Media I've consumed in 2015

January 03, 2016 at 10:46 PM | categories: movies, books, games | View Comments

Someday I'll create my own art. Until then, I continue to consume.

Books

My 2015 reading list is incredibly skimpy, due to taking on reading the entire Song of Ice and Fire series. I've been reading a chapter a night, and I'm still not all the way caught up. Still, of the few books I've read this year, I'd give the od to the original A Game of Thrones, both because it was very fresh (I had been successful in avoiding HBO series spoilers before reading the books), and because at that point I hadn't burnt out on the series. At this point, I'm kind of sick of it, but I'm on the home stretch. I'm kind of glad Martin is taking his time writing the next book.

Movies

Whiplash does a lot of things, and it does them all well. It explores the sacrifices made to attain greatness. It makes a memorable, over-the-top scene-chewing J. K. Simmons villain who still never comes off as evil or cartoonish. It takes an incredibly dense music genre that I frankly don't have the time nor inclination to care about but made me not just appreciate it on an intellectual level, but actually enjoy it throughout the movie. Although the first bars of the titular Whiplash will probably haunt me for a long time.

Games

The game I kept coming back to in 2015 was Cook, Serve, Delicious!. Something about that game just puts me into a Zen-like trance that I probably haven't felt since playing through the higher levels of Super Hexagon or beating "Freebird" on hard in Guitar Hero (I never could crack expert, though). The light sim and progression elements provide a nice wrapper, but really the mechanics of hammering on your keyboard to make hamburgers, sushi, and spaghetti are incredibly satisfying, especially after serving the last customer on a perfect day. If there's a reason to get the loudest possible mechanical keyboard, it's this game.

Also, a shout-out to Gathering Sky for best art and soundtrack, although full discosure, the artist on that game is a coworker, so take the recommendation with a grain of salt. Still, cool game.

Media I've consumed in 2014

January 01, 2015 at 04:30 PM | categories: movies, books, games | View Comments

When the opportunity for self-improvement in 2014 knocked, I consumed all this media instead.

Books

Michael Lewis did it again in Flash Boys and made an entertaining page-turner about boring economics, all while exposing various injustices in the American economic system. I knew about the arms race among traders for getting faster connections to marketplaces to facilitate high speed trading, but I had no idea about the shenanigans the various marketplace owners themselves were taking part in. If you read that, you'll probably also want to read The Big Short.

Movies

As much as I want to give a favorite nod to This is Not a Film or The Act of Killing or any of a number of other very worthy smaller movies I saw last year, I have to be true to my heart and give it to The Lego Movie, which was just the most dumb fun I had watching a movie all year.

Games

Again, I want to say my favorite is The Stanley Parable or Jazzpunk, but if I'm honest the latest Diablo III expansion Reaper of Souls is just a perfect Skinner Box, fixing pretty much all the issues from the initial Diablo III release. Even if it's all just a carefully concocted science experiment providing intermittent positive reinforcement, it tickled just the right parts of my lizard brain to give me the sensation of fun.

I Just Played Zombies Run! 5k Training

April 27, 2014 at 08:00 PM | categories: games | View Comments

I know, I know. The internet has already jumped on the whole "zombies" meme, sucked it dry, and deemed it over. Still, as cheesy as the concept is, Six to Start's Zombies, Run! 5K Training app is one of the few purchases I've made that not only turned into a habit, but a healthy one at that. The basic concept is that you run the app while jogging, and short clips of an ongoing audioplay fire off in between the music you listen to as you run. There's some light progression and base-building aspects, but the main attraction is the audioplay.

The app comes in two basic packages: the couch-to-5k training app that is structured to get your endurance up to running a 5k in 8 weeks (it took me 10, given our freakishly snowy winter), and the full app, which has a lot more features, but assumes you can run for 30 minutes at a time (at least, if you want to "play along" with the audioplay). Because I'm a sedentary computer programmer, I started with the 5K trainer. Prior to the trainer, I kind of enjoyed jogging, but I didn't do it regularly, and was pretty much spent after about a mile. The trainer both got me out jogging regularly, and had me doing increasingly longer intervals to get my endurance up to go a full 5k without walking. Still, if you can run a 5k today, you'll find the trainer pretty mind-numbing and you'll probably want to go straight to the "full" app as the trainer assumes you've never jogged in your life, and not much happens story-wise. The "full" app is much more featureful, and the storylines have been more interesting since I've graduated to the full app.

I can't say the app will work for you, but for me the episodic story nature got me in the regular habit, and once the health benefits start kicking in (starting with better times on runs, and progressing to weight loss and better sleep patterns), the app has made running a habit that I'd find hard to kick. I highly recommend giving it a shot if you think it could work for you. Also, I respect a mobile game that has the guts to fairly price its content and not hammer me with ads or in-your-face upsells. The trainer is only $2, and after going through that, I've purchased all the content from the full app mainly out of appreciation, since it'll be months before I get to it all.

One final note, even though the app can track distances and has a pretty nice web component to track various aspects of your runs (I've just passed 200km total), and the full app even has some missions that are based on distance, all of the 5k trainer missions are strictly timing-based. By the end of training, I could do a 5k in under 30 minutes, but the final mission is nearly an hour to give everyone a chance to finish. I could not run for an hour, so I'd recommend you map out exactly how long 5km is before the last run, and spend the rest of the time celebrating.

Media I've consumed in 2013

January 01, 2014 at 02:30 PM | categories: movies, books, games | View Comments

Here's my now-annual list of how I wasted my time this year.

Books

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

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

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.

I Just Played Rhythm Thief and The Emperor's Treasure

September 22, 2013 at 10:26 PM | categories: games | View Comments

Rhythm Thief was pretty much a disappointment. As a fan of Phoenix Wright, Professor Layton, and Elite Beat Agents, it seemed like a perfect mix of the three. Unfortunately, it has none of the humor and wit of Phoenix Wright, none of the charm of Professor Layton, and the game mechanics themselves were not as fun as Elite Beat.

In particular, Where Elite Beat, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band make it feel like you are "playing" the music, Rhythm Heaven just layers calls and responses on top of the music. While technically it's timed to the rhythm of the music (mostly), the gameplay and the music don't feel very connected. The one exception is the violin minigame--which also happen to be the easiest.

One redeeming factor is the graphics and 3D cutscenes. While the story itself is full of "anime bullshit", from a technical and visual aesthetic level, it's very nice to look at.