End of the year, good time as ever for a review.

I started tracking my shows and movies with trakt in 2019, so i actually have a year of data to showcase. Keeping in mind that a lot of replays in this are me leaving the tv on in the background / while I sleep, here is my year:

https://trakt.tv/users/jleclanche/year/2020

Some highlights for me... I discovered Only Connect, what became by far my favourite game show. In general I've been enjoying game shows quite a lot and, since Trebek's diagnosis, have been going through some of Jeopardy when bored.

New seasons: I loved the latest season of Westworld, it's sweet seeing Nolan going back to his Person of Interest roots. Archer also went back to its roots and it's been great. Sabrina got even darker, loved it. Watched the last season of stranger things and got a lot less excited about it (i do remember it getting better but this is a show that should have ended after 1, maybe two seasons).

Reboots: Ducktales... What a revelation! And I just started the revived Animaniacs, also looking great. Finally watched the new Aladdin, very much enjoyed it! Lion King was ok, nothing special. Also, Sonic I thought was kinda funny; watched it for shits and giggles but honestly enjoyed it.

Watched and rewatched Hamilton. Already liked it as just a playlist but as a show it truly is phenomenal.

Some other discoveries... The Good Place. Good Girls. Ozark. All of them excellent. Started After Life but didn't get past episode 1 even though I quite want to. I finally started King of the Hill (in my watchlist for years) but I frankly can't get into it, i dislike the animation, the voices and the characters; it is witty and i can definitely see Judge's writing seeping out, but it's not smart enough to make up for the rest. And Swedish Dicks; haven't finished it as I'm watching it with a friend but loving it so far.

How was your tv year?

I asked in another thread about the best games you played this year, which is a question that tends to surface highly polished and often highly familiar gaming experiences.

This thread isn't about "best" but about the most interesting -- games that did something different or odd or tried something new. They didn't have to necessarily succeed at that, and they can be very rough around the edges or even outright bad -- what matters is that they went out of their way to offer something very much their own.

The final results would look something like this.

Ours here wouldn't be tailored to obscure music like that though, just the best albums of the year with no other qualifications. There hasn't been one on reddit since 2017, you can find the 2011-2017 sets in the archive. The first one was just me putting up 15 albums. I believe the highest number we ever hit was 287 albums. It's heartening when the artists show up to thank you for shining a light on their little corner of the music world, too. A good list is good press for Tildes, it'll make the rounds.

Frankly, the people who were instrumental in those roundups are here on Tildes now, so hitting past 300 isn't outside the realm of possibility, not that we need to get that extreme (it's just fun). There are several new type two listeners here too, so potentially we've already got more music lovers and more help here than we've had doing the previous set. General input from tens of thousands of people like you see on reddit isn't as important to this process as the hardcore music lovers, we'd get like 3 solid recs out of 1000 comments, and small/forgotten /r/letstalkmusic always kicked everyone else's ass when it came to album picks.

These things can be rather a lot of work, which is why they are hard to do. It's not the playlists that eat up the time, though - it's collecting all of the albums and getting enough ears on them to give them the stamp of approval for the final list. The way to make that easier is to get started on it early and spread the work out over several months. That way come November you're looking for late releases and overlooked gems rather than panicking and trying to do it all in a single week. Been there, that's the worst.

The way we'd do it before, we'd run roundup threads on reddit periodically (in several different subs) then sift the comments for album recommendations, listen to them to see if they passed muster. That's hardly necessary on Tildes, especially with the long-lived threads here that bump with activity and never truly lock. We also used a google docs spreadsheet so we could tally everyone's votes up, but that was a major pain in the ass I'd like to skip. Tildes' own votes should be more than enough, and exemplary tags can highlight the must-listen set that goes at the top.

I think the best way to do it is put up a collection thread that everyone who is interested can then bookmark or ignore, and then drop albums in the comments between now and mid-November. No, not in this thread, I'll post a thread for it during the first week of October. We just let that roll and keep dumping new albums into it, listening, and leaving comments there. Come late November I can whip that into a set of playlists in a weekend, that's the easy part.

I enjoy doing this because it's been my experience that most music publications would rather argue about what numerical order the same 50 albums should be in than round up all of the best and let the listeners decide for themselves. They also have an incentive to pimp bands that are industry darlings or that they are being paid to boost in the recommendations. We don't.

So, are you folks interested in getting the ball rolling on this in October? Leave a comment if you are interested in contributing (even if it's just a single album) so we can get a sense of how many people are down for this before we get started. If there isn't enough interest we can try again next year. I'd also like to invite the folks who have done this before to share their experiences, you know who you are. ;)

• What are your favorite books that you read this year?
• What made them so noteworthy?
• Who would you recommend them to?

Note: the books do NOT have to be from this year (i.e. published in 2019). Any book you read this year regardless of publication date counts.

As we come to the close of another year, I thought it would be a neat idea for people to give their picks for the Best/Worst/Most/Least [something] of 2019. Think of these like awards, although some of them are not necessarily in categories people would want to win.

There are no limits and no criteria. Examples:
Best Meme
Worst Tweet
Most Pretentious Startup
Least Surprising Box Office Bomb

Anything is fair game -- do whatever you want! Get creative and have fun! Winners can be people, places, or things -- all 2019 nouns are eligible!

While I'm intending this to be mostly for fun, it's okay to give serious ones too, so if you want to tell me about, say, the legit Best Movie or the Most Transformative Hashtag of 2019, be my guest.

Make sure you don't just drop your award winners' names in the thread. Be sure to explain why they're deserving of their title.

Also, it's okay for one category to be awarded with more than one winner, so if someone else has already given their pick for, say, Best Season Finale, and you feel strongly that another deserves the win, add your pick and explain your thinking!