Tag: yearinreview

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My 2024 Reading List

Here’s another “year-in-review” post (I’m done, I swear). Over the course of 2024, I read 30 books. My favorite books this year were Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and The Cuckoo’s Egg (I wrote about visiting the author at his Oakland house). My least favorite was easily Palo Alto (it was one of the few reviews I wrote this past year).

EDIT: Fixed hyperlinks. GoodReads changed how their reading challenge page is displayed and I did not update my parsing tool to account for this.

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My top music of 2024

Last.fm has been diligently cataloging my music listening habits for nearly 20 (!!) years. Now that we’ve said goodbye to 2024, it’s time to look back at what I’ve been digging into. Compared to previous years, there are some interesting surprises. And stuff that is just absolutely the same as always.

  1. Dispatch
  2. Social Distortion
  3. Hot Water Music
  4. The Interrupters
  5. Red Hot Chili Peppers
  6. Angie Mattson
  7. Aesop Rock
  8. Guts
  9. Natural Incense
  10. The Juliana Theory

Dispatch and Hot Water Music have always consistently been in my top 3, (except for last year, where neither even made my top 10, weird). It’s no surprise that both of them rank up there as my favorite bands. I saw HWM earlier this year when they made their way back to the Bay Area.

Thanks to some iPhone photo memories, I was reminded of Angie Mattson early in the year — this is an artist who loved about 20 years ago and then literally dropped off the face of the Earth. Her music is no longer available on Spotify or Apple Music. I found a few videos that are still up on YouTube (who knows for how long), but other than the albums in my local library that Last.fm has logged, she apparently doesn’t exist anymore.

Social Distortion was coming back to town and I was so excited to see them. And then a few days before the show, I tore my ACL in a paintballing incident with friends (go figure, it was my first time ever playing paintball), and I could barely walk.

Fun times all around, really. Here’s hoping 2025 is even better — even though this year starts off with the letters W(ednesday) T(hursday) F(riday).

Previous years in music:

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My 2023 Reading List

I didn’t do a great job of reviewing every book I read this year, but still read a good number of books this year. My Goodreads goal was 24 books and I hit 30.

This is down from 40 in 2022, 56 in 2021, and 60(!) in 2020. Kind of an interesting correlation between the pandemic years and what has happened as we’ve come out of various lockdowns (e.g., more activity outside is less time reading inside).

Anyway, this year’s list of books is below. My favorites were The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Tracers in the Dark. My least favorite was easily Blindsight.

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My top music of 2023

Chuck Ragan of Hot Water Music (taken by me)

It’s time for the yearly (semi-yearly?) update of my favorite bands according to Last.FM. It is kind of all over the place this year!

1. Chuck Ragan
2. The Glitch Mob
3. Creedence Clearwater Revival
4. Vansire
5. The Lawrence Arms
6. AFI
7. The Interrupters
8. Deer Tick
9. Two Gallants
10. The Rolling Stones

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My top music of 2022

It’s that time of year again! Thanks to Last.fm, we can compile all the songs and artists that I’ve listened to over the last year. The results? (Same as it ever was, really.)

  1. Hot Water Music
  2. Dispatch
  3. Dramarama
  4. AFI
  5. Led Zeppelin
  6. The Rolling Stones
  7. The Who
  8. Bob Dylan
  9. Dire Straits
  10. They Might Be Giants

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My top music of 2021

Spotify has wrapped (which is fun and cool) and I had some initial opinions on it, via Twitter:

My Spotify Wrapped 2021 is just going to be kids songs all the way down, isn’t it?

Fortunately, it wasn’t! With regards to looking back at musical tastes, I’ve always been partial about Last.FM and it’s also a fun thing to look back on when I remember to grab the data in time — especially since Spotify Wrapped is fully baked around the beginning of December. (Though, that’s probably because a lot of people’s profiles will be overrun with Christmas music.)

My top artists for 2021 are:

1. Bad Religion
2. Bob Dylan
3. Dispatch
4. Fat Freddy’s Drop
5. The Sounds
6. Hot Water Music
7. Joe Strummer
8. Polyphia
9. Bing Crosby
10. The Beatles

Bad Religion tops the list due to reading their biography earlier this year and just really going back through their catalog remembering some of their songs.

It’s kind of interesting comparing it to my musical tastes from 10 years ago. Hot Water Music and Bob Dylan were there. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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My top music of 2020

Oh, joy. What did I listen to this year in order to get through a global pandemic, lockdowns, an election and all that fun stuff? According to Last.fm

  1. Dispatch
  2. Hot Water Music
  3. The Glitch Mob
  4. Anti-Flag
  5. Johnny Cash
  6. Tropidelic
  7. Rodrigo y Gabriela
  8. Slightly Stoopid
  9. Guts
  10. The Rolling Stones

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My top music of the decade: 2010s

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been sending music data to Last.fm for nearly 15 years! Because of this, we can start doing some crazy things… like compiling a list of all top artists I listened to over this entire decade.

From 2010 to 2019, the list is:

  1. Bob Dylan
  2. Hot Water Music
  3. Johnny Cash
  4. State Radio
  5. Dispatch
  6. Daft Punk
  7. Chuck Ragan
  8. The Glitch Mob
  9. Bad Religion
  10. Frank Turner
  11. Aesop Rock
  12. DJ Shadow
  13. Manu Chao
  14. ait-J
  15. Widespread Panic
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My top music of 2013

bob_dylan

Bob Dylan

Thanks to things like Rdio and Sonos, I listened to a ridiculous amount of music in 2013. Here are my top bands from the last year. See also 2012 and 2011.

1. Bob Dylan (509 plays)
2. Pretty Lights (488 plays)
3. Daft Punk (382 plays)
4. Dispatch (377 plays)
5. Calexico (372 plays)
6. Frank Turner (366 plays)
7. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis (365 plays)
8. Alt-J (323 plays)
9. Wild Belle (318 plays)
10. The Sounds (268 plays)

Data via Last.FM

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Favorite tracks according to Last.FM

According to Last.fm, here is the list of songs I’ve listened to most often.

I’ll embed some of the music I can find below.

1.) “Here We Go” by Dispatch

Here We Go (07.13.07) – DISPATCH

2.) “Drive” by Angie Mattson (I’ve shot photos of her before)

3.) “King Without a Crown” by Matisyahu

4.) “The General” by Dispatch

5.) “Camilo” by State Radio (perhaps my favorite song ever… at least right now)

6.) “Mass Destruction” by Faithless

7.) “Bongo Bong” by Manu Chao

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Fear not… I am alive!

Wow. It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly a year since I last posted! Thanks to graduating from college, getting a real job and figuring out how life works in the real world, I’ve sort of neglected my poor webpage. Perhaps 2008 will be a time to change that.

2007 was an absolutely amazing year though. How do I even begin to catch people up on what has gone on? Perhaps the best way at the moment is through Flickr.

Cathedral Hill HDR - Looking North

Click on through, as I take you on a photographic journey of the last 12 months…

Continue reading “Fear not… I am alive!”