Spencer TuckermanThe most popular year-end list on the internet is back. Every year I pour over thousands of hours of film and music and I still get more feedback on this list than any of that. I’ve come to terms with it.
Melinda’s Fire Roasted Jalapeño and Garlic Pepper Sauce
The streets are saying this is the perfect hot sauce. Tastes unique but not strange. The perfect spice level. Goes with everything. Did I try this and then immediately order four bottles from California off Melinda’s website? Yes I did.
Astro Bot
I bought a PS5 entirely so I could play EA Sports College Football 25. I played it for a couple weeks before real-life college football consumed all my free time and didn’t pick up a controller until Astro Bot came out. Kara and I 100%’d this game in the matter of a week. One of the only truly captivating gaming experiences I’ve had this side of high school.
Blu-rays
The PS5 is also a Blu-ray player, so I’ve made the extremely dangerous decision to begin wading into physical media. Thus far I’ve skirted a spending crisis, keeping my purchasing to my all-time favorite movies, and only when they’re on sale. We’ll see how strong my self-discipline lasts. Purchases include classics such as, but not limited to: Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Parasite, and Gummo.
Apple Music
I’ve tried abandoning Spotify numerous times over the years and have never been able to get it to stick. I finally made it happen in 2024. Here’s the thing: Spotify is an objectively bad company, both from an ethics and a product standpoint. They compensate artists poorly while continuing to increase prices in support of a bunch of features I don’t even want. Podcasts! Audiobooks! An AI DJ! Switching is a pain if you have as many playlists as I do, but once I got over the hump I never looked back. Obviously Apple is not perfect but I do believe it’s a company that fundamentally loves music and always has, and I think that seeps through into their streaming product. I feel in control of my own listening habits again, untethered from Spotify’s insistence on their algorithm-fueled playlists. In 2024 I listened to more music than I ever have (I checked the numbers!) and discovered more artists than I have in years. I believe this is true: Spotify is an audio content product; Apple Music is a music product.
TV
Know me and you know I watch very little television, preferring to invest as much couch time as possible into movies. Yet every year a couple manage to sneak past the goalie. This year yielded perhaps my fewest TV show hours ever, but here are the two new shows I did enjoy:
Ren Faire on HBO
Produced by the Safdie Brothers—an affiliation that is immediately apparent. This is a documentary of silly, insular drama portrayed as Greek tragedy, and composed in a really beautiful way.
Presumed Innocent on Apple TV+
There’s a strange emerging trend where show runners are taking old movies and TV-ifying them. If you’ve seen 1990’s Presumed Innocent, this is an extremely odd choice! And yet I love Gyllenhaal so I was morbidly interested enough to use this as plane entertainment. It’s a lot of pulpy fun and even makes a few interesting departures from its source material, an extra wrinkle for those of us who watched every episode waiting to see if the story would end in the same way.
Bluesky
As a longtime Twitter (err, X) user, it pains me to say this, but 2024 was the year the site’s slow, backwards slide into utter garbage caught up with me. Even beyond the hate, conspiracy, and gore that gets passed around on there, the product has simply become junk—inundated with seemingly millions of bot users and an endless sea of spam and hollow engagement bait. Less and less of what I see on there is remotely interesting or valuable to me. Enter Bluesky, a site with shortcomings of its own but a remarkably refreshing value prop: You have control over what you see. It feels like the Twitter of a decade ago in a lot of ways. The barrier to entry is probably a bit high for average users, but for now it’s small and quaint and fun to use, something I haven’t felt from Twitter in a long while. I pray it continues to grow.
Indian food
After hearing praise from friends and family for years, I finally gave Indian food another shot this year. It’s good! I’m not venturing from the made-for-Americans menu yet, but maybe we’ll get there.
Pocari Sweat
Imagine an “all-natural” tasting grapefruit Gatorade from Japan. And it has an awesome name.
Lake County Captains rebrand
The lower stakes of minor league baseball theoretically give teams a wider palette to pull from in their brand. Get crazy with it. Who cares? Yet few are able to capitalize effectively. A lot of teams still manage to get too silly and gimmicky, and too many have logos that feel like the generic set you’d get to choose from in the Madden 2007 Create-A-Team mode. But the Guardians’ Single-A affiliate rolled out a new brand this year that feels like the perfect blend of polish and fun: A logo that looks like it was made by a human for fans of baseball, not something that was cooked up in the boardroom of an anonymous branding agency.
Toronto Tempo brand
WNBA’s popularity continues to explode. (Maybe next year I’ll be able to put an expansion to Cleveland on this list.) The latest to join the fray is the Toronto Tempo. Like the entry above, they’ve capitalized on the more young and adventurous WNBA ecosystem to roll out something that feels pulled from the ‘80s in all the right ways. One of the more daring major sports brands in recent years.
Black Walnut picker upper
We have two black walnut trees in our backyard and they spend the entire autumn bringing walnut hell upon my entire property. If left to their own devices I think these trees would’ve killed all my grass. The walnut spinny basket thing takes a untenable bit of yard work and simply makes it tolerable, which I’m grateful for.
Baseball
Needed its own section, god bless it:
Watching way too much baseball
The pandemic broke my brain and ever since I’ve been on an unsustainable spiral of baseball consumption. This summer I started the Guardians season watching effectively every single game, figuring I’d curb my viewing habits when the team eventually faded. They never did, so I watched more baseball than I have in my entire life. It’s really not possible to watch much more baseball than I did. Between my lack of easy access to the Cavs (thanks Bally Sports) and the Browns’ insistence on layering despicable business ethics on top of the usual football ineptitude, baseball has resumed its status as my favorite sport, for probably the first time since middle school. We got a Benjamin Button situation.
Watching a no-hitter in person
With the assistance of the Cincinnati Reds I checked off a true bucket-list item: Watching a dude throw a no-hitter in person. As a Guardians fan, I always attend Reds games rooting for the home team, but by the 7th inning or so my baseball brain took over and I began to root for history. I will almost certainly never see another one in my life. What a moment.
Watching first-half Steven Kwan
My Guardians are a franchise of pitchers, not of hitters. In any given season you’re much more likely to see a starter strike out 200 batters than you are to see a batter hit even .280. But 5’9” Steven Kwan, my hero, broke the mold in 2024. Before the inevitable cool-off, he was hitting the cover off the ball, peaking at the .400 mark in mid-June. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Watching baseball in four different stadiums
This wasn’t even something I sought out, but I saw baseball games in four stadiums in 2024—Yankee Stadium, Great American Ballpark, Progressive Field, and Citizen’s Bank Park. Nothing will ever top the comforts of baseball in Cleveland, but my two new visits had their charms, be it the easy transit access and sicko bar scene in the Bronx or the feels-like-an-NBA-game raucous atmosphere in Philly.
Watching the coolest homer of my whole entire life
LOOK AT THIS:
And then watching another one
LOOK AT THIS: