Tag Archives: lists

Best CDs of 2024 According to an Old Guy Who Bought 11

October 16, 2025 By in Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
11 CDs on our kitchen table, capsule reviews to follow.

The nominees, alphabetically.

Hi, I’m Fat Casey Kasem and welcome to another music listicle, but not a Top Ten because I bought one too many!

As part of my annual series of year-in-review entries, I remain one of six people nationwide who still prefers compact discs to digital downloads. My hangups about vinyl would require a separate essay unto themselves. My new-album splurges are rare because: (a) it’s increasingly tougher for new music to catch my ear as I grow older and more finicky; and (b) my favorite yesteryear acts died, stopped recording, or swiveled in directions away from me. That usually means missing out on what majorities loves, thus further dropping me down the bottomless wishing well into total irrelevance as chronicled on this very website, thirteen years and counting.

In 2024 I bought brand new studio albums from eleven acts, omitting any pre-2024 finds or gifts, and not counting non-studio releases we’ll cover at the end. It can be fun to walk past the cool-collectors’ vinyl bins to the way-back by the T-shirt rack and pick through what passes for in-person CD sections today, though I’m seeing diminishing returns as those get smaller and dustier, sometimes not even alphabetized.

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The Academy Awards 2025 Season Finale

March 3, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Conan doing photo ops on a black stage with a giant Oscar statue behind him. He's grimacing and holding a large jar of cotton balls or something resembling them.

He’s written for comedy shows, starred in talk shows, and hosted other award ceremonies and events. Some of that might’ve prepared him for tonight!

Oscar season is over at last! Tonight the 97th Academy Awards were aired live on ABC and streamed live on Hulu, once again held at ye olde Dolby Theatre in Hollywood and hosted for the very first time by beloved funnyman Conan O’Brien. This year’s soiree clocked in at 229 minutes, twenty minutes longer than last year’s and fifteen longer than The Brutalist with intermission. O’Brien was his usual uproarious self, taking more potshots at himself than at anyone or anything else and (mostly) refraining from hot-button politics. Anyone who needs more political debate can go overdose on any given social app anyway. Most such netizens generally avoid the Oscars anyway, or spend the evening replying to Oscars fans with such scintillating pearls of Oscar Wilde brilliance as “Who cares.”

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Oscar Quest 2025 Final Scorecard: 47/50

March 1, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments
Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan sit in character in the back of a limo. Strong glares at Stan, who's on the 1980s car phone.

“Look, Bucky, you’re gonna get me into the MCU right NOW.”

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’25 is over! I did my best to catch all the Academy Award nominees I could in every single category before the big ceremony Sunday, whether in theaters or on our household’s available streaming services. Last year I managed a 100% completion achievement, but no one gave me a trophy for my amateur hobbyist efforts. My wife Anne was relieved to know our routines could get back to normal, but that’s about it for prizes. Oh, and it was a great excuse to catch some fantastic films I might otherwise have missed…as well as a few pieces of garbage.

This year I earned no real bragging rights. Of the fifty different works up for honors this year, I’ve seen 47 in all as of Saturday morning, with no chance of getting any farther. Per my completionist tradition, the following are capsule summaries of the other ten nominees I watched over the past six weeks that I hadn’t previously written up. The services that granted me access to each of them are provided as well, though at least one has changed since I watched it.

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My Oscar Quest 2025 Quick-Start Scorecard

January 24, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Robot has baby bird in its palm. Hand emits red and orange light rays into the darkness around them, diffused through its fingers.

The Wild Robot, my favorite film of 2024, nominated for three Academy Awards!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: every winter is my annual Oscar Quest! The game is simple but time-consuming: after the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announces their latest nominations for the Academy Awards, I make plans to catch the nominees in every category, regardless of whether I think I’ll like them or not, whether their politics and beliefs agree with mine or not, whether they’re good or bad for me, and whether or not my friends and family have ever heard of them. They have the Super Bowl; I have the Oscars.

I’ve seen every Oscar-nominated feature and short released between 2021 and 2023 — running the full gamut from the highest-priority Best Picture contenders down to the mediocre flicks with negative Tomatometer scores that show up only for Best Original Song. I’ve seen every Best Picture winner from Wings to Oppenheimer, and every Best Picture nominee from 1984 to the present, many of which were memorable and worth the hunt. I’ve enjoyed surprises and suffered regrets.

Sometimes I have to wait for smaller films to arrive at the art-house theaters here in Indianapolis. Sometimes I luck out and they’re available on our subscribed streaming services of choice. Sometimes my only option is a streaming rental for a few dollars more. For extreme cases and a bit of savings, I used to turn to Redbox kiosk rentals, but alas, as of last July they are no more. I go wherever the Quest takes me, while my wife Anne waits patiently at home or in another room, like Penelope looking forlornly at her calendar and wondering why that pigheaded Odysseus insists on stopping at every single time-wasting Mediterranean island in his way.

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2024 at the Movies at My House

January 18, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
Robot in darkness wearing headgear made of antlers, talking to someone in the shadows.

The Wild Robot 2099.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in 2024 I made 29 trips to the theater to see films released or screened in festivals that same year. Meanwhile at home, I kept up with select new releases depending on what was conveniently available through our family’s streaming subscriptions, what sounded most watchable, and/or what felt like potential future Oscar nominees that should be gotten over with in advance to ease my annual Oscar Quest time crunch. For value-added fun, as an anniversary gift from my lovely wife Anne we now have Max, which expanded our options without expanding my available TV free time. I did what I could within the time slots allotted.

Hence the fifth annual installment of the MCC tradition borne of the pandemic: a ranking of all the brand new films I saw on comfy, convenient home video in their year of release. Sure, they could’ve been 20 separate entries written in real time as I consumed them, but that’s not how I roll. The Academy Award nominations announcement is coming up January 17th, assuming the L.A. wildfires are quelled and no further raging of them continues endangering lives or homes. As a teenager Anne survived the ordeal of her family’s home burning to the ground, so we’ve been following those tragic headlines and testimonies as they’ve kept on coming. Our prayers are with all those whose lives have been deeply affected.

So. On with our countdown, ranked from awfullest to awesomest, name-checking which service had them at the time. Some have migrated to different services since then…

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My 2024 at the Movies, Part 2 of 2: The Top 10

January 11, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Tiny blond witch holds large ugly witch's hat.

Everyone don your sorting hats!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s listing time again! In today’s entertainment consumption sphere, all experiences must be pitted against each other and assigned numeric values that are ultimately arbitrary to anyone except the writer themselves. It’s just this fun thing some of us love doing even though the rules are made up and the points don’t matter. I saw 29 films in theaters in 2024 that were actually released in 2024. Seven were screenings at the 33nd annual Heartland Film Festival, some of whose makers are still seeking an American distributor. In young-adulthood I used to scoff at critics who’d fill their year-end Top 10s with films they saw at festivals that none of their readers would be able to watch for another few months, if ever. Now that I’ve participated in a festival these past two years, those seven totally count and I’m not cheating by including them. This is, like, just different.

Here’s the annual rundown of what I didn’t miss in theaters in 2024. Links to past excessively wordy reviews and sometimes bizarrely construed thoughts are provided for historical reference…

On with the better end of the countdown!

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My 2024 at the Movies, Part 1 of 2: Starting at the Bottom

January 5, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
IMAX poster for Madame Web in a theater hallway. Visual elements include five eyes in separate circles surrounding a falling body. In the middle there's a tiny spider. There are concentric circles and some cluttered webbing.

NEVER FORGET.

It’s listing time again! In today’s entertainment consumption sphere, all experiences must be pitted against each other and assigned numeric values that are ultimately arbitrary to anyone except the writer themselves. It’s just this fun thing some of us love doing even though the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

I saw 29 films in theaters in 2024 that were actually released in 2024, a 20.8% increase over 2023, steadily climbing post-COVID. That number doesn’t include ten Academy Award nominees I caught in theaters in 2024 that were officially 2023 releases, but which I saw later outside the house as part of my annual Oscar Quest. It also doesn’t include the 2024 films I watched on streaming services, which will receive their own listicle.

Of those 29 releases, 16 were sequels, prequels, or chapters in an ongoing universe or venerated popcorn-flick IP. Only five were superhero films because Marvel sent themselves to the penalty box. Two were animated. Five had scenes during or after the end credits (again, blame the low tally on the MCU hiatus). Seven were screenings at the 33nd annual Heartland Film Festival, some of whose makers are still seeking an American distributor. In young-adulthood I used to scoff at critics who’d fill their year-end Top 10s with films they saw at festivals that none of their readers would be able to watch for another few months, if ever. Now that I’ve participated in a festival these past two years, those seven totally count and I’m not cheating by including them. This is, like, just different.

Here’s the annual rundown of what I didn’t miss in theaters in 2024, for better or worse, starting as always at the bottom. Links to past excessively wordy reviews and sometimes bizarrely construed thoughts are provided for historical reference. On with the countdown!

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Midlife Crisis Crossover 2024 in Review: Guaranteed 100% A.I.-Free

January 3, 2025 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anne in our kitchen wearing eclipse glasses and an Indiana Total Solar Eclipse T-shirt, doing jazz hands.

4/8/2024: Anne dresses up for the Total Solar Eclipse extravaganza. Indianapolis was among the prime viewing spots.

Hey, there! Welcome, gracious readers and bots, to the thirteenth annual Midlife Crisis Crossover year-in-review! Once again we self-analyze the site’s pinnacles and nadirs among readers, skimmers, search engine gadabouts, and any other casual internet users who come within fifty light-years of this li’l boutique site. Over a twelve-month period those fleeting glances add up to concrete stats that may or may not be reliable indicators of trends, fads, and wins ‘n’ sins on my part.

This virtual hermit cabin opened its creaky wooden door on April 28, 2012, as a place where I could entertain myself by making essay-shaped things out of whatever words and pictures I had at hand, and placing them somewhere I personally owned rather than someplace a capricious third-party moderator or owner could delete on a whim. (Yes, I’ve had bad experiences.) Often it’s been a satisfying platform to share galleries, memories, hugs, screeds, and pop-culture opinions that might otherwise have dissolved unwritten in my head or collected rejection emails from every professional website ever. Sometimes it’s disappointing, maybe even depressing, but whenever the encouragement comes or an impetus spurs me, I’ll make an effort for my most labor-intensive hobby anyway. When my head is in the right space, I can enjoy the process and the results, with or without feedback.

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Halloween Stats 2024: OF COURSE the Only Day It Rained THIS ENTIRE WEEK.

October 31, 2024 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Halloween skeleton lying on a table surrounded by party snacks -- breadsticks, sausages, cheeses, carrots, and so on.

No, this wasn’t our house, but an office party I ran across a couple weeks ago.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: each year since 2008 I’ve kept statistics on the number of trick-or-treaters brave enough to approach our suburban Indianapolis doorstep during the Halloween celebration of neighborhood unity and no-strings-attached strangers with candy. I began tracking our numbers partly for future candy inventory purposes and partly out of curiosity, so now it’s a tradition for me. Like many bloggers I’m a stats fiend who thrives on taking head counts, even when we’re expecting discouraging results.

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The MCC Presidential Burial Site Visitation Checklist (so far)

August 31, 2024 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Inside George Washington's tomb: two marble coffins and a wreath on a stand that was just placed moments before in a daily ceremony.

, George Washington! d.12/14/1799, age 67. His and Martha’s sarcophagi share a vault at Mount Vernon, in this teaser image from our 2024 road trip.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: every year since 1999 my wife Anne and I have taken a trip to a different part of the United States and visited attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home in Indianapolis. From 1999 to 2003 we did so as best friends; from 2004 to the present, as husband and wife. We also like to travel on our respective birthday weekends — sometimes to comic conventions that just so happen to coincide with our celebrations of continued existence, sometimes to neighboring towns and states of significance to our interests. After being raised as virtual shut-ins, it’s been a joy to expand our horizons together, gradually and on a modest budget. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.

Among our many recurring motifs are final resting places of Presidents of the United States of America. Anne is a major history buff whose vacation research leans heavily to famous American people, places, events, and artifacts. In our early traveling days, a few dead Presidents just so happened to be located near sites we were seeing for other reasons, or on the same convenient roadside. As we’ve diversified our directions over time and expanded the scope of what we considered a “point of interest”, the late leaders of our nation kept ranking on our to-do lists. They’ve basically become a long-term side quest for us. We earn no trophies or high-fives from imaginary teammates; we’re just seeing how many of them we can visit before we’re too old or broken down to continue.

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