Media I've consumed in 2013
January 01, 2014 at 02:30 PM | categories: movies, books, games | View CommentsHere's my now-annual list of how I wasted my time this year.
Books
- A Study in Scarlet
- Attack of the Bacon Robots
- Beauty and the Beast
- Because I Said So! The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids
- Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
- Epic Legends of the Magic Sword Kings
- Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
- Just a Geek
- Life and Death in Assisted Living
- Machine of Death
- Midnight Cowboy
- Oliver Twist
- Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
- Pirate Cinema
- Pro Git
- Signal to Noise
- Slaughterhouse-Five
- Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
- The Art of War
- The Pickwick Papers
- The Picture of Dorian Gray
- The Sign of the Four
- The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't
- Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
- Water for Elephants: A Novel
- xkcd: volume 0
My favorite book this year has been The Signal and the Noise. You can read my initial impressions, which haven't changed. I really enjoyed the added context it provided to Michael Lewis' Moneyball, showing that patterns found in data can be inaccurate or misleading without a human insight into why the patterns in the data exist in the first place.
Honorable mentions go to the Mary Roach books I started reading, which are very light, funny reads which still manage to teach some of the more embarrassing and taboo aspects of science.
I didn't read too much fiction this year, but I started reading the original Sherlock Holmes stories, mainly to tide me over until the next BBC series makes it over to this side of the pond. I'm pretty impressed with how much of the original survived in the transplant into the 21st century.
Movies
- Battle Royale
- Black Caesar
- Charley Varrick
- Children of Heaven
- Close-Up
- Coffy
- Compliance
- Cooley High
- Cosmopolis
- Django
- Django Unchained
- Drive
- Frankenweenie
- Ganja & Hess
- Gravity
- Hugo
- I am Comic
- Iron Man 3
- Jiro Dreams of Sushi
- Kooky
- Moneyball
- Monsters University
- Mud
- Offside
- Pacific Rim
- ParaNorman
- Prince Avalanche
- Room 237
- Shaft
- Skyfall
- Sleepwalk With Me
- Stalag 17
- Star Trek Into Darkness
- Super Fly
- Ted
- The Blind Side
- The Bourne Legacy
- The Dark Knight Rises
- The Great Silence
- The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
- The Hunger Games
- The Lost Weekend
- The Master
- The Mirror
- The Queen of Versailles
- The World's End
- Timecrimes
- Today's Special
- Trading Places
- Upstream Color
- Wreck-It Ralph
- Zero Dark Thirty
Being a huge Tarantino fan, it was no surprise to me that Django Unchained was my favorite movie I saw this year (initial impressions).
More surprising was how much I enjoyed following Filmspotting's Contemporary Iranian Cinema marathon. The subject matter seemed daunting, but all of the movies I saw were very accessible, while also providing insight into the "feeling on the street" in a country that otherwise might as well be on another planet to me. Close-Up and The Mirror play with the movie format, leading you to frequently ask yourself if the movie is scripted fiction or a documentary. Children of Heaven, aside from the subtitles, is a perfect kid-friendly, feel-good movie. And Offside is a surprisingly tense movie about a group of women who sneak into a World Cup qualifying match: on one level you fear for the characters on screen, but on a meta-level you fear for the filmmakers themselves. The movie was shot on-location during the qualifying match portrayed, and the director is currently under house arrest for his role in this film, among others.
Games
- 10000000
- Animal Crossing: New Leaf
- Awesomenauts
- Beat Hazard Ultra
- Bioshock Infinite
- Bit.Trip Runner
- Canabalt
- DEFCON
- Dynamite Jack
- FTL: Faster Than Light
- Funky Smugglers
- Grand Theft Auto V
- Gratuitous Space Battles
- Little Inferno
- McPixel
- Plants vs. Zombies 2
- Plants vs. Zombies
- Poker Night 2
- Professor Layton and the Last Specter
- Proteus
- RESOGUN
- Rhythm Thief & the Emperor's Treasure
- Saints Row IV
- Saints Row: The Third
- Shatter
- Stacking
- Super Hexagon
- Super Mario 3D Land
- The Binding of Isaac
- Thomas Was Alone
- Ticket to Ride
Yet again, I've already written about my favorite game this year, Bioshock Infinite. Frankly, it wins on its soundtrack alone. From the first notes of God Only Knows, to the calliope rendition of Girls Just Wanna Have fun, to the jazz cover of Tainted Love, to the acoustic traditional Will the Circle be Unbroken, the soundtrack is fantastic. It puts you in the world, it adds an air of mystery that I haven't seen since the best episodes of Lost, and taken on its own, it's just a great collection of music. Seriously, if you have three and a half hours to spare, listening to the whole soundtrack is a good way to make an afternoon doing chores fly past.