the busted early days of generative AI. Seeing computers get lost in their own world, creating dreamlike images, scenes, and sentences was interesting. But the relative competence of the newer systems has sincerely ruined the entire internet. I don’t know what the way forward is, but it’s not this way. If you didn’t bother to create it, why should I bother to engage with it? What is the end goal if AI is able to lay everybody off?
What I’m working on
Reading more
I brought my kindle with me, and while I’ve finished a couple books so far while in nature, most of my free time I spent working on grad school applications. Now that that’s mostly done, I’m hoping to start reading more and spend less time on my phone. Billionaires ruined social media, so odds are I’ll be more successful in this endeavor this year than last.
Running
Working a manual labor job for the last 7 months has absolute made me stronger and gotten me in better shape. Long term, though, I don’t really want to be a firefighter. I do want to play ultimate frisbee, though, and strength matters much less in frisbee than speed. I’m trying to improve my distance running currently, and along the way I hope to increase my sprint speed, agility, and general endurance. Because I haven’t really been able to play the sport since I left (I did play in a tournament 2 days before leaving for Sacramento), my best chance to show up as a valuable player at tryouts is to simply be in better shape than everyone else there. Currently, I’m running a 10K at about 8:15/mile and I’d love to get that down another 30+ seconds before the start of tryouts. I haven’t run a mile sprint in a while, but a goal I’m setting for that is ≤6:30 in the same timeframe.
Starting and finishing projects
I have a bad habit of not finishing projects. There are a number of projects that if I just spent a little more time on them I’d have a finished product that I could show off. The one that bothers me the most is my senior capstone short film, which is about 99.3% done, and mostly just needs a few more passes for audio levels, color correction, and made a little shorter. Maybe like 5 more hours of work. Will it be great? No. But it would be cool if I had something to show for my time in film school that was officially “done”.
This leads into point number 2, which is because I often don’t finish projects, I’m less likely to start a new project knowing it could end up being wasted effort.
This is, of course, a bad way of thinking.
My plan for the first 1/3 of the year (while I’m still in AmeriCorps and generally limited in what I’m able to accomplish) is to start with smaller projects. Namely, I want to start more books without knowing if they’re a perfect book for me. If I finish them or not isn’t entirely important. If it’s good, I’ll read it. If it’s bad, I can put it down and start something else. This ties in well with my previous goal of wanting to read more in general.
The second part of the plan is to learn more songs on guitar all the way through. I know lots of bits and pieces of many songs, but only a select few from start to finish. Other, smaller ways I aim to increase my comfort being outside my comfort zone is to listen to more new music, explore more of Portland, OR (it’s new to me!), and generally be open to more opportunities.
What a year! Do you agree or disagree with anything on my list? Are you focusing on anything in particular this year?
Please send book recommendations if you have any, my favorite genre is when everything is normal but one thing is really weird (and questionably supernatural?? Who knows?! Maybe we’ll find out…)
Currently watching/reading :
Severance (S1 rewatch with the team (none of them have seen it before!), about to start S2)
The Dark Forest (2nd book in the Three Body Problem Series)
In Perpetuity,
Jesse
I think my least favorite thing was the election- otherwise I agree with the list wholeheartedly
You’re such an icon!
My book rec is “Our Share of the Night”
It’s magical realism and so good