I’m fond of Castlevania II, both as the first ‘Metroidvania’ game and also for its music, although it’s nearly impossible to complete without Nintendo Power or a FAQ.

I wonder if Nintendo is not planning on an N64 Classic more because the Switch Online is now a thing and the NES/SNES Minis were, in some way, a stopgap for the Virtual Console. 

I believe SimCity was a launch title with the Super NES on August 13, 1991.

It appears all the pre-2017/2018 books I read this year were by women: Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Yaa Gyasi’s Homecoming, Emma Cline’s The Girls, as well as Cheryl Strayed’s “Dear Sugar” collection Tiny Beautiful Things, Sherry Simpson’s Alaska collection The Way Winter Comes (in advance of a trip), and…

A few additional disappointments: Pacific Rim: Uprising, The Cloverfield Paradox, Fahrenheit 451, and A Wrinkle in Time.

There are a number of scenes from Sorry to Bother You that come to mind, particularly the ending-- but I think Tessa Thompson’s art gallery performance sticks with me the most.

I bolted upright out of my seat in the theater.

It’s a tie for me: Janelle Monae and Brandi Carlile both gave gorgeous, life-affirming shows this year supporting their newest albums.

I would very much like to hear any unfinished SDRE material. Grohl rerecording Goldsmith’s parts for TCATS without telling him is definitely shitty, although I always felt the uneven tempos on Diary hurt the record overall, and I think TCATS is an incredibly tight record with Grohl on drums and guitar.

Some of my favorite books this year include Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists, about the lives of four siblings who learn their exact (and varied) death dates as children; Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation, a YA historical fiction novel where a zombie uprising interrupts the Civil War and African-American girls are…

I remember taking my band to a Chick-Fil-A in 2004 while we were on tour in South Carolina; I hadn’t been to one in a couple years, and I liked the food enough to drag three other people there.

I assume it will all be healthcare jobs specializing in heatstroke.

“Dinner Party”, the season 4 episode that is maybe the series’ pinnacle for cringe comedy, is one of my favorites, maybe because it’s all of these people genuinely being horrible to each other as the veneer of passive-aggressiveness dissolves completely over the course of a few hours at Michael and Jan’s condo.

I liked Octopath Traveler because every one of its battles feels fresh. Despite the clockwork nature of the game’s main quests — Honest Game Trailers wasn’t lying when they said you travel to a town, watch some cut scenes, visit a labyrinth, defeat a boss, and repeat up to 32 times — I was always primed for the next…

Most of the record stores I go to still sell new CDs -- I like Newbury Comics in Boston and Waterloo in Austin.  Also, I have an $80 Audio-Technica turntable with RCA and USB outputs and it suits me just fine.

Saw them in Boston last month; they played 50+ songs, including a bunch of tunes from these upcoming releases.

Uncle Bob loves to futz with his album plans. Zeppelin Over China seems to be sticking to its February release date; Warp and Woof was originally planned for fall 2019, months after the 7" EPs came out, but is now bumped up to April; and Street Party has been rechristened as Rise of the Ants and has been bumped up…

Didn’t Winslet say she would never work with Cameron again after her experience on Titanic?  And wasn’t it specifically because of the shit he put her through filming in water?

I still, to this day, get this song stuck in my head unbidden.

The Wii VC was the best experience, I thought. Tons of content, updated frequently, non-Nintendo systems too. $5-10 for a game I once paid $30-80 for didn’t seem so bad, either.