Never before have people been so eager for a year to end. All because they cannot wait for my review of the year. I can hardly disappoint them, can I? So for the fourth time already, I will parade the best and worst posts of a full year of blog posts. A brief moment of retro- and introspection, where we can laugh at the me from the past and pray the me from the future will do better.
The worst of 2020
CIPC #169: The wire S1 E3, The buys
One of my many, many failings as a human being is that I never seem to get any decent results when I tackle the big and popular. This paltry excuse for a blog post is an excellent example of this adage. Strange, huh? Who would have guessed that someone who maintains a website about Belgian chess history has more affinity with obscure things?
I will let you discover why I don’t much like this post yourself.
CIPC #195: Cores advertisement
Never before have I been so quick, but perhaps I should have been slower. Maybe I should have waited until I had a joke or something.
CIPC #199: Alice in Wonderland
Further evidence for the general rule mentioned above. Or is it? Alice in Wonderland is plenty popular, of course, but this particular version of it not so much. Whatever the case may be, the fact that I called the post a flop in the selfsame post is a very bad sign – and not a misleading one.
The best of 2020
CIPC #153: Kilburne, A game of chess
Okay, I admit it: the main reason it’s on this list is that I like the painting. And I think I got it pretty much right — like Kilburne himself.
An alarming counterpart to the rule that I do badly when discussing popular things is that I seem to do well with really bad things.1 Perhaps I should just give up on watching decent things.
I think other people might put this on their worst list for precisely the same reason I’m putting it on my best list: the puns! Oh, the puns! Reading it back after a couple of months, even I had to think a bit before understanding them. Then I got the urge to groan. And that’s exactly what the reaction to a pun should be.
CIPC#191: The odd couple S2 E9, Chess nuts
Not only is this a better than average post, but I think it breaks the record for the highest quality of post to quality of subject ratio.
1. [Well, relatively well.] ↩