It's odd. As I've gotten older and list my favorite things, so many are from long ago. Perhaps I'm learning why older folks reminisce so much; why nostalgia plays such a disproportionately large role in the lives of the elderly. Were I to compile yet another "best of" list, I'm willing to bet there'd be little on it from the past two years.
I've often referred to my three favorite TV series being The 4400, Farscape, and Fringe. But after having given Stranger Things a third watch this past week, I think I've got to add that show to the list. It's just so good. Additionally, I should probably include Avatar: The Last Airbender. Despite it being animated, I watched the whole series twice and loved it both times.
Video games are another topic I could reminisce on ad nauseum. Beyond Good & Evil, Half-Life 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Resident Evil 2 and 4, Starcraft, Street Fighter 2, they're all old. The newest one is a PC game which I bought on CD. Nowadays I mostly play Sentinels of the Multiverse, a tabletop-to-PC card game translation. It's fun, but I can't really rank it with the others.
The books I count amongst my favorites at least average a bit newer. Altered Carbon and Wheel of Time are older, but The Dresden Files and World War Z are... oh. More than ten years old. Little Brother was ten years ago, and even Ready Player One is six years old at this point. So while they're at least generally from this milennium, they're not as new as I felt like they were before taking a closer look.
Favorite movies? Yeah, they're old. Empire Strikes Back, Contact, Sneakers. The Avengers is at least only five years old.
Although the volume of new artists I listen to isn't large owing to my tendency to find a band and listen to nearly nothing else for six months, I can at least count some of my latest favorites as newer music. My recent Steely Dan kick might not make it seem that way, but Chvrches is all music from the past decade, I've purchased the latest two Poets of the Fall albums from the Google Music store as soon as they were released, and although Adam Warrock has retired from his nerdcore rapper career, I was snatching up his music as he'd release it while it was still a thing.
The final hobby I've got which requires mentioning is Warmachine. It's interesting in that the game sits on a constantly-evolving ruleset as new releases come out monthly and the game's balance is constantly tweaked and rebalanced. I've been playing for three years, but the game is ever-new and still forefront in my mind most days.
This blog post may just be another link-dump, but my primary thought here was to take note of how such a great portion of my favorites is from many years back. Does that make me old?