New Year's Resolution (as determined by iTunes), Take 2

Let's start by revisititing the outcome of my new year's resolution from 2006. Sadly, since m resolution didn't make any sense, I don't have any particular outcomes to report either. Hence, let's see what iTunes has to say about my New Year's resolution for 2007:

1. Enya, "Amarantine"
2. Cheap Trick, "Surrender"
3. Blues Traveler, "But Anyway"
4. Los Lobos, "No Tengo Dinero"
5. Talking Heads, "Stay Up Late"
6. Tears For Fears, "Head Over Heels"
7. Delerium, "Aria"
8. Engima, "Cross of Changes"
9. Garbage, "It's All Over But The Crying"
10. Talk Talk, "Strike Up the Band"


This is a very solid group of songs. My favorite of the bunch is "Cross of Changes" but not by much. For what it's worth, song number (9) is by far the best song on Garbage's 2005 album.

Now, what does this stuff mean (besides the fact that I am a sucker for iTunes resolutions/fortunes...)? Here is the key. If I use this as a fortune, then it looks like (3) implies that the best thing I can do is to say 'fuck it' and just move on (which is often good advice). Song (10) seems to be implying that things might end with a rim shot. As usual, I really don't have much of a clue as to how to interpret this, but I am amused at the placement of some of the songs.

In the spirit of reality, perhaps I should resolve to become better at making new friends. Once I move in October, I'm really going to need to find some good people or else I'm going to be hanging out on my own way too often.

2006: The Year in Movies

I am done seeing movies for the year, so here is my year-end wrap-up. (I'll do separate reviews of the most recent movies later.)

I liked going to movies anyway, but I really got into them when I was at Cornell because there was nothing else to do. (I also got more into theatre and classic rock while I was at Cornell, so I guess Ithaca did do me some good.)

I still haven't quite decided on a single best movie, but I'll see if trying to put the year's flicks in perspective helps me out with this. In contrast to Gazebo, this is because there were several fantastic films this year that I can distinguish clearly as being my favorites but which I have trouble ranking relative to each other. Hence, I have to disagree with Gazebo in that I feel there were several standout films in 2006. In my opinion, this year had more really awesome movies than any of the last several years (ever since I began going to movies this frequently). His movie of the year is Brick, which I didn't originally want to seem, but which his high praise has made me want to see.

I'll use wikipedia's film list to hopefully prevent me from forgetting any films, and then I'll try to hand out some awards at the end. It's possible some of the rankings below aren't entirely jiving with my initial reactions to a film or two, but sometimes opinions change upon reflection. Anyway, here are my films of 2006 separated into very broad categories (with order within a ranking not meaning anything):

Fantastic: Thank You for Smoking, V for Vendetta, A Prairie Home Companion, Stranger Than Fiction (wow... Will Farrell can act!), A Scanner Darkly, The Science of Sleep. (I considered putting Smoking and Vendetta on the list just below this one, so this gives me four finalists for film of the year)

Extremely good but not quite awesome: Cars, Pan's Labyrinth (I would consider putting these two on the next list because not much separates them from the top films in that list and in the case of Pan, some more reflection could change the order)

Very Good: Underworld: Evolution (barely makes this category, and I know I like this series more than most), Ice Age: The Meltdown, The Devil Wears Prada, Employee of the Month (which was much better than I thought it would be), Flushed Away (near the top of this list), Casino Royale (near the top of this list), District B13, Night Watch, Scoop (near the top of this list), Curse of the Golden Flower (my 4th foreign language film in a row at the time I saw it [today]!), 10 Items or Less

Good: Ultraviolet, Mission Impossible III, X-Men: The Last Stand, Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest, Little Miss Sunshine (good but not close to as good as most people seem to think), Fearless, The Prestige, Kinky Boots (part of this year's Lola sequence), Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing and Charm School, This Film is Not Yet Rated, Take The Lead, The History Boys

Fair--OK to Decent--Pretty Good: The Pink Panther (decent), Art School Confidential (fair), Over the Hedge (OK), Clerks II (fair), Marie Antoinette (decent), Happy Feet (OK), For Your Consideration (pretty good), Factotum (fair), Find Me Guilty (pretty good), Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (fair), Volver (decent)

Not so good (aka, bad): Borat (ok, I know why I saw it but I wish I hadn't because things where people are harming other people really stick in my craw, despite the fact that some moments in the film were genuinely funny), Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (or perhaps in this comedy... all the jokes were in the trailer!)

Snakes on a Plane: This movie is special and deserves its own ranking. I had a lot of fun with it, but it was absolutely essential that I saw this on opening night. So, under the circumstances that I saw it, I would rank the experience as very good. However, if I had seen this film by renting it and watching it at home on my own, then the experience would have suffered a lot and my opinion would be much lower. Accordingly, I hereby proclaim that SoaP is not just a film but also a film category. (Actually, I probably would have classified it as OK independent of everything else because I have a fondness for campiness, but the whole experience was a very important part of the film.)


OK, here are some awards:

Best film of 2006: I can't really decide, so I'm going to cop out and proclaim a four-way tie: A Scanner Darkly, The Science of Sleep, A Prairie Home Companion, and Stranger than Fiction. The second and 4th of these (and Adaptation, for that matter) have some characteristics in common, and all four of these films are considered so-called "independent" releases. (More and more of my favorite films have been going in that direction the past couple years, though I still really enjoy a good blockbuster.) Ask me again in a year, and we'll see if more time makes one of these stand out more than the others.

Best pre-2006 film that I finally saw: Adaptation. My runner-up is Rushmore.

Heaviest film: Pan's Labyrinth, and it isn't close. (In fact, this may be the heaviest film I have ever seen.) This is the first time I have ever been in a theatre where the audience cheered when the bad guy (and, oh, was this guy bad) was nailed. He really had it coming.

Most breasts: Curse of the Golden Flower (again, no other movie is even close)

Most deceptive trailer: United 93

Best stories (outside of the film): Tie between the United 93 trailer and the whole Night Watch experience.

Best animated film: A Scanner Darkly

Biggest disappointment: Borat

Best musical and/or play: I'll do this instead of writing a separate year-end summary. Anyway, the award goes to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

2006: The Year in Gaming

Hmmm... I just updated the title of my reading year-end review to reflect the fact that it's for 2006 rather than 2005.

So, let's get to the gaming. I don't actually play a huge number of games, so this won't take took long. My Wii games will be discussed in my 2007 year-end review (and perhaps in individual reviews as well). I have Wii Zelda sitting on my table, but I don't currently have a way to play it at home.

Let's break this down by category:

RPGs: This has been on hiatus for a while, but I look forward to both campaigns and one-shots. I'm thinking of starting a Dragonlance campaign once I'm in Oxford, but first I will need to find people with whom to game. I still need to fully design and run a version of the Cheesegrinder. (Additionally, I am tempted to see if I can stay with a friend around labor day and then fly off to Atlanta and participate in DragonCon. Or I could go to a more local convention. But I haven't been to a Con since Labor Day 2004 and I want to go to one.)

Board (and card) games: Well, I spent a bunch of time playing old favorites and I also had a chance to try some new ones. 1000 Blank White Cards is nice quick fun -- maybe I can convince people at conferences to play that -- and You've Been Sentenced is also really good (though our rule modifications improved a couple aspects of the game quite nontrivially). The D & D board game is another new one from 06, and the card games I've tried (in 05 and 06) that others own are also going strong. (There's the Uno on crack and that bean game.) Ticket to Ride was very fun, though I have yet to play it correctly, so I'll reserve judgement on the correct way of playing the game. We played a block game at Jorian's on Newton's b-day that I enjoyed quite a bit, and I've tried some other new games as well over the past year. Oh, I should definitely mention Lemming's game with paper dice. I can't remember what it's called, but that's another standout. As for individual gaming "moment" of the year, that's got to be the marathon game of Munchkin with the end game scenario that lasted almost an hour (or about 50 minutes after I first promised we'd be done soon because the end game had started). That was an amazing achievement.

Video (and computer) games: There aren't too many to mention. (As I wrote, I have to reserve the Wii ones for next year.) Civ IV is providing the expected addiction, and New Super Mario Brothers (I really need to get back to this...) and Puyo Pop Fever ("Ribbit! Ribbit! Ribbit!") are also very cool. The AI in Puyo Pop Fever kicked the living crap out of all of us in multiplayer even though I think we adjusted the difficulty to maximize our benefit. That was a little ridiculous. The 6-player battle Tetris at Doug's graduation ceremony was extremely memorable, and I seriously need to buy Tetris so we can do some more multiplayer Tetris. Hell, even just with the few of us and no new people, I would still really like to do this because it was that damn fun. I tried a few other games, but none of them really did much for me. I wouldn't mind giving some of them more chances, however. (It's not like I played them for a long time.)


The 2007 outlook is obviously filled with Wii games, starting with Zelda. Additionally, I hope that Super Smash Brothers Brawl, currently slated for a Fall release, comes out before I leave Pasadena because I'd really like to play multiplayer with the gang in person. (I find in-person multiplayer to be much more enjoyable than multiplayer over the internet, even with the exact same people involved in each case. While I'll still have with Smash Bros with the latter situation, fewer bars will be increasing on my end of things.)

Grabaduccia!

2006: The Year in Literature (and other reading)

Well, I'm going to define "literature" broadly for the purposes of this blog entry. I really mean the year in text.

I read a few more novels this year than usual for two reasons: (1) I'm not currently teaching and the time in the evening I might use to prepare lectures I can instead use for reading, baseball, games, or any of several other means of goofing off. (2) I gained at least a couple novels (and probably three) because a baseball book -- a rather comprehensive one filled with scouting reports-- I used to buy every year called The Scouting Notebook was not printed in 2006.

OK, so what did I read?

I finished off the Deathgate Cycle books by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman and had a lot of fun with most of those (though some were better than others).

I also read the third and final book (Road of the Patriarch) in R. A. Salvatore's "Sellswords" trilogy, which is set on Toril (Forgotten Realms) and follows the assassin Artemis Entreri and the drow mercenarcy Jarlaxle. (Jarlaxle is one of my favorite characters.) It's good that Salvatore has been moving away from writing about Drizzt all the time and has turned the spotlight on some of the other characters he's created (some of which are more interesting than Drizzt and definitely benefit from the development). One of the things I particularly liked with this trilogy is to focus on characters whose alignment isn't good.

I read the second book in the current trilogy in the main Dragonlance story arc. This book, called Amber & Iron, follows the character Mina, who was introduced in the "War of Souls" series (by Weis), and brings in some new characters. (There are occasional cameos by some of the other Dragonlance characters, though these aren't as interesting as many of the older ones about whom I read for years.) The third book in this trilogy should be coming out in February. Another book by Weis & Hickman, Dragons of the Dwarven Depths, is the first book in the "Lost Chronicles" trilogy and covers the main Dragonlance characters of old between the first two books in the original Chronicles. Reading about adventures between two known ones isn't the same as following a timeline without knowing where it will lead, but I really like the writing of Weis & Hickman, and I also enjoyed the chance to read about Tasselhoff, Raistlin, and company again. The next book in this series comes out in July.

I finished up the new Amy Tan book (called Saving Fish from Drowning) at the beginning of the year. I bought it towards the end of last year, and it was sadly a major disappointment. I typically buy her new books (other than children's books) without a thought, but after this disaster, I'm going to be more judicious about the next one and not trust her automatically.

I also ate into my backlog a bit, which includes several novels I bought dating back to when I was a student at Tech -- I don't use a queue or a stack when choosing my reading material; I'll read certain things that I buy immediately and others have to wait for me to get around to them. One of them, about Lord Soth's fall from grace, wasn't good, but I insist on finishing books that I start. I'm anal that way. (Among other things, I was annoyed how the Knights of Solamnia in the book were depicted just like stereotypical soldiers who like to drank, brag about their conquests, etc. The book also wasn't well written, which is a greater sin than the depiction that didn't feel faithful to the Dragonlance universe.) Another book from my backlog that I read was I, Strahd: The War Against Azalin, which is the sequel to I, Strahd: Memoirs of a Vampire, which I read many years ago. Both of these are by P. N. Elrod, known for her vampire stories outside of Ravenloft (which is where these two take place), and I enjoyed both of them. (I should have read the sequel earlier. I've owned it for 10 years.) I am currently reading another Ravenloft book from my backlog. (Recently, Wizards started reprinting some of these stories for the first time in many years, so I'm hoping some new Ravenloft stories will also be written.)

There might be a couple more novels I'm missing, but they're not coming to mind at the moment. In terms of short stories, I read some more in my Harlan Ellison collection and will be finishing that soon. (I bought it while at Cornell. When it comes to short stories, I'll typically read a few stories and then put the collection down for a while.) I recently finished my Lovecraft collection, which I also bought while in graduate school. I have gotten a couple hundred pages through a Philip K. Dick collection (The Philip K. Dick Reader), which I bought around the time A Scanner Darkly came out in the theatres. I had been meaning to read some of Dick for a while, and the release of the movie provided the impetus I needed. Thus far, some of the stories are mediocre, but I like others quite a lot. (A recent one that I read that I really enjoyed was involved a robot that advertises itself and one just has to buy it.) There might be a couple other things I read this year, but in some cases I'm not sure if I read it last year after I returned to Tech or this year. The time just kind of washes together.

For next year, I recently bought a copy of Dune (and its first sequel), so I think I'll finally get around to reading the first of those. Maybe I'll read the 2nd next year too. I also ordered a copy of The Annotated Chronicles, so that will give me a nice chance to revisit the original Dragonlance characters in a way that will job my memory and also provide some new stuff. I may also start one of the other Weis & Hickman series. (Besides Dragonlance and Deathgate Cycle, has anybody here read any of their other stuff?) Flatland has been part of my backlog for a while, and I want to reread the third Hitchhiker's Guide book as well. (I reread the first two a couple years ago after not having finished them off when I was much younger.) There are also other novels like Farenheit 451 that I've meant to read for a long time, so maybe I'll pick up some of those as well.

I own several d20 rulebooks that I have glanced through with varying levels of thoroughness, so maybe I'll read a couple of those. (Another reason I read more novels this year is that I didn't bother with any of those this year.) In particular, I'm thinking either the Cthulhu or Dragonlance books. (I'd like to run a Dragonlance campaign.) I won't be renewing my subscription to Dungeon, so I can do a bit of a time trade-off with those two things. Oh, so in terms of magazines, I spent some time going through my Dungeon issues but I didn't read those cover-to-cover. I also read Electronic Gaming Monthly and made some headway in my backlog of Caltech alumni publications and issues of American Scientist (which occasionally has articles I like, but some issues definitely have more than others --- so some of them taking considerably longer to finish than others). I also get Physics Today and Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Like American Scientist, there is a large variation in how long the issues will take me.

What else? I read numerous scientific journal articles (with refereeing, reading students' reports, and reading page proofs of my own articles being the most painful because of how carefully I have to read that stuff), lots of issues of The Tech, tons and tons of articles on ESPN.com (tons and tons of baseball articles but very few others), a particular couple of blogs most of us know, and lots of other random (or not-so-random) things on the Web (wikipedia entries and whatnot). Oh, I also finished the 2005 Beverly Hills High School alum publication (just a little late...) and am currently working on the 2006 one.

So, I read a lot. I wish I could read fast because sadly I can't. But the above really involves a huge amount of time when one reads as slowly as I do. I like reading, though it would be nice if I could concentrate better when I read and not be so slow. (I can be painfully slow at times.) I think even for a light novel, I'd say because of the focus problems that 20-30 pages an hour would be a typical pace for me, and if I'm stressed out, it can get even slower than that.

I'll have some more end-of-year reviews later. Well, I'll at least do one for movies. I might incorporate plays and musicals into that one too, as I probably didn't see enough plays and musicals to justify their own entry. I probably won't do one for my research, because it feels too much like stuff I have to do. (I'll need to be sending the CPI people a summary of the 2006 stuff in a month or two when they are filling out their progress reports for the people who pay them.) I might do one for games, though there also aren't that many I played this year. I could discuss nailing Princess Peach against a fence, because I didn't spend enough time doing this in 2005, so I continued that practice a bit into 2006.

Random music awards (2006: the year in music)

This entry will serve as my 2006 year in review for music because I simply won't be able to compete with the expansive review Gazebo can offer. (I can give a pretty thorough one for movies, however.)

Following Gazebo's lead, here are 10 miscellaneous music awards for 2006:


Best discovery of an old album: Garbage, Beautiful Garbage. This album has some songs which are absolutely fantastic: "Cherry Lips", "Androgyny", "Cup of Coffee". (I might still technically be missing one or two songs from this CD, so I should possibly go buy the damn thing.)

Best "duo" about homosexuality: Pet Shop Boys and Elton John, "In Private". (The Pet Shop Boys have shared this award multiple times before.)

Best song on a new Loreena McKennitt album: "Caravanserai" from An Ancient Muse. (I only just got this album, so my opinion is subject to change.)

Best cover [English]: Celtic Woman, "Orinoco Flow" (covering Enya). (Actually, this probably wins for best new song of the year.)

Best cover [Spanish]: L-Kan, "Ama y Esclavo" (covering "Master and Servant" by Depeche Mode). (This technically came out in 2004, but I first heard it this year.)

Best band dedicated to bossa nova covers of new wave and punk songs: Nouvelle Vague. (By the way, check out the play on words in the band's name, style, and choice of material to cover.) I downloaded a bunch of their stuff and while I haven't listened to all of it yet, let me particularly recommend their covers of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and "Heart of Glass".

Madonna Memoral Award for most ornery musician (other than Madonna): The lead singer of Echo & the Bunnymen. Don't request him to sing "People are Strange".

Best proposed misuse of a song: Me, for the proposal to play "Freebird" at all Oxford graduation ceremonies.

Best song performed live: Depeche Mode, for their stripped-down rendition of "Shake the Disease"

Most appropriate concert for Hollywood: Pet Shop Boys, on their "Fundamental" tour. (The concert was also extremely good.)