Round Up Ready – Best of 2012 Edition

Every year around this time, “Best of” and “Year in Review” lists are complied, and they are awesome. Google summarized the highlights of 2012 quite nicely in a short video

Below is a Round Up of some of the “Best of” the “Best of the Year in Review Lists”.

Movies and Television

The top 5 films and tv shows that the World was searching for on Google

Google Zeitgeist released the World’s search trends for 2012 (we are kind of screwed up), at left are the top searches for Feature Films and Television Shows.

If you didn’t have a chance to see many movies this year, this supercut has you covered with all 182 movies released in 2012 mashed together in 6 minutes and 45 seconds

If you decided to watch just a couple of films from 2012, there are plenty of Best of Lists to choose from, David Edelstein’s Top Ten Movies of 2012, IMDB’s Top 10 User-Rated Movies of 2012, Col Needham’s (creator of IMDB) Best Movies of 2012, if you are feeling a little bit art-housey, NPR has 2012 In Review: 10 Films Worth Going Out Of Your Way For, and if you are feeling for something in the sci-fi fantasy realm io9 has a list of the Best and Worst Movies of 2012, and if you feel like punishing yourself Wired has a list of the The Epic Entertainment Fails of 2012, and here The Year’s Worst Movies Review Themselves, in a supercut! For good measure, one more supercut of the year in film.

2012 was also a great year for television, and here are the best TV offerings of the past year as reviewed by Vulture, NPR, IMDB, and Pajiba. and in terms of comedy here are 10 of the Funniest Television Episodes of 2012. It was also an important year for dogs on television and Warming Glow has a list of the 10 Most Important Dogs to Appear on TV in 2012. One of the beefs people have with television is the commercials, however if they featured some the creativity as these 12 Best Commercials, I think people would have a different opinion of commercials.

Music

Here are 44 Wonderful Reasons Why 2012 was a good year for music. NPR sums up music in 2012 as: beats, harmonies, struggles, breakdowns, recoveries, party starters, raw-voiced rallying cries, song suites, storytellers, pop experimenters, never-more-devastating septuagenarian poet-crooners, never-more-devastating 285-year-old oratorios, epic statements, perfect miniatures, instant classics, hard-won achievements and explosions of joy. They go on to list their 50 Favorite Albums, as does Spin Magazine. NPR also has a list of their 100 Favorite Songs of the Year, but if 100 is too much, Rolling Stone has their Top 50 Songs, and if 50 is too much, Spin has their Top 40 Songs. However, if you want more Canadian indie content, and don’t mind 100 songs, definitely check out CBC Radio 3’s picks for the Top 103 Songs of the Year, or their lists of Top 5 albums from 12 genres (covering everything from rock, pop, jazz, classical, Aboriginal, and World), or check out 33 of Canada’s best bands and musicians’ picks for the Top 5 Canadian albums of 2012. After you are done listening to all of those albums, here are 12 Other Albums You Should’ve Listened to this Year. If you want to get a head start on music for 2013, the Shazam music team analyzed internet hype and other publicly available information about breaking artists, then compared against Shazam’s data to indicate which acts are trending with fans and will be huge in 2013.

Pop (and K-pop; Best of K-Pop) music was big in 2012, and the mashup below demonstrates the state of pop music today, for better or worse.

Music videos were very popular in 2012, and despite not getting much airplay on television the power of the internet showed that they are still relevant. Buzzfeed (which has a great collection of Best of 2012 everything) lists the 23 Best Music Videos, and if that is too much, So Bad So Good has a list of 10 of The Greatest Music Videos of 2012. But no video, music or otherwise, was bigger this year than Psy’s Gangnam Style. It inspired countless parody/tribute videos, the 24 “best” are presented by Buzzfeed.

The Internet

My vote for meme of 2012, The stylish Ikea Monkey.

As seen with the spread of Gangnam Style, the internet was a particularly fertile place this year. The Oatmeal has a comic depicting The State of the Web Right Now, it is kind of sad. Neatorama lists the 50 Greatest Memes of 2012, while Buzzfeed settles for 32 Best New Memes of 2012, CBC has a list of the Top 12 internet characters, while Gawker has a list of The Most Annoying Memes of 2012 (And a Couple Good Ones). Many of these memes were born on Tumblr, and here are 54 of the Best Tumblrs Started in 2012, which included Texts from Hillary. Hillary Clinton was very present in 2012, and Gawker wondered if Hillary Clinton is the Meme of the Year, and presented The 21 Most Moving Images Hillary Clinton in 2012. Buzzfeed made the case that 2012 was The Year of Queen Elizabeth. My vote is for Ikea Monkey as the meme of 2012, partially because it was able to riff off many other memes from the year, and also because it is a monkey. The internet is rife with Amazing Animal Photos, but it will always have a special place for cats, and here are the 30 Most Important Cats of 2012.

This rather technical report on 2012’s Internet Trends, shows that Twitter continues to grow each year and is becoming a second screen for many people. Social media brought some humor this year (likely read or composed while on the toilet), here are The 65 Funniest Webcomics, 22 of the Funniest Tweets, The 12 Best Tweets, and the 11 Funniest Auto-Corrects Texts of 2012. Many comedians distributed their material through their own websites, including some from this list of The Top Ten Stand-Up Specials of 2012.

Sports

The internet took its love of memes and mixed them with sports in some very amusing ways this year. Again, Buzzfeed has a list of The Best Sports Meme’s of the Year, The Funniest Sports GIFs (2012’s word of the year, which after looking at the 54 Best GIFs of 2012, it is easy to see why), and The Most Inspiring Sports Photos, while Uproxx has a slideshow of The Top Sports Moments, and Deadspin presents a very comprehensive list of the 10 Best Sports Infographics of 2012. There were many great, and not so great (looking at you Lance), sports stories this year, here are the top stories according to Sports Illustrated, The AP, and The Globe and Mail.

Reads

Between all the movies, television, music, and internet, sometimes it is nice to escape the screens and turn to a good book. Books offer something for everyone, NPR has a list of the Best Books for nearly any occasion or reader, and Flavorwire distilled 16 lists from 14 media organizations’ “Best Books” lists and determined the most popular books of the 2012 best book lists. Scientific American has a Baker’s Dozen: Sampling the Best Science Books of 2012 and Sense About Science has a great list of books for the science lover, and for the science fiction fan io9 has a list of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2012. The Berkley Center for Diversified Farming Strategies offers a list of books for the food minded reader, and along the food line Buzzfeed presents The 15 Best Cookbooks of 2012. If you prefer to read off of a screen, Longreads has a list of some of the Best Longreads of the Year. Through all their reading this year the folks at MentalFloss learned some new words, 25 Wonderful Words and Phrases, to be precise. With all the reading and listening that we did this year, it was necessary to look up some words to make sure we knew what people were talking about, and The Atlantic has a list of 2012’s Most Looked-Up Words.

Pictures

It has been said many times, but it still holds true, a picture is worth a thousand words. Photoshelter presents 57 Reasons to Love Photography in 2012, and The Best Astronomy Images of 2012, The Year in Volcanic Activity, National Geographic’s Best Wallpapers of 2012, CBC’s The Year in Pictures, The Atlantic’s 3 Part Year in Photos (Part 2, 3), and Buzzfeed’s 45 Most Powerful Images of 2012, all provide ample evidence for how amazing photography was in 2012, or roughly 293 000 words worth of awesome.

Curiosity takes the most vivid and amazing selfie.

As powerful as pictures are, sometimes a little text helps drive home a point. Inforgraphics combine pictures and words and were particularly popular during this election cycle, and Visual.ly presents 20 Great Infographics of 2012. Moving pictures are also particularly powerful, and here are 10 Videos That Inspired Us in 2012.

Many of those images were presented to us by the news media. Sometimes the news media can flub a story, as seen in this 5-part compilation of 2012’s Best News Bloopers (part 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), which is forgivable. But it is less fogivable when they get the story wrong. Poynter complied The Best (and Worst) Media Errors and Corrections (or ‘Correrction’ according to the Toronto Sun) of 2012. One of the most glaringly incidents of incorrect reporting came from Time Magazine and their Person of the Year (winner: President Obama) nominations. One of their nominees was the Higg-Boson particle, unfortunately their description of the particle was completely riddled with errors, with one sentence having 3 errors.

Science

The Higgs-Boson was certainly one of the biggest (and smallest) scientific stories of the year, but by no means the only one, Wired offers 10 of the Top Scientific Discoveries of 2012, and Science lists the Top 10 ScienceNows of 2012. Nature has a great feature their Top Science Stories of 2012, the 10 people at the heart of some of those stories, the Top Features of the Year as chosen by readers, and the Top Papers on Social Media. Nature also takes a look at the medicines that made the news in their Drug Approval (and Rejection) Highlights. Lastly, they offer an Interactive Journey Through 2012 in Numbers, while very cool, I am not really getting behind this bulky interface. NASA, which had a particularly exciting year, outlines their Year in Review quite beautifully.

One of the most ambitious, and beautiful phylogenetic trees, the above figure chronicles avian evolution beginning in the time of dinosaurs and ending with the 9,993 living bird species.

Speaking of beautiful images, Wired complied a list of The Best Scientific Figures of 2012 (see above figure for an example), I was suspicious of this list given that it excluded the falling panda figure, but that was first published in 2011, so everything is OK. Those wonderful figures are complemented by the Top 10 Science Videos, which much like the Top 10 Nat Geo Talks which are visually stunning and educational. They also have a list of the Top 10 Weirdest Stories of 2012. In addition to all the amazing science that happened this year, 2012 was also saw some bad science and high profile science scandals.

Here is hoping that 2013 is filled with as many inspiring, breathtaking, heartwarming moments, and a lot fewer of the sad, heartbreaking moments, that characterized 2012.