Featured Posts of 2016

2016 was my most prolific year yet for writing. I wasn’t consistent for the entire year, but I did generate 270 posts—a massive increase over 2015’s total of 67. The downside to producing a large number of writing pieces is that the more notable ones can get lost in the sea of content I’ve created, but for today’s retrospective piece I’ve ventured out into that very sea and brought back a few posts that stood out to me as I was examining what I wrote last year. The selection process for this turned out to be harder than expected, both because of the vast choice of nominees, and because when you write this much you can start having a hard time remembering all the things you published in a given year. In the selection process I also slammed my head on the keyboard several times as I discovered yet more typos in my writings. Before getting to the list I’ll admit there’s a fair amount of overlap with the material you can find in the Suggested Readings gadget on the right side of this blog (below the Blog Archive gadget) and a few of the entries are cop-outs in the sense that they are actually links to a series of posts, rather than individual ones, but please just bear with me on this one and just roll with it. Anyways, without further ado, here are my selections for the Featured Posts of 2016. Clicking the title of each entry will take you to it.

Istanbul: Metropolis
The was the first post of the year, and a very long one too. At the time I was still working on getting all of my travelogue posts from the 2015 Europe journey typed up and published, and the completion of this post meant I was now on the final third of them. Like all the other travelogue posts, it is written in the very dry style of my travel journal, so it may not be all that interesting to read unless you really want to know every detail of what I did in Istanbul.

Side Stories 2015
After finishing the travelogue posts from Europe 2015, I published a series of brief posts on various experiences I had while overseas.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens
This post gets highlighted not because of its actual content, but because it marks an important point where this blog transitioned from journaling the 2015 Europe trip to it’s current form where I write about things on my mind. If you do choose to read it, what you’ll get is the story of the time leading up to when I finally saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

PSX 2015
The tale of my first, and only, gaming convention attendance.

Wood Photo Transfers
I seem to produce one of these instructional writing pieces per year, and this is 2016’s edition. Some of you may have seen the wood photo transfers that I’ve made in the past, and this is process I used to create them.

Donald Trump
I don’t normally write much about politics, but there was simply no avoiding writing something about Donald Trump. Keep in mind this post was published in March, while the primary season was still ongoing and Trump had not yet secured the Republican nomination.

Borderlands 2
Before there was Late to the Party, I did two posts on game called Borderlands 2, which served almost like a prologue to the work I would do later in the year with Late to the Party. The post I’m linking to here is the second of the two, but it includes a link the first one in the top paragraph if you want to read both.

Cinematic Video Game Trailers
What do I know about the art and science of video game trailers? Practically nothing, but that’s not going to stop me from pretending like I know what I’m talking about when I highlight four of my favorite cinematic video game trailers.

Game of Thrones, Season 6, Episode 1
I watched an episode of Game of Thrones. From Season 6. Without watching any of the other episodes before it. There’s no way this can go wrong.

Four Years
A short retrospective history of my first four years of writing online.

Uncharted 4 - The Grand Finale
My thoughts on one of the best games of 2016, which was also the only game that I bought at launch last year.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
This post on a game from the PS3/Xbox 360 generation represents the greatest resurrection in my writing career to date. For years it languished in the Blog Graveyard, but last year I finally got my act together and finished it.

Photo Print
I’ve been taking photos for years and had never gotten one of my photos printed, up until this point.

Activation Series
An intentionally vague introduction to some of the characters of the 2016 Writing Project.

Memorable Places Series
I found myself thinking back to memorable places I had visited in Europe in 2015, and made a series out of it. If my travelogue posts are too long or too boring, this can be thought of as a highly condensed summary of places I visited. It doesn’t cover every town or location, but it does hit the big ones.

We Are Pigeons
The story of where my profile photo comes from.

Election Aftermath, Part 1 & Part 2
A two-part series on the aftermath of the US presidential election. The first part details my experience on the day after the election, and the second parts gives some of my thoughts on the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

Pockets Full of Soup
I took a stab at pretending I was a guest on a podcast that I regularly listen to. Obviously it’s not the same as being on the actual show, but it allowed me to tell the story of someone I’m thankful for.

Any of the editions of Season 1 of Late to the Party
I tried, I really did, to pick just one of these to highlight, but I simply couldn’t. For those that don’t know, Late to the Party is my series of commentaries on video games I’ve played recently.