Siskoid Awards 2024 - Technical Achievement Ceremony

As usual, the Siskoid Awards are followed by a Technical Achievement Ceremony, hosted by someone famous parallel to the main event, and by technical, we mean a grab bag of categories and jokes that would have made a mockery out of the actual ceremony.

And to host, I like to put someone who's had a big year in that spot. Traditionally, it should have been Margaret Qualley this year (Poor Things, Drive-Away Dolls, Kinds of Kindness, The Substance), but she wouldn't return my calls. Next up was Glen Powell (Hit Man, Anyone But You, Twisters, the upcoming Running Man), making him the first man to host my dumb gala. Who says I can't throw the other team a bone? So I'm handing it off to Glen, let's get this show started.

Best role-playing-related product of 2024 (played, not released): Torg Eternity's Dr. Y and the Jiangshi & Kanawa Operations! To just quote from my original review, it's "quite the mouthful, but that's because it's really two products smooshed together, and that's perhaps the unfortunate thing. I'll explain. The Operations back-half has some interesting ideas about pulling off con jobs and heists in Torg Eternity, ideas that feel inspired by the Leverage RPG and perfect for the intrigue of the game's Pan-Pacifica Cosm. It seems a bit abstract at times and I wish there had been more examples to explain how to pull all of this off, but mostly, I wish the Dr Y adventure in the FRONT half had made use of it! There's no real connection between the two halves, however, except that they both appear to be material cut from the Pan-Pacifica releases. That said, Dr Y and the Jiangshi is a great 2-Act adventure that really puts the players in the driver's seat when it comes to dealing with the Contagion once and for all(ish). This is an element Torg Eternity leaned away from for obvious real-world reasons, but you can at least make the players' characters directly responsible for its cure! Infiltration, zombie hordes, and drastic measures make this one of the better scenarios I've read for Pan-Pacifica, and I'm always looking for opportunities to make my group's actions have an impact on the global stage. Whether you're going to use the Operations rules or not (and I think you could at least cannibalize how to handle spy/thief stuff from it), the adventure itself is well worth the price of admission."

Best role-playing moment of 2024: I left this to my players and they decided it should be the big ball scene that acts as pre-climax in Torg Eternity's When Cosms Collide. Given we played this in January of last year, and that there have been more than 20 sessions since, we have to agree it left an impact (or I just lost "it" for the rest of the year). The lesson is that these players like big casts of characters and a chance at social interactions. I'm sure the fact that a big dance is an unusual event for a role-playing game has something to do with it too. Big moves that actually shook up the world - enabling the Russian civil war, curing the zombie plague, downing a number of enemy zones - never had a chance.

Best movie trailer of 2024: Ohhh it was almost Superman, but at the end of the day, it's gotta be 28 Years Later, not so much because of its images, but thanks to its use of an old WWI-era recording of Kipling's "Boots", which I'll be very sorry to NOT hear in the film itself. Powerful, creepy, emotional, a real exercise in mood, and it makes me more excited for this late sequel than a normal "clip show" trailer would otherwise have made me.

The Superman trailer DOES kind of win the award for best memes coming out of it. In particular, let's mention the fan-made Lego version, and the now-famous one where Streaky takes Krypto's role:

 

 

Best and Worst Geek-Related Decisions of 2024
-The Apex Monkey goes to... All-In (DC Comics): I think Mark Waid taking the lead on DC's artistic direction has mostly been a hit, and series coming out of the All-In launches and relaunches have for the most part been winners. I love the Absolute titles (as mentioned last week), and anything written by Waid himself is worth the read. Tom Taylor has moved to Detective Comics, which means I'm reading that now, and Nightwing remains interesting. The Superman books are poppin'. The various (mini?) series based around the new JLA Watchtower intrigue. That new Metamorpho series is very retro-cool. Obviously, I'm not reading everything, but I haven't been excited about comics like this for a long while.
-The Nadir Monkey goes to... Star Trek's decision makers who decided to sink both animated series within a year. Prodigy rescued the Voyager cast from the bad taste it left in some fans' mouths, while Lower Decks was (is) the best NuTrek series, no matter what Strange New Worlds fans would say. Being animated, it could have lasted for years and years, but it's not meant to be. I still hold out hope that they're hiding the future release of an "Upper Decks" series or something, only rebranding after the characters' promotions (how is this crew doing better than Harry Kim?!), so don't wake me from my dream.

I'd like to end the ceremony with a few movie statistics and prizes, courtesy of Letterboxd, which says I logged 50 entries ON THE DOT (446 new), a slow year for me, but as you'll see, I made up for it with reading. Here are the top 10 stars who most appeared on my screens:

As with last year, podcasts kinds of ruled the day in these departments. I did a show on Denzel, so he's HIGHLY represented. The Kurt Russell-specific show should keep him in the list year after year. Keitel and Mikkelsen are there legitimately, though. Bringing up the rear are all P.T. Anderson collaborators, so we're back in podcast land. The same principle holds true if we look at directors, but not as much:

I did episodes on Ridley Scott and PTA, but otherwise, these are just normal selections. I'm a big fan of Mike Leigh's, and he's won the top spot TWO YEARS IN A ROW! Well, unless I do a rewatch, I'm running out of material I haven't seen for him to pull a hat trick (even here, a number of shorts are included). I sometimes go through filmographies on purpose, but not so much this year. Makoto Shinkai is perhaps the exception (Criterion Channel dropped a bunch of his early stuff), and our Mad Max marathon took care of George Miller.

If Letterboxd is my movie tracking platform, GoodReads has that job for my reading. I managed 90 books this year (almost 60 proper books when you discount graphic novels and RPG manuals, though I admit a lot of them were short reads). Here's a graphic of the 2024's reads:

I spent a lot of time reading Fantastic Four comics last summer, so the page count is still massive, especially once I dovetailed into Godland and spent a bit more time with Black Hammer). But my decision to read all the Doctor Who Target novelisations certainly paid dividends at the end of the year. I've set my goal higher for 2025 because just the Targets could easily yield 100 books, though I read other things between "seasons" that would slow me down. We'll see.

And there you have it, folks. Another year, another completely meaningless awards show. My thanks to Master Powell and thank YOU for sticking with us all these years. The Siskoid Awards will return in a year's time, personal survival willing.