Greg's Favorites of 2019

2019 is over.  The 2010s are over. This blog still exists!  Wow.

2019 was a novel year with some significant changes in my personal interests and hobbies.  This year by happy accident I discovered the secret world of board gaming, and it just about took over from everything else.  Or at least everything else had to move over to make room for this new hobby.

With Maria's editing job becoming a more significant source of income, we had a bit more discretionary funds this year and so besides board games, this was the year of conventions.  I attended several board game conventions (SaltCon, BGG, and more), pop culture conventions (All Con, ArlingCon), magic conventions (Penguin Magic Dallas), Halloween/horror-themed conventions (Oddities Expo, Spooky Spectacle), and more.  We went to the State Fair, Sherwood Forest Renaissance Festival, and Screams Halloween park (which I've been wanting to see for years and years and finally had the chance this year.)  I got to see a couple magic shows in Vegas (during a work trip,) including David Copperfield which was absolutely amazing!  We didn't take any big trips as a family, with Colin working nights with no vacations, so we had to make due with weekend trips and events.

Let's move on to my favorites.

Music

There was a bit of an uptick in finding new music this year, thanks to Spotify.  My son Spencer had been loaned an account from a girlfriend, but then they broke up. He then had to convince us to sign up for a family account so he could keep all his music and playlists.  Streaming music is allowed at my work so I was able to listen a lot there and at home in the mornings.  The service is really good at suggesting music that you might like that you would normally never hear, so that lead to some interesting finds this year.  Here are some of my favorites:

• Temples: Hot Motion - This band has been around for a few years, but I only found them this year.  Spencer had one of their older songs on his favorites playlist that I heard in the car and it piqued my interest.  I looked into them and found a really great modern psychedelic band with bits of BritPop and 60s British Invasion.  (See "Shelter Song," the song I heard on Spencer's playlist, for a great lost Beatles song.)

• Annexe the Moon - Another modern psychedelic rock band which was randomly suggested by Spotify.  They don't appear to have any albums out, just singles and e.p.s.  They also have no bio and I can barely find any info out there about them, but what music is available is great so far.

• Bryan Scary: Birds - It's been 7 years or so since the last proper Bryan Scary release (Daffy's Elixir.)  As you can tell by the title, this album is about birds.  Every song about birds.  This guy really likes to keep his concept albums on point.  However, these songs are really quite beautiful and seem much more relaxed and less frantic than his earlier work.

• Trevor Horn Reimagines the 80's - Trevor Horn goes back to the 80s and enlists some guest stars and an orchestra and reinterprets songs that he was involved with and a few others.  Some to greater effect than others.  I only like about half this album, but there's a few that I really enjoy.  I especially like his version of Owner of a Lonely Heart.

• White Lies: Tokyo - This one snuck in at the end for me after finding it on someone else's top songs of the year list.  I have yet to fully explore this band or even the album it's from, but it stands alone as a great song either way.  I'm reminded of some 80s synth rock like Simple Minds or Alphaville mixed with a modern feel of Imagine Dragons ("Radioactive").

A few other musical items I listened to this year:

• Darkness - Easter is Cancelled.  More Darkness.  Not bad, but nothing new or particularly grabbing.
• Howard Jones - Transform.  An enjoyable new album from Howard Jones.  Has some of his best stuff since the 80s.
• Jeff Lynne's ELO - From Out of Nowhere.  Interesting to hear something new from ELO, but little of it was the ELO that I like.
• Blame Candy - Pathetic.  A new glam rock band that only has a few songs out and little information that I can find.  This song is amazing.  Not sure if/when a full album will exist.
• Dhani Harrison - Motorways (Erase It). Spotify put this on a random suggested playlist for me one week.  My first thought, "Wow, this sounds just like George Harrison."  Then I looked and discovered it was his son.  Great psychedelic rock.  No idea if this is part of more music or and album.  I could only find this one song from this past year.
• the bird and the bee - Reinterpreting the Masters 2: A Tribute to Van Halen: I don't know this band, but this is amazing.  Soft rock, poppy modern versions of hard rock classics.  Here's Panama.

Movies

I didn't see as many movies this year, partly from board game nights and partly because I changed some focus at work which left less time for casual movies playing in the background.  However, I am still subscribing to AMC A-List which gives 3 "free" movies a week.  I've only used that full quota once or twice, usually only using 2 tickets once in a while when a couple good movies open on a weekend, or I have to catch up from missing one that opened earlier.

I watched about 161 movies this year (down from 270 last year.  Wow.): 56 movies in the theater (the most ever in a year), 25 newer movies at home (movies released 2018/2019), 39 older movies for the first time (usually older films for my bad movie podcasts), and 41 rewatched movies (many inspired from subscribing to the new Disney+ service.)

Here are some of my favorite movies of the year:

• Avengers: End Game.  I saw this twice.  I cried, cheered, gasped, and altogether loved this film.  It was an amazing culmination of a decade of Marvel films.
• Us/Ready or Not/Knives Out:  I expected with the title "Knives Out" that the latter would share a bit more in common in the horror elements with the two former.  However, all three of these films are both great individually and work together with an odd synchronicity in providing similar commentary about the struggle between upper class vs lower class or the haves vs the have-nots.  I enjoyed each of these films this year.
• John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum. I loved the simplicity of the first movie, and this one continues to add too much complicated detail to the story, but the set pieces and fight scenes are just amazing, making me forgive everything else.
• Spider-Man: Far From Home. This was a great dessert film after Avengers.  It probably won't resonate for long, but I had a lot of fun watching it.
• Shazam! Loved this take on "Big" as a superhero movie.  If only the kid in the film was having as much fun as Chuck.
• Doctor Sleep.  I never liked the Shining.  This shares an author and a terrible title, otherwise it's quite different and I was surprised how much I preferred this sequel to the original.
• Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw.  Okay this was dumb.  Really dumb.  But it knew it was dumb and leaned into it.  Somehow the Rock was more of a video game character in this  than Jumanji: The Next Level.
• It: Chapter 2.  I enjoyed the great casting of the middle-aged version of the first movie's kids.  There were some great tense and scary sequences.  It didn't hold together very well in the end, but it was good enough to complete the story more or less satisfactorily.
• Happy Death Day 2U.  I need to watch this again since it was at the beginning of the year, but I really liked how this turned from weird slasher horror to Back-to-the-Future 2 sci-fi.  It's too bad it still needed to keep the killer aspect from the first movie.
• Yesterday.  I expected more from this though I enjoyed it.  I loved the set-up: a struggling musician finds himself in a world where he's the only one who knows Beatles songs and so he records them as his own.  It didn't seem to want to explore its own premise as much as it should have.  It made me think that if called on to do so, I would step up to recreate Weird Al's discography.

Disappointments and other films of note:

There were a lot of stinkers this year.  After Avengers showed how to cap off a big giant sprawling franchise, Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker completely blew it (and so did Game of Thrones on TV.)  X-Men: Dark Phoenix was a complete dud.  MIB International found a way to make the stars of the last Thor movie completely uncharismatic.  Godzilla: King of the Monsters seemed more interested in people sitting around in dark control rooms than in the monsters.

There was a movie that came out this year called Serenity which had nothing to do with the Firefly franchise.  This was a movie with Matthew McConaughey and a boat.  It's a terrible, terrible movie but it has a jaw-dropping twist.  One you can see coming, but it's so ridiculous that you dismiss it because it couldn't possibly be so stupid as to be that twist.  Yes.  It is that twist.  This is a movie that will be forgotten by most, but then secretly passed around and become a cult hit film in the future.

Looking into 2020: There's a new Bond movie ("No Time to Die.")  Another excuse to rewatch the franchise.  This is likely Daniel Craig's last time as Bond and I hope it's an improvement over the last one.  Wonder Woman is going to 1984, which should be interesting.  "A Quiet Place: part 2" is coming.  Can it be as interesting as the first?  Another new Ghostbusters is coming connecting back to the original.  But I guess the one I'm anticipating most with a significant amount of trepidation is "Bill & Ted Face the Music."  Comedy sequels seldom work.  Comedy sequels set years after the original ("Dumb & Dumber To" "Blues Bros 2000") almost always fail spectacularly.  Let's see where this goes.

TV

I both watched more TV than ever before and less in the same year.  How is that possible?  There were very few series that I faithfully or completely watched this year.  Much less than in years past.  A few major shows that I've watched for years I completely skipped such as America's Got Talent and, (gasp!) the Simpsons.  Yet I watched more YouTube clips from TV shows than before by watching late night talk shows every day on YouTube.  Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, and occasionally James Corden and Jimmy Fallon.  Then I'd go over and see what's happening on CNN and MSNBC.  I was somehow so fascinated with the craziness of reality that I gave up on TV make believe (or even TV "reality" shows!)

Regardless, here's a few of the things I watched this year:

• Late Night Talk Shows.  As I said above, this was what I watched the most of and the most regularly.  Particularly the monologues and then any interesting guests.
• The Mandalorian.  I loved this.  With every Star Wars movie seemingly worse than the previous, this TV show gave me "A New Hope" for Star Wars on TV.  "Baby Yoda" and all the various adventures and characters (IG-11 especially!) made me hang on to Star Wars when I was about to jump off.
• This Time with Alan Partridge.  I think this is the first Alan Partridge project that I actually saw as it was released rather than caught up on later.  Very funny show.  I liked the concept of Alan co-hosting a daily news and talk show, but I wish there was more behind-the-scenes elements or plot developments across the series.
• Cobra Kai (S2). I didn't love this as much as the first series, but it had some interesting twists and continues to play with the nostalgia of the original movie(s) while twisting it at the same time.
• What We Do In the Shadows.  A spinoff from the movie I love so much.  The series is set in the US rather than New Zealand with a different set of Vampires, but has the same style of humor.  I liked "Wellington Paranormal" better last year.
• Penn & Teller Fool Us.  Still my favorite magic-themed show on TV.
• I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson.  A very quick, very random, sketch comedy series on Netflix.  So quick I nearly forgot about it until I reviewed my list.  I rewatched a couple episodes and remembered that it was indeed funny.
• Touch of Cloth. A comedy British detective show from 2012-2014.  Only three episodes (or TV movies?) done in the Airplane-style of straight-faced absurd comedy.  A great treasure find for the year.

A few other TV items of note:  There was new Arrested Development this year.  I'm pretty sure I watched it.  I don't remember it.  There was new Black Mirror this year.  I'm pretty sure I watched it.  I don't remember it.  There was new Stranger Things this year.  I'm pretty sure I watched it.  I don't remember it.  (Actually Stranger Things S3 was better than S2, but I think they should have stopped with one season.)

No idea what to look for in 2020.  I'm mostly looking for Marvel shows and other Star Wars stuff on Disney+.  I think "Falcon and the Winter Soldier" is coming in the fall.

Podcasts and Online

In the past I included late night shows here and news channels, but I moved them to TV this year for no reason.  Here's what else I listened to on my phone or watched on YouTube.

• RedLetterMedia - Half in the Bag, Best of the Worst, movie reviews and more.  I'm always excited when something is released on this channel.
• ScreenJunkies - Honest Trailers and daily movie news show.
• Movie B.S./Empire/Slashfilmcast - All my regular movie review podcasts that I've been listening to forever.
• We Hate Movies/How did this Get Made - My favorite bad movie podcasts.
• James Bonding/Star Trek the Next Conversation/In Voorhees We Trust/Monkey Tennis - My favorite podcasts around specific franchises I listened to this year: Bond, Trek, Friday 13th, and Alan Partridge
• Board Game Channels or shows: Shut Up & Sit Down, Game the Game, Dice Tower, Rahdo Runs Through it, Game Night, and many others.  I watched a lot of playthroughs and instructional videos regarding board games.  It just helped to feed my current obsession.
• I tried a few board game podcasts as well (Shut Up & Sit Down, Board to Bits, a few others) but I soon found it's a subject that just didn't work for me over audio.

Games

We got a second Switch this year so both Spencer and Jaden could play.  Since it's a portable system, sometimes it wouldn't be around when someone wanted to play.  Unfortunately, games don't easily share across systems, so we ended up having to repurchase a lot of them.  So as convenient as digital downloading is, having a physical copy works much better if you want to have multiple consoles! Just a random word of advice. Most of my gaming this year was on the phone, followed by Switch, and then XBox One.  Here are a few of note:

• Happy Color - I think both Maria and I got hooked on this simple paint-by-number app.  Very therapeutic.
• Batman Arkham Collection -   I purchased and replayed the entire Arkham series, save Origins.  Arkham Knight was brand new for me, though.  I still really enjoy this series.  The exploration and movement through the city (from Arkham City and on) make this an all-time classic series for me.
• Luigi's Mansion 3 - They finally made a full game on a console for Luigi's Mansion.  I always loved the original, but it felt more like a tech demo than a full game.  The sequel was on the DS, so this is the full game I've been waiting for since the release of the GameCube.  It's a lot of fun.
• Archero - Dungeon/fantasy "shooter" game (using arrows, axes, etc.) game that makes things super difficult and impossible to pass until you grind and grind to improve your character and weapons and hope for random bonuses to help you get to the end of the level only to present you with something even harder.  I don't know why I've put so much time into this.
• Pirates Outlaws/Legendary DXP - Deck builder games for the iphone.  The first game made me realize that I really like deck builders.  Particularly ones where you don't have to build the deck ahead of time (e.g. Yu-gi-oh, Magic).  This lead me to the Legendary deck builder series in both real life and on the phone.
• Homescapes/Cooking Craze - Two of my bigger time wasters on the phone this year.  Matching game and a food management game.
• Link's Awakening - A full console remake of the GameBoy sequel to A Link to the Past.  Because it's a faithful recreation of the original game, there's a lot of older out-dated game mechanics, but I loved the 3D recreation and new artwork in the game.
• I Love Hue - A simple idea for a game that gets surprisingly complicated fast, where you put blocks in order of color gradient.  But those colors get more and more subtle as you progress and it somehow turns into playing by feel rather than by logic.
• Golf Blitz - I got really hooked on this for a while this year on my phone.  It was a very fast and fun competitive golf game until I leveled up enough that it had a hard time finding enough opponents.  Then instead of 4 man games it was mostly 1 on 1 which was less fun.  Then after losing a bunch of games in a row and rage quitting, I gave up altogether.
• Apple Arcade - I signed up for a free month's trial at the end of the year.  It's a  large collection of games that aren't trying to sell me gameplay via advertising.  Looking forward to exploring this more.

Looking into 2020, I know most of the family are excited for the new Animal Crossing for Switch.  For me, I'm holding onto the small possibility that there's a new Metroid Prime or even Zelda Breath of the Wild 2 coming before the end of the year.

Board Games

So I think I've had board games on my list a time or two in the past, but this year it's a beast.

At the end of February I went to a work trip to Ogden, Utah.  I discovered that the hotel I was in was next to a convention center and that weekend they were holding a board game convention called SaltCon.  I managed to finish my work early (Thursday morning) and wasn't scheduled to leave until Saturday, so I bought myself admission and had a blast!  There was a giant room of tables with people playing hundreds of games I'd never heard of.  There was a great big dealer room with people showing off games and gaming paraphernalia that I spent hours in.  The next day I was going to spend with my brother Jeffrey.  I called him and asked if he wanted to join me at the convention.  So we spent the day playing games together there.  I came back to Fort Worth and looked up gaming groups.  I found one that played Tuesdays at the Hulen mall where I went for a few months, then I discovered almost in my backyard, "Fort Worth Game Night" (FWGN) that meets just a few miles away and has people who host almost in walking distance from me.  I joined up with that group and have gamed weekly and more since May.  I've been introduced to hundreds of games I'd never heard of and almost all of my top games of this year are ones I was not aware of last 9 months ago.  I've had to rearrange my game collection and get new shelves several times this year as I keep adding new games I didn't know I'd love.  I've also made a lot of new friends with the local gaming community, which I'm also excited about.

I got an app to keep track of my plays and here's what it tells me.  I played 465 games this year (probably low since I'm sure I missed a few).  Of those 465, 225 were unique.  In other words, many of those I played multiple times.  So I played 225 different games this year.  I played a game in 32 different locations (homes, conventions, hotel rooms, etc.)

Here are some of my favorites this year:

• Legendary James Bond/Legendary Buffy/Legendary Encounters (Alien)/Legendary Encounters Predator/Legendary Big Trouble in Little China.  The Legendary card games mostly all play with the same mechanic of starting with a few cards that allow you to fight and recruit/purchase more cards.  You try to fight off a deck of bad guys while adding newer, stronger cards that will help you fight stronger bad guys and finally beat the final boss.  I love how they theme these games into the different franchises.  Each one has slightly different elements that work within it's own theme.  There's still a few I don't have such as X-Files, Firefly, and Marvel.
• Dice Throne - This is a battle game like a board game version of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, where you pick your fighter at the beginning of the game and each one plays slightly different.  Then you battle the other player(s) to remove their health while trying to fend them off from doing the same to you.  I love the dice mechanisms, the menu board of different battle choices, and how each character works differently.  There are currently two "Series" of Dice Throne, both of which I own and are fully compatible with each other.  I have also pre-ordered (or "Kick-started") Dice Throne Adventures which turns the game into a cooperative dungeon crawler.  I'm super excited about that.
• Space Base - Another dice-based game where you draft spaceship cards that go on to your board on spaces 1-12 and roll your dice to get whatever rewards match your dice.  The bonus is as you send your ships out from your base, they get rewards whenever other players roll their dice.  So you are always involved the entire game, even when it's not your turn.  Jaden and I played the regular game and a couple expansions that I grabbed and had a blast.  The Emergence of Shy Pluto expansion had a particularly fun way of introducing the expanded elements over a series of games.
• Bang! The Dice Game - I guess I like dice.  This is a hidden role game (like Mafia, Werewolf) where you are the Sheriff and Deputies vs Outlaws.  You roll dice to shoot other players and heal yourself.  No one knows if you are shooting a friend or enemy at first.  I'm not initially a fan of hidden role games, but this one is simple enough (unless you add all the expansions like I have) that it can be a lot of fun.  Only issue is that it needs a large group to play.
• Tiny Epic Games - I got Tiny Epic Quest at SaltCon, essentially Legend of Zelda the board game.  I eventually got Tiny Epic Zombies, Western, Galaxies, Defenders, Kingdoms, and Mechs.  Of those, Galaxies and Zombies are my favorites and both are really great games that I can replay again and again.  The rest range from really good to okay.  Some I need to play a bit more to really decide how I feel about them.  But I love that they are all small, and easily fit in the edges of a game bag or backpack or luggage.
• Paranormal Detectives - This game is a lot like Mysterium which has been one of my favorite games for several years, this takes the same concept of Clue (finding murder weapon, location, etc.) lead by a ghost player except rather than just communicating via cards, you communicate via a whole range of methods from writing using someone else's hand to pantomime to sculpting string into shapes and more.  The mysteries each have a full story rather than being random so it makes it fun as the detectives try to take bits of information and create their own version of the story.
• Chronicles of Crime - Speaking of mysteries, this unique game is a series of mysteries where you use your phone to scan crime scenes and interrogate witnesses.  I've only played a few games, but I really love the unique way this game plays.
• Unlock!/Exit the Game - These "Escape Room" in a box games add to several that I already had.  I'm fascinated with these games and have a large collection as I've made them into a Pokemon game of "gotta catch 'em all."

Looking into 2020, there are still thousands of games I've never played, and more being released each year.  As mentioned under "Dice Throne" above, I have Kickstarted (became a Kickstarter backer of) "Dice Throne Adventures," as well as several others such as "Dungeon Drop," "Zorro the Dice Game," "Hunted" (Alien-style solo game), and a few others.  So those are obvious games I'm looking forward to when they finish production and get released.  Otherwise, I'm looking forward to attending more gaming conventions, and more game nights to discover more games or just to play the ones that I already have.

Books

I didn't do a lot of reading this year.  As usual.  Here's what I did read:

• Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - An interesting time travel, butterfly-effect story in the Potter universe.  I'm interested in someday seeing how they stage things in this play that seem impossible from the script.
• Alan Partridge: Nomad - Alan Partridge goes on a long walk.  Sometimes very funny.  I did something I seldom do and switched to audiobook version half way through.  It really needed Alan's voice.
• Queen Album by Album - a book that steps through all of Queen's discography with some interesting insight, though they always seemed to skip over the songs I love the most.
• The Great Brain - I read this book to Jaden over a few months at night when I was at home and he wasn't too late for bed time.  I think he quite enjoyed it.  It was one of my favorite book series as a kid.

Into 2020, Maria got me some type of strange horror book that I'm very curious about for Christmas. I don't even recall the title and don't want to get up and walk 10 feet to look at it.  I'll keep it a mystery until I read it this new year.  I've also got some puzzle books, "Escape Room in a book" from Christmas and Kickstarter that I'll be trying out this year.

And so...

That's it for 2019.  I'll be doing another post to wrap up the entire decade soon.  So look for that.

Otherwise this year will see Spencer graduating and starting college.  Jaden will be moving on from elementary school to a secondary school for 5-6th grades.  Colin aims for more than working nights at Home Depot, so hopefully he'll find a way to move on to better things work-wise.   I've been moved to a new organization at work just before the Christmas break that could potentially shift me onto new things--though it's too early to say yet.  They've also modified our work schedule this upcoming year to 10 hour days with every Friday off.  Not sure yet how losing an hour with my family to gain a day for myself will work in the long run.  Maria continues to work as an editor and has increased her rates again for the new year which shows how much her writers value her that they all consented to paying more for her services.  We have a trip planned this summer to go up through the mountains of Tennessee, a part of the country I've never been to, so I'm looking forward to that.  We really want to find a way to get to Disneyworld again, but school and work schedules keep getting in the way.  Also, it costs a lot!  Maybe we will find a way this year, if not, 2021 then!

Hope everyone has a great 2020!  See you next year.