Sufficiency Top 100 Update
New List (BOLD = New Addition)
- First Robotics Competition
- Emotion
- In Rainbows
- Fahrenheit 451
- House
- Mario Kart Wii
- I Saw the TV Glow
- Slay the Spire
- Tetris DX
- Berserk
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: End of Evangelion
- Pokemon Trading Card Game
- One Piece
- Jackbox 7
- Us Against You
- Secret Hitler
- Balatro
- Ocarina
- Everything Everywhere All At Once
- Wallflower
- Hundreds of Beavers
- Kung-Fu Hustle
- Catch-22
- The Great Gatsby
- The Rocky Horror Picture Show
- Golf With Your Friends
- Speed Racer
- Perfect Blue
- Between the World And Me
- Vagabond
- The Lord of the Rings
- Tango in the Night
- American Football
- Before Sunset
- Synecdoche, New York
- The Poisonwood Bible
- The Secret History
- Today Tonight Tomorrow
- Revue Starlight
- Invisible Women
- The Goldfinch
- The Fifth Season
- Kaguya-Sama Love is War
- Lawrence of Arabia
- Seven Samurai
- Social Network
- Harakiri
- OK Computer
- Action Button Reviews Boku no Natsuyasumi
- Jacob Geller
- Silent Hill 2
- It’s Such A Beautiful Day
- Mulholland Drive
- Brat
- You Will Never Know Why
- Hanagatami
- Celeste
- 98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare
- Hamlet
- Hunger
- Normal People
- Totoro
- Hamilton
- Persona 3 Portable
- Nathan For You
- Enter the Gungeon
- Dog Day Afternoon
- Glass Beach
- Haikyuu
- Chrono Trigger
- The Matrix
- Come and See
- Station Eleven
- Titanic
- Moulin Rouge
- Avatar
- Princess Mononoke
- For Emma, Forever Ago
- The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place
- Funeral
- Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse
- La La Land
- Connections
- Danganronpa V3
- Bloom into You
- Symphony of the Night
- The Double Life of Veronique
- Paddington 2
- Clone Hero
- My Brilliant Friend
- Demon Copperhead
- 10 Things I Hate About You
- JFK
- Welcome to the Black Parade
- Brat Internet Culture
- The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild
- Shin Megami Tensei V Vengeance
- Folklore
- Gilmore Girls
- Succession
*To be clear, I am only writing about what I want to write about. Not all new entries get a writeup here.
100. Succession
Succession will probably make it a lot further in next year’s list, but alas, I am still working my way through it (currently halfway through season 2). Regardless, what I’ve seen so far is enthralling, beautifully crafted episodes of bad people in a constant power struggle.
99. Gilmore Girls
Probably far better than the placement on this list suggests (or maybe it really shits the bed in the latter half), but I couldn’t really put it higher considering I’ve only seen the first three seasons. Just good ol middle class white woman television comfort food, the conflict in the show is small but it all feels so real, I’ll write a big piece on this one once I finish.
98. Folklore
Modern day T-Swizzle is high key a fraud (one good song in the past two albums is a crazy terrible ratio, though Guilty as Sin is pretty great), but the Folklore/Evermore run is phenomenal, pop folk amplified by early day Swift’s astounding ability of universal resonance.
97. Shin Megami Tensei V Vengeance
A turn based RPG that hates you, from its hostile architecture to its brutal boss encounters, but still enticingly accessible enough to keep you marching through its post apocalyptic hellscapes, all grounded by a philosophically rooted narrative. This is my first mainline SMT game, and if the other games maintain the power of this core gameplay while having an actually competent story, next year could have one of these games much higher on the list.
95. Brat and the Culture of Addiction
Alexander Avila is the best political video essayist around, consistently entertaining and witty but also has a way of distilling the ideas of ancient philosophers and modern sociologists into a form far more digestible to our modern day rotted brains. Brat and the Culture of Addiction is ostensibly about Charli XCX’s excellent era defining album, but is really about our chronic need to fill the void in our lives with something, anything. There’s a moment in this video that’s probably my favorite video essay moment ever.
94. Welcome to the Black Parade
I maybe like Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge as an album more, but the title song here is undeniable. The world will never take my heart.
93. JFK
Masterful – it’s not really about the (inaccurate) history of the events surrounding the JFK assassination as it is about learning to distrust a fundamentally broken system that is designed purely for profit at the cost of countless lives. What is past is prologue.
92. 10 Things I Hate About You
*Pick for all the girly classics – Legally Blonde, Mean Girls, Clueless, and so on
These are all great, sharply written while also deeply kind to their characters, watched these all with a phenomenal group of people.
91. My Brilliant Friend
This and its surrounding entries are dedicated to my bff <3 (the book is fine, I guess). In response to your writing about this novel, have a passage from this novel as a treat.
“Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but–further–she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, I heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, of the confusion of the oral; it had the vivid orderliness that I imagined would belong to conversation if one were so fortunate as to be born from the head of Zeus and not from the Grecos, the Cerullos.”
Thank you for always pushing me to be better and putting up with my bullshit.
89. Clone Hero
Rhythm games are obviously great in how they force you to pay the utmost attention to them in order to succeed on any level, making you leave behind any worries and stresses behind in the process. Everyone has their favorite, Clone Hero just makes sense to my brain, the near infinite amount of user generated content also helps.
75. Moulin Rouge
*Entry for the Broadway musical
Truth, beauty, freedom, love. The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. The Bohemian ideals are the Sufficiency ideals. Watching with some of the best people cancels out the deeply problematic parts. Let the loud pop music bleed into your broken heart.
71. The Matrix
As much as I love The Matrix Resurrections, I’m replacing it with the OG because how could I not? A pitch perfect film, a smorgasbord of philosophy and anime and queerness coalesces into the best action flick probably ever.
63. Hamilton
I love Hamilton, to the point that I wrote a bad 20 page essay on it. Not all writing is meant to be seen, after all. But because I’m lazy, I’ll self plagiarize and copy the intro to that essay here.
While studying for a Calculus exam, I, for reasons beyond my comprehension, decided to listen to the Original Broadway Cast recording of the blockbuster musical Hamilton. Maybe this was just because Lin-Manuel Miranda (writer of the entire show, Hamilton in the original cast) is more interesting than L’Hopital, but looking back on it, this is an entirely reasonable decision – Hamilton is exciting, Hamilton is energetic, Hamilton is a sports film projected through the eyes of a theater kid who read a dry tome of a biography of a man relegated to a few sentences in U.S. history textbooks and instantly knew that he would spend the next seven years writing a pop rap R&B musical about him. It’s a two and a half hour hype song, an ode to hard work, if Hamilton could write his way out of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean to become one of the most powerful men during the creation of a global superpower, then you can figure out how to do related rates problems. And it worked at hyping Hamilton up – there were plans to remove him from the $10 bill until the musical came out, at which point he was so beloved that there would be riots in the streets if ol Hammy was replaced. But more than being a brilliant piece of pop art that both wine moms and gay teenagers adore, Hamilton is a brilliant piece of propaganda. It is the richest text of the 2010s, not because of its layers of wordplay and motifs but because of what it omits to tell its story of a young immigrant rising up to become a founding father in the greatest nation on Earth. Hamilton the man is America, all of its strongest attributes and deepest flaws personified, and in the act of glorifying him, Hamilton perpetuates the eternal lie, the lie that the systems in place here work for the people, the lie that through the structure of checks and balances, the moral arc of our nation bends towards justice.
59. Hamlet
The best Shakespeare, fairly obviously his magnum opus.
55. You Will Never Know Why
My soundtrack for the late ride back home, after nights of long partying with friends, the notes fill the strange void that was so overflowing with the joy of other people a few minutes ago. Don’t you make me smile if you don’t intend to. The traffic lights turn to flashing yellows. Change is inevitable. Maybe that’s okay.
51. Silent Hill 2
“In my restless dreams, I see that town. Silent Hill.”
Broken people stuck in a broken place, trying to find that which is already lost.
50. Jacob Geller
The best currently working video essayist, or at least 2nd best depending on how loose your definition of “currently working” is, able to weave together some impossibly different strands into something beautiful. His book “How A Game Lives” is excellent.
49. Boku no Natsuyasumi
Tim Rogers is the best writer that writes about games. I would kill to write half as well as he does, his authorial voice bleeds into every word he’s ever penned. This is a 6 hour video essay ostensibly about Boku no Natsuyasumi, a Japanese PS1 game that was never localized and still hasn’t been translated to English in any capacity, official or otherwise, but it’s actually a beautiful reflection on nostalgia and memory and existentialism framed through the lens of this mostly forgotten Playstation game.
48. OK Computer
Would’ve gone on the original list, but I already had In Rainbows on the list and I didn’t want two Radiohead albums on the list. Now that I’m free of my own stupid rules, I can acknowledge that the album most people consider one of the best ever is good, actually. The stretch from the opening “Airbag” to “Karma Police” is absurdly strong, “Let Down” is a top 3 Radiohead song, “One day, I am gonna grow wings” is the best line they’ve ever written. Such a good depression core album, speaks to the existential angst of a generation going through monumental change in a way that resonates with us living through the AI revolution (obligatory fuck AI), undeniably great.
38. Today Tonight Tomorrow
To be clear, this entry is not for Today Tonight Tomorrow, it’s not quite that good. The book is simply a stand in for all the crappy romance novels I’ve been reading, which you’ll hear more about in December. All I’ll say for now is that I adore trashy tropey romance novels and T^3 is the best — academic rivals to lovers (the best trope), deeply kind to its characters, and even has a good sequel.
36. The Poisonwood Bible
A highlight of the monstrous AP Literature reading list (conjured up by a teacher who liked the postcolonial classics a little too much) that I had to work through — I assure you, my suggestion to read this in a Denny’s on a scorching hot summer day is not ironic, as it really puts you in the same mindset as the characters of the novel.
33. American Football
Midwest Emo living up to its conceptual highs, captures the feeling of being eternally trapped in an area that hates you, surrounded by the ghosts of should’ve and could’ve. Regrets are inescapable if everyone knows everyone.
32. Tango in the Night
Clears Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours by a hair for me, Tango in the Night’s tropical vibes ground the album’s yearning while Rumours is a rocket powered purely by spite and angst. But really, this is here because it was the background noise while I talked to the best person in my life seriously for the first time, whom I love dearly despite her chronic insistence that Pride and Prejudice is a good novel (though, it did lead to the excellent Pride and Prejudice and Zombies).
26. Golf With Your Friends
The ultimate Discord game, instantly understandable, infinite content, always fun but never requiring enough thought as to be more than a background process while conversation flows.
25. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
A campy, silly, beautifully queer horror musical as a canvas for connection – there’s nothing quite like yelling “asshole” and “slut” at a screen for a couple hours.
24. The Great Gatsby
An uncompromisingly raw depiction of the U.S. through the eyes of the emotionless elite, who still fall for the trap of sacrificing everything for the shadow of a dream. The great American novel.
17. Balatro
Just a perpetual dopamine machine, preys on the most primordial parts of your self but also requires some real thought unlike trash like Vampire Survivors.
16. Secret Hitler
Sure, it’s a special kind of torture, being trapped on a cramped bus for a long time, your life temporarily held in the hands of a sketchy, underpaid, probably drunk driver. But all the time I spent on those charter buses earlier this year was beautiful too, burning the time away with social deduction games, passing the ace, and sneaking glances at someone I cared far too much about. Drunk off our laughter and dubious gas station food, the hellish rides passed by in an instant. Blink and you miss it. This entry isn’t really for Secret Hitler, all social deduction is just an elaborate ruse to make you talk to people, consider who they truly are, stare deep into their eyes to see if they’re telling the truth, but something will always be off. The only truth to be found here is the connection made in the process. The real secret hitler was the friends we made along the way. Maybe the quality of life wasn’t the best on these rides, but the quality of life was, sparks form so much easier during a conclusion, and here, with films softly ignored in the background, the sun leaving to come back to a dimmer tomorrow, and the chatter dying down as the day grew long, I felt content.
13. One Piece (Pre Time Skip)
Now that I’m mostly caught up, I can confidently say I don’t really like post time skip outside of Whole Cake Island. But regardless of how it flops later, the best of pre time skip One Piece is the best of all of shounen, character driven to the point that everything matters because of how much you care for the straw hat crew. Again, Water 7/Enies Lobby is a perfect slice of storytelling, probably won’t be topped ever within its genre.
9. Tetris DX
Hates you just enough to not be modern Tetris with its modern niceties of drop lines and holding and different friction points but loves you enough to not be OG Tetris with its absurd speed scaling, the perfect middle ground between two eras. An immaculate piece of game design.
8. Slay the Spire
The best game (ignoring how badly balanced the watcher is), a constant battle of risk and reward, instantly perceived, never fully understood.
4. Fahrenheit 451 (UPDATE)
“Every man, I think, reads one book in his life” – E.B. White on Walden
Forever and ever my one book, the one that irrevocably changed the trajectory of my life. I’m half English major now because of one fateful day where I learned the truth of the world through one novella.
1. FRC
I guess this might not exactly synchronize with your idea of “art”, but labels constrict and sports are a large part of our cultural mythos so screw you. Anyways, this is probably a permanent #1, robotics demands everything from you and gives more in return. I’ve never been particularly good at the whole emotions thing, most of my feelings are a dull whisper, but FRC competitions made it feel natural for me, a tidal wave of ecstasy and euphoria that I can never translate to words no matter how hard I try.