2024 Professional Wrap-up

Every year, I begin work wondering what I could possibly do that could be new or different, and I worry that I will spend the year stuck in a rut. I have yet to find the rut. In fact, 2024 will likely go down as one of my favorite years since I started working with the Culture and Trends team in 2015!

Here are some fun numbers from the year:

Ten+ internal and external speaking engagements, mostly delivering my talk on the evolution of fandom.

Nine awards for last year’s run of Flowers, including a Silver Entertainment Clio award.

Seven blog posts published on this site. I didn’t hit my goal of publishing monthly, but I’m satisfied!

Seven trips in support of my work, including a half-week at Dream Con, where I got to indulge in observing fandom from a multicultural perspective. I should’ve done a blog post or video on it.

Three new episodes of Flowers.

Two trends reports published. One on fandom and the other a global end-of-year trends report. This is a 100% year-over-year increase in trends reports!

One trip abroad. To London to see this magnificent crew:


One thing I really loved about this year is seeing several the things I’ve been championing at work get turned into tangible things. Anime, Fandom, and Horror are things that I’ve been charting the growth of and evangelizing for a couple of years, and this year, we did things with all three. For anime, we created a Yoodle (a change to the YouTube logo) celebrating the community, and I participated in this episode of our Like & Describe podcast on the topic. For fandom, we created a trends report on the topic, and it became our team’s trends narrative for the year. For Horror, while there’s still more that we could explore, we created a Yoodle celebrating analog horror and produced this analog horror on analog horror.

After having taken a month off, I’m looking forward to finally getting back to work!

What do you think? Leave a comment!