A Year in Review (2023)

Another year has waved goodbye, and that means it’s time to review a bit of Review Party Dot Com, to look back just before we look forward.

Though the skies were filled with smoke, this year didn’t feel like a total dumpster fire compared to the past few, but that’s just my Western bias talking. And in any case, I’m not here to talk about geopolitics, economies, or anything that serious. I’m here to talk about what we’ve been up to for this silly podcast.

Return of the Champs

Yelp Elite. The title, the aura, the mystique. It’s going to hang around a bit longer, because Matt now has three years running of Yelp Elite status (2021, 2022, 2023) and has been nominated for the 2024 year as well. Yeah, that’s right, it’s a honor you have to maintain! You’re not just an Elite once and forever, you have to keep up with writing helpful reviews, and that Matt has done.

To learn more about Elite life, check here or here or here.

Additionally, Matt has another year of Amazon Vine under his belt, and inadvertently actually ordered above the threshold where it will become taxable, oops. (That’s > $600 worth of products over the calendar year). To learn more about Vine, check it, check it!

We also started an official Review Party Letterboxd account to pen our own reviews of movies old and new.

So who cares? Well, we hope you do! We may joke that we’re the best review podcast on the internet, but we’ve got the bona fides to back up our talk, brothers and sisters. We know reviews inside and out!

Write, Write, Write

We don’t just make comedy for your ears, sometimes we make it for your eyes too! Or sometimes it’s just information for your eyes, in the form of our many, MANY blog posts. We write about Yelp/Google/Amazon and any other review site we track down (Rotten Tomatoes, Did They Like It?, It’s Good), we write about scandals and scoundrels.

Those whose restaurants get review bombed for non-business reasons, those who make a living on reviewing pizza. AI for writing and for screening reviews.  

There’s a whole lot, plus we’re organizing and tagging blogs so you can better find related content. And boy do we have content. We’re on episode 183 of the podcast, and the blog isn’t far behind.

If there’s something review related that you’d like to read about, let us know!

Meme, Myself, and I

Or more of Me, You, and Meme Reviews, actually. This year we featured four products in the ever-popular Me, You, and Meme Review series of segments: the segments where we find those products that received a cult-like following due to their funny reviews, so much so that the reviews became more important than anything else.

We recapped the lore of these funny products and reviews, then got them in our hands to write our own, honest (and also funny) reviews. And actually, this year we revisited some of our most popular (and earliest) Me, You, and Meme Reviews subjects.

So what did we conquer?

Well, way back in January, Matt got an Ugly Garfield Plush (through Amazon Vine) and rated it unsettling grotesqueries. He also took his shirt off for some reason. If that piques your interest, read all about it here.

Then, to truly give the people what they want, Matt broke ground with the first Me, You, and Meme Reviews Revisited, once again buying a package of sugar free gummy bears, diving even deeper into the lore of Haribo’s claim that they never sold sugar free products, and not holding back he ate the whole dang bag. Find out how that went here.

Cracking the seal on an oldie but a goodie, Matt donned the infamous Horse Head Mask. Did he say yay or neigh? You can read here to find out (and potentially see how sweaty he was in a horse mask in the August heat).

Finally, Matt returned to the very first MYMR to Revisit the Three Wolf Moon shirt, to find even more fun reviews and to rewrite his opinions after having the Three Wolves for three years.

These are always fun for us, and we hope they’re fun for you. As we say, we live for a laugh, but we love a good useful review too. In these segments, we hope to bring both.

Odds and Ends

There have been a few fun Great Reviews in History blogs written this year, with clippings from newspapers pre-1940, and sometimes far older.  

There were a lot of scandals, as mentioned, so much that we may add that as a tag. If you’re interested in crummy people doing crummy things, this past year has a lot to offer.

This year, in addition to fun hater comments we’ve gotten on a few blogs, we’ve also gotten legitimate comments on the Vine post and a gummy bear post, which we love to see. We’re so happy to be reaching an audience that is invested in what we care about.

Thanks for listening and reading!