The second full year of the pandemic was a strange one. As other people noted, it felt like 12 months took both a decade to pass, and about five minutes at the same time. In 2020, it felt like entertainment was a vital tool to maintain sanity, but trying to sift through the murky soup of the last 24 months to find the highlights from 2021 has been surprisingly difficult.
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy some brilliant things over the past year, but it feels harder to separate out everything from January to December from all came before. But I need to try, so enough preamble.
Dan’s Disposable 2021: Watching
One of the standouts of the start of 2021 for me was Wayne, which originally appeared in 2019 on Youtube Premium, and then resurfaced on Amazon Prime Video at the end of 2020. The teenager, played by Mark McKenna sets out with his new girlfriend to take back the 1979 Pontiac Trans Am stolen from his father before he died. And this leads to a mix of slapstick, violence, dark humour, and weirdness.
And I also caught up with people who already had access to Apple TV, and understood why they’d fallen in love with Ted Lasso. It rivals Parks and Recreation as an incredibly well written comedy, which manages to always leave you feeling positive, after some surprisingly touching and poignant moments.
Writing this has reminded me that I need to finish Dispatches From Elsewhere, which was charmingly different. And more engaging than the American remake of Utopia, which just can’t match the British original. And an honourable mention also goes to What We Do In The Shadows. Initially it was underwhelming compared to the original film, but it’s grown on me over time.
I mentioned All Elite Wrestling as a highlight of 2020 due to the combination of the classic musclebound superheroes enacting good vs evil with some soap opera backstories to follow. But it’s possibly been even better this year, particularly with the addition of notable names including Bryan Danielson, and especially CM Punk. Yes, it’s predetermined, but it’s also a whole heap of fun.
Film highlights are trickier. I though Shadow in the Cloud was underrated by critics and audiences alike, as it hovered between war story, horror and feminism. And films like Boss Level and The Kitchen were good entertainment if not enduring classics. I did finally catch Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse, which probably has to be my highlight, as it surpassed any expectations I had for an animated superhero film.
Dan’s Disposable 2021: Listening
I find it difficult to listen to podcasts while I work, so I haven’t consumed as many as I’d have liked. I do try to keep up with Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford, and You’re Dead to Me. And my girlfriend introduced me to Imagined Life to see if I could guess the subjects of each episode before they were revealed. Plus I’ve been enjoyed listening to Screenshot with Mark Kermode and Ellen E Jones, and The Hackers, both on Radio 4. Although as I’ve got older, I’ve found myself doing the washing up whilst listening to the Archers more and more.
Musically, I’ve found myself enjoying the reassurance of familiar classics, whether it’s Max Richter, Pearl Jam, Waxahatchee or the Screaming Females. I’ve got a whole host of listening to try and catch up on, but I did enjoy Wolf Alice “Blue Weekend”, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis “Carnage”, Chvrches “Screen Violence”, The Dead Deads “Tell Your Girlfriend It’s Alright”, The Anchoress “Art of Losing”, and digging into the back catalogue of various artists.
But the highlight for me was being given a CD player, which means I can finally dive back into the hundreds (possibly thousands) of recordings that have been sat on shelves since my last one died. That’s the real cause of my current new music backlog, but it’s one I can live with.
Dan’s Disposable 2021: Playing
Global lockdowns gave a big boost to the gaming industry, despite the challenges of remote development. And while I hate to repeat my highlights from 2020, some of the titles which seem to have sped up the pace and quality of their content releases as a result include iRacing and Automobilista 2. For example, the Mercedes F1 team worked with iRacing to simulate their current F1 car, while Rieza Studios tackled the highlights of a decade of U.S Indycar and CART racing in one DLC pack.
A big part of it has been my increasing involvement in league racing and running Team ORD in various series on iRacing, which has brought back some of the sense of community that faded when previous groups dispersed into work, marriage and family life. One of the challenges of multiplayer gaming as you get older is finding people to play with, especially if you work mainly from home. But for those who want some less serious motorsport, Forza Horizon 5 and Hot Wheels Unleashed both stood out as fun and enjoyable ways to just have a good time without worrying about suspension settings or tyre pressures.
Away from racing, I had a brief play with Halo: Infinite. And while I can understand why people enjoy it (and it did trigger a nice bit of nostalgia), it just didn’t draw me away from Apex Legends, which is still the best battle royale shooter around. More accessible and fun than CoD Warzone, a better weight and feel to weapons than Halo: Infinite, and just more satisfying to play.
I’ve still spent far too much time trying to ignore the toxicity while I improve at Rocket League, relax with Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator, and avoid sinking too much time into various Total War games and Football Manager 2021 (although now I’ve managed to get Maidstone United into the Championship, it feels like I can’t stop now). And to get away from the PC, a copy of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla arrived at Christmas to let me finally raid Peterborough in the way I’ve always dreamed.
Dan’s Highlights 2021: Reading
One of my few successes in 2020 was massively upping my reading away from a digital screen. And a disapointment for 2021 was letting that slip badly throughout the year for various reasons.
I really enjoyed Chilling Effect and Prime Deceptions by Valerie Valdes, which are the kind of easy, accessible and funny science fiction which you sometimes need for an escape from reality. As much as I love hard and serious scifi, sometimes I just want a laugh involving psychic cats and comedy.
And on a more serious note, I also found Ask Iwata really interesting, as it collected a selection of columns by Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata which I hadn’t seen before. Along with The Innovation Stack by Jim McKelvey, who was a glassblowing artist and former computer scientist. He became a cofounder of Square with Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, and it’s genuinely one of the most humorous business books I’ve read, whilst still having useful insights.
Plans for 2022:
The immediate habits I need to reintroduce are spending more time listening to new music, and reading more books. I know studies show that as you get older, you tend to end up preferring the songs from your teenage years, but I as much as I love Britpop and gurnge, there are amazing new bands and artists appearing all the time.
And my reading has tragically slipped over the last 12 months, so it’s time to rectify that. Hopefully it will also include more new comics, as the only graphic novels I’ve been buying have been to finish existing collections of past work. So it’s time to discover something new to get me hooked once more.
But the main thing will be organising some regular writing for Disposable Media, as the best laid plans have been hampered by various things, from global pandemics to family illness. So this year, I’m intending to start a couple of regular columns to get things going again. Until then, stay safe and have a great 2022.
