At the end of 2010, I made a post counting down my top 25 favorite things from that year. It was a fun and revelatory process to reflect on what had affected me during the previous twelve months. Now that 2011 is wrapping up, I’d like to put together another end-of-year discussion of the year’s most meaningful media to me.

But there’s a problem: My calendar for media consumption is not necessarily in line with the actual calendar. In 2010, it made sense to limit my list to items released that year because most of my favorite movie-TV-music-game-etc. experiences happened to line up with the 2010 release calendar.

2011 is a different story. Due to some combination of my laziness in keeping up with what’s current and finally catching up on stuff that I’ve been putting off, very little of my attention in 2011 was on media released this year.

So I’ve decided to do something a little bit different. It’s still a countdown of my favorite things from this past year, but now it’s a countdown of my favorite things from my past year. That is — I’m making no release date restrictions on the items contained herein.

I know this set-up makes my list less relevant, more sporadic, less compatible with lists everyone else makes. It’s less useful as a analysis of 2011 and more a personal memoir. Whatever. If it bothers you at all, just think of it as a series of reviews.

The rules

• Fifteen items on the list
• I had to have experienced — read, watched, listened, played — this item for the first time in 2011, regardless of release date. This eliminates all-time favorites I revisited. It also eliminates Parks and Recreation and Community, two shows I again loved and would be near the top like in last year’s list.
• I’m allowed to be as inconsistent as I want. For example, a band is on this list. So are a couple of albums. Similarly, there are a couple of TV series and also some TV seasons.
• I will publish one article discussing one item per day. That puts #1’s published date on 12/31. (edit: slight delay in releasing these, but I’ll finish) And I promise that I will actually finish this series, unlike a couple of other attempts at ambitious projects I undertook in 2011.

I’ll link to the entries below:

• Honorable mentions
• #15 LOST
• #14 Portal 2
• #13 Larry and His Flask
• #12 Grantland
• #11 Mount and Blade: Warband
• #10 Adventureland
• #9 Bruce Springsteen – Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75
• #8 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
• #7 Europa Universalis 3
• #6 coming soon!
• #5 coming soon!
• #4 coming soon!
• #3 coming soon!
• #2 coming soon!
• #1 coming soon!