Best of 2024, Not from 2024

Continuing to rest in the comfort zones of retro styles, but my new calling as a junior roleplaying Game Master kept me from stagnating and got me scribbling furiously on notepads again. Welcome to this year's influential round-up of Some Things I Liked This Year, Not Necessarily Also Produced This Year, Although Some Were.

Horrifying thing I drew when I was six

A while ago, I showed my four-year-old some of the surviving notebooks from my childhood, for something to do and to buck her ideas up. There was one image in particular that stuck in her mind and would be brought up out of the blue months later, usually when getting ready for bed. This one:

I remember drawing that (my dad had taken me to visit the farm, bright and early, but for some reason I'd stubbornly insisted on staying in the car while he worked for however long, so I had to entertain myself by drawing, it turns out, terrifying nightmare fuel), but I can't remember where the idea came from. It seems too messed up for a six-year-old to invent, but he has been raised on the likes of Knightmare and Beetlejuice, so I wouldn't put it past him.

On a lighter note, your child asking to colour in the "Doctor Disguise Colouring-Book!" you made in 1992 is a strange, new emotion, but a nice one.

Aimee's Best of 2023, I Guess?

Here's What Aimee Probably Liked Best This Year, I Guess? Includes things that were released in other years, but that she got around to late, for reasons such as not existing at the time.

I may not do this again, though the idea of keeping it up when she's 27 and living in a different country, based on an old man's poor comprehension of social media memes, amuses me.

Best of 2023, Not from 2023

Full-time work and full-time parenting left negative time for personal pissing about for most of this year, but hacks like passive audiobooks in work-prep time and secret subtitled anime when she's watching My Little Pony kept me sane.

Here are the things I enjoyed discovering (or sometimes revisiting) in 2023, some of which were even released in 2023, though mostly not.

Best of 2022, Not from 2022

Squeezing work around full-time parenting cut into my self-improvementindulgence time this year. I may not have read any long novels, but I did see the entirety of Peppa Pig several times over and learned all the names of multiple generations of plastic ponies.

Here's what I managed to scrape together for my out-of-calendar cultural year.

Best of 2021, Not from 2021

The second childhood of parenting is already corrupting my taste through secondary joy, contrasting with my conventionally mature picks of board games, comics, adventure gamebooks and fighting robot cartoons.

Here is The Best Entertainment That I Happened to Experience Within The Past Year!!!!!!!

Ready, set, come on, let's go!

The mundane nostalgia of 500 Bus Stops

When I was 18, I thought nostalgia was remembering cartoons I watched a decade ago and escaping from insecure adolescence back to the sheltered innocence of an indoors childhood. I wasn't wrong, but there hadn't been enough time yet for those roots to grow to any meaningful depth. My less exciting adventures in the real world would turn out to have the more lasting impact.

Best of 2020, Not from 2020

My favourite anachronistic CONTENT CONSUMED over the past 12 months, regardless of date of manufacture.

Plus some new things. That are mainly revivals or homages of old things, admittedly.

Retroreads 1980s–2000 : More Childhood Books

A while ago, I retrospectively reviewed some favourite childhood books with my usual 80-word depth, focusing on the select few I felt were worth adding to the big list.

I don't know why I was being so coy.* Here are 100 more (let's not get too crazy) that are worth mentioning, sometimes less so. It's not absolutely everything from the shelves, schools and libraries, but between these, the last lot and the Trek books, it's surely most of them.

Some are so obscure or poorly remembered on my part that I can't find images or other evidence of their existence. I should probably be glad that there's at least some nostalgia I can't ruin.

* Update: Oh I see, I didn't want to waste days of my life on something completely pointless. Bit late to start worrying about that.

Robinson Crusoe: A Haven of Inaccurate Facts – 20th Anniversary Illustrated Edition

It's been 20 years since I sat at the family PC, bashing out a stream-of-consciousness critical commentary in real time, for some reason, as my youngest brother watched the video of Animafilm's 1973 adaptation of Robinson Crusoe, for some reason. Little did the angsty teenage critic know he was creating his own "stupid" and "pathetic" historical relic to be mocked in due course.

Fortunately, I didn't put it on the internet... until now, in a special illustrated edition that might help those unfamiliar with the cartoon (there must be some people) to understand where 14-year-old, casually homophobic me was coming from. Sadly, this involved breaking up the original WALL OF TEXT into more legible paragraphs, which spoils the effect somewhat.

Added emphasis and [footnotes] when 34-year-old, slightly less homophobic me felt the need to chime in. If you're watching along, I only made it as far as 25:40 (out of 1:14:30) before getting bored. If you can't be bothered to read the whole thing, ctrl+F for 'gay' and 'thick' to get the gist.

I made this

Do you remember that short-lived Children's BBC 'Genie' ident from 1995, with the generic Aladdin bloke whose head was bigger than his body, as if he'd been drawn by a child who was still in single digits and had no knowledge of anatomy, but knew how to flatter competition judges by unsubtly implying that their channel was magic? I did that.

My unimaginative winning entry to the CBBC ident competition (I think the stop-motion bees one was the other winner) has never showed up in ident compilations on YouTube, when I've been feeling self-indulgent enough to check, and it's still classified as lost media by people who think that information is valuable enough to include on a wiki, but who clearly aren't obsessive enough to skim through random continuity uploads from early 1995 to see if it's there.

Found it! (4:06)



That was 25 years ago. I should probably get some new achievements.

Best of 1988–1999, Not from 1988–1999

If 13,000 words of anachronistic 21st-century highlights wasn't going far enough already, here's the nostalgic prequel to fill in the rest of my autobiography in entertainment, as far as I remember it:

The Best Things I Watched, Read and Played Each Year from 1988–99 (Aged 2–14).

Probably. Cross-referencing across school years and houses I lived in was satisfying detective work. You know, for me.

Update: Replaced by expanded, ongoing, more historically accurate edition.

Best of 2000–2019, Not from 2000–2019

Happy New Vicennial! Rather than a boring round-up of things I've enjoyed in the past year, or even the last decade, here's a thoroughly tedious chronology of My Best TV, Films, Books, Music and Other Stuff That I Happened to Experience During Each of the Last 20 Years.

These are the cultural highlights that were most important to me At the Time (Aged 14–34), plus retrospective overall favourites by category and the Overall Best Thing of the 21st Century.

Importantly, many best things of the year Weren't Actually Released in That Year, because there are loads of other years to catch up on and I'm not some zeitgeisty freak. No, I'm clearly normal.

Based on Memory, Research, Guesswork and Existential Anguish. Selections from my old 2014–18 round-ups revised when I somehow remembered things more clearly years later.

Update: Replaced by expanded, ongoing, more historically accurate edition.

Retroreads 1993–1996: Some Kid Books

Even if there was any way I could remember every single book I read as a child, I wouldn't want to waste time talking about them all. Most of them were rubbish and rather childish. Some of them were fantastic.

To keep things relatively sane, here are some of the more substantial books* I remember reading in and out of school in juniors (age 8–11, pre Star Trek). That's the earliest I can go where I can still imagine possibly reading them again for fun, and might possibly have done so as a grown man from time to time. Maturity is just a number.

I won't add all of these to the book list, that would just be embarrassing. School books in yellow.

* I bet he breaks this rule immediately.

Retroreads 1997–2000: Mainly Trek Books

The cusp of high school is as far back as I can reasonably* go while still trusting my memory and juvenile judgement. Accidentally getting into Star Trek at eleven was the end of childish pursuits and the beginning of one-note obsessive fandom for a few years (which was obviously totally grown-up and stuff).

No, that's not fair; I liked Red Dwarf as well.

School books are yellow. You'll also recognise them for not being about Star Trek or aliens generally.

* You passed that point of no return a long time ago, mate.

Retroreads 2001–2007: Study Books and Recreation

I was required to read a lot of books for my English literature degree, but I didn't always, and rarely all the way through. Uni's not really about the studying is it?

Here's what I remember reading from GCSE level (my most illiterate period ever) through A-level to degree level, for work and pleasure. Yellow for study books, in case you somehow couldn't tell them apart. It does get trickier when the study books eventually start to get good.

Retroreads late 2007: Edinbureads, Vol. 1

After graduating from a literature degree where I'd done the minimal reading required to blag exams, I suddenly became a voracious reader. I reviewed a couple of books a week, among other things, to earn a modest unemployment income (so modest it didn't cover my low-budget lifestyle), and since I had nothing else going on, I read some more books in my free time. It's not that impressive, most of them were graphic novels.

Here is that, largely based on this.

Retroreads 2008–2010: Edinbureads, Vol. 2

Not books about Edinburgh; rather, the books I can remember reading while I lived there. Not counting the first few months, which was a ridiculously prolific period that needs its own entry to avoid breaking the page.

Library books, comic downloads and audiobooks soundtracking walks around town and mindless data entry. I didn't keep notes, so this incomplete list of transient tomes can never be comprehensive and I should stop worrying about it. I wish I could stop worrying about it.

Retroreads 2010–2012: Travelreads

Back for another round of increasingly hazy, some would say worthless retrospectives covering the books I can remember reading or having read to me during the first two-and-a-bit years of this blog's timeline since I left the UK. Because this is vital information.

Alternating between audiobooks read on the go – forever associated with irrelevant visuals of national parks and exotic cities – and physical books chosen from a despairing selection on hostel shelves to keep me company on buses.

Surely this futile odyssey will end here and I won't attempt to recall all the stacks I borrowed from Edinburgh Central Library over the previous three years? (Is there somewhere I can access that information?)

Retroreads 2013–2014: Filling the Gaps

It's a bit strange to keep a compulsive checklist of everything you read, but even stranger to arbitrarily start doing that at 29 years old, so there are gaping gaps in bibliographies. ("I see you enjoyed that obscure C-tier Alan Moore spin-off slightly more than you expected to. Tell me, have you read 'Watchmen'?")

If I've done a book fair and square, and can remember it well enough to write a pithy comment for posterity, I can add it to the big list. Here are some books I read in the year or two before I started keeping track.

I could keep backtracking all the way to undocumented childhood favourites, but that would be insane. So I probably will.