The Best Music of 2017 Part II – #20-#1

The best album of the year is Damn. If you go by any metric – popularity, importance, influence- Kendrick Lamar’s Damn is this year’s champion. So go have a listen. However, here on the highway to hell some of us lost souls still need the guitar to haunt us. This year, it feels like everyone…

The Best Music of 2017 Part I, Top Albums #50-#20

Hello Gentle Reader, wherever you are. To make up for lost time never regained, we have exploded the top albums list this year to include WTMFA (way too many fucking albums). To prevent the reader from slipping into a catatonic state, descriptions for many of these albums in the lower ranks has been left brief,…

Best TV of 2017

We’re back dear reader, Synthetic Error abides. This one goes out to all the space cats riding the cosmic rails, and what’s out there with them, blasting like x-rays from man in the moon marigolds? Television! Jesus there is a lot of it to watch. 2017 saw the world hitch into a slightly more depressing…

Best Movies of 2016

2016 was filled with stunning, particularly emotional movies this year. After 2015, the year of the “concept album” film, we enjoyed some well crafted respite with films somewhat less complicated, but which often struck strong tones.    Here are some asides to fill in the landscape; movies like Jungle Book, Fantastic Beasts and Where To…

Best Games of 2016

Video games have a very different critical cycle compared to other forms of media. Movies, which can be consumed during a night out, tend to trigger a wide variety of opinions thereafter. Mostly lauded films will still earn bipolar, unpredictable opinions (that last Meryl Streep was good despite the reviews, or that Paul T Anderson…

Best Music of 2016

Greetings Errorer, Another year has come and gone for rock and roll. Although the conversation at large remains centered on egotists who rely on synthetics, under the city’s surface thousands of rockers toil in the sewers and abandoned warehouses of the not quite hip part of town. In a way it is sort of a…

Best TV of 2016

Here we go, another year in peak TV. The well continues to broaden and deepen, with great directors and movie stars dropping into the once quaint suburb to stir some shit up. This year seemed to be about vulnerability, about trying to understand who we are from a place that’s not always quite safe. Here…

Best Movies of 2015

Without further ado, the final part of Synthetic Error’s Best of 2015 series. Here are the best movies of 2015: 1. Son of Saul 2015 wasn’t much for drama, but this Hungarian film about the Holocaust dropped in at the last minute and punched me in the stomach. At least that’s how I felt. Son…

Best Games of 2015

The nature of the game industry is changing. As a product, video games stabilized in the post crash 90’s behind four or five major console makers with standardized products. I bet you can’t remember a PacMan 2. In contrast, what about Megaman 1 through 10? Sequels are a sign of an industry figuring out what…

Best Albums of 2015

Maybe it was a little too soon to proudly proclaim rock not dead- this year dragged its blue suede shoes pretty bad and left its electro shit all over the carpet. Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but even in the minor leagues it seems that interest has faded for guitar-lick based music and metal…