annual media roundup

2013.01.14
My annual media wrapup. All my numbers for movies and books and games are about the same as the last few years.

I think I ended up giving out too many 4 stars to talk about them sensibly. So, 5 Stars: No movies in the theate, but I found out "i ♥ huckabees", indeed... great existential playfulness. TV-wise, "Pulling" is this terrific show, like a grungy british anti-Sex in the Season. Unfortunately the first 2 or 3 episodes aren't great, but then it hits its stride, and the second season is just brilliance, so worth the Netflix streaming... I'm still not playing many games but I was reminded how much I loved "BattleTanx: Global Assault" on the N64. Bookwise, Egan's "Zendegi" was a maturation of his sc-fi "what would uploading people be like" themes (as seen in "Permuation City".) "The Last Policeman" was also sci-fi; it's what I wish the movie "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World" would have been. On the geeky side, "10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10" was a deep study on old computers and even older concepts of randomness and labyrinths, and on the comic-geeky side "MetaMaus" provided deep insight into Spiegelman's art and his relationship with his father, and being so many people's insight into the atrocities of WW2.

Anyway, stuff in Red was 4 stars or more, stuff in gray was disappointing...


Movies at the Cinema (14)
The Hunger Games, The Dictator, The Avengers, Men in Black III, Casablanca, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight Rises, Resident Evil: Retribution, Looper, Sinister, Rise of the Guardians, Django, Argo,


Movies on Video(43)
The Kids Are All Right, Elizabeth, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Cowboys and Aliens, Another Earth, Borat, The Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Hangover Part 2, Gone with the Wind, The Help, Be Kind Rewind, My Week with Marilyn, The Descendants, Fantasia, Zoolander, Emmanuelle Through Time: Emmanuelle's Sexy Bite, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, My Dinner with Andre, Knocked Up, The Royal Tenenbaums, Caged Heat, Postcards from the Edge, Paper Heart, The Men Who Stare at Goats, My Neighbor Tortoro, Brick, Thelma & Louise, I HEART HUCKABEES, Tiny Furniture, i heart huckabees, Perfect Sense, 3 Idiots, Art Of 16 Bars, Before Sunrise, Moonrise Kingdom, Primer, Exotica, Goodfellas, Marjoe, Clue, 6 Days to Air: The Making of South Park, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Swingers


TV Shows (19)
Pulling Season 1, PULLING SEASON 2, Spaced Season 1, Party Down Season 1, Spaced Season 2, Sherlock Holmes (BBC), Enterprise Season 1, New Girl, The Office: Season 8, Parks and Recreation Season 4, Modern Family Season 3, Girls Season 1, Mad Men Season 5, Portlandia, Archer Season 2, Portlandia, Enterprise Season 2, Archer Season 3, Sherlock Holmes Season 2,


Books (65)
The Fat Man on Game Audio: Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness, 50 Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know, Closing Time, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), Distrust That Particular Flavor, 200 Brain Filling Curves: A Fractal Bestiary, The Illuminatus! Trilogy , 50 Mathematical Ideas You Reallly Need to Know, The Beginning of Infinity, Dragon's Egg, The Anthologist, Enter, The Most Human Human, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, How to Be Black, Letters from Hawaii, Down from the Top of its Game: The Story of Infocom, Basic Training, Love And Sex With Robots, The Magicians, Jacked, The Mirage, The Visible Man, Confessions of the Game Doctor, How to Do Things with Videogames (Electronic Mediations), Insanely Simple, The Postmortal, I Suck at Girls, Things my Girlfriend and I have argued about , Driving with Plato: The Meaning of Life's Milestones, Free Will, Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule our World, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, The Brain That Changes Itself, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, Alien Phenomenology,or What It's Like to Be a Thing ..., The Children of the Sky, The Happiness Hypothesis, The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, Bird by Bird, B is for Beer, Why is the Penis Shaped Like That, Constellation Game Extras, Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong, 77 Love Sonnets, Whiter Shades of Pale: The Stuff White People Like, Coast to Coast , The Kobayashi Maru, Mortality, This Will Make You Smarter, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, ZENDEGI, The Last Lecture, God is Not Great, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality 1-35, The Size of Thoughts, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, The Last Testament: A Memoir, THE LAST POLICEMAN, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears, METAMAUS, Mr g, Motorcyclus and Other Extremely Scary Stories,


Comics (21)
Supergod, Drinking at the Movies, Time and The Batman, Too Much Coffee Man: Cutie Island, The Zen of Steve Jobs, X-Men Days of Future Past, Hulk: Broken Worlds, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge, All Hail Megatron 1, Are You My Mother?, Fun Home, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, The Indelible Alison Bechdel, Too Much Adventure, Smut Peddler, Poorcraft, Black Summer, Brunhilda, School of Hard Knock Knock Jokes, Empowered 7


Video Games (9)
BattleTanx, BATTLETANX: GLOBAL ASSAULT, GTA3, Intec G5405 InterAct Complete Video Game Entertainment System, Grand Theft Auto III, Just Cause 2, Mansions of Madness, GTA: Vice City, Karateka


Day 1 of a Couch to 5K. Need: goofy reflective vest. Want: iPhone holster, app w/o ads, reassurance about my knee.
Guy working the alewife dunkies- at first I thought he might Belushi with less talent, but maybe it's Belushi without the cocaine

SMBC is so smart.
You have to understand, princess-- Prince Charming exists only in fairytales. In real life, there are only frogs.