Recapping 2012

Happy new year, dear readers. It's time again to glance at the rearview mirror and see how I'm doing in my mission to clear out my entire backlog. In short, it ain't pretty.

Above you'll see my stats month by month in 2012, along with the yearly totals. I also included my totals from 2010 and 2011 for comparison's sake. The bottom line, so to speak, is actually the lower right-hand corner, and I'm sad to say it indicates regression rather than progress. What went wrong? The problem was twofold. In comparison to last year's pretty solid 56-mark, I completed fewer items and acquired more items. It's that simple.

We can dig a little deeper though. By splitting acquisitions and loggings by category, it becomes clear that I didn't beat fewer video games or read fewer books; no, the fact that I logged so many fewer items can be traced directly to the 28 fewer movies (and TV seasons) I watched this year. How about that? Contrarily, my acquisition bulge can't be blamed on movies or TV shows, where I added just about as many items this year as I did last year; it is instead the 11 extra video games and 21 extra books that should bear the brunt of the inflation.

Further analysis indicates a few trends, some good and some bad. For instance, I came out of the gate in 2012 just firing away on video games, beating 18 in the first third of the year alone and matching the +11 mark I achieved throughout all of 2011. Unfortunately, I slowed down in a major way after that, and if it weren't for an eight-game beating spree in October I'd have finished the year with a net negative result on the video game front. I should try in 2013 to come out of the gate just as strong, but not let up as summer arrives. Sliding over a few columns, from March through July I averaged only three movie (or TV season) viewings a month. I rebounded with 8 in August, but also somehow bought 15 different new DVDs or Blu-rays. Why? How? Moving forward, I've got to be better about making huge bulk purchases on a whim like that. And then we come to books. Actually, in spite of this being the only category with regression instead of progress, it's the one I'm proudest of, I think. I may have read fewer books overall this year than last year, but nine of those were over 500 pages long and five of them topped 800. And on the acquisition front, the month that really did me in was - no surprises here - December. Take that month away and I'm +12 on the year. It's not great, but at least it's progress.

So there's my status. But what about the year itself in a nutshell? What various kinds of entertainment were we consuming?

Books

2012 will be remembered for a number of different series, chief among them being George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (the series that Game of Thrones is based on) and Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy, which four different bloggers finished up in the first few months of the year alone. Elsewhere, there was a ton of Kurt Vonnegut - five of us posted about his stuff collectively over a dozen times - and Stephen King. Speaking of that guy, his new Dark Tower book was almost instantly read and posted about by three separate people. There were several posts on works by José Saramago and Chuck Klosterman, with Sween carrying the bulk of each of those loads and a cameo appearance on each by me. Other than that, we were all over the place in 2012, each posting all kinds of different material.

Video Games

It was a big year for series like God of War (5 games) and Call of Duty (6 games). It's always a big year for Zelda (this time around, 6 games by 4 people). But the surprise "winner" of the year in gaming was the Final Fantasy franchise, in which Sweeney and I combined to beat seven titles, all of them different: VIII, X-2, XII, Revenant Wings, VII, Mystic Quest, and Tactics A2, giving us a nice mix of main titles, sequels, and spin-offs. What's more, Sween and I are currently playing three more combined, so I don't expect 2013 to be quiet on the Final Fantasy front. Aside from those four series though, we all kind of did our own thing for the most part. Elsewhere, the only duplicate loggings came on Halo 4 and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, and each of those only got posted for the second time in the final ten days of the year.

Television

This is an area of the blog I tend to dominate; the first eleven TV posts of the year were all mine, for example. As such, the year in television more or less comes down to what I've been watching. Breaking Bad appears to be the lone exception to this rule, as it led the way with six postings, four of which came from Sween. I contributed one as well, as did Trevor, who has another Breaking Bad post in the works as I type this. Community was another big one, with four posts, with Trev posting three seasons of that one in the last two months alone. Marissa saw three seasons of The Wire and Sweeney also watched three seasons of Sons of Anarchy. Elsewhere it was pretty scattered. My own decision to watch five seasons of That '70s Show gives it the second-most posts of any TV show in 2012. Both Sweeney and I watched the first two seasons of Downton Abbey as well. Webber watched seven full seasons of Star Trek but confined them all to one post. There really wasn't anything we all seemed to be into, which may just mean that all the shows we mutually watch are the ones we watch live on TV as they air.

Movies

There was only one movie that garnered multiple posts in 2012, and that was Drive, a movie which both Trev and I said was the best movie we'd seen in 2011. Otherwise, we were all over the place as usual.