To escape the continued crushing reality of 2017, I escaped into a world of multimedia.

Books

• The Breakdown: How Politics and Government Really Work, and Why They Don't
• The Man in The High Castle
• The Undoing Project
• Abomination
• Next: The Future Just Happened
• Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison
• Abandon
• 99 Bottles of OOP
• Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works
• The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. and Death
• Stranger Things Happen
• Murder on the Orient Express
• The Three Body Problem
• Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

As boring as it may sound, and despite reading some pretty good fiction books this year, my favorite is probably 99 Bottles of OOP by Sandy Metz. In addition to reiterating what "real" OOP is as in her Nothing is Something talk (hint: creating a Dog class that inherits from the Animal class isn't the important bit), it also has an eye-opening exercise that if you actually do at the start of the book, it shows just how seductive it is to over-engineer a solution.

Movies

• Heart of a Dog
• Buzzard
• Manos: The Hands of Fate
• Everybody Wants Some!!
• Miami Connection
• Arrival
• Fireworks Wednesday
• Logan
• The Handmaiden
• Sully
• Tower
• The Witness
• Wonder Woman
• Moana
• Born to Be Blue
• Sing Street
• Dunkirk
• Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
• The Wild Bunch
• O.J. Made in America
• The BFG
• Loving
• The Edge of Seventeen
• The Fits
• American Made
• La La Land
• Toni Erdmann
• Thor: Ragnarok
• The Lego Batman Movie
• Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond
• The Disaster Artist
• Star Wars: The Last Jedi
• Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 2

Thor was probably the most fun I had in a theater all year, but O.J. Made in America was the most enlightening. I was around ten years old when it all went down, and I was old enough to understand everything that was happening, but not why it was such a big deal. This 8 hour documentary (best watched in chunks) lays everything out in detail, from the specifics of the case itself, to O.J. Simpson's reputation as being "aracial" in contrast to other contemporary African American athletes, to the historical context of Rodney King and the LA police, and the rise of 24-hour news coverage. I highly recommend, even if you don't care about football at all, and you didn't want to hear another second of O.J. coverage during 1995.

Games

• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition
• Pokemon: Alpha Sapphire
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice
• Mario Run
• Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
• The Walking Dead: A New Frontier
• Splatoon 2
• Tacoma
• Zombies, Run: Season 5
• Pyre
• Super Mario Odyssey
• Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series
• Picross S
• Minecraft: Story Mode: Season 2

Witcher 3 is what I was hoping for out of Fallout 4: another huge world to explore with scads of deep stories to wander between. It also looks amazing, and basically never bugged out on me, which is more than can be said for most Bethesda games. All of the quests--even the smallest side quests--told an interesting story, and the Hearts of Stone expansion told an even better story (I never did get around to finishing Blood and Wine, but I probably will at some point). I never played the previous games in the series and don't feel like I missed out, but don't be surprised if you see some of the Witcher books upon which the game is based in my list next year.