GregHowley.com

Here we are, another year has gone by, and it's nearly 2020. Holy cow, does that sound like the future. Well, I mean, technically 2020 is the future, but it sounds more distant than it actually is.

In any event, 2019 had some better content than 2018, so this should at least be a decent list.

Best Movie: Avengers: Endgame. Yeah, this is likely no surprise. 2018 was Infinity War, 2017 was Thor: Ragnarok, and 2016 was Captain America: Civil War. I've got to go back four years to find a movie-of-the-year that wasn't an MCU movie. And even then, if I go back to 2014, it's Guardians of the Galaxy. It should be no surprise that the big kahuna of superhero films is my number one this year.

I've already written up a pre-Endgame and post-Endgame article, so I won't re-recap my favorite moments, or repeat why the movie was so great. It just was.

Best Video Game: Pillars of Eternity. I wrote an article on GregHowley.com about my favorite video games of 2019, and an article on GeekDad.com about the mechanics of Pillars of Eternity. The game is great, and scratched my RPG itch until such time as Baldur's Gate 3 finally comes along.

My runner-up is Wasteland 2, the sequel to a game I played 30 years ago on my Commodore 64.

Best Book: Death's End, by Cixin Liu. I stopped keeping my book log when my site went down, but I did keep things up at Goodreads. I've got a 2019 Reading Challenge, which I'm on track to miss by two books. I should have known that a book per month was too much for me. I mostly re-read Dresden Files books in 2019, and they are all very quick reads, but it wasn't enough.

Death's End is the third book in a Chinese-written science fiction trilogy which begins in the 1960s and goes into the far future, ending at the heat death of the universe. It certainly gets weird at times, especially in the first book, The Three Body Problem, when you don't yet know what's going on. But the final book in the trilogy was easily the best of the three.

Best Board Game: Spirit Island While Spirit Island isn't a new game in 2019, I first got a copy and played this year. And I really like it. The premise of the game? Settlers are slowly populating the island, exploring, building settlements and building cities. You need to kill them all.

Yep. You play the spirits of island. Spirits of water, fire, and shadow. The settlers are despoiling your pristine land and driving back the natives. I've found the game to be extremely difficult. I've played something like six times, and only won once. But it's fun! After you initially learn the rules, which can be time-consuming, the game actually plays very quickly.

My runner-up would be Photosynthesis, which is a board game about growing trees by positioning them to maximize the amount of sunlight they get, and casting shadow on other players' trees.

Best Television: Stranger Things The third season perhaps wasn't as amazing as previous seasons, but I did really enjoy it, despite it being far more horror-y than previous seasons. The melting people felt like something out of John Carpenter's The Thing, and the scene where they have to cut open El's leg to remove something was almost too much body horror even for me. If you're interested in my full opinion on the show, check out the write-up I did on GeekDad in July, of which I'm moderately proud: Stranger Things 3 Celebrates Nostalgia, Nerdiness, and Horror

I do have some runners-up. We're nearly done watching Raising Dion on Netflix, which is a very good off-brand X-Men story. Additionally, I've only seen one or two episodes each of Watchmen, His Dark Materials, and The Mandalorian, so I can't yet comment much about any of them. I do think that they all have potential.

EDIT: I finally saw The Mandalorian. It's pretty close to Stranger Things in quality. Not Stranger Things season 1 good, but nearly as good as season 3.

Best Music: Almost none of my music here is new. In fact, much of it is from before I was born. I love going back and re-discovering songs that I've heard before but never really focused on. That's why this year I rediscovered Boz Scaggs, Led Zeppelin, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Jim Croce. But the one band I'd have to place as my 2019 favorite is Pomplamoose. They do mostly covers and mashups, but many of them are actually better than the originals. Don't believe me? Watch their covers of Daft Punk's Harder, Better, Stronger, Faster and of La Roux's Bulletproof. I've already got tickets to see them in concert on January 16th, and I'm not much of a concert-goer. They're so good.

In closing, since I'm on music, I've got to share some of my very favorites - those songs where I'll be at work, and they come on in my playlist, an I've just got to stop for a minute, close my eyes, and groove.

Agnes, by Glass Animals. (link) It's about watching a friend succumb to drug addiction, but for me it's not about the lyrics - I just love the music. It's become my favorite song by a band that I've grown quite fond of in the past year. When the chorus starts repeating near the end and you get that augmented chord variant... augh. So good.

Sara, by Fleetwood Mac. (link) It's a song I'm sure you've heard a hundred times. Drowning in a sea of love where everyone would love to drown. Try listening with headphones, like I do at work. Listen to the drums. Listen to the way the piano chords are balanced between the left and right channels. Trying to overanalyze the structure like the amateur hack of a music theorist I am, perhaps it's interplay between the piano chords and the bass, and the way the tune spends so long at the subdominant and dominant before resolving to the tonic during the chorus. Love it.

I just pulled out my phone's crappy keyboard app and tried to recreate what I'm talking about. As the base moves through its 1-6-4-5 progression, the higher notes repeat. Listen to this crappy MIDI file: (link)

So that's it for my 2019 favorites. See you in 2020!