The Internet Personified: My best life-stuff this year

A round up of my favourites in 2024

Dec 19, 2024

Some years in addition to my massive best books I read list (I’m aiming for the week between Christmas and New Year’s to send that out because I’m still reading so many good books. This is actually a really good month for reading because activities are slow and people have gone out of town and it’s COLD) I also send out a round-up of the best of the rest of 2024. Between reading and writing, here are my favourite — I’m not sure what to call them. Things? Experiences? Life stuff? Hmm… life stuff— from this year.

Going up into another year. (I’m actually quite cheerful but resting bitch face worked with my OUTFIT, you see.) (Hey, you can see the glasses chain I mention further down in this photo!)

Subscriptions

This was the year I doubled down on subscriptions. In addition to continuing my Urban Sports Club membership, I also added another subscription app to my phone, which is described by most as “Urban Sports Club for culture.” I like Abundo—that’s what it’s called, Abundo—because for a monthly membership of 56 euros, K and I get two tickets to whatever’s on that day. And they have good offerings, from cinema to theatre to live gigs and so on. In fact, we’ve become so reliant on the app, we’re rarely looking outside it for entertainment, which is lazy of us but this is so easy. It’s not the best thing in the world (limited selection, weird cancellation fees, can only have two bookings at a time, even if one is six months away etc) but it has filled a much needed gap and also makes us get out and do so many more things. Good for culture tourists. Sadly, right now it’s only available in Berlin, Hamburg and Stockholm, but if you live in any of those cities, here’s a code you can use for a free month (and 10 euros off for me, win win).

Besides Urban Sports, my favourite local yoga studio which is on it was offering a summer fare of 49 euros for unlimited classes, which worked out cheaper. I love Lotos Yoga which has the added advantage of just being a ten minute walk away. It has two studios and the instructors are all, uniformly, really nice. (Okay, I had one not great one and she was Indian so I felt a bit guilty about not liking her, y’know solidarity sister and all that but her style was just not my style, so it’s likely just a compatibility issue.) I also like their studios a lot, there’s another new yoga studio (it’s where I live, it’s all vegan restaurants and yoga studios, like a very cold urban Goa) much closer to me but they a) don’t have a locker room and you walk right into their changing room and b) they have a draft coming from under the door and so unless you’re lucky enough to get a spot that’s further away from the door and also close to the instructor, it’s freezing. I’ve been doing a reasonable amount of flopping around on my mat this year, not like crazy fitness levels, but enough that my joints feel less stiff and I have more energy. I regret to inform you that exercise is actually good for you and it’s not just propaganda. Blargh.

Earlier in the summer, I subscribed on a whim to the London Review of Books and swiftly became obsessed. I loved how they took these sometimes super academic and obscure books and gave them really dense reviews, so almost as good as reading the real thing. I loved how it made me think deeper about issues I likely would not have clicked on if presented to me as a tab somewhere. You can’t click on all the links but you can read a magazine cover to cover. I loved print so much, the actual physical feel of a magazine in your hands that K got me a subscription to Harper’s magazine for my birthday and my dad to the New Yorker. (well, he sent me cash and that’s what I spent it on.) I have now spent most days on the respective websites, reading the archives, waiting for my physical copies to start arriving in the mail. Also, I love getting things in the post and so this just adds to the general “oooh I got a present!” feel of it. It’s a lot of magazines and will require some intellectual bench pressing this year but I’m not worried about novels, I will always find time to read them and these magazines can plug the non-fiction hole in my life. Besides, I can now be that insufferable person at a party: “Well actually, I was reading in last week’s New Yorker/LRB/Harper’s magazine…” SO MUCH TO LOOK FORWARD TO.

Movies I Liked

This year I rewatched a lot of TV but I also made up for that by watching films. This was in part thanks to one of my close friends who is a filmmaker and so goes for movies as often as I read books and sometimes we make it a date, also because of the aforementioned Abundo membership which has a tie up with one cinema which happens to have all the newest films. (That’s my plan for the next few weeks, just fill them up with cinema. If any more movies make my list, I’ll add them to another issue.)

Anyway, I just counted my Letterboxd list and I have seen 41 movies this year, which is pretty good, considering. Here are the ones I liked the most:

Joyland (lovely interiority to this movie which I liked very much.)

Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahaani (I know! So weird! But it was this really good pastiche of really OTT Bollywood and somehow I—and K, more discerning than me—both vastly enjoyed it.)

American Fiction (made for me satire movie about writing and publishing.)

Io Capitano (beautifully moving story about “illegal” immigration and what it takes.)

The Substance (blew me right out of the water, perhaps my favourite movie of the year.)

Anora (or is Anora my favourite movie of the year?)

The Wild Robot (or is it The Wild Robot?)

The Holdovers (one of the best Christmas movies I’ve ever seen, dethroning The Family Stone in my personal list.)

Past Lives (so sweet, so sad)

Riefenstahl (a documentary about Hitler’s favourite filmmaker which coupled with the reading I’ve been doing really hit the spot.)

And movies I didn’t

Perfect Days: This Wim Wenders film about a toilet cleaner in Japan who is just so happy with his life as a toilet cleaner, which fine. But nothing happens! It’s a screensaver of a movie! I liked one Letterboxd review a lot which I’m screenshotting here.

Laapata Ladies: Look I thought it was a cute made-for-Netflix film not India’s entry to the Oscars.

Poor Thing: Deeply creeped out by Emma Stone being a very sexual child.

Things I Lost

I deleted all my social media apps off my phone (not including Bluesky, which is lovely but is still so new that it can’t yet count as a timesuck. You can find me here.) (Or Substack Notes which I use from time to time and Reddit which I rarely post on but I do read.) Which means I use Instagram from my browser only redownloading it for travel and dutifully removing it again. I wasn’t enjoying how much time I spent just idly flicking through Instagram like a worry bead. Who even are all the people I follow? I just want to see my friends and my friends rarely post. Then yesterday Facebook kicked me off my account because of some fraud Instagram account connecting to it, which I didn’t know was possible without my two factor authentication, and I’m not sure they will let me back on. (The only way to dispute it is to go via Meta chat which is only available to Meta verified subscribers which is $15 a month, um, no thank you.) It’s a bit sad, but FB was seeing the end of days anyway so maybe this is the kick in the pants I need to finally quit it.

Things I Found

A good year for scavenging things off the streets of Berlin! I think my most used found item this year has been a stainless steel frying pan from IKEA that someone scorched badly and then threw out. I carried it home on the train, waving it like a weapon and then used baking soda and aluminium foil to scrub it shiny clean and new. Stainless steel pans are amazing, if you heat them up enough they work just like non-stick without the harmful microplastics.

Relatedly, my mum and I found a wooden chopping board at a junk store for just 1 euro and that has become my second most used kitchen item. What I like about both these non-plastic things is the heft of them, they’re so satisfyingly heavy and how they don’t leak little black things when I wash them like our old plastic chopping board and sometimes our Teflon frying pan which is reaching the end of its life after just two years.

Life changing purchases

The last time I was in Delhi, I was at my friend Pragya’s house and she had this coffee machine right next to her bed. When I laughed at it, she looked very solemn and said, “I need coffee as soon as I wake up.” Hang on a minute, I thought. So do I!

I mentioned this to K, and we considered putting the drip machine in the bedroom but the drip machine doesn’t do great coffee so after a while, I forgot about it, but he didn’t, and one day he came home with a second hand electric Bialetti he found on eBay. Now my mornings are luxurious, I wake up, hit the button on the machine (already pre-loaded the night before, my mug with sugar and oat milk sitting covered up on my bedside table), snooze until the coffee is done, then sit up in bed, propped against a bolster and spend the morning reading the news on my laptop with my coffee right next to me, until I’m ready to emerge and face the day. I could set the alarm on the coffee maker, but it’s a bit fiddly to reset every day and I find I prefer to wake up gently (I use a sunrise alarm clock for normal days, and my phone alarm for “get out of bed now!” days) and then ease into it.

I’ve really been into Grannycore fashion these days. I just find a certain sort of older woman, 60+, dresses more interestingly here than the kids. I’m so bored of seeing all black everywhere I go and these ladies are wearing bright fuschia, dark greens, spotted hats, they just look so cool that I find myself turning to look at them. One of the Grannycore accessories I have adopted is a glasses chain especially in this weather where my glasses get fogged up as soon as I go into a warm room from a cold outside. I drop my glasses on an elegant silver chain and then lift them up again. I feel very Dowager Countess/Lady Catherine deBourgh.

A special mention for our cold weather MVP which is a heated throw. I found a nice one on Amazon but as luck would have it, K’s mum had just bought one and didn’t like it, so she passed it on to us. It’s the coziest thing, so soft, so warm. You can unplug it and carry it around from room to room and also, you save a ton on heating because some days I don’t even turn the heat on, I just collect it under my blanket. I’m sitting under it now writing to you.

The Internet Personified Cats of the Year

I have only given the prestigious TIPCOTY award once before, and it was to Olga but Squishy has really been a paragon of virtue this year so I decided to give it to both of them. A joint award, and well deserved in my totally unbiased opinion.

And that’s my list! What was your favourite anything this year?

The Internet: Personified

Discussion about this post