I’ve been hearing this whole year about how bad 2016 was. Musicians like David Bowie, Prince, Fife Dawg, and Leonard Cohen died. The 2016 election got Donald Trump in, and plenty of people didn’t like that. (Not getting into that because I don’t talk politics on this blog.) But didn’t anything good happen? Well yes, and just to end this year on a positive note, here’s some of the good things that happened this year:
- DC Comics ended the “New 52”: The New 52 was a mixed bag at best. Batman was good, but Superman was stripped of everything that made him what people love. Man fans were disappointed with the new direction, and DC eventually realized this. With their event “Rebirth”, they hit the reset button. Wally West came back to the DCU. Oh and Superman has a kid now? Suddenly comics are interesting again!
- Great New Music: As a music lover, this is always a good thing. Four of my favorite bands released great albums this year: Sting, Cheap Trick, Bon Jovi, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Soul Asylum (with the Chili Peppers’s newest album being the best of them). I enjoyed The Getaway much better than Me Without You. While Bon Jovi seemed incomplete without Richie Sambora, This House Is Not For Sale wasn’t bad. Sting’s album 57th and 9th seemed like a return to the music he recorded when he was still in The Police. And as I’m posting this, the Rolling Stones have released their first album in a decade, Blue Lonesome!
- WCPW was Launched: YouTube channel Whatculture has a great sub-channel called Whatculture Wrestling, where one of its hosts Adam Blampied tells you how he would’ve changed historically bad moments in the WWE’s history. They eventually decided to try to prove just how good they can be and created their own independent wrestling faction called WCPW, Whatculture Pro Wrestling. They even created a new kind of championship called the Internet Championship, where each contest is always available online FOR FREE! I watch every week, and they are improving with each episode of their main show, Loaded.
- The Chicago Cubs Won the World Series: For over a century, the Chicago Cubs were considered a joke. This year, they proved everyone wrong when they beat the Cleveland Indians, who also had a historically bad reputation. No matter who won the World Series, it would’ve been a crazy situation, but the Cubs winning it made it even crazier. My friends who are baseball fans told me the World Series was one of the best they’d seen, and I think any underdog story that ends this way has to be great.
- Doctor Who Released a New Version of “Power of the Daleks”: “Power of the Daleks is a milestone in Doctor Who’s history. It’s the first episode featuring Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor. For fifty years, this story has been missing. But now it’s been restored with animation, the first missing episode to be released entirely animated. Since Patrick Troughton’s era has so much missing from it, I think that’s awesome. And while we’re on the subject of Doctor Who…
- Big Finish Released Their Audio Dramas to Spotify: For 16 years, Big Finish has been producing great audio dramas based on Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes, Blake’s Seven, Dark Shadows, and more. Before this year, you had to buy their CD’s, and since they’re based in the UK, that’s not cheap for Americans like myself. Thanks to Spotify, now we can stream them! Granted, they haven’t uploaded every story, but the selection they currently have is pretty big already. I’ve already listened to quite a few of them, and enjoyed them so much, I restarted my Doctor Who review blog.
- Netflix Began Enabling Downloading: Netflix is great, but what about when you don’t have Wi-Fi? Well, now they let you download so you can watch offline. Granted, you have to pay for the downloads, but if you want a movie to watch from them without Wi-Fi, this is great news.
Aspie Catholic 