Three Years of Things You Otter Know
Looking back and looking ahead
We have a couple well-established traditions here at Things You Otter Know Incorporated.
The first is me disappearing off the face of Substack for weeks at a time without notice (and we’ll get to this in a second).
The second are these year-end Spotify wrapped-esque Substack recap posts that I still (how?!) have not found a snazzy title for, even though all the joy in my life revolves around me coming up with snazzy titles for things.
We did this wrap-up thing in 2022:
…and we did it again at the end of last year, 2023 (are you keeping up?)
This exercise is more for me than anything or anyone else. I spend a decent chunk of my year hacking away at this silly little Substack, and part of the reason I started it in the first place was to encourage me to write on a regular basis. It has kind of sort of worked. I’m now three years deep into a project that I initially supposed would last three weeks, given my history of starting projects and never seeing them through. And you may recall that there was a point around halfway through the year when I considered abandoning it altogether. But now all I want to do is keep it alive.
On to the stats:
Some stats!
Aka the one time a year I do math.
42 posts in total, including this one! That doubles the 21 I sent in 2023. (This means I’ve been writing more regularly which is massive news for me personally.)
Roughly 47,000 words total, excluding this post (I haven’t finished this one yet). This is nearly 10,000 more than I wrote in 2023.
The longest post at 3,286 words was my Significant Otters interview with Ivi Hua, the only SO of the year, and probably the last one for the time being, unless someone out there decides to publish a book for some odd reason.
About 8,400 total views! Had 5,000 last year. Lemme tell ya, the dam is growing!
Some faves:
I made a concerted effort this year to write about stuff that made me happy—but in a way that kept you interested instead of bored. My fave posts of the year other than the ones listed below include 1) this on Liam Payne; and a complaint on the state of journalism in 2024 (it hasn’t aged a day).
SPORTS: College football (expect another one of these in January, after the College Football Playoff wraps up!). The Super Bowl. Women’s college basketball and Caitlin Clark. The WNBA and Caitlin Clark. (This truly was the year of Caitlin Clark for me.) I kept the hockey yapping to a minimum, are you proud of me. And then some Olympics track and field stuff.
MUSIC: Here’s an ode to the Killers. A piece on the Canadian Grammys. Then a takedown of Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums list. Taylor Swift dropped a double album, I spent a week banging my head against the wall trying to write about it in a way that didn’t repeat what all the professional reviewers were saying, and I think the last paragraph of my TTPD essay is one of my fave things I’ve ever written. I am very proud of this piece on Let It Be (no, not that Let It Be) that I have been trying to write in my head since I fell in love with the Mats 2.5 years ago. Conversely, I finally got to write a U2 thinkpiece after years of waiting for the right time to do so, and if I really hated all my Otters I would fill this entire Substack with U2 thinkpieces. Oh, and Linkin Park revived themselves!
ANYWAYS. As I was saying. I took the holidays off from Things You Otter Know because I was with family, hence my absence.
And unlike in 2023 I decided not to send any song or albums of the year lists out to y’all, because I felt like I hadn’t consumed nearly enough new stuff, and I didn’t want to give you, like, a half-assed list of the 4.72 new albums I actually remembered to listen to more than thrice. This is really a shame, it apparently was a great year for music, and I wish I had more bandwidth to parse through it all.
I have technically been waiting for 2025 since I was nine years old, because that’s when “22” by Taylor Swift came out, and I would always dream of walking down King Street on my 22nd birthday—September 13, 2025, take note—blasting that song at max volume and annoying the bejeezus of the white collar workers around me.
But now I am older and very much looking forward to that day, because it means time is passing and the end of my life is basically imminent.
I anticipate 2025 will be a massive year, personally and professionally. We’ll get to the actual oh, here’s how my year went and here’s how I want the next year to go rambles in due course, but for now I just wanna tell you:
Happy New Year, dearest Otter, and as always, thanks for reading Things You Otter Know, which returns for its 4th season on TUESDAY, JANUARY 7TH, 2025!!!
I’m stoked to return to that twice-a-week, 1,000-word operation you know and (hopefully) love. This project has essentially become a chronology of my early 20s now. In all of its growth and pain and stupidity. Essential reading it sure ain’t.
Like, some kids have cool passion projects. They code leets and start nonprofits and become directors of the universe or whatever. Then there’s me trying to write 1,000 goofy words a week.
But I’m consistently blown away by how many of you have engaged with Things You Otter Know, seen yourselves in it, even learned stuff from it. 204 Otters! Across 25 US states! Five continents! 20 countries! In as far away as South Korea! My word. I have absolutely no idea how to best express my gratitude… so I think I’m just gonna keep writing. You seem to enjoy when I do that.