Greg's Favorites of 2010

It's the start of another year and time for my annual post of my favorite things from the past year.

Music:
This year was a little different from most years in that I found myself listening to quite a lot less music and more podcasts.  As a result, I spent less time searching for new albums and thus found less good music.  I didn't even find enough to put together a full top 10 list.  On top of that, many previously loved bands put out rather mediocre albums, so there was a lot of disappointment this year music-wise.  There were still a few good highlights, though.

• Hoosiers - The Illusion of Safety
- My favorite album of the year. Nearly a perfect brit-synth-pop album. Their first album was fun, but this one is amazing.
• Scissor Sisters - Night Work
- My favorite song off of this is album is "Invisible Light" but the video is too disturbing to embed, so here's "Fire With Fire" instead.
• Kids of 88 - Sugarpill
• Ginger Ninja - Wicked Map
• Rock Sugar - Reimaginator
- An amazing cover band that does some very inventive mashups of rock songs. Make sure if you watch the video that you wait for the verse to actually start.
• Special mention: They Might Be Giants - Here Comes Science
- I can't say this was one of my favorites this year, but I probably listened to it more than any other since it played in our car over and over again. Here's hoping for some good music in 2011, and if not, hopefully I'll have my own album finally ready to share sometime this year.

Podcasts:
I was listening to podcasts more than music this year. Here's who I was listening to.

• Movie B.S. With Bayer and Snider
- Eric D. Snider, movie critic and writer that I've followed since college has finally got his own podcast and it's one of my favorites.
• Slashfilmcast
- Movie news and reviews
• Comedy Death Ray
- General silliness
• The Nerdist
- Slightly less silliness. Slightly more nerdy.
• Pod F. Tomkast
- The Paul F. Tompkins podcast. Even more silliness.
• The Tobolowsky Files
- Story telling podcast by Stephen Tobolowsky.

Movies:
For movies, I put a list together of all the movies I watched this year and culled off the top 10. Here they are:

• Toy Story 3
• How to Train Your Dragon
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
• The Karate Kid
• Inception
• Scott Pilgrim vs the World
• Tangled
• Despicable Me
• Paranormal Activity 2
• Exit Through The Gift Shop

TV:
Found a few new shows this year, "Lost" a few favorites as well.

• "Biggest Loser" - Finally started watching this year and went back and watched every season up til now as well as several seasons from the UK and Australia! Definitely a life-changing show.
• "Lost" - Not exactly happy how it ended, but I can't dismiss the entire show from an unsatisfactory ending.
• "Community" - Has become our must-watch show on Thursday. The paintball contest episode has to be one of the best TV episodes ever made of any show ever.
• "Big Bang Theory" - Has become our second must-watch show on Thursday.
• "Office"/"30 Rock" - Both still crowd our Thursdays.
• "Sherlock" - Great British series with a modern version of the Sherlock Holmes story.

Games:
Most of the games I really enjoyed this year were on my iPhone.  Which makes up the bulk of the list below unless otherwise noted.

• Bejeweled Blitz
• Tilt To Live
• Angry Birds
• Peggle
• Super Mega Worm
• The Incident
• Fruit Ninja
• Helsing's Fire
• Plants Vs. Zombies
• Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii)
• Lego Harry Potter (yrs 1-4) (Wii)
• Bit Trip Runner (WiiWare)