Recapping 2014

Time to check in on the big picture once again. The goal of Back-Blogged, for me, is to document the process of reducing and ultimately completing my backlog of books, games, movies, and TV shows. It's a four-front effort - well, a three-front effort on paper, since I count movies and TV shows in the same category for logging purposes - and a great year in one category can make for a shitty year elsewhere. So, how did I do in 2014? Let's see:

Progress

I'm only eleven items closer to my endgame than I was when the year began, but the silver lining (and perhaps saddest part) is that 2014 still made for my second-best calendar year yet. (Negative signs are a bad thing; they indicate negative progress.)

Breaking things down categorically, let's start with video games. This was my most productive year yet at beating video games, but unfortunately it was even more so my worst year yet at acquiring them. This is especially ironic, given one of my 2014 goals - but we'll get to those later. The biggest caveat to consider here is that 33 of those 70 games added came in the form of a Sega Genesis loaded with emulations that I got for Christmas, on New Year's Eve; you could technically punt those 33 additions to 2013, but I chose not to count them there a year ago because, come on, that would have just ruined my year. Anyway, 26 of the games beaten were also Sega games. Remove the Genesis gift entirely, and I'd be at 38 games beaten and 37 added, which is very much in line with previous years.

Movies and TV seasons were where I really made hay this year. I watched fewer than ever before, but I acquired an even smaller relative amount. Three huge things happened here. First, I more or less stopped buying movies. I think the number is something like three purchases in the last eight months of the year. That's good! Secondly and on a related note, for a few years I've been letting my TV season purchases dwindle. I still have a stubborn "complete the series" mentality, which will lead me to make future dumb purchases like True Blood: Season 7 and Sons of Anarchy: Season 6, but I've stopped blindly purchasing new shows and thus starting these cycles all over again. And both of these related things are likely due to the third thing, which is that I finally started really using Netflix and Amazon Prime last year. In the final months of the year I probably watched something like fifteen movies between those two services, which offset my need to go out and buy movies and TV shows. Success!

Books have been a rough spot for me for a few years running now. After netting 29 steps toward backlog completion in 2010 and 2011, I've stumbled backward 14 spots ever since then. The way around this is simple - read more books I already have, and buy fewer that I don't already have - but these are such correlated issues. When I'm not into reading, I'm not buying new books. And when I'm devouring books, I'm buying more from similar authors. A vicious cycle!

2014 Goals

I made four distinct Back-Blogged goals for 2014. Let's revisit each one and see how I did.

"Beat more than 50 games." Check. Sixty-four is a good deal more than fifty.

"Purchase no more than fifteen games." I added 70 games this year, more than four times as many as I should have. So this was a huge and epic fail! Or was it? I mean, it was - I definitely purchased more than fifteen games - but this goal was intended to be a money-saver as much as anything. What I should have done here was limit myself to a budget and say something like "spend no more than $750 on video games this year." That'd have been 15 fifty-dollar games, after all. Now, I don't have the receipts for every game I bought in front of me, but I think this may actually be pretty close. I'll explore this in more detail in a comment later on.

"Finish the year with fewer than 20 unwatched movies/TV seasons." Yep, this one checks out too. There are six movies and seven TV seasons in my backlog right now. There's a decent chance 2015 is the year this entire subsection of the backlog gets vanquished. No promises!

"Read 25 books." Nailed this one exactly. Actually, I "hurried up" in November when I was still eight books away from this goal, and read a lot of shorter books. I also stopped cold in mid-December once I'd finished my 25th book. I really wanted this one, apparently.

2015 Goals

I'm going to cop out of this one entirely and just give a few vague things I'd like to focus on. No numbers or benchmarks. I want to finish off a few book series. I want to read multiple science books. I want to kill off all the Sega Genesis games and I'd also like to heavily focus on the PS2 and the Xbox 360. Those are really the big ones. And, of course, I want to log far more items than I add.

How about the rest of you? I think there may only be three of us actively participating at this point.