Time for the final 2015 round-up: a reflection on all the writing, reading, TV/film viewing and gaming I got up to in 2015, and my pick of favourites. I’ve already done 2015 in Art, a 2015 resolutions retrospective, and a post about little things and big things that made me happy over the last year, so click over if you missed those.
It’s been fun spending January thinking about the past year and where to go from here. After this post, I’ll be back to blogging about the present day, more-or-less. Sort of. I can’t promise not to blog about time travel.
Writing
“All the Broken Things” Draft 3 (with lots of thanks to Jen). A huuuugeee rewrite, I finished this right at the start of January. I wrote a rambling post afterwards, reflecting on how I spent all of 2014 revising.
“All the Broken Things” Draft 4 (with lots of thanks to Mike!) at the end of May. Another massive rewrite, changing 40,000 words in a 90,000 word book. Hard going, but so worthwhile. Retrospective over here.
“All the Broken Things” Draft 5. A smaller redraft, by my usual tear-it-down-and-rebuild-it standards, but still hefty. And my god, was I tired of the story by the time this draft came around in August.
“All the Broken Things” Draft 6. A perfectionist redraft. I got most of the way through this by December, but I’ve still got some dithering and polishing to do in January.
Overall, I wrote 150,000 words, which I’m really happy with.
Books
A few things not on Goodreads:
Beta read of a middle grade novel for JB Rockwell
Ghost Story beta read for Miss Cole
YA Beta Read for a purple hippo friend
Fantasy stories by Malcolm Bews and his mate Ben.
And all 70 books that were on Goodreads get a mention in my 2015 list.
☆ Top 5: Kushiel’s Dart, Illuminae, The Awesome, A Darker Shade of Magic, The House of Shattered Wings.
Movies
☆ Top 5: Big Hero 6, Gone Girl, Mad Max: Fury Road, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Jupiter Ascending.
(YEAH THAT’S RIGHT, JUPITER ASCENDING WAS ONE OF MY FAVOURITES. I’LL FIGHT YOU FOR IT’S HONOUR. Seriously though, it’s a super fun genre movie with some crazy good worldbuilding. It’s messy but it’s great messy.)
Others:
Only Lovers Left Alive — A really fun, character-focussed vampire movie with some adorable details that really bring the cast to life.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: Pretty decent, but it didn’t stick with me.
Amazing Spider-man 2: Lots of fun. I really love Spidey.
Snowpiercer: Just flat-out amazing.
Maze Runner: I hadn’t heard much about this when it popped up on Netflix, but it was a solid adventure movie.
Interstellar: Really long, but I enjoyed every minute of it’s three hours.
Going Clear: A documentary about Scientology! Very interesting viewing.
They Call it Myanmar: A really interesting documentary about the lives, particularly the poverty and state surveillance experienced by those living in Burma.
☆ Pitch Perfect: I discovered this movie really late, ignoring all the hypes for ages, but oh man I really enjoyed it. This was almost in my top 5 for the year. Pitch Perfect 2 was also a lot of fun.
Avengers: Age of Ultron Lots of fun, though I had a few issues with it.
Ant-Man: Not as bad as I expected, but far from my favourite Marvel movie.
Magic Mike: Haha, yeah, this was really fun.
Spy: Really fun, underrated spoof of Spy movies. It’s just a shame that they took the marketing in completely the wrong direction, and the extended cut is really unnecessary.
TV
Top 5:
☆ Person of Interest: By far one of my favourite things of 2015. Everything about this show was just so, so damn good.
☆ Agent Carter and Sense8 were both BRILLIANT.
☆ Doctor Who: The 2015 season was a really nice improvement on some of the issues I’d had with it in the previous years. I loved it.
☆ Jessica Jones: Fantastic, though the final episodes had some noticeable issues that I keep meaning to blog about in greater detail.
Others:
Great British Bake Off: Excellent fun, as always.
Game of Thrones Season 5: Eh, I dunno. I’m not as much a fan of GoT these days. This season had a lot of issues and I really wasn’t a great fan of it.
Hannibal Season 3: I had some trouble with the start of this season and lost interest, I need to get back to it.
Orange is the New Black Season 3: It took some questionable turns, but overall it was a good season.
Anime
☆ Steins;Gate: An early favourite of 2015. Time travel sci-fi with a strong comedic streak, and an excellent English dub.
☆ Death Parade: The dead are forced to play a game for their lives in a show with a wickedly catchy intro.
☆ Noragami Season 1 and 2: Another favourite of 2015. So brilliant.
☆ Yuri Kuma Arashi: The world is under threat of attack by… bears and lesbians? This was a surprisingly deep, biting satire about homophobia in Japan, dressed up in symbolism and comedy. Really clever stuff, let down by some fanservice in the earlier episodes that put off a lot of the target LGBTQIA+ audience.
Aldnoah.Zero: GIANT ROBOT ANIME. Absolutely amazing first season with a refreshing wealth of female characters (good female characters in mecha shows are rarely seen since Evangelion, sadly). However, the second season was a disappointment and the whole series ending poorly. At least the music was great.
Cute Earth High Defense Club Love! It’s Sailor Moon but with dudes. Really fun to watch, though without much substance, I ended up abandoning it mid-way. Sorry, Sailor Moon dudes.
Video Games
☆ UNDERTALE: GAME OF 2015. This was so, so damn good. An absolutely perfect game, and one that will stick with me for the rest of my life.
☆ Hatoful Boyfriend, where you date pigeon boyfriends, was another early contender for best of 2015. I joked about this game a lot, but despite its weird concept, it packed a real punch with some excellent writing.
Starfighter Eclipse: Creepy ships in space, and lots of romantic drama. A lot of fun, and a great first outing for Date Nighto’s dating sim engine, though it doesn’t quite live up to the plot of Hatoful Boyfriend or the complexity and art of Dramatical Murder. Massively impressive for a very small group of people, though.
The Legend of Korra (PC): Three hours of fun based on the animated series, though the difficulty spikes in a few areas made me abandon the game a few times before finally completing it. Definitely one of the most fun spin-off games I’ve even played, though.
There were a few other games that I started but never got to finished. MURDERED: SOUL SUSPECT, Dragon Age Origins, Persona 3, let’s hope 2016 is your year.
Bride of the Book God says
Yay to have food someone else who loves Jupiter Ascending. It was feeling a bit lonely out here :-)