Twenty fourteen in tv show stats and other geeky stuff

Every year, I create a “what I did this year” blog post on my blog, meticulously organized by month. But this year I don’t feel like it would enrich my blog. The years are accelerating at an incredible rate. It seems only yesterday that I wrote my 2013 post, and I’m starting to get the feeling that soon my blog will only contain these posts, one every year, since I hardly find the time to blog about other things. Seriously, who still reads/writes a blog…?!

2014 and me

The year 2014 was a strange experience. It was the year I arrived at home after half a year abroad feeling like I’ve entered a parallel universe… a strange, grey place that doesn’t seem quite real. It was the year in which I was in a state of limbo, unsure what to do with my newly earned Bachelor’s degree, weighing all options and choosing the most convenient one — was that a wise choice? 2014 was very much a transitional year, from southern to northern hemisphere, from writing to gaming, from bachelor to master, from job seeking to working, from twenty-something to thirty.

The best part of the year happened at its very beginning; traveling around New Zealand. While that was definitely amazing, it had the disadvantage of not financially providing the ability to travel more in 2014. I will definitely have to travel properly again in 2015.

Another highlight was definitely the acquirement of archery skills. It’s something I wanted to do in ages, and it was a very interesting experience. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time and the nerve to do it regularly (for the reason that the location is sooooo freaking far away with public transport and that the other people there were… meh), therefore I will not pursue it further anytime soon. I hope one day I’ll just be able to have a target in my garden.

Other than that, if I look at my year on dailyfratze, it seems to be a year in which I had lots of good times with friends. I hope 2015 will be the same.

2014 and literature

I have read a total of 28 books in 2014. That’s quite a lot for me, since I’m not particularly great at reading the majority of books I encounter. While I love some, others, particularly those I had to read for university, were a bit of a torture for me. I really hated Peter Ackroyd and Jean Rhys. Jane Eyre, on the other hand, was ok-ish but a bit tedious. On the other hand, I absolutely loved reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. I have also read a shitload of secondary literature and science-y books for my bachelor’s thesis, which I finished writing in June. I was utterly happy to have a break from uni reading after that, so I decided to re-read my favorite book of all time, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. I’ve also been wanting to re-read all the Harry Potter books, but I just didn’t have the time before my master’s degree began. Maybe next semester break…

2014 and film

As my lovely statistics page tells me, I have seen 78 films in 2014. That’s quite a lot compared to last year, where I’ve watched only 39 films, but still not quite as much as the 100+ films I used to watch within a year back in the 2000s. A significant percentage of the films I’ve seen in 2014 were not new to me; I’ve rewatched a lot of stuff I already knew. Among those where the all the big franchises; I’ve rewatched the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, I’ve rewatched all of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies, I’ve rewatched all of the The Hunger Games movies, and I’ve rewatched all of the X-Men movies.

But by far the best films I’ve seen this year were not among the above. I was totally blown away by Krugovi (Circles), Snowpiercer, The Grand Budapest Hotel and I somewhat enjoyed Edge of Tomorrow, Lucy and Boy. Quite funny was also What We Do In The Shadows. I admit that Guardians of the Galaxy was also great fun, but this ever increasing uncreativeness of Hollywood is getting a bit dull.

2014 and TV

Let’s turn to my favorite mode of storytelling: TV series. Even I can’t wrap my head around the amount of shows I watch, which probably explains why I usually forget 70% of the plot after a while. This year, I have watched 761 episodes from 62 different shows, out of which 52 were fiction (the other ten were documentaries or game shows and such). That’s an average of 2.59 episodes per day. That’s a bit less than last year, where I’ve seen 812 episodes from 48 different shows with an average of 2.99 episodes per day.

Being a geek, I have created my own statistics page for my TV watching habits with the help of Google Charts. However, it mostly for myself and is not public. If you’re interested in seeing these stats, leave a comment and I will give you access. For now, I’ll give you a little glimpse of some of the charts I have created there; my favorite is probably the calendar chart, which looks like this:

This chart plots the amount of episodes I have watched into a calendar, resulting in a colorful grid. February was a particularly good month for binge-watching, but as you can see, I don’t actually watch TV every day. This is such a pretty chart, however it’s such a shame that as of the posting of this, there are no options to change the colors or the size of it.

The same data can also be plotted by month into a nice trendline. So far I’ve been too lazy to create a Google Chart for this, but this image shows such a line from January 2013 to December 2014:

If you watch that amount of shows AND are a statistics nerd like me, you’ll probably start noticing patterns; actors, locations, writers, producers etc. I’m always particularly interested in filming locations, because after I had been to Toronto, I started noticing it as a filming location for many of the shows I watch. A lot of American shows are in fact filmed in Canada, whereas some are even shot in other places all around the world. This chart divides this year’s shows by filming location:

This chart only includes shows with very obvious locations; some shows just can’t be fitted into it because they’re shot all over the world (like Game of Thrones). This chart is another thing I haven’t figured out with Google Charts yet, and Excel is quite messy when it comes to customization, but I guess you’ll get the idea.

Another particularly interesting chart is the division between shows that were new to me and those I already knew but continued watching in 2014. The chart shows that this year about half of the shows I watched were new to me, whereas the other half were not. This seems to be a continuing trend (however, 2008 is not quite accurate since I just don’t have the data for 2007 to figure this out).

So what did I enjoy watching in 2014? Out of the shows that were new to me, I was blown away by Orphan Black, Äkta Människor and The 100. I also enjoyed The Flash and The Strain. Out of the returning shows, it was fun as usual to watch Arrow, Castle, Doctor Who, Hannibal and Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, but nothing was quite as brilliant as Utopia.

I’ve also seen a lot of terrible shows, some of which I even stopped watching after a few episodes – which explains the large amount of distinct shows in my stats this year. I’m a bit bored by what’s being thrown at me lately. Much like Hollywood, the TV business is relying too much on the success of existing shows, which results in repetitive and boring plots. I’m becoming increasingly harder to impress, I can spot plot twists a mile a ahead, and pretty much nothing is particularly innovative to me. Therefore I was very happy to look outside of the English-speaking realm, where I found the great Swedish science fiction show Äkta människor (Real Humans). I hope next year will be an allover more interesting year for TV. Otherwise, I might have to read more books. Imagine that!

2015 and me…

My focus next year will definitely be university; I have exams and papers lined up for February and March, and most likely for July. I will have to read a lot of books for university, but I hope I’ll enjoy them more than this semester’s books. I also hope I’ll find the time to watch more quality films and shows, as well as to play some more Diablo III and perhaps some other games. And last but not least, I hope I’ll be able to travel a lot more next year and see a lot of places I have never been before.