➥ AADL 2024 Staff Picks: Homepage
➥ AADL 2024 Staff Picks: Words
➥ AADL 2024 Staff Picks: Screens
➥ AADL 2024 Staff Picks: Audio
 

AADL 2024 STAFF PICS: PULP LIFE
Games, apps, sports, outdoors, and any other kind of hard-to-categorize cultural and life activities:

AMANDA S. — LIBRARY TECHNICIAN

The Northern Lights
In 2024, I saw some spectacular lights, more than once, for the first time in over 20 years. It’s worth at least ONE TIME in your life to stay up late or head out in the middle of the night to go find them. There are apps to help keep you in the know! I like using Aurora Alerts.

Sigur Rós Live
My favorite concert this year. I’ve seen them so many times, but this year I saw them perform live with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and it was extra magical. If you have never seen Sigur Rós or the DSO, keep an eye out for upcoming shows. {Website}

AMANDA V. S. — GRAPHIC ARTIST

Art Classes
Taking art classes has allowed me to keep building my skills and exploring new ways to draw. Being involved with and attending events sponsored by organizations and local chapters keeps me inspired and connected to other folks in my areas of practice.

Duolingo
My Duolingo streak — I don’t think I’m actually learning much, but it’s a good distraction.

Detroit Lions
Detroit Lions, man!

DANI G. — BOOK PRO

The Creature Conservancy: Art & Animals
My bestie and I recently went to an event at The Creature Conservancy where we got to meet Tortellini, one of their leopard tortoises, and then paint a picture of her led by a local artist. This event was so much fun, and we got to learn a ton about Tortellini and her life at the conservancy. I think what they are doing has such a ripple effect, and I can't wait to eventually volunteer there one day. {Website}

Holy Bones Art Shows in Ypsi
Holy Bones frequently hosts different art vendor shows at the Ypsilanti Freighthouse throughout the year, and I always end up leaving with something. If you are looking for gifts for people this Christmas (or for yourself), definitely check it out! {Facebook}

Decode Ann Arbor: Around the World in 80 Days Escape Room
For my bachelorette party this year, I made my friends do an escape room with me. Many of them had never done one before, and I was excited to do a bigger one than I have. Decode Ann Arbor's "Around the World in 80 Days" escape room is perfect for first-timers and people who have lots of experience. It spans multiple rooms with lots of puzzles to spread out and solve. Every time I turned around a different pair of girls were solving a puzzle together. There's no timer and you aren't meant to solve every puzzle. I'd love to do it again in the future to solve all the puzzles I didn't get to see the first time! {Website}

ELLEN L. — DESK CLERK

U-M SMTD Student Recitals and Concerts
Did you know that the University of Michigan has one of the best programs for the performing arts in the country? If you’re finding yourself with an abundance of free time in the evening, and you want to spend about an hour and a half supporting local student musicians and experiencing some quality performances for free, then check out the SMTD events calendar for the next recital or large ensemble concert. With everything from the eccentric solo tuba recital to the captivating orchestra concert, the School of Music, Theatre & Dance has something to offer for everyone in Ann Arbor looking to expand their musical interests and knowledge, and these student musicians will appreciate your support! Plus, when that euphonium player whose recital you went to in 2025 makes it big, you can say you’ve been listening to them since before they became famous. How hip and cool of you! {Website}

ELI — LIBRARY DIRECTOR

Chocolate Tahini Shake at Spiedo
Spiedo on Fifth Avenue by the Library (in the long-ago home of Jerusalem Garden, more recently Chela's) has a great menu and everything's a winner, but do not miss their incredible Chocolate Tahini Shake. The consistency of a Wendy's Frosty, it's a very unique treat just packed with rich, velvety flavor in a nice small size. It's vegan, too! {Website}

ELIZABETH S. — LIBRARY TECHNICIAN

Plant Swaps
If you’ve ever had a thriving houseplant, you might know that they soon fill up space, need to be repotted and trimmed, and you soon have several of the same plant. What to do with these spares? Well, I have found immense joy in taking them to community plant swaps and giving them away, or trading for plants or plant supplies. I am once again giving a shout-out to The Planted Life, who again hosted two amazing swaps this year! {Instagram}

EMILY H. — LIBRARY TECHNICIAN

Handmade Websites
Earlier this year, I got really frustrated with the limitations of the content management system where I host my website. Then I had a sudden realization, “Wait!! I used to make my own sites by hand as a teenager! I can learn to do that again!” HTML and CSS have made some evolutionary leaps since I closed my last </p> tag over 20 years ago. Re-learning how to code websites by hand has been both challenging and rewarding. It’s also allowed me to discover a whole online community of people who are into sharing their interests via the handmade web. If social media, crappy AI art, and algorithms have got you down, build a cool little blanket fort on the internet, just for you.

Paper—Just Paper
I don’t want to idealize paper because I know that it’s often made by some heinous industrial processes, but I cannot help but love it. Paper is a miracle. It is the place where human thought becomes something we can touch with our hands. It can be the medium through which we display art—like in printmaking—or it can be art in itself—like in bookbinding and origami. Things made out of paper appeal to our minds and our senses simultaneously. Printing on paper (again, heinous and exploitative processes) is what makes our ideas real. This year I spent a lot of time with paper—typewriting, sending and receiving snail mail, hand-writing journals. I realized that, in some ways, I have been doing all this stuff as an excuse to work with paper. In this imperfect world, I wish to always have a tiny notebook to carry in my pocket and a letter to drop in the mail.

JOSH H. — DESK CLERK

Mothership
Tabletop Roleplaying Game
(2018)
I love tabletop roleplaying games, but the issue I always have is keeping the rules straight. There are some real behemoths out there, and while I enjoy playing them, learning the rules can be a slog. At a cool 44 pages, Mothership is a short, tight, and enjoyable sci-fi horror RPG heavily based on the Alien franchise. I had the absolute delight of routinely getting the crap kicked out of me in session by aliens and terrible luck, only to get critical successes while looking for a possum. My character was a bodyguard, comfortably divorced, from New Jersey, and running a moonshine operation on the ship that none of his scientist co-workers knew about. The limit is truly your imagination. Mothership offers advice for DMs looking to write their own campaigns, or there are prewritten modules that are an absolute blast (I recommend Dying Hard on Hardlight Station for some good Die Hard-inspired action during the holidays). {AADL}

KATIE D.W. – LIBRARY TECHNICIAN

WCTH Radio Hour
My mom discovered these performances over the summer and invited me to join her. Since then, we haven’t missed attending one. The community theater performs a live dramatic reading of an old radio show script. The event is free and open to the public. It’s a fun way to spend the afternoon and I enjoy hearing these old shows brought back to life. {Website}

Hues and Cues
This has been a favorite board game with me and my friends lately. The board is a spectrum of 480 different colors. The object of the game is to get your friends to guess a particular color square by giving only a one-word hint, followed by an optional two-word hint in the second round. Another nice thing about this game is that you can easily adjust the length of gameplay to fit the amount of time you want to spend playing. There’s no board to travel all the way around or number of cards needed to win. {Vault of Midnight}

Concept
I first played this board game at a friend's game night and enjoyed it so much that I introduced it to my family. You can play as individuals, but we prefer to play in teams of two. The game reminds me of Pictionary or Charades in that you're trying to get others to guess a word or phrase, but there's no drawing or acting out involved. The board has rows of pictures and symbols on it. Each player or team gets a card that gives possible meanings to those symbols. Individuals or teams take turns drawing a card and then placing pieces on the pictures to try to get the other players to guess the word or phrase on their card. The cards have different difficulty levels, so you can make it as easy or as challenging as you like. As someone who is not great at drawing but has always enjoyed the concept of Pictionary, I really love this game. It was a hit with the whole family! {AADL}

KIM G. — DESK CLERK

FrankenFest
Port Huron and Detroit
Not only do I present at FrankenFest every year, but I am an avid enjoyer as well! It's like a day of Halloween during the summer, with vendors and artists of all kinds (spooky, family-friendly, horror-themed, witchy, etc), an aerial show, and plenty of live talks and entertainment! This past year there were two FrankenFests: Port Huron at the Fort Gratiot lighthouse and Detroit at Historic Fort Wayne. Both are haunted locations and steeped in Michigan history. FrankenFest is a really fun time for all ages, no matter what aspect of Halloween you're into. Plus, you can take a photo with Frankenstein's monster AND his bride! {Website}

LILY W. — PUBLIC LIBRARY ASSOCIATE

Godspell at Flint Theater
GODSPOOL! It's Godspell ... in a pool! This regional theater production went briefly viral on TikTok for its insane premise of staging a musical version of the Christian Gospel stories in an aboveground chlorinated pool. I've never seen anything like it: high energy, high camp, yet performed with incredible earnestness and talent. My jaw hurt by intermission because it had been hanging open nearly the whole first act. By the end, my dress was wet with pool water (front row splash zone problems) and my face was wet with tears. I think this was the most joyful experience of my year.

Newsies! at Pioneer High School
The perfect ending to a tense election week. Really nothing I love more than kids tap dancing about their militant dedication to union organizing. The lead Jack Kelly, played by Pioneer senior Emmanuel Morgan, was particularly impressive with his enthusiastic dance moves and emotional rendition of the "Santa Fe" reprise.

LOREN B. — DESK CLERK

First Orchard
{AADL}  

Winnewana 50K
{Bikereg}

Little Island, NYC
{littleisland.org}

MARISA H. — LIBRARY TECHNICIAN

Pawpaw Fruit
I think I first tasted pawpaw fruit maybe seven years ago. In 2018, I bought some tiny pawpaw trees and planted them in my backyard. This year, they produced their first fruits. I’ve been babying these trees for so long, it’s such a delight to eat their fruit after so long.  

Pie
I have been a lifelong pie hater. Most pie is objectively bad and I stand by that. But it’s tradition at holidays and I’m extremely stubborn, so I’ve been on a multiyear journey of trying to bake something I don’t hate. In the words of my therapist, “Why do you think you’re afraid to quit things?” I haven’t found that answer yet, but I'm getting pretty good at it and I'm starting to love pie.

MATT M. — DESK CLERK

Dead of Winter board game
My wife and I play a lot of games, but one that really consumed our attention this year was Dead of Winter, a collaborative game set in a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested future where you must work together to survive while also achieving a secret goal of your own. You play as several characters with different abilities, and each game requires you and your group to overcome different obstacles to survive the winter and the zombie hordes. One thing that draws me to this game is its flexibility. You can set it up for a few or several players and for shorter or longer scenarios, depending on how much time you have to play. Since we got it back in January, it has been a favorite among friends and family unfortunate enough to have been roped into a board game night with us. If you like Dead of Winter, or the film Alien (1979), you may also like Nemesis, which shares many of the same elements but in an entirely different setting! {Website}

Sporcle Trivia Nights
On any given night of the week, there are businesses hosting trivia in Ann Arbor and other towns in the surrounding area. Stop in to eat some good food, test your knowledge, and possibly win a gift card! While we haven't won much, going to trivia has been a great way for my wife and me to discover new places to eat and learn all kinds of new and interesting tidbits (that will surely be useful for future trivia nights) along the way! {Website}

REENA P. — DESK CLERK

Bouldering (Rock Climbing)
A hobby shared by my friends in California, indoor bouldering has quickly become a staple in my life. As a sport shaped by personal goals and ambitions, bouldering can very quickly become meditative; the need for body coordination and spatial reasoning becomes more apparent the longer you climb. The social aspects of the sport are very positive too—cheering when people succeed on their climbs and fist-bumping them even when they don't. It feels good to improve and become the best climber you want to be. Planet Rock Ann Arbor is the home gym for many Ann Arborites. Give them a visit sometime! {Website}

Jogging
Initially started as a way to gain cardio fitness for LARP, I discovered that getting around quickly on foot can be very rewarding, both as an exercise and as an opportunity to enjoy the outdoors! If you have a smartwatch there are also settings for tracking your run on a digital map, which is neat (as long as you don't think too hard about companies collecting and storing sensitive data for you).

ROOSEVELT R. — DESK CLERK

The Boyne City Morel Festival
{Website}

Maggie Rudy's Mouseland
{Website}

Rhizome Roots Studio in Ypsilanti
{Website}

SHERLONYA ZOBEL — DEPUTY DIRECTOR

Things
A colleague introduced me to the app Things 3, and this year is the year that I began to use it in earnest. I have no idea why to-do apps are so personal, but my relationship with this productivity app is the longest one that I've ever had. It is a true game-changer. {Website}

Lomography
Experimenting with plastic toy cameras is something that I've wanted to do for a long time. This year is the year that I took the plunge. I don't take as many photos as I thought that I would, but I am very much loving the wait-and-see surprise of film photography using quirky cameras.

VANESSA K. — BOOKSHELVER/PROCESSOR

Travel
This past summer, I visited Europe for the first time with my family. We visited London, U.K.; Paris, France; Brussels, Belgium; and Rome, Italy. An absurd number of pictures featuring the sights and food were taken! One of my favorite memories is definitely seeing a live theater performance of the musical Cabaret at the Playhouse Theatre refurbished as the Kit Kat Club from the story. This performance starred Layton Williams as the Emcee and Rhea Norwood as Sally Bowles—both very talented singers. Fast forward to today, I almost wish I could revisit London for an extended stay.

Drawing Manga
Feeling inspired and desiring a creative outlet, I decided to learn how to draw in the manga art style. Between the end of September 2024 to December 1, 2024, I managed to commit around 91 hours to watching instructional videos on YouTube, taking an online drawing class, and practicing what I have learned. Although it wasn't consistent, I am quite happy with my progress! Perhaps this is ambitious thinking, but I would love to create my own manga or graphic novel one day.

More AADL Staff Picks:
➥ 2023
➥ 2022
➥ 2021
➥ 2020
➥ 2019
➥ 2018
➥ 2017
➥ 2016