I played “Infinity Nikki” for 10 hours in 3 days—and I would do it all again.

As another year comes to a close, it's a perfect time to pause, reflect, and actually blog for a change. It’s been an eventful year on so many levels and while it might be easy to look back and think of some of the awful things we’ve gone through, I want to take a moment and describe 2024 in one word: hopeful.

I’ve escaped to the pine-scented mountains of Lebanon far too many times in the 20 years I lived there, finding tranquility in the serene views that I couldn’t find in the suburbs of a crowded Beirut. It’s not unlike Luisa, the protagonist in the video game Dungeons of Hinterberg, who escapes her big-city lawyer job to find peace in a small Austrian town surrounded by prominent peaks and valleys. And a little bit of magic.