Weekend Reads (January 4): “The Oregon Trail,” Thomas the Tank Engine, the Disappearing Web, 2025 Predictions
Recommended weekend reading material for January 4, 2025.
Welcome to the first “Weekend Reads” of 2025. If you’re new to Opus, I compile a list of articles every week in order to give my subscribers something interesting and thought-provoking to read over the weekend.
If you’re of a certain age, the words “The Oregon Trail” will probably summon forth a wave of nostalgia. (For myself, I recall endless hours spent trying to hunt buffalo and avoid dysentery on my school’s Apple II.) Created over fifty years ago, the game has been a massive success and not insignificant part of many people’s childhoods, but it’s also generated some controversy.
Some say The Oregon Trail launched the entire category of educational gaming. Its innovations became video games staples. If you’ve ever named a character in your gaming party, for example, you can thank The Oregon Trail, which popularised the very idea that you might name companions. But its biggest effects extend far beyond games. The Oregon Trail shaped entire generations’ understanding of the US. Although many educators celebrate the game for getting children excited about history, it’s also faced sharp criticism for taking a colonialist perspective, and ignoring those whose land was stolen by settlers. Developers have worked to include the stories of oppressed people in more recent iterations, but the debate continues over whether there is a more fundamental problem with turning the violence of westward expansion into a playful quest.
Via 1440.
The Associated Press highlights some of the significant celebrities, artists, politicians, and personalities who died in 2024. Their list includes actors Carl Weathers and Louis Gossett Jr., comedian Richard Lewis, comic creator Akira Toriyama, journalist Robert MacNeil, and stuntwoman Jeannie Epper.
Britt Allcroft, the producer responsible for bringing Thomas the Tank Engine to TV, died earlier this week. She was 81 years old.
Thomas started out as a character in a series of books dating back to the 1940s by Rev. Wilbert Awdry, an English Anglican minister and train enthusiast. Awdry's The Railway Series revolved around a cast of anthropomorphic trains, including Thomas and his friends Gordon, James and Percy, all chuffing along on the imaginary island of Sodor.
But Allcroft made Thomas an international sensation, starting in the mid-1980s with her TV adaptation narrated by Ringo Starr.
We went through a major Thomas phase with our kids, and owned more than a few DVDs, not to mention toys and other paraphernalia. Those early Thomas & Friends episodes really were quite delightful, due in large part to their elaborate physical sets. They possessed so much more detail and personality than the later CGI-produced episodes.
Related: Watch the trailer for An Unlikely Fandom, a documentary about the adult fans of Thomas and his friends on the Island of Sodor.
As far as Christmas movies go, Jennifer Ouellette makes the case for The Long Kiss Goodnight, an under-appreciated action movie from 1996 starring Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson.
Yes, there are some cheesy elements and the film’s action is frequently over-the-top — but not any more so than countless other hugely popular action movies, particularly those from the 1980s and 1990s. It’s all that wickedly sharp dialogue, expert pacing, and strong performances from the cast that makes the movie fire on all cylinders. Anchoring it all is the bickering dynamic and powerful bond between Sam/Charly and Mitch. Davis and Jackson have undeniable on-screen chemistry — an essential ingredient for any successful buddy-cop action film — and both are clearly relishing their respective roles.
Writing for The Verge, s.e. smith laments the disappearing web.
The same accessibility and low barriers to entry, that same easy come — I can set up a website in the time it takes me to finish this sentence — can also morph into an easy go. A social media account can be locked or banned for a real or perceived terms of service violation in the blink of an eye, a venerable feminist publication can abruptly vanish, a news startup can wink out of existence just as quickly as it rose to prominence, and news organizations can nuke decades of music journalism or TV archives at the flick of a switch. Restructured links and a fundamentally broken search infrastructure can shift an article out of view to all but the most determined. I wonder, for example, how long my National Magazine Award-winning column at Catapult will remain accessible online, living as it does at the whims of its owner, an eccentric billionaire.
As AI-generated snippets, overviews, and summaries replace traditional search results, they also begin to undermine the process of linking, which serves as the foundation for the web.
The web represents the largest assembled repository of collective memory, both in the individual web pages hosted and in the links that allow users to traverse them. How will this repository be supported and developed if users rarely make it past the homepages of Google or ChatGPT?
Via The Dispatch.
The good people at ScreenAnarchy have shared their favorite films of 2024.
We asked everyone here what their favorites were, and 24 writers gave a list. On it, a grand total of 96 films, a lot more than last year. That means our votes were spread across a wider field, and 2024 was probably a harder year than most for everyone to keep up with.
The Polygon staff has assembled lists of their most anticipated movies, TV shows, video games, and sci-fi/fantasy novels of 2025. They’ve also shared a list of RPG releases they’re excited about, including one based on Brandon Sanderson’s best-selling novels.
Related: I’ve shared my own list of movies I’m looking forward to seeing in 2025.
Casey Newton shares 15 tech-related predictions for 2025, including a TikTok ban, the start of the AI culture war, and Bluesky and Threads continued rivalry and success. He also reflects on how well his 2024 predictions turned out.
From the Blog
In keeping with tradition, I shared my favorite songs of 2024 on New Year’s Day 2025. The last twelve months brought us ambient classics, otherworldly jams, the return of goth and synth-pop icons, thoughtful post-punk, existential shoegaze, and much, much more.
I agree with John Scalzi when he writes “If you don’t find time for rest and joy the fire will consume you.” So I guess I’ll just say… that these songs brought me rest and joy in 2024 in ways both gross and subtle, and even in some ways that I’ll never be able to fully explain.
Related: Check out all of my year-end mixes from years past.
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