Some thoughts on 2021

As like last year, after some stats, I follow up with some things that I didn’t like and things I liked during the last year. Gone are the days of ranked lists, these are just randomly put together with no real order.

Things I liked

  • Spiderman Far from Home, a lot of hype surrounded this movie and to my surprise the movie delivered nicely.
  • Titane, after RAW I knew I was in for a ride and what a ride it was. Not an easy movie to watch and one that sticks around for a while.
  • Wish you were here, I’ve listened to this album quite often
  • Pneuma, a song from last year’s Tool album but one I really discovered this year.
  • Invisible Monsters, reading my favorite book once again and it’s still a fucking roller coaster ride (awesome quotes here)
  • Half-Life Alyx, playing this game in VR is just amazing, horror, suspense and action all in awesome graphics make you feel you’re there.
  • Google VR, vising interesting places in VR was a nice way of going around the world in the midst of a pandemic.
  • Judas and the Black Messiah, oh man that performance from Daniel Kaluuya, oh man he deserved that Acadamy Award.
  • The Power of the Dog, an atmospheric brooding character study with amazing performances and stunning images.
  • A Glitch in the Matrix, probably the movie that provided the most interesting discussions with people, and yes in some way I believe we are.
  • Kirby, I fell in love with this flat-file CMS. I’m glad I’m switching because it has so many things which allow me to do exactly what I want
  • Friends & Seinfeld, rewatching some classic sitcoms put a smile on my face in some dire moments this year, and there were quite a few.
  • The Green Knight, that ending, oh that ending blew me away.
  • My daily walks, I started to take them last February and I really needed those to clear my head, and I keep doing them because it gets me outside, breathing fresh air and doing something for my health.
  • Arcane, I purposefully put this one last because it’s a biggie. By FAR the best thing I’ve seen this year and probably the best first season of any TV Show I’ve ever seen (not counting mini-series). I will probably dedicate a full blog post about this show. Go watch it on Netflix!

Things I didn’t like

  • Bland big-budget movies like Red Notice, Venom, Mortal Kombat and especially Monster Hunter.
  • Social Media are a pain in the ass and I start to reduce them one by one.
  • Subscription Services, everything has a subscription service and they all cost money, something will not add up in the long run.
  • David Fincher yet again not winning an Acadamy Award
  • Last years Superbowl, what a bore and I hate Tom Brady
  • The state of the world, damn you COVID-19
  • Me not being as productive or focused as I would have liked

What else did I do?

  • I did my yearly redesign, improved upon the version before
  • picked a WordPress replacement CMS
  • I learned React, a bit of Vue and started to use Vite.js
  • I lost weight, which was deliberate
  • optimized my home office, though I’m not done yet

I’m sure I’m forgetting some things, but a year is long and if you don’t write anything down you tend to forget a few things.

To summarize, it was, once again, a weird and difficult year. For a moment it seemed to be over and we would get back to normal (whatever that is) but we got pulled right back in for another go-around. Let’s just hope this was it, we need to find some normalcy I think, we really need to.