A New Year
It has been way, way too long!
I can't believe I've just gone an entire year and hardly updated this at all. 2004 went so quickly! Overall I'll look back at it as an excellent year, but there were some not so good things too - the biggest of which was probably how many people I lost touch with for no reason other than my own awfulness at keeping in touch with people. Even if I just updated livejournal a couple of times a month, I'd at least have still been in touch with people. The losing in touch thing has been most prevalent with livejournal friends because there are so many people on here that I've really missed posting with, and yet for some reason I wasn't able to shake off the losing touch thing all year. I think I probably promised myself every week that I'd update livejournal and try to get back in touch with people, and yet it just never happened. This has happened with some of my friends in real life as well. Not calling or emailing people back, and in no time I'm suddenly not sure what's going on in their lives, I've not seen them in ages, and yet I still don't make that call or email that I should. I apologise to everyone who I've lost touch with this year, all the emails I've not returned, "happy birthday"s I've not said, etc. I really hope I'll be able to change this about myself this year, and making this entry now seems to be the best way to ensure that I do. :)
I think it's pretty obvious what my main new year's resolution was! I actually did plan on updating on New Year's Day and then trying to update every day of this month, but after having stayed down a friend's house on New Year's Eve and then helped him and some other friends move into a house together on the 1st, I stayed over their new house on that day and couldn't get online at all. Having got back home it still managed to take me a couple of days to make an entry! *sigh*
Overall I've had a nice Christmas/New Year, and I hope you all have too! Thank you so much to
littlexander, helygen, faithx5, redwitch_g, bignrichcowgirl and shebit for the cards! :) I really appreciate them.
I like looking back at journal entries to sort of re-live moments in my life, to see what I was feeling at certain times, etc. and it's a shame that I don't have LiveJournal entries to do that with from last year. I really enjoyed readingstevefarrell's Year in Review, so I think I'll do the same. Seems as good a way as any that I'll be able to remember what I was listening to, watching, etc. :)
The Year In Film
I started the year with a really massive movie addiction, where I was watching 2-4 films every day (86 films in January, 62 in February), but these sorts of numbers trailed off massively as the year went on. When I started my first 9-5 office job, I saw only 15 movies in the entire 2 months I worked there (September and October.) For some reason I developed a lack of motivation for watching movies as the year progressed, especially going to the cinema to watch them. The days of 4-cinema-movies-in-a-day disappeared completely, and I ended up with my lowest total of movies seen in the cinema in 4 years (62.) (I have way too many movie lists, and way too many statistics about my movie watching, I can see that it's a bit overly obsessive and yet I never fail to enjoy making them!)
I loved some of the movies I saw, I hated a few (but not that many), but there were tonnes and tonnes that I was pretty much indifferent to. There are a *lot* of bland movies being made.
Actually... come to think of it, I'll make a seperate post with my favourite, least favourite movies of the year. :)
The Year In Music
Getting my own PC and broadband connection in August (I had previously been using my brother's) allowed me to download loads and loads of MP3s. Starting the office job in September which included a 30 minute drive there and back (due to traffic, it was actually not that far from me) gave me a chance to make CD-RWs of some of my downloaded albums and listen to them on the way to work. Some were great, some were good enough but forgettable, and some sucked. Most significant was Bruce Springsteen, who I have not stopped listening to since. Having listened extensively to all of his studio albums, I can safely rate him as one of my 3 favourite artists of all time (along with Metallica and R.E.M.)
When it comes to live music I seem to see lots of it only every other year. In 2001 I went to the Reading festival and various other gigs. In 2002 I saw next to no live music. In 2003 I also went to Reading and a bunch of other gigs. Last year I was back to seeing next to nothing. I went to a couple of gigs in small local venues - The Crimea (who had a song off their album, White Russian Galaxy, played in the pilot episode of Wonderfalls (it was such a great shock hearing that song playing!)) were the better of the two, but Mountain Men Anonymous were also excellent.
Chart wise, while I usually try and download all the week's new chart entries so that I can keep up to date with what music is being released (I despise the radio - it always has either obnoxious DJs or commercials or both, plus it gets very repetitive and ignored a lot of good music that gets released in favour of over-playing crap), I failed to do that entirely this year, so there are tonnes of chart songs that I won't have heard. From what I have heard - I surprisingly like some of the bigger selling songs of the year. Eric Prydz' Call On Me is one of the better dance songs I've heard in a while, Mario Winans' I Don't Want To Know was good, The Streets' Dry Your Eyes, even Eamon's I Don't Want You Back grew on me (though I utterly despised the 'rebuttal'.) Of course, I would still rate the vast majority of the chart songs I heard as rubbish, but still.
Having tried to work out what my 5 favourite 2004 albums have been, I realised how many albums I didn't *love* all the way through, but loved one or two tracks on it. These are some of the albums I considered as being some of my favourites, and some of the songs I particularly like off them, but that I ruled out because there are too many tracks on them that I've not really listened to enough/didn't make a strong enough impression:
Thursday - War All The Time - (War All The Time, This Song Brought To You By A Falling Bomb)
Vanessa Carlton - Harmonium - (Who's To Say)
The Used - In Love And Death - (All That I've Got, Take It Away)
Chevelle - This Type Of Thinking (Could Do Us In) - (The Clincher, Another Know It All)
Katie Melua - Call Off The Search - (Call Off The Search, The Closest Thing To Crazy)
Avril Lavigne - Under My Skin - (Forgotten, Nobody's Home)
Snow Patrol - Final Straw (Grazed Knees, Run)
The Killers - Hot Fuss (Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine, Smile Like You Mean It, Mr Brightside)
Embrace - Out Of Nothing (Ashes, Gravity)
I really enjoyed listening to all of those albums, though I'm not ready to call any of them truly great albums. In some of their cases I'm sure it's because I've not listened to them enough times to truly appreciate them yet. I can only think of four albums from 2004 that I've loved from start to finish and that are still excellent with every listen, and they are:
The Crimea - Tragedy Rocks
Incubus - A Crow Left Of The Murder
R.E.M. - Around The Sun
Jimmy Eat World - Futures
I'm definitely not ready to make a Top 5 list of the year yet though, when some of the albums I've listened to need further listening, and some albums need listening to for the first time (I've still not heard the albums by Eminem, The Rapture, Keane, Franz Ferdinand, U2, and a bunch of others.)
The Year In TV
I started to slightly lose my interest in ANGEL towards the end of the season, and I'm still waiting to watch the final three episodes. It never got to the point where I didn't enjoy the episodes (like what happened in season 7 of BtVS), but I did stop eagerly awaiting new episodes, downloading them the moment they became available online, etc. I'm still very sad that the show got cancelled, and I really miss the Buffyverse world being on TV, but the obsession I had with the shows definitely faded into a more natural appreciation and enjoyment.
The West Wing - I think the fifth season was pretty disappointing, but I feel that the sixth season has been excellent so far. I downloaded the 6th season episodes over the past couple of weeks, and as soon as I watched one I immediately had to watch the next, and so on. I've loved every single episode. It even motivated me to download all of Season 3 and the first half of Season 4, neither of which I had previously watched. Such an absolutely brilliant show, and I can't wait for the next episodes!
The O.C. - I still absolutely love this show. Towards the start of the year, and the middle/end of the season I stopped downloading the episodes for some reason, but they were all showing on TV in November-December so I caught up on it all, finishing the first season, and realised what I'd been missing. That of course led me to start downloading the second season, and while I think it was touch and go for a moment (previous favourite characters becoming dislikeable), I think it's got back to it's former self in the last few episodes, and I again can't wait for the next ones!
Lost - I'm not sure why it was only in December that I truly got the urge to download loads of TV shows, but as a product of my very temporary TV downloading addiction, and having watched all of The O.C. and The West Wing, I started downloading this show, and I'm really enjoying it! The latest 2 or 3 episodes have been especially awesome, and bode well for the rest of the season. A show with a really interesting premise, and that has got better and better with almost every episode as the season has progressed - chalk this up as another one I can't wait to see the next episodes of!
The Amazing Race - Reality TV at its absolute best - tonnes of fun, a good amount of drama, and I love that there are teams I root for and teams I despise... it's like a cross between reality tv and sports. I only got into this show towards the very end of the year, so I've missed the first 5 seasons, but I'm glad I've finally got into it!
The Daily Show - Every episode I watched when I was in the states made me more annoyed that we don't get this show in the UK. I started downloading episodes towards the end of the year, but still, if we get Fox News we should at least get the comedy show that does a better job of presenting news than an entire news station does!
The Year In Books
I read 41 books in 2004, which is a fair amount by my standards. One of the highlights of those were the Harry Potter series which I had never previously read, but that I absolutely loved, more so with every book, and have me eagerly awaiting the next installment. I really didn't think I'd love them quite so much, but the last three books especially made me realise just what all the fuss has been about all these years and how much I'd been missing out on. Along with those, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is the best book I read all year - absolutely superb. I really enjoyed the other two Dan Brown books I read too, Angels and Demons and Digital Fortress. Other authors I've read for the first time this year and really enjoyed are John Grisham, Lawrence Block and Agatha Christie. On a non-fiction note, I absolutely loved Al Franken's Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and feel that 2004 would have been a much, much better year had most Americans read that book.
I'm going to cut this entry short now (partly because I want it posted before the day ends!). There is more I want to talk about, though I think this is probably enough babble for one post. :) I really hope I follow this entry up with more entries in the following days. I'm really determined to.
I'm sorry once again for having lost touch, I've really missed everyone. I'm looking forward to getting back to reading entries and posting with you all again. :)
Happy New Year to everyone! I hope 2005 is a really happy year for you all. :)
I can't believe I've just gone an entire year and hardly updated this at all. 2004 went so quickly! Overall I'll look back at it as an excellent year, but there were some not so good things too - the biggest of which was probably how many people I lost touch with for no reason other than my own awfulness at keeping in touch with people. Even if I just updated livejournal a couple of times a month, I'd at least have still been in touch with people. The losing in touch thing has been most prevalent with livejournal friends because there are so many people on here that I've really missed posting with, and yet for some reason I wasn't able to shake off the losing touch thing all year. I think I probably promised myself every week that I'd update livejournal and try to get back in touch with people, and yet it just never happened. This has happened with some of my friends in real life as well. Not calling or emailing people back, and in no time I'm suddenly not sure what's going on in their lives, I've not seen them in ages, and yet I still don't make that call or email that I should. I apologise to everyone who I've lost touch with this year, all the emails I've not returned, "happy birthday"s I've not said, etc. I really hope I'll be able to change this about myself this year, and making this entry now seems to be the best way to ensure that I do. :)
I think it's pretty obvious what my main new year's resolution was! I actually did plan on updating on New Year's Day and then trying to update every day of this month, but after having stayed down a friend's house on New Year's Eve and then helped him and some other friends move into a house together on the 1st, I stayed over their new house on that day and couldn't get online at all. Having got back home it still managed to take me a couple of days to make an entry! *sigh*
Overall I've had a nice Christmas/New Year, and I hope you all have too! Thank you so much to
littlexander, helygen, faithx5, redwitch_g, bignrichcowgirl and shebit for the cards! :) I really appreciate them.I like looking back at journal entries to sort of re-live moments in my life, to see what I was feeling at certain times, etc. and it's a shame that I don't have LiveJournal entries to do that with from last year. I really enjoyed reading
stevefarrell's Year in Review, so I think I'll do the same. Seems as good a way as any that I'll be able to remember what I was listening to, watching, etc. :)The Year In Film
I started the year with a really massive movie addiction, where I was watching 2-4 films every day (86 films in January, 62 in February), but these sorts of numbers trailed off massively as the year went on. When I started my first 9-5 office job, I saw only 15 movies in the entire 2 months I worked there (September and October.) For some reason I developed a lack of motivation for watching movies as the year progressed, especially going to the cinema to watch them. The days of 4-cinema-movies-in-a-day disappeared completely, and I ended up with my lowest total of movies seen in the cinema in 4 years (62.) (I have way too many movie lists, and way too many statistics about my movie watching, I can see that it's a bit overly obsessive and yet I never fail to enjoy making them!)
I loved some of the movies I saw, I hated a few (but not that many), but there were tonnes and tonnes that I was pretty much indifferent to. There are a *lot* of bland movies being made.
Actually... come to think of it, I'll make a seperate post with my favourite, least favourite movies of the year. :)
The Year In Music
Getting my own PC and broadband connection in August (I had previously been using my brother's) allowed me to download loads and loads of MP3s. Starting the office job in September which included a 30 minute drive there and back (due to traffic, it was actually not that far from me) gave me a chance to make CD-RWs of some of my downloaded albums and listen to them on the way to work. Some were great, some were good enough but forgettable, and some sucked. Most significant was Bruce Springsteen, who I have not stopped listening to since. Having listened extensively to all of his studio albums, I can safely rate him as one of my 3 favourite artists of all time (along with Metallica and R.E.M.)
When it comes to live music I seem to see lots of it only every other year. In 2001 I went to the Reading festival and various other gigs. In 2002 I saw next to no live music. In 2003 I also went to Reading and a bunch of other gigs. Last year I was back to seeing next to nothing. I went to a couple of gigs in small local venues - The Crimea (who had a song off their album, White Russian Galaxy, played in the pilot episode of Wonderfalls (it was such a great shock hearing that song playing!)) were the better of the two, but Mountain Men Anonymous were also excellent.
Chart wise, while I usually try and download all the week's new chart entries so that I can keep up to date with what music is being released (I despise the radio - it always has either obnoxious DJs or commercials or both, plus it gets very repetitive and ignored a lot of good music that gets released in favour of over-playing crap), I failed to do that entirely this year, so there are tonnes of chart songs that I won't have heard. From what I have heard - I surprisingly like some of the bigger selling songs of the year. Eric Prydz' Call On Me is one of the better dance songs I've heard in a while, Mario Winans' I Don't Want To Know was good, The Streets' Dry Your Eyes, even Eamon's I Don't Want You Back grew on me (though I utterly despised the 'rebuttal'.) Of course, I would still rate the vast majority of the chart songs I heard as rubbish, but still.
Having tried to work out what my 5 favourite 2004 albums have been, I realised how many albums I didn't *love* all the way through, but loved one or two tracks on it. These are some of the albums I considered as being some of my favourites, and some of the songs I particularly like off them, but that I ruled out because there are too many tracks on them that I've not really listened to enough/didn't make a strong enough impression:
Thursday - War All The Time - (War All The Time, This Song Brought To You By A Falling Bomb)
Vanessa Carlton - Harmonium - (Who's To Say)
The Used - In Love And Death - (All That I've Got, Take It Away)
Chevelle - This Type Of Thinking (Could Do Us In) - (The Clincher, Another Know It All)
Katie Melua - Call Off The Search - (Call Off The Search, The Closest Thing To Crazy)
Avril Lavigne - Under My Skin - (Forgotten, Nobody's Home)
Snow Patrol - Final Straw (Grazed Knees, Run)
The Killers - Hot Fuss (Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine, Smile Like You Mean It, Mr Brightside)
Embrace - Out Of Nothing (Ashes, Gravity)
I really enjoyed listening to all of those albums, though I'm not ready to call any of them truly great albums. In some of their cases I'm sure it's because I've not listened to them enough times to truly appreciate them yet. I can only think of four albums from 2004 that I've loved from start to finish and that are still excellent with every listen, and they are:
The Crimea - Tragedy Rocks
Incubus - A Crow Left Of The Murder
R.E.M. - Around The Sun
Jimmy Eat World - Futures
I'm definitely not ready to make a Top 5 list of the year yet though, when some of the albums I've listened to need further listening, and some albums need listening to for the first time (I've still not heard the albums by Eminem, The Rapture, Keane, Franz Ferdinand, U2, and a bunch of others.)
The Year In TV
I started to slightly lose my interest in ANGEL towards the end of the season, and I'm still waiting to watch the final three episodes. It never got to the point where I didn't enjoy the episodes (like what happened in season 7 of BtVS), but I did stop eagerly awaiting new episodes, downloading them the moment they became available online, etc. I'm still very sad that the show got cancelled, and I really miss the Buffyverse world being on TV, but the obsession I had with the shows definitely faded into a more natural appreciation and enjoyment.
The West Wing - I think the fifth season was pretty disappointing, but I feel that the sixth season has been excellent so far. I downloaded the 6th season episodes over the past couple of weeks, and as soon as I watched one I immediately had to watch the next, and so on. I've loved every single episode. It even motivated me to download all of Season 3 and the first half of Season 4, neither of which I had previously watched. Such an absolutely brilliant show, and I can't wait for the next episodes!
The O.C. - I still absolutely love this show. Towards the start of the year, and the middle/end of the season I stopped downloading the episodes for some reason, but they were all showing on TV in November-December so I caught up on it all, finishing the first season, and realised what I'd been missing. That of course led me to start downloading the second season, and while I think it was touch and go for a moment (previous favourite characters becoming dislikeable), I think it's got back to it's former self in the last few episodes, and I again can't wait for the next ones!
Lost - I'm not sure why it was only in December that I truly got the urge to download loads of TV shows, but as a product of my very temporary TV downloading addiction, and having watched all of The O.C. and The West Wing, I started downloading this show, and I'm really enjoying it! The latest 2 or 3 episodes have been especially awesome, and bode well for the rest of the season. A show with a really interesting premise, and that has got better and better with almost every episode as the season has progressed - chalk this up as another one I can't wait to see the next episodes of!
The Amazing Race - Reality TV at its absolute best - tonnes of fun, a good amount of drama, and I love that there are teams I root for and teams I despise... it's like a cross between reality tv and sports. I only got into this show towards the very end of the year, so I've missed the first 5 seasons, but I'm glad I've finally got into it!
The Daily Show - Every episode I watched when I was in the states made me more annoyed that we don't get this show in the UK. I started downloading episodes towards the end of the year, but still, if we get Fox News we should at least get the comedy show that does a better job of presenting news than an entire news station does!
The Year In Books
I read 41 books in 2004, which is a fair amount by my standards. One of the highlights of those were the Harry Potter series which I had never previously read, but that I absolutely loved, more so with every book, and have me eagerly awaiting the next installment. I really didn't think I'd love them quite so much, but the last three books especially made me realise just what all the fuss has been about all these years and how much I'd been missing out on. Along with those, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is the best book I read all year - absolutely superb. I really enjoyed the other two Dan Brown books I read too, Angels and Demons and Digital Fortress. Other authors I've read for the first time this year and really enjoyed are John Grisham, Lawrence Block and Agatha Christie. On a non-fiction note, I absolutely loved Al Franken's Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and feel that 2004 would have been a much, much better year had most Americans read that book.
I'm going to cut this entry short now (partly because I want it posted before the day ends!). There is more I want to talk about, though I think this is probably enough babble for one post. :) I really hope I follow this entry up with more entries in the following days. I'm really determined to.
I'm sorry once again for having lost touch, I've really missed everyone. I'm looking forward to getting back to reading entries and posting with you all again. :)
Happy New Year to everyone! I hope 2005 is a really happy year for you all. :)