Every year we try to put together a 'best of' list that is devoid of the same 200 albums that make up all of the other music lists on the internet. We do this by intentionally excluding popular/mainstream artists from our submission pool. Our cutoff is generally no more than three tracks with a million plays on spotify, though we do fudge it a bit especially for artists that only have regional success or put out something really great. The popularity limits are more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule.

I used last year's results as a test post on tildes, if you want to see what the final results will look like. Once we finish voting on the albums we generate the playlists on spotify and use automated tools to replicate them to other streaming services. We have a google spreadsheet that helps us manage the process. There's a submission form that will drop recommendations right into the spreadsheet where we can work on them.

We're not trying to find albums that are 'better' than the mainstream. We're just trying to include more of the great music that gets released every year, particularly the good stuff from new and overlooked artists that gets lost by the wayside while all the major music publications argue about the right order of the year's press darlings. Consider AlbumOfTheYear's List as the 'official' record of what's popular in the music press.

We do this by asking people for their favorites - in listentothis, in letstalkmusic, and today here on Tildes. I'd like to invite everyone on Tildes to submit their picks for the best overlooked music they've heard this year.

How do you know if an album you like is good enough? Everyone has their own way of listening, but generally, if you've had the record on repeat at all, that's the sign that it's worthy of attention. If you've got one you can't stop spinning and can't get out of your head, that's 'must listen' territory which goes at the top of the list. Make sure to leave a note in your comment when you submit, if you think it's that good. ;)

You can submit albums right here using this form. Please put a ~ in front of your username when you submit, so we know it came from a tildes user rather than a reddit user.

This spotify playlist contains the 175 albums from 2018 we've gathered so far. That's what's in our spreadsheet right now, at the start of the process. We haven't vetted/voted on these yet, just made sure they come in near the popularity cutoff. If any of the albums in this list really knock your socks off, let us know in the comments below. The first 1/3 of the list is mostly from random redditors, quality may be a bit dicey. The last 2/3 is the fruit of the l2t crew's cratedigging all year, submissions from our 30+ moderators. Every genre you can imagine (and some you can't) is in this list, they aren't sorted by style yet - this is one big bucket that goes all over the map.

I will update this playlist as new albums come in, though not exactly in real time - expect a day or two delay. If you want to keep up with it, just follow that list on spotify.

We're taking until the end of Feb. to finish the 2018 set, so roughly 6-8 weeks to listen to all of this stuff before we push the finished set out the door. If you want to help us listen, bookmark this thread here on Tildes, and leave a comment here when one of the albums grabs you. Feel free to submit new albums to that spreadsheet right up until the deadline at the end of Feb.

Happy listening. :)

When it comes to news, it can be hard to separate the big drops in the bucket from the small. In thinking back through all the news of the year, what stories do you think are the most important? In other words, which are the stories that people will look back years from now and remember when thinking about 2018?

What made them great? Who would you recommend them to?

Don't feel like you have to limit yourself to 2018 releases either. I'm interested in whatever you played and enjoyed regardless of when it came out.

Cross-posted with /r/composting

I'm pretty proud of the results of my first year of serious composting (before this year, my method was, "dump kitchen scraps in a pile and turn it occasionally"), so I figured I'd share. Here's a picture of the pile, opened up yesterday for turning/dumping fresh kitchen scraps. Closer view, and even closer. As you can see, it still has a ways to go. It consists of mostly kitchen scraps, grass clippings, and oak leaves, and I guess the latter of those takes quite a while to break down. Here's a picture of it covered with a tarp after I was done, yesterday.

This is actually a combination of eight different smaller piles I worked on throughout the year while I was teaching myself to make compost. The first piles I made were basically just the result of mowing some tall grass/wild plants in the spring--I had thought that since I was mowing up both leaves and grass that the ratio would be just right for composting. I was wrong. Those three piles didn't really go anywhere. I should've added far more leaf matter, kept them wetter, and combined them into one rather than three.

The fourth pile was a combination of kitchen scraps and leaf matter. I had about a 1/2:1 ratio of leaf matter to kitchen scraps. It turned out okay, but of course, I should've added more browns. The fifth pile (featuring a guest who liked the "fresh greens" that I often went outside to spray onto the pile, if you catch my drift...) started out with probably a 1:1 ratio of browns to greens and ended up with a 2:1 ratio, since I started actually figuring things out. I used both mowed-up leaves and mowed-up household paper waste for my browns, and kitchen scraps and grass clippings for my greens. The pile did end up getting fairly warm. I turned it every 2-4 days.

The sixth and seventh piles were nothing but oak leaves mixed with grass clippings. I wasn't great about getting the ratios exactly right, but they were both probably close to 1 1/2:1 browns to greens. Both heated up after I turned them, every few days, and turned out great. I think I do have some pictures, but can't find them.

I started using a tarp with my eighth pile, and that tarp, as well as the increased amount of browns--always at least 2:1--made a huge difference, as previously I had a hard time keeping piles at the right moisture level. Either they'd dry out in the sun or they'd get soaked in the rain. The tarp protected from both and helped insulate the pile, enabling it to get to the right temperature despite being fairly small.

I tried to follow the Berkeley method closely (other than that I added to it every time I turned it). If I added new scraps, I let it sit for four days; otherwise, I turned it every other day. I started adding pretty much anything to it. One time while I was turning it, I found a dessicated dead robin nearby and tossed that in. There was no trace of it the next time I turned the pile.

Fairly recently, I combined all of my piles into one, as you saw above. This makes it a lot harder to turn, but it seems to be going well. Instead of making a new pile and letting this one sit, I've continued adding to this one every week, when I turn it (now that it's this big, it's hard to find time to turn it more often than that). I'm not sure if I'll be able to do this through winter. I've been stocking up on coffee grounds from Starbucks (I have maybe 8 bags of them sitting in the garage?) to help me keep it going, but it gets pretty cold here in Michigan. Maybe I should start a new pile in the winter rather than keeping this one going; I haven't decided, yet. I'm happy to hear your suggestions.

Thanks for reading! Tremendous thanks to /r/composting; everyone there is incredibly helpful, and there are many very knowledgeable folks there. I couldn't have learned this much about composting without them. I've offered them my five invitations, so hopefully we can eventually get the same kind of composting/gardening discussion over here!

I'm hardly an expert after just one year of composting, but I'm happy to answer any questions you have about my methods, about composting in general, or about how you might get started.

Now for some bonus pics, just for fun:

A bear admiring my pile
That same bear about to destroy a bird feeder... D'oh.
Compost/Hugelkultur-in-progress (I'm not sure how people find the time to gather enough woody materials/grass clippings to make a hugelkultur all at once!)

What do you guys think are the best albums released so far this year? Obviously this is subjective, I'd just like to hear some of your opinions :-)

My favourites out of the ones I can remember are:

• Kids See Ghosts by Kids See Ghosts
• Egg on face. Foot in mouth. Wriggling Wriggling Wriggling. by Crywank
• Moe Moe by Moe Shop
• Little Dark Age by MGMT
• Veteran by JPEGMAFIA