Greetings, reader!
Wow, I can't believe I've written 200 of these dumb things. Every damn Thursday from January 2020 to today (plus a handful or three of Sunday Specials). It truly has been a time in my life.
One hundred posts ago, I celebrated my 100-post milestone by ranking the top 10 100th episodes from television shows. This time, I'm celebrating my taking a reflective look at my own writing - my biggest fan Tiina (who also happens to be my mother) has suggested this post many times and initially I didn't like it, as it felt so narcissistic as an idea. But, now that I decided to do it, I embraced the narcissism and made this into a top 20 instead of a top 10, because it turns out I have many posts that I felt to deserve a singling-out. So, today I'm shamelessly tooting my own horn, introducing the posts from this blog of mine that I'm the proudest of!
Oh, and just click on the title of any post to read the whole thing, if you're interested :)
Here are my honorable mentions: Top 10 Movie Drinking Games, Ranking Every Netflix Original Christmas Movie, R.I.P. Fred Willard - Top 10 of his Funniest Roles, Happy Arbor Day: Top 10 Iconic Movie Trees, Sunday Special: A Tired Recap of our 24-hour 24 Marathon.
20. Top 10 summer camp movies
I wrote this in the summer of 2022, from the request of my Aunt Donna, just as I was getting done with my second summer as a camp instructor. It was fun to look at camp movies through that lens, as for each film in the top 10, I wrote one paragraph about the movie in general, and one about my perspective on that movie as a real-life camp instructor. Blending my cinematic analyses with real-life experiences like that was quite a fun writing project.
19. Boxing Day Special: Ranking the Rocky movies
On the surface, it's a 'ranking the movies of this franchise' post like any other, something I've done countless times. But this one stands out for a few reasons: It's the point where I started to add defining quotes from each film in my descriptions (which has since become quite a staple), I reasoned one of my hotter takes (the original Rocky isn't at #1), and most important, I'm ridicilously proud of the timing of releasing my Rocky ranking on BOXING DAY. Get it?
18. Ranking all Star Trek TV shows
Not many posts all the way from 2020, the year I started to write my blog, made it onto today's list, as I consider myself to have improved a great deal as a writer in the last three years. My ranking of Star Trek shows is one of the few early posts that I'm very fond of, as it really showcases how fun it is to write about something you're really passionate about. Sure, all of my posts have that passion to some degree as movies and TV in general are a big thing for me, but the phenomenon is extra strong when writing about something like Star Trek, of which I am a MASSIVE fan. I feel like my passion for Star Trek translates into this post as authentic and childlike excitement, which is quite nice.
17. Top 10 movie/TV snacks
For this post, I gave recommendations for specific snacks to go with specific movies / TV shows. Coming up with such a list was delightful, with snacks ranging from obvious (a tasty burger with Pulp Fiction, coffee and cherry pie with Twin Peaks) to instances of incredibly dumb humor (iceberg lettuce with Titanic - ha ha, get it?). Another similar post I can recommend is the Top 5 movie-pizza pairings, that I posted in honor of National Pizza Day.
16. Music Month: Top 10 bands I'd like to see live (had I a time machine at my disposal)
As I have other passions than movies and television, I occasionally like to do theme months, where I post top 10's based on some other category - as of now, I've done two theme months on music, two on literature, and one on football. These have been a fun breath of fresh air, and my favorite post from my two music months has got to be this one, where I analyze which bands I'd most like to see, if I had the ability to travel back in time like Doctor f**king Who. It's a love letter to some of my favorite music, and to the history of rock and roll.
15. R.I.P. Chadwick Boseman: 5 of his greatest performances
I always strive to make my posts topical and relevant on some level - the release of a new movie, the anniversary of a classic movie's release, a holiday or observance tied to certain movies et cetera. The most gripping instance of a post being topical is when a famous actor passes away, and I pay my respects by ranking their greatest performances.
The hardest one I've had to write in these three and a half years was, without a doubt, Chadwick Boseman. As an actor, he was an inspiring beacon of hope, and he died much younger than anyone should, ending not only a hellishly promising career but also a life that by all accounts had brought joy and love to so many around him. I definitely consider this In Memoriam -post one of my more emotional texts.
14. Football Month: Top 10 football moments of all time
Last year's football theme month was something delightfully different from my usual shtick, and out of the four posts in that collection, it was the ranking of my favorite football/soccer moments that was the most personal and special to write about. The sport's dramatic nature and the incredible narratives that come with it are a big part of why I've always been drawn to following the sport, so getting to write about the most powerful and epic football moments I've witnessed was really quite something. My descriptions of moments like Leicester City's 2015/16 cinderella story and Liverpool FC's Champions League comeback against Barcelona may be riddled with romanticizing, but that's just how I see the world.
13. Top 10 How I Met Your Mother Episodes
This is one of the few posts to make it onto today's list that don't have any super-special real-life tie-ins or unique premises to justify why they're among my favorites. HIMYM is one of the many, many shows that I like and that I've done a 'Top 10 episodes' post of. I just somehow really like the way this one turned out, as I had an especially inspired writing session when working on it, and I feel like I managed to convey clearly just why I love this particular sitcom so much.
12. Sunday Special: A completely arbitrary ranking of all Olympic sports
I'm not sure if my sports-enthusiast Mother has ever fully forgiven me for this one. I did this post for fun and for my own personal entertainment, recklessly and arbitrarily analyzing a bunch of sports events that I have zero expertise on, not even pretending to know what I'm talking about but rather going fully tongue-in-cheek with just how out of my depth I was. For better or for worse, I had a blast writing it.
11. Top 10 stranded-in-the-woods TV episodes
I consider this one of the more zany topics I've come up with: I was watching an episode of Atlanta with my Dad, when I realized that weirdly many TV shows have a 'stranded-in-the-woods' episode. As I started to work on this list, I realized that it's also a very varied selection: what other topic would put The Simpsons, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Walking Dead and The Sopranos all in the same Top 10? Writing about such an oddly specific premise felt like a nice side quest, almost like going on a nice walk in the forest...
10. Inauguration Week: Top 10 movies that define the Trump era
While I've never done a Politics theme month (I can just imagine how many people I'd piss off), I've used many of my movie/TV posts to convey my worldview and political opinions, and especially to process and reflect living through the train-wreck clusterf**k known as the Trump presidency. These posts are often among my favorites, as I get to discuss deeper and more real topics than I do in posts that are 'just' about movies.
Here, I analyze the Trump era by picking 10 movies that define that period of time for various reasons. I posted this on the week of Joe Biden's inauguration, and I don't think I've ever used a quote more appropriately than in this post, as I opened with this line by Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) in Community:
"I'm done with you. He's done with you. The world is done with you"
9. My 99th post: Top 99 episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine
One of the many times I've gone full 'silly goose' with my posts, as I really like dumb concepts and commiting to various bits. So, for my 99th post, I looked to the direction of Brooklyn Nine-Nine - and ranked its 99 best episodes. Because I didn't want the post to be an exhausting 10-hour read, I limited myself to writing exactly one sentence about each episode. Quite a challenge for me and my long-winded writing style, but a fun one at that.
8. Top 10 Arabic numerals
My Uncle Dan, one of my biggest idols in life humor-wise, suggested this topic to me recently, and I rolled with it. With such an out-of-left-field topic, I could've been all arbitrary, but instead I chose to commit to the bit and spend a lot of time coming up with my reasonings, really looking at the issue from multiple perspectives. I was quite proud of the end result myself, and the general crowd seemed to agree as this became one of my most complimented posts.
7. Five years since Twin Peaks ended: Top 10 interpretations/theories about the greatest series ever made
Much like with the Star Trek post, this is also an example of me really diving head-first into a topic that I'm very, very passionate about. I love Twin Peaks and I LOVE talking about Twin Peaks, and in this particular post, I went delightfully deep into my thoughts and interpretations about the lore, themes and mysteries in David Lynch's masterpiece. Quite proud of this one.
6. One from the archives: Top 10 dystopian movies
The lore behind this one is a bit complicated - I wrote it for the Thursday after Election Day 2020, for the event of Trump winning. I had also written an alternate post, "Top 10 Party Movies", for the scenario of a Biden victory, and a third one, "Top 10 Ambiguous Movie Endings", for a situation where the election hasn't been decided by Thursday.
I ended up publishing all three.
On that Thursday, the nightmarish counting of votes was still going on, so I posted the one about the ambigious endings. On the weekend, I celebrated Biden's victory by posting "Top 10 party movies" as a Sunday Special. And for a year, the "Top 10 dystopian movies" stayed in my archives, haunting my mind, as I was so proud of the text that a part of me wanted to post it anyway.
So, in November 2021, on the five-year anniversary of Trump being elected President in 2016, I posted it, with a preface shedding light on the post's original context. There was something about the text's morbid humor in the face of despair that was too good to not be published.
5. Getting honest: My Top 10 unpopular movie opinions
Got 'em! I always post on Thursdays, and when I noticed that April 1st 2021 was a Thursday, I absolutely had to do something with that information. So, instead of gathering my actual top 10 unpopular movie opinions, I came up with 10 fake ones that would piss the maximum amount of people off, and ranked them in an escalating matter from least to most downright shocking. I riddled the post with Easter Eggs that might give someone the feeling that something is off, and after a paragraph about Cats (2019) being a vastly misunderstood masterpiece, I pulled the April Fool's reveal. Good times.
4. Top 10 cult LGBTQ+ movies
There are some less personal posts I've done, and some more personal ones - and then there's the one where I celebrated Pride Month by discussing some cult cinema and ended the post by publicly coming out.
It felt right to do it in this blog of mine - for a variety of reasons, one of which surely is that whatever 'fears' come with coming out were calmed down by knowing the fact that not that many people read my blog. Still, quite a few read this one, and I got a ton of encouraging messages from friends and relatives. It's nice to have who I really am out there, and I'm quite content with the manner in which I shared it with the world.
3. January 6th: Top 10 pieces of media that defined that dreadful day
The idea for this one came from my Dad, and writing about January 6th one year later was quite cathartic in its own way. I clearly had a lot to say on the topic, and writing about it via the lens of TV and news media was quite an important part of processing the events and reflecting on them. Not to toot my own horn, but I really feel like I managed to hit the nail on the coffin with that #1 and its appropriately bleak description.
2. So, I read the entire Bible. No, really. Here is my ranking of its books.
Yay, back to the fun and outlandish ambition projects! Definitely my most widely complimented blog post, this one generated tons of delightful feedback, which I was glad to see. The rambling text is a ridiculously long kitchen-philosophical train of thought, mixing humor and political opinions with movie references and theological analysis, and everything in between. It's chaotic to the maximum, and for whatever reason, people seemed to like it quite a bit.
1. 75 'A Song of Ice and Fire' fan theories, ranked from conventional to obscure
Funny how this is supposed to be a movie/TV blog, and my personal top 3 posts are one about politics and news, one about a long-ass book, and one about stuff that people on the internet wrote about a book series. Go figure.
But, yeah. The Bible post walked so that this even more ridiculous and over-ambitious clusterf**k could run. Mind you, this one was much less widely received as the Bible post, because the subject matter is so obscure that I know about 3 people who gave a shit and I'm one of them. But, yeah, there's no getting around this - the ASOIAF fan theory post has got to be my favorite.
It's not just because I was inspired to deep down the rabbit hole of this subject matter due to my friend Atte's pestering, and that I wrote this post as a weird-ass birthday present to him. It's not just that I familiarized myself with the subject matter by watching a 7-hour YouTube video on 1.5x speed across two over-caffeinated train trips. It's not just my stubborn pride at having seen an enormous amount of effort for a post on such a niche topic that hardly anyone will read it. It's a combination of all that, and that I'm simply very proud of my writing in said post - my dive into the subject matter had been so deep, that I knew what I was talking about to a worrying degree, and got a lot of self-conscious humor mileage out of the sheer absurdity of it all. Say what you will, that's my magnum opus right there.
Thank you for reading! Tune in next week as I post my revised ranking of Christopher Nolan films, now with the new Oppenheimer (2023) included.
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