2024 End of Year: Movies
It's been a little while since I've written anything here, for various reasons, but with the end of 2024 sailing off into the past, what better way to get back on the proverbial horse than with some good old fashioned end of year lists! (I never did see why people publish these articles at they start of December, when there's still a month of stuff to go…)
Let's start with a Films of 2024 list. I'm not the biggest film buff, and my movie-watching habits tend be to rather sporadic, having phases of watching films regularly, and then maybe nothing for months. I really should get into the habit of having something like a 'Friday night is film night' schedule.
2024 was a bit of a washout film-wise for me. I didn't really watch all that much (18 films), and of what I did watch, not much really stood out. That said I didn't really seek out much that was out of the mainstream, as I often I was watching late into the evening, and generally wanted something that was pretty on they eye and easy on the brain. Oh, and there's a few kids films in there, because you do sometimes have to sit and watch with them.
Of the few films I watched, the standouts from an eye-candy perspective were problem Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, and Alien: Romulus. I'm still patiently waiting for them to do the movie where an xenomorph queen makes it to Earth, but until then Romulus was the best entry in the Alien canon from some time, maybe since Aliens?
The best of the rest, and my favourite film of the year (although it was released in 2023) was Past Lives, by director Celine Song. A very different film to the Apes or Alien, which probably tells I need to watch more like this next year.
The worst? Well, that's was probably a tie between the utter mess that was Argylle (the only film on this list I didn't manage to watch all the way through), and the overblown nonsense of Kong x Godzilla: The New Empire.
Anyway, in reverse chronological order, here are the films I watched in 2024.
- Past Lives (2023)
- The Wild Robot (2024)
- Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
- Argylle (2024)
- Alien: Romulus (2024)
- Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
- Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024)
- Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)
- The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024)
- The Garfield Movie (2024)
- Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)
- The Fabelmans (2022)
- Godzilla Minus One (2023)
- Dune:Part Two (2024)
- Dune (2021)
- Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024)
- Jurassic Park (1993)
- The Marvels (2023)
I use the Letterboxd service to log and track the films I watch - you can see my Letterboxd profile here.
I've Built a Damn Website!
So having written a little about how I've built this site, I thought I'd write about why I've started this site.
Over the last year or so I've built a handful of websites for family and others. These have been built in established website builders like Wix and Squarespace, and honestly those things don't require a great deal of technical knowledge. I mean, setting up the domain name and hosting and so forth can be a complete ball-ache, but building the sites themselves is pretty straightforward. I guess that's the whole raison d'être of those sites.
Secondly, my partner works in digital marketing and social media management. On a number of occasions with her work, she had turned to me for some technical support on sites that she was managing content on for clients. These sites were built across a range of services, Wix again, WordPress using Elementor, and others. Increasingly I was running up against issues that I was finding hard to resolve due to custom code sitting under those sites, and quickly running up against the limits of my minimal knowledge.
So what all of this began to pique my interest in how to build (or even just fix) what lies beneath those structures. To find out what are the bones that the flesh of these sites hangs off? (slightly macabre analogy ,sorry).
Its's been a long time since I dived in to trying to learn a wholly new skill set from scratch, and this seemed an ideal skill to try and tackle. It doesn't require much financial cost or investment, I can approach it at my own pace, as and when free time allows, and hopefully had a learning curve that wasn't too steep initially so as to seem overwhelming.
On a broader basis I've increasingly been put off by the big social media sites out there. I've never really got anything particularly worthwhile out of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al. The companies themselves have become increasingly toxic, especially Twitter/X in recent years, and even though they are places where I find myself wasting lots of time, more and more they are not places where I particularly (strong>want to waste time. Nevertheless I find myself maintaining a presence there - some of this is unavailable. My kids scouting group communicate through their Facebook page. I need an X account for my professional day-job needs. So in some ways they're unescapable.
But there does seem to be another way. The first prompter of this was making the move to Mastodon. I have neither a large following there, nor follow a huge amount of people. But increasingly that's where I'm finding things that interest me, from interesting people. And maybe steadily that's where I'll share stuff too, interesting or not.
From there I've picked up loads of discussion and articles about the growth of the 'indie-web', and the resurgence of personal websites. It's odd really, but as a nearly-50 year old, I came of age during the first great wave of personal websites, of the popular boom of the internet, of Geocities, and blogging on and so on. But largely let them was over me without getting involved. But maybe not this time. Discovering this flourishing community of personal sites of blogs, of people just posting what they want to post, and most importantly doing this on a site they own, even if that means posting to a smaller audience has been really enjoyable. The idea of owning what you create and who you are on the internet - not letting someone else own it, is really appealing. I guess that's the drive behind the POSSE movement too.
So all of that was just sort of marinading away in my head, as a thing I maybe, sorta, oughta get round to.
And all this was finally given some impetus by a blog post from Louie Mantia. That blog post was 'How to make a Damn Website'. Published back in March, I think I found It around mid-May. In that post Louie only talks a little about why you should build a website, but really helpfully to me, talks at length, and simply, about how to build a damn website. And it seemed, from how Louie described it, as something that I could actually do.
It's easy to forget how simple a website can be. A website can be just one page. It doesn't even need CSS. You don't need a content management system like Wordpress. All you have to do is write some HTML and drag that file to a server over FTP.
For years people have tried to convince us that this is the "hard" way of making a website, but in reality, it may be the easiest.
And so I started to do it. I followed Louie's instructions and built a website.
Well, not of all his instructions, and not all at once. I played around with it in unpublished html files for a while before registering this domain and actually
But the important thing about that post was that it got me started. It really is just a great post. So Mr. Mantia, if you ever happen to read this, thank you
Since then I've realised just how much there is to learn, how many place there are to learn this stuff, and how many people there are willing to share what they know to help others learn. Were I to start doing this all over, or giving advice to someone else doing the same, I would certainly point them towards the newly published web-book 'HTML for People' by Blake Watson. This takes the themes from Louis post, and runs with them, delivering a beautifully presented, detailed and easy to follow guide to anyone wanting to learn some HTML and build a webpage. It's free, it appears to be an absolute labour of love and I don't think I could recommend it highly enough.
The response to the book seems to have been really positive, and rightfully so. It's been fun seeing people react to it the same way and use it as their springboard to start doing this too. In the spirit of the web as place built on links, I'll shout a fellow Steve (of sorts) doing the same thing, Estebantxo. It's heartening to know there are others just starting out doing this, when so many other seem to have been doing it for half a lifetime.
So that's it really, that's kind of why and how I'm doing this. I'm literally just typing this up in Apple Notes, pasting it into a HTML file, and uploading it to a server. And in doing so I've built a damn website.
The Walking Dead..live...again.

Ah. The Walking Dead TV show. Like it's titular protagonists, it just never quite really dies, does it?
I had intended to give up on The Walking Dead, I really had. I'd been with the show since the minute Rick Grimes woke up, way back in Season 1 in 2010(!). The first few series were truly excellent, and that quality stayed high right up until somewhere until Season 6 or 7. (Why'd they have to do Abraham dirty like that??) Still I stuck with it through Rick's departure in Season 9, and even as the show limped on to its anticlimactic conclusion with Season 11. It seems I was one of very few, as the shows viewer numbers cratered after Season 7.
I had high hopes for the first spin-off, Fear the Walking Dead, debuting as it did whilst the main series was riding high. The initial premise of following a dysfunctional family navigating the early days of the outbreak was appealing But by series 3 that show too staggered off into convoluted, confusing and incoherent storylines (Daniels Alzheimers/fugues state/PTSD??) and failed to keep it's best characters (John Dorie!). Still, ever the glutton for punishment I persisted with that show too, for all 8 increasingly pointless seasons.
So that was it, after 13 years, and 20 seasons of TV, I was finally finished with The Walking Dead. Put a pointy thing through my head, I was done.
…
But then AMC went and released a min-series, The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live. Shit title aside, I was curious, against my better judgement, to see just what exactly happened to Rick after that bridge exploded. The answer turned out to not be particularly exciting, but was well enough told and it was good to see Rick back. With that last dangling plot line finally tied up, I was happy to let this particularly zombie universe rest.
…
Then of course AMC released another mini-series The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon. And well, another six episodes won't hurt. After all, who wouldn't be intrigued by Daryl Dixon, in France, escorting a nun and her zombie apocalypse messiah nephew (obviously!) to the Mont St. Michel. I was.
And well, it was actually pretty good. And now there's a season 2, and I appear to be back in again. Damn you everliving zombieswalkers!….