I am so tired of lists. It’s god damn February! Here’s a TV list. My only rule was every was show had to have debuted in 2010 or later. I don’t like any of these sloppy “Part of it was in this decade” bullshit. That’s not how I ride. I ride like the wind.
Making my best of the decade list for TV was both very frustrating and very easy. Frustrating because unlike an album or a movie, you can’t easily rewatch a whole TV series in the name of research. So instead of spending hundreds of hours rewatching these shows, I’m doing this all from how well I remember them. Which, of course made things all very easy, considering the lack of research and reassessment involved in writing this. So… let’s just hope these shows are still as good as I remember. Continue reading
The 2010s were a complicated decade for me, musically speaking. It was the first decade where I felt like I was more or less in touch with new music for the entirety of the decade, and yet it was also the first time that I truly felt old while discovering new artists that were younger than me. It was a decade that saw countless albums that I loved, and also in many ways felt like a decade where two of my favorite things — albums and rock music — seemed to decrease noticeably in cultural relevance. It was the decade where I eventually took over as “the music guy” at Mildly Pleased, and thus spent a lot of time writing about the kinds of albums that’ll be appearing on my list. Well, let’s take one last gander at them. Continue reading
Here we go, top albums of the decade. For a long time, I’ve stressed that I’m never trying to make actual “best of” lists, because that’s impossible. But for these ones, I’ve made it known for a while that my approach was going to be even more unusual: Basically, I took all the albums from the previous 10 years of top tens, added a few more that I found out about at the wrong time, and started dividing them into groups. When I had 10 groups, I picked my favorite five album in each group, then my number one of those. Then, when I had all 10 winners, I ranked them somewhat arbitrarily… I guess just overall in terms of how much I like them now.
For me, this was the only way I could take on such a daunting task, and it resulted in a top five I’m extremely confident in, and a 6-10 that feels pretty good. Unfortunately, I skew toward the beginning of the decade, which I think mostly reflects that I’ve had more time with those albums and less that more recent music isn’t as good – because it is, check the honorable mentions in each section. It also doesn’t help that I’ve never been very confident in defending my own taste in music, and it’s only slightly comforting that I had a full decade of top 10 lists on this blog to fall back on for references as I wrote this. I guess what I’m saying is take it easy and please don’t be mean. I’m trying my best.
I don’t like doing “End of the Decade” lists. There’s such a finality to it. How can I claim to have found the ten best albums for me when there’s still so much to discover? The fact that I struggled to find ten albums I could call my favorites just goes to show the journey isn’t over.
That being said I do love these ten albums… for the time being. We’ll see how these selections settle in the next ten years. I like to take my time with albums. Spend several years with them and let ‘em stew. This is why I have no albums from 2019. Not enough time has passed. Which means these tens albums I have picked are special. They have stood the test of time. Now let’s open up the capsule.
P.S. I decided to include YouTube videos instead of pics so you can listen to some of my favorite jams. Enjoy!
2020 is cooking up something in that lab. We got a new Ghostbusters on the way, a new Top Gun, and a live-action Mulan. We’re not talking about any of those movies but we are talking about other better movies (and in the case of Colin worse). So buckle up into your Ecto-1 and crank up our picks for the Most and Least Anticipated Movies of 2020.
Well, unlike some other media, it would be hard to make a case that 2019 was the year of the decade for video games. With aging hardware and new consoles looming on the horizon, this last year was all about keeping on keeping on. Games as a service continues to be a thing, with the added wrinkle that game subscription services really hit their stride with the massive success of Xbox Game Pass. I guess it sort of became a year about catching up with stuff for best of the decade and wrapping up this console generation. It didn’t help that some of the year’s most exciting titles either disappointed (Anthem) or slipped into 2020 (DOOM Eternal). Oh well, plenty to look forward in the months to come!
