Year-End Round-Up 2017
Dec. 28th, 2017 03:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
earlgreytea68Most Disappointing Categories This Year: Television. I started to write up my year-end round-up and then realized that every single show I was going to talk about had won the same award from me last year. The best show I watch, even with the extremely stressful nature of its plots, is still Good Behavior. Javier and Letty are still the TV ship I’m rooting hardest for. Versailles is still the show that shocks me most often (and so much of it is true! I’m still amazed by that). Martha and Snoop’s Pot Luck Dinner Party and Lip Sync Battle are still my favorite fun shows to watch when I’m unwinding. I'm still enjoying Dirk Gently. No new shows really caught my eye or got added to my repertoire. So I really have precious little to share by way of television this year. Despite the fact that I still come home and watch television every night, it turns out I’m watching less of it than at any point before in my life.
Show I’m No Longer Watching: Are You the One. I probably stuck with this show a lot longer than most other people, but it was nice to have a show on my television schedule that was supremely ridiculous. Except that this season I was suddenly and abruptly over it. The people on the show seemed to make even stupider choices than usual, such that it was as if they’d learned nothing from all the previous seasons of the show. They still insisted that they fell IRREVERSIBLY and UNDENIABLY in love FROM THE VERY FIRST MOMENT THEY SAW THE OTHER PERSON ACROSS THE ROOM, and THAT’S IT, they cannot deny this TRUE LOVE, not even for a million dollars, not even to just fake it and sit next to another person for ten whole minutes, THEY JUST CANNOT DO IT. Oh, please. Get a grip and go and play this game. And then—AND THEN—after being the worst contestants on this show of any season, never knowing who any of the couples were, flailing around cluelessly for ten straight weeks, ALL OF A SUDDEN, IN THE LAST CEREMONY, THEY MAGICALLY GOT ALL ELEVEN COUPLES RIGHT. This is impossible, okay? Either the producers of the show helped them for the last episode or the producers of the show manipulated them to pretend to be doing super-poorly the rest of the season. There’s just no way that’s how this show actually happened. And I know reality television is all manipulated anyway but at least respect me a little bit in how you do it.
Second Most Frustrating Show on Television: Property Brothers (AHAHAH EVERYTHING IS NEGATIVE THIS YEAR, SORRY, HASHTAG 2017). I actually like the Property Brothers. I mean, they seem nice enough. They tend to make the same designs over and over but that’s kind of how HGTV goes and also I think that’s just how creative people can be sometimes. Certainly I often feel like I write the same basic story over and over. I choose to believe it has hallmarks that let you know you’re reading an EGT story. That’s a better take on it than just “I write the same thing constantly.” So it’s fine that they design the same basic house fairly often. That also wasn’t helped by a lot of their show being filmed in the same city whose architecture was apparently entirely row houses. They’ve branched out now, and they’ve gotten to flex their creative muscle some, and that’s great. But. How, how, how are we meant to believe that EVERY SINGLE HOUSE the Property Brothers work on has "secret" "hidden" electrical issues / plumbing issues / asbestos? I get that there’s no way the Property Brothers are truly this incompetent. I get that they feel like they need to do this to keep television dramatic. But it again makes me feel like the producers are being condescending. There’s no way they don’t know there’s asbestos in that tile, because I have watched enough HGTV shows that *I* know. Every time they propose taking down a wall, I’m like, “That’s going to be load-bearing and ruin your budget.” If my contractor was as incompetent as the Property Brothers at predicting house issues and budget constraints, I would stop working with that contractor. Granted, I am led to believe that contractors are often impossible and sketchy, so maybe the Property Brothers represent the zenith of the occupation, in which case…you’re better off moving than ever redoing a house, is I guess the lesson I’ve learned. Which I think might not be the lesson the Property Brothers intend?
Show That Made Me Feel Most Conflicted: Pretty Little Liars. Look, this show was terrible. For, frankly, most of its life. But it was also a show that had lived through a lot of my life with me. My mother and sisters and I all watched the show together, all sang along to the theme, all complained about it endlessly. That was most of the fun of PLL. So, while I actively despised it by the end and resented every ridiculous plot point it tried to make and just wanted it to be over…I’m also sad about that portion of my life coming to an end. PLL was just standard for so long. I feel like, if you track these Year-End Round-Ups, you can track me getting older, because I spend less time talking about things I loved and more time talking about the things that were comfortable and familiar and that I’ll miss. WATCH OUT, YOUNG FOLKS. IT’LL HAPPEN TO YOU, TOO. And at least PLL stayed true to itself and went out with the most ridiculous revelation of them all. Thank you for that terrible accent, actress-who-plays-Spencer.
Old Show I Started Watching This Year: Avatar: The Last Airbender. There was this period of time this year when a bunch of people were like, “YOU NEVER WATCHED AVATAR?!?!?! HOW?!?!?! YOU MUST WATCH IT!!!!!” Tbh, I don’t know how I missed it. It just aired at a time when no one around me was watching it? I totally missed this huge phenomenon was going on, Idk. For the longest time I thought it was the same as, like, the movie Avatar. I WAS CONFUSED. So, anyway, I tried to watch Avatar. Naturally Amazon Prime took it off of streaming as soon as I decided to watch it, which is why I hate streaming services. So instead I had to watch whatever happened to play on television. So I saw the last season. And it was good!
Song I Listened to the Most This Year: Revelator Eyes by the Paper Kites and FortyFive by Bootstraps. Both of these were on the writing playlist I used for the Shenanigansverse, a playlist which I listened to a lot when I was still in love with my OTP, but I tended to skip mainly to these two songs, which was SO THEM to me at the time, and relistening to them is so much nostalgia, it all feels a thousand years ago ot me now and that OTP and I ended up having a violent breakup, BUT these songs are still super-great and I should listen to them more again.
Song I Did the Most Writing to This Year: The Weight of It All by Handsome Ghost. This could have been in the previous category, but this is my true Theme Song of my version of the Shenanigansverse OTP, and I listened to it SO MUCH, over and over and over, while I was writing. Until I got irritated and shifted to Looking for Knives by DYAN. Heh. THAT OTP WAS LIKE THAT. My other major writing project this year (other than Dream Bigger, which somehow expanded to take up the whole year but mainly has the same writing playlist as the rest of the HGTV verse) was the podcast, and my theme song for the podcast couple is Half-Light by Rostam. Ugh, it's so yearning and plaintive and THEM. <3
Song I Was Most Happy to Encounter on the Radio: I’m the One by DJ Khaled. Once again thanks to my oldest niece (whose favorite song was one of my picks for this category last year), who was obsessed with this song and listened to it a lot and by the end I loved it, too. Also Don’t Take the Money by Bleachers.
Album of the Year: Reputation. I have complex, complicated feelings toward Taylor Swift, but I can’t deny that every time I listen to her songs—especially her recent stuff, not so much her early stuff—I just…love them. I wasn’t going to listen to Reputation, and then I listened to an episode of Switched on Pop that was basically walking through how well-crafted from a music theory standpoint the album was, so I gave in and listened, and this album, ugh, I listened to on repeat for most of this last month of the year. There are a couple of songs I like less than the others, but I adore everything about Getaway Car and End Game and the way that beat kicks in on So It Goes… and that line about familiar laughter on a stranger on New Years Day and basically just all of them. Taylor Swift writes incredibly tropey lyrics, and that’s what I love about them. Dress is like every friends-to-lovers fic ever written distilled into one song. The lyrics on Gorgeous just seem to capture so perfectly the giddy mood I try to capture when I write a love story. I just feel like Taylor Swift songs are written as fic accompaniments, like, she read a good fic and she set it to music. That’s probably not what’s happening, but I can’t fight the fact that I love this album.
Best Movie I Saw This Year: I am literally sitting here trying to think of the movies I saw this year, and I feel like it was only two? Unless I’m forgetting one from the summer but nothing is really coming to mind. I went to see the second Kingsman movie, which was ridiculous but I enjoyed it way more than the other movie I went to see, which was the Blade Runner sequel and had basically a hundred lines of dialogue for its entire three-hour running time and was mostly just people staring moodily at inanimate objects and I think that just went over my head so I’m going with Kingsman here.
Best Book I Read This Year: The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. This book was recommended to me as being the sort of stress-free book I enjoy, and it totally was. I grow quickly weary of high fantasy world-building, to be totally honest, but this book didn’t get bogged down in it. The POV character was a lovely delight who was a joy to spend time with, and the plot was gentle, and the fact that the book just builds to this soft crescendo of love is just…lovely. The MC ends up with totally the wrong character but that’s a surprisingly mild complaint because that’s just not the focus of this book. There’s love in this book—the book is awash in it—but it’s not a book about shipping, really, and that made it gentle and sweet. I love a windswept romance, of course, but this was a year when I felt like I just wanted to read about a writing being nice to their characters, and this fit the bill. It feels like Addison *likes* her MC and wanted him to be happy, and that’s so oddly rare in books, for some reason, that I ate it right up.
Favorite Podcast: Reply All. This is a new category I decided to add this year! Because I’ve been listening to more and more podcasts. I don’t listen to tons of fiction podcasts (ironic for someone who just helped co-write one) but I love to listen to educational-ish ones (not political ones, that’s too stressful for me). I learn a lot and I love that. Anyway, my favorite podcast this year was Reply All, because I find the hosts’ chemistry hilarious. When I listen to Reply All and it’s not just the hosts bantering with each other, I get all upset, because what is even the point? I know they’re not a couple, but my goal for our fiction podcast is for you to feel like the OTP has as much chemistry as the Reply All guys.
Podcast I Had to Stop Listening To: Note to Self. Note to Self was one of the very first podcasts I ever started listening to, but I had to take it out of the rotation this year, because it got obsessed with its “Bored and Brilliant” idea and just kept bashing me over the head with this idea that I disagree with so, so, so, so, so much. Mainly I just think the entire thing was a misnomer. I get that it’s a good idea to put our phones away and it probably forces us to be more creative, but that is not the same as being bored! Putting your phone away does not equal automatic boredom! I think it’s so weird that people seem to think that way? “If I’m not looking at my phone, I’m bored.” I just… As someone who writes fiction a lot, it doesn’t happen when I’m bored. I don’t sit around, like, “Wow, there’s nothing to do, guess I’ll write that novel.” Idk. I thought it was just such a weird way to talk about creativity. Which I don’t think was what they intended but I never really understood what they were talking about and I just got progressively more irritated every time they did another episode trying to tell me to make myself bored more often. I write because I like to write, not because I’m bored of the rest of the world. And I think that’s okay. So there, Note to Self. (I know I should probably have read the book and then I would have understood what they’re saying but, after many many episodes of them babbling at me about it, I’m pretty sure what I mostly understand is they don’t really mean “bored,” they just mean “thinking about something other than an app,” and I remain upset that they just seem to classify anything that’s not looking at a phone as “boredom.”)
Tumblr posts of the year!
February: David Duchovny Loves Shrimp
February: Are Pokemon Real?
February: Walking Out of a Bathroom With No Hand Dryers
February: Am I Dying?
March: Mario Koala Statue
March: Like Lord Byron Before Me
March: Party This Lit
March: Donald Trump's Mom
March: Cats
April: Incredibly Realistic Wolf Animation
June: Naked Alien
September: Do You Accept Criticism
September: When You Graduate
October: Is This Hamilton
October: Swims
October: Dog on a Plane
October: Thanks, Henry Ford
November: The Granny Queen from A Bug's Life
November: Girlfriend Making Pancakes
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Date: 2017-12-28 09:10 pm (UTC)(Is it bad that your year-end round-ups make me feel like I never do anything new? I am in literal awe of how much you experiment with new things in the entertainment universe!)
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Date: 2017-12-29 01:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-29 02:05 pm (UTC)Thanks for the recap; it's always interesting even though I don't know half of the shows/songs/albums!!
But nevertheless it's good to keep in touch - I do, indeed, send you very good thoughts and wishes, and look forward to reading your posts in 2018.
*hugs*