My 2023 Favorites

Out of 49 movies, 50 shows, 49 books, and a ton of songs these were my top finds of 2023! ⭐ by my favorite in each category, followed by alphabetical.

Movies


⭐ Nimona

What are the odds a graphic novel beloved by our family gets made and then shelves and then resurrected and then comes out an it’s quite different from the graphic novel but just as beloved by all of us? SLIM, that’s what the chances are! And yet here we are. A delight.

Bottoms

A very worthy and overdue addition to the raunchy high school comedy pantheon. Kinda a lesbian Fight Club (concept?) Mean Girls (tone?) Heathers (body count?!) Booksmart (humor?) mashup.

Decision to Leave

From the great Park Chan-wook, a neo-noir mystery romance, and like all his movies (Oldboy, The Handmaiden) just gorgeous to look at.

Knock at the Cabin

M. Night Shyamalan has had such in interesting career arc. Came onto the scene with the acclamied blockbuster The Sixth Sense and then each of his next SIX movies were each worst than the last, starting with Unbreakable (which was pretty good) and hitting rock bottom with The Last Airbender. But then he somehow pulled the plane out of the nosedive and has made some decent ones, and those one’s a hoot.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Just an absolute sweetheart of a movie. About a sentient seashell! I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during that pitch meeting.

No One Will Save You

A home invasion movie with an alien twist, very little dialog, so it’s really just a great excuse to watch Kaitlyn Dever act the heck out of it.

Oppenheimer

Somehow Amelia and I dragged each other to see this despite neither of us being psyched for such a buttnumbathon—some kind of weird mutual bootstrapping—but as soon as it was over we turned to each other “wow that was actually great!”

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

I really love the dynamism Spider-verse brought to animation and this is such a fun and surprisingly poignant example, with Puss grappling with mortality and even panic attacks.

RRR

Another epic of butt-numbing proportions but the action! The dancing! The brothers-in-arms! The epic sweep! The CGI tiger! A contender for favorite movie of the year.

Rye Lane

Low-key delightful rom-com. Loved our leads. Sometimes there’s no more to say than that.

Significant Other

Twisty little relationship thriller in the woods, I always love when Maika Monroe adds more bullet points to this section of her resume (The Guest, It Follows, Watcher)

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

How do you make a sequel to a movie that’s in the running for both my favorite animated movie and my favorite superhero movie? Like this.

Talk to Me

Favorite horror movie of the year, don’t miss it. Unless you don’t watch horror. In that case you probably want to miss it.

Shows


⭐ The Great

Pour one out for one of the greats, canceled after three seasons, but fear not it ends pretty well (even though they wanted three more seasons 😭). Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult are INCREDIBLE in this off-kilter bawdy rauchy rollicking comedy/romance/court intrigue/period piece. The laughs and the shocks! For a stretch of season three I worried a bit that they’d lost their way but my fears were misfounded, what a finish.

The Bear

I try not to list shows in multiple years but I’m gonna make an exception for my favorite show. Season two just as great as season one, even though they broaden the horizons. If I haven’t convinced you to watch this yet there’s nothing for it, and the show has since caught fire so doesn’t need my endless shilling, but you’ll almost certainly hear it from me when season three drops nonetheless :)

Daisy Jones & The Six

I wonder how Fleetwood Mac feels about this show? Didn’t seem like a thing I’d be into but it’s deeply watchable and really feels like it captures a time well, even though I was a little too young then to have any right to that opinion.

Gen V

This superhero spinoff of the The Boys needs every kind of content warning but while I could never recommend The Boys (even though I hate myself for being addicted to it) because it’s just sooo misanthropic this show has much more heart so I’m gonna go out on a limb and put it here. YMMV!!!

Good Omens

A wonderful adaptation of the Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman book. Michael Sheen and David Tennant are pitch-perfect as the lifelong angel/demon friends grappling with various apocalypsi.

Jury Duty

Delightful entry into the kindness HoF, and a form of reality show? Everyone is in on this hoax jury trial except for ONE GUY. And James Marsden is in it playing himself (is he the most underrated actor of his generation? I think maybe). Anyway, it’s a treat and I won’t ruin it if you haven’t seen it.

Queen’s Gambit

Riveted from the jump, I’m a sucker for a good sports narrative, and Anya Taylor-Joy is perfect. I just loved watching her carve her way up (and down!) through the ranks. They stakes always feel so high, and outcomes uncertain. Plus the costume and set design, good lord.

Scavengers Reign

Wildly imaginative animated show about a handful of people marooned on a very alien planet. The creativity that went into the ecosystem is so frickin' cool and watching the characters grapple with it is so engaging. There’s also a surprising “ugh this fucking guy” element to one of the aliens but I won’t say more than that.

Shrinking

Bill Lawrence left Ted Lasso after two seasons to focus on this show and it shows in both places (I like how TL wrapped up, but our family is divided on that :). More overtly about mental health, grief, and relationships but no less funny and almost certainly gonna find a spot in the kindness HoF too.

Slow Horses

Gary Oldman oversees Slough House, the shabby branch of MI5 for disgraced agents who get stuck with grunt work and such. The plots are gripping, and Oldman turns in the best performance of an ascerbic genius since Hugh Laurie played Dr. House.

Succession

Modern day court intrigue of the highest order! Incredible performances and dialog, I don’t know if I’ve ever had more fun watching people I hate. I really had to muscle past that baseball scene in episode one. “Shakespearean” gets thrown around, I’ll say this gets “Most Shakespearean” in the drama category this year, and The Great takes in in the comedy category.

True Detective

Only watched season one. An incredible season of television, but at the same time doesn’t make me hunger for more? It’s weird. Maybe because everyone is so deeply unlikeable. Dark stuff for sure, but so well done.

Yellowjackets

Cut from the same cloth as Lost. If you were into that, hard to imagine you won’t be into this!

Songs


Triaged a few thousand songs and found 266 keepers, depending on how deep you want to go:

Books


Non-Fiction

  • ⭐ The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green I absolutely loved this collection of essays (which I later learned was a podcast and is also wonderful), DM me if you want me to send you my favorite chapters (The Yips; Sycamore Trees; and On Love, Vulnerability, and Sunsets).
  • Allow Me to Retort by Elie Mystal Excellent and super-readable dive into legal BS around The Constitution, and The Abortion Chapter is an absolute tour de force. Again, DM me if you want me to send it to you.
  • Broken (In the Best Possible Way) by Jenny Lawson The Bloggess writing about her mental health struggles in her inimitable funny and open style.
  • Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski Sex education has come such a long way.
  • Command and Control by Eric Schlosser The history of the management of our nuclear arsenal. Holy shit it’s a miracle we’re all still here.
  • Determined by Robert Sapolsky I didn’t need much convincing, but this lays out the case for free will being nothing more than a useful fiction.
  • Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb A therapist discusses therapy through (highly anonymized) accounts of a few of her patients, plus her own experience of therapy as she navigates heartbreak. So interesting and I think maybe the first book I’d recommend to someone who would benefit from therapy but is reluctant.
  • Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us by Rachel Aviv Mental health essays. Definitely a theme this year!

Fiction

  • ⭐ American Rust by Philipp Meyer Resisted this for too long because I thought it was gonna be a little highbrow but turns out it was a gripping page-turner and just beautifully and evocatively written.
  • This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohar & Max Gladstone Really interesting short SF book, more of a novella really.
  • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin A story of friendship and creatively and really engagingly portrayed characters.
  • Upgrade by Blake Crouch Kinda a sucker for these sorts of “unlocking human potential” fantasies.
Mon, Mar 11, 2024

My 2022 Favorites

Out of 55 movies, 44 shows, 34 books, and a ton of songs these were my top finds of 2022! ⭐ by my favorite in each category, followed by alphabetical.

Movies


⭐ CODA

Made me cry. More than once! Example above. Equal parts funny and touching with stakes that feel real. I also love that it really brought home to me the expressiveness of ASL in a way that hasn’t really hit me before.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

The wildest ride of the year and I love the complicated and moving mother-daughter relationship at the core of it.

Glass Onion

Very different feel from Knives Out but that’s a good thing. Not quite on the same level for me but still loved it.

Hustle

I’m still a sucker for a well-done sports movie.

Last Night in Soho

Beautifully shot and cut and good n' twisty, I just love Edgar Wright’s style.

The Menu

Cast crushes it, Nicholas Hoult can do no wrong and I love everything about the dynamic between him, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Ralph Fiennes. Love the service worker/consumer dichotomy. And I think about that burger like weekly.

Pinocchio

The Pinocchio story doesn’t usually do much for me but this one’s the best, and the artistry of this one is incredible.

Prey

The first one will always be iconic but even so this is the best Predator movie with one of the great action movie heroines.

The Sea Beast

I gotta admit the ending doesn’t really work for me but still definitely a good one.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Really fun, highlights include a great bit of physical comedy from Nicholas Cage and the Paddington 2 discussion.

Shows


⭐ The Bear

My favorite thing I watched in 2022! Fantastic ensemble cast, centered around a world class chef who inherits the local Chicago family sandwich shop and tries to get a recalcitrant staff to adopt new practices and transform the place. Food, found family, tension, has it all! Lots of team-building carryover, reminiscent of sports shows or movies. The penultimate episode of season one captures the experience of a stress dream better than anything I’ve ever seen.

Amphibia

Delightful show about three friends who find themselves transported into a Planet of the Apes type situation, but with amphibians. Feels kinda young and episodic at times but the overarching story arcs, character arcs, and relationships are very satisfying.

Attack on Titan

Perhaps the twistedest and twistist thing on the list? A post-apocalpytic world where the remnants of humanity live inside a walled city to keep the cannibal giants at bay. Lots of action and gore, very imaginative, fun world-building. Most everyone will probably be able to find some badass or another to relate to, but don’t get attached.

Chernobyl

Omg I put off watching this for so long because when am I ever in the mood for what I thought was going to be a bit of a slog of a docudrama but this was RIVETING. I’m glad I had no idea at the time how razor-close this disaster came to tipping over into mega-disaster. Also an incredible portrayal of how responsibility and accountability can go so wildly wrong when you’re under a regime that makes covering your ass paramount.

Dead to Me

Linda Cardellini and Christina Applegate bring to life one of the great TV friendships amidst a backdrop of murder and suburban strife. Three seasons and done, done perfectly. And James Marsden should be a much bigger star.

Derry Girls

I was definitely worried about this one because the first two seasons were such delights and season two ends in such a satisfying and emotional way, and season three might not capture quite those same heights but it’s still really good and a worthy final chapter.

Final Space

One of the worst TV cancellations, on a huge cliffhanger, so you should know that going in. But also some of the most fun science fiction I’ve ever seen, while it lasted. Also Olan Rogers, creator and lead voice, just seems like such a wonderful human being.

Justified

Okay this is a cop show with all that entails and definitely hasn’t aged well in that regard and a few others but between Timothy Olyphant and Walton Goggins I’m not sure it’s legal to have this much charisma in one show.

Mob Psycho 100

More than any other show on this list I think this might have the biggest “I’m not used to anime” hurdle to get over, but along with Kipo and Ted Lasso and Knives Out this show deserves a spot in the kindness pantheon. Also has anyone ever had more fun animating action and psychic powers? I don’t think so.

Our Flag Means Death

A romantic comedy alternate history where gentleman pirate Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard cross paths. Took me a minute to get into the mood, but it really hits its stride when Blackbeard (Taika Waititi) shows up.

Primal

Never would have guessed a show about the friendship between a caveman and a dinosaur and almost no dialog could be so captivating and often moving? Gorgeously animated. Heads up, violent.

Reacher

A great guilty-pleasure adaptation of some great guilty-pleasure books. I think I binged this in two nights. Embarrassingly macho stuff but Alan Ritchson as Reacher seems beloved by both men and women I know so what the hell, I’m putting it in.

Severence

Take an intriguing concept–what if you could undergo a procedure such that your work life and personal life were completely isolated from each other in your head–and execute it flawlessly and you’ve got this show. The season finale was incredible, I can’t wait for more.

Songs


Triaged a few thousand songs and found 252 keepers, here are 10 favorites, DM me if you want the full firehose:



Books


Non-Fiction

  • ⭐ Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman Burkeman also wrote The Antidote so has now written my two favorite self-help books that are really more anti-self-help books. Or more philosophical? This one’s “an exploration of time management in the face of human finitude”, here’s a fun tribute if you don’t want to read the whole thing, and here’s a very brief piece by him to give you a taste of his writing: What If You Never Sort Your Life Out?.
  • The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson Good read on CRISPR and ramifications.
  • How to Be Perfect by Michael Schur Really engaging book on moral philosophy from the creator of The Good Place.
  • Free Will by Sam Harris I tend to think free will is a useful fiction so of course this grabbed me.

Fiction

  • ⭐ Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir Weir also wrote The Martian, deservedly wildly popular and movie-fied, but I really liked this one a lot too. More out-there, literally and figuratively, but still feels sciency while still being a page-turner.
  • Anxious People by Fredrik Backman I just love most of his books, no exception here.
  • If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio A murder mystery at a conservatory that only does Shakespeare, great interleaving between the plays and the plot, characters.
  • Vicious (Villains #1) and Vengeful (Villains #2) by V. E. Schwab Fun dark take on superheroes.
Tue, Apr 18, 2023

My 2021 Favorites

2021 roundup, better late than never edition! Out of 62 movies, 47 shows, 35 books, and a ton of songs these were my favorite finds of 2021. In alphabetical order this year, because I’m a coward.

Music

I probably triaged 4,000 songs? Kept 169 and of those I made playlists of my favorites on Apple Music or Spotify, choose your weapon.

Movies


The Mitchells vs. the Machines

Oddball family coping with sending their kid off to college? Their pug features prominently in saving the world from the robot apocalypse? MADE FOR US. Made for anyone, really, this one’s a hoot from beginning to end.

Pig

One of Nicolas Cage’s best movies (and from what I’ve read one of his favorites). “We don’t get a lot of things to really care about” feels like such an honest sentiment, and if I could give an Oscar for best scene that one would get it. As great as Cage is David Knell steals that scene, watching him die inside as he struggles to maintain the cheerful façade is amazing.

Promising Young Woman

Riveting. Funny and horrifying and I don’t want to spoil anything by saying more. Needs a trigger warning for sure though.

A Quiet Place Part II

A marvelous sequel to one of my all-time favorite horror movies. Millicent Simmonds is wonderful and if horror could get any respect at all Troy Kotsur wouldn’t have been the only deaf actor up for an Oscar recently. Might want to try these even if you don’t like horror. Very tense, but more action-horror (like Aliens) than horror-horror (like Alien).

Wolfwalkers

Cartoon Saloon is a great independent Irish animation studio that does beautifully animated fables and this might be their best yet. The end really gets me.

Shows


Arcane

Gorgeously animated, pulls no punches, found it hard not to blaze through it in one sitting. Kinda in three acts, so watching three episodes at a time is a good approach. Love the father-daughter stuff, love the kick-ass women, love the grappling with madness, love… I could go on. There is one fight scene that layers on past and present in a truly extraordinary way. Can’t wait for more, hopefully they don’t ruin it by hewing more closely to the source material (a video game, of all things!).

BoJack Horseman

Took me awhile to get into this one, as initially no one seems the least bit sympathetic, but eventually it’s clear it actually has a ton of heart and sympathy for its deeply, deeply, DEEPLY flawed characters.

Harley Quinn

Hooked from the opening line, “My fellow whites! Let’s raise a glass to this pyramid of money, built upon our favorite pasttime: Fucking the poor!” My favorite portrayals of these DC characters.

Invincible

Goriest entry on this list? I did not expect this show to go so hard. First episode mostly felt like standard superhero fare until…

Maya and the Three

Joins Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts on the Criminally Underwatched list. A great story set in a world influenced by Aztec, Maya, and Inca mythology. Made me cry.

Midnight Mass

Mike Flanagan is in the midst of an extraordinary run with Netflix. Haunting of Hill House then Haunting of Bly Manor and now this… all top-notch. Also worth trying even if you don’t like horror, love the emotional themes and characterizations at the core of his shows. Also love what this one does with religion and small-town living.

The Owl House

A delightful show with such good representation, taking place in a richly imagined magical world. Sad the creator of that other witches-and-wizards world has gone off the rails? You’ve come to the right place.

Books

  • Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley I was not a great English major so this translation, packed with anachronism and a smack-talking Beowulf ended up being right up my alley: “Meanwhile, Beowulf gave zero shits…” Lol
  • The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune Maybe my favorite book I read last year? Follows a case worker at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth as he is sent on an unusual (even for the job) assignment.
  • The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson Sprawling climate change science fiction, loved how it delves into various implications of the path we’re on, feasibility of various solutions, somehow manages to get into the weeds on details while still being super readable as a story.
  • Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke and The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova Two poker books, one by a poker legend, one by a newcomer immersing herself in the world in a quest to get good. Both really interesting in their own ways, with common threads of being women in a world that’s overwhelmingly male. Grateful to Annie Duke to introducing me to the concept of resulting.

Final Word

Don’t sleep on the 2020 roundup! It includes my all-time favorite, and if you haven’t checked it out yet…

Fri, Apr 15, 2022

My 2020 Favorites

In 2020 I watched 50 movies, watched some amount of 56 shows, read 57 books (32 solid reads plus 25 short ones (e.g comics) or skims), and whittled roughly 3,600 songs that the robots recommended to me down to an annual mix of 300+ songs (on Apple Music or Spotify) then further distilled down to under 100 favorites (Apple Music, Spotify).

On to my favorites!

Favorite Thing: Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts

A perfect show, and a perfect show for 2020, a sunbeam during a dark time. In this particular apocalypse, intelligent animals dominate the surface, and the remaining humans take refuge in underground burrows. Kipo finds herself on the surface for the first time in her life and has to survive. Things I love, in no particular order:

  • Really imaginative worldbuilding
  • Wonderful blend of character arcs, relationship arcs, plot arcs
  • An arc for the team badass that I’m not sure I’ve seen before
  • Compelling character backstories (some super dark!)
  • Great depiction of family and found family
  • Excellent representation
  • Explores the power of kindness and forgiveness, but also their limitations
  • Looks like it’s going to indulge in a couple annoying tropes and then handles them in ways I love
  • Great characters you think will be one-offs but that return in meaningful ways
  • Killer soundtrack
  • Deeply satisfying final season and conclusion

Do. Not. Miss! (Netflix)

Favorite Movie: Knives Out

I don’t have anything against mysteries, but generally it’s not my genre, so I avoided this for awhile, and wow what a mistake that was. The twists, the performances, the mounting tension, the satisfaction and surprise as all the pieces click into place, wonderful. Also look at this cast, holy shit: Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, LaKeith Stanfield, and Christopher Plummer.

Favorite Show That’s Not Kipo: Ted Lasso

Like Kipo, this is a show that is just saturated in kindness and warmth. Unlike Kipo, it’s not a post-apocalyptic fantasy with giant animals, it’s a story of a middlin' Div II football coach (Jason Sudeikis) who is hired to coach a professional soccer team in England despite not knowing anything about the sport. The premise did nothing for any of us but tried it based on the reviews and Vicky said it best: “I just find, at the end of every episode, I’m smiling at the screen.” Every character is a gem. I’m a sucker for stories that make me want to be a better person and this is one of them. (On Apple TV+ which it feels like nobody has, but you could fit this into the one-week free trial easily)

Favorite Nonfiction Book: Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

A deeply enlightening and readable book that compares the caste systems of the US (past and present), Nazi Germany, and India. Revelatory. From Chapter 8, The Nazis and the Acceleration of Caste:

In the early stages of the Third Reich, before the world could imagine the horrors to come, a committee of Nazi bureaucrats met to weigh the options for imposing a rigid new hierarchy, one that would isolate Jewish people from Aryans now that the Nazis had taken control. The men summoned in the late spring of 1934 were not, at that time, planning, nor in a position to plan, extermination. That would come years later at a chillingly bloodless and cataclysmic meeting in Wannsee deeper into a world war that had not yet begun.

On this day, June 5, 1934, they were there to debate the legal framework for an Aryan nation, to turn ideology into law, and were now anxious to discuss the findings of their research into how other countries protected racial purity from the taint of the disfavored. They sat down for a closed-door session in the Reich capital that day, and considered it serious enough to bring a stenographer to record the proceedings and produce a transcript. As they settled into their chairs to hash out what would eventually become the Nuremberg Laws, the first topic on the agenda was the United States and what they could learn from it.

The man chairing the meeting, Franz Gürtner, the Reich minister of justice, introduced a memorandum in the opening minutes, detailing the ministry’s investigation into how the United States managed its marginalized groups and guarded its ruling white citizenry. The seventeen legal scholars and functionaries went back and forth over American purity laws governing intermarraige and immigration. In debating “how to institutionalize racism in the Third Reich,” wrote the Yale legal historian James Q. Whitman, “they began by asking how the Americans did it.”

The Nazis needed no outsiders to plant the seeds of hatred within them. But in the early years of the regime, when they still had a stake in the appearance of legitimacy and the hope of foreign investment, they were seeking legal prototypes for the caste system they were building. They were looking to move quickly with their plans for racial separation and purity, and knew that the United States was centuries ahead of them with its anti-miscegenation statutes and race-based immigration bans. “For us Germans, it is especially important to know and see how one of the biggest states in the world with Nordic stock already has race legislation which is quite comparable to that of the German Reich,” the German press agency Grossdeutscher Pressedienst wrote as the Nazis were solidifying their grip on the country.

Western Europeans had long been aware of the American paradox of proclaiming liberty for all men while holding subsets of its citizenry in near total subjugation. The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville toured antebellum America in the 1830s and observed that only the “surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint.” Germany well understood the U.S. fixation on race purity and eugenics, the pseudoscience of grading humans by presumed group superiority. Many leading Americans had joined the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, including the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, the auto magnate Henry Ford, and Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard University. During the First World War, the German Society for Racial Hygiene applauded “the dedication with which Americans sponsor research in the field of racial hygiene and with which they translate theoretical knowledge into practice.”

Favorite Fiction Book: Check, Please! by Ngozi Ukazu

Joins Kipo and Ted Lasso as the third perfect cinnamon roll of the roundup. And twice this year I’ve made the mistake of thinking that because I don’t care about the sport (hockey, in this case) I won’t care about the story. Couldn’t have been more wrong. The blurb:

Eric Bittle may be a former junior figure skating champion, vlogger extraordinaire, and very talented amateur pâtissier, but being a freshman on the Samwell University hockey team is a whole new challenge. It is nothing like co-ed club hockey back in Georgia! First of all? There’s checking (anything that hinders the player with possession of the puck, ranging from a stick check all the way to a physical sweep). And then, there is Jack―his very attractive but moody captain.

Too Much Great TV!


Infinity Train

I love this, and it’s Amelia’s favorite show. It is only because this is my blog and not hers that Infinity Train and Kipo aren’t reversed. But while we disagree on the order we agree that you should watch this. Between this and The Good Place I’m feeling spoiled by delicious food that bakes personal growth into the plot device. (HBO)

The Dragon Prince

From a couple people involved with Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of our all-time family favorites, this is a safe bet for all AtLA and Korra fans. Fair warning, they’ve only made three of the planned seven seasons, but the show has been picked up for the full run. (Netflix)

Derry Girls

This show made me laugh the most this year. Vicky has been urging me to watch it for years and I don’t know why I dragged my feet. I won’t make that mistake again, I’m sorry mah honey! (Netflix)

The Haunting of Bly Manor

A worthy (and completely separate) followup to Hill House. I love how both series can make me jump and make me cry. (Netflix)

Schitt’s Creek

So funny, and some of the most satisfying character arcs I can think of. It took me awhile to warm to, well, these super-entited rich people brought low, but the gradual character development sneaks up on you perfectly. Wonderful ensemble cast, the love and warmth that went into is so obvious. (Netflix)

Watchmen

I’m amazed they pulled off making a show that picks up all the threads of the comic perfectly, but that you don’t need to read the comic to enjoy. I think this is a one-and-done season, and I wouldn’t have it any other way, can’t imagine what else they do. If that doesn’t convince you maybe this will: I forgive Damon Lindelof for the ending of Lost. (HBO)

Sex Education

So much more than the raunchy teen comedy it could have settled for being. I care about everyone so much, and love the way they tackle a variety of issues. Can’t wait for it to return. (Netflix)

The Good Place

Still stunned that a show about moral philosophy got greenlit. We don’t get very many perfect shows–shows that hit the ground running, never have an off season, and end as satisfyingly as they’ve begun–but this is one of them.

Honorable Mentions


Movies

  • Fighting With My Family
  • Free Solo
  • Hannah Gadsby: Douglas
  • If Anything Happens I Love You (a short, devastating)
  • Jojo Rabbit
  • Little Women
  • Parasite
  • Troop Zero

Books

  • The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman
  • Binti: The Complete Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor
  • The Body by Bill Bryson
  • Breath by James Nestor
  • Educated by Tara Westover
  • Fangs by Sarah Andersen
  • How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
  • I Wrote this Book Because I Love You by Tim Kreider
  • The Prince and Dressmaker by Jen Wang
  • Prince of Cats by Ronald Wimberly
  • Range by David Epstein
  • Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh
  • The Story of More by Hope Jahren
  • The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel

TV

  • The 100 (warning, disappointing final season!)
  • Barry
  • Dead to Me
  • Gravity Falls
  • The Great
  • Hamilton (Daveed Diggs, wow)
  • Hannibal
  • High Fidelity
  • New Girl
  • The Owl House
  • She Ra
  • Why Women Kill
Mon, Jan 18, 2021

My Free-to-Play Golden Rule (and Pac-Man 256)

My current iPhone game addiction is Pac-Man 256 which is wonderful and you should play it. It takes the classic elements from the original game and reinvents them as an endless runner with power-ups. It wins for both nostagia and freshness in equal measure, which is so rare. The way they incorporate the map 256 glitch is genius.

Really, get it, it’s great. With one caveat: their so-called Free-to-Play (FTP) model tips the wrong way. See this post by Jason Kottke (which has since been updated to reference this take by John Gruber).

Generally, these are the two major FTP strategies that games can employ:

  1. You can buy things with in-game currency that makes the game more fun. You earn currency in-game in dribs and drabs, but can progress much faster if you buy in-game currency with real-world currency, or if you watch ads. Playing the game only with earned-in-game currency is a grind, so you’re encouraged by buy.
  2. You can only play for a certain time allotment, and then the game is disabled or crippled in some manner. If you don’t want to wait to be allotted more time, you have to buy more time.

These strategies make money. Lots of money if you have a hit. But at the expense of fun. If you set out to make the most fun game you could make, you’d never do these things.

Pac-Man 256 implements both of those strategies as follows:

  1. You upgrade your power-ups (laser, stealth mode, etc.) with coins. It costs 4,080 coins to upgrade a power-up all the way. There are 16 power-ups. You earn coins in-game by finding them. There aren’t many; maybe you can get 10-20/game if you focus on them. But if you want a better score you are better off ignoring coins. You can also earn coins by completing challenges. These pay better. Randomly somewhere between 16-256 coins, but mostly 16-64 coins. You can also earn coins by watching 15-30 second video ads, which pay off similarly. Sometimes each of those things gives you “credits” instead of coins (see #2 below). You can buy a “coin doubler” for $5.00 which doubles the payouts. Presumably it doubles both in-game coins and challenge/ad coins, but I haven’t bought it so I don’t know.

  2. You get six credits to start. When you play, you can either choose to play with power-ups (more fun) which costs a credit, or you can play for free (no credit required) with no power-ups (less fun). When your credits are used up, you can only play without power-ups. Your credits replenish at a rate of one every 10 minutes. Sometimes when you complete a challenge or watch an ad you get two credits instead of coins. For $8.00 you can get infinite credits.

Unfortunately, this runs afoul of my golden rule for game monetization: always make it possible for the player to buy, with a one-time purchase, the optimized-for-fun version of your game.

Pac-Man 256, and most other FTP games, falls short on this front. Even if you buy everything, the game will still be more fun if you watch ads to earn coins at a faster rate. There is no way to buy an optimized-for-fun version.

On the bright side, Pac-Man 256 is still relatively benign on the FTP front. It doesn’t provide a path where anybody is going to wipe out their savings. It just doesn’t let me pay for the best possible version of Pac-Man 256, and that makes me sad.

Wed, Aug 26, 2015

Recommended Movies You Can Stream on Netflix

Here are all the movies I rated either four or five stars on Netflix that are available to stream as of 8/21/2015. Some of these ratings are really old and I’m not sure they’d stand up to a rewatch. Even glancing at it now, some seem indefensible. YMMV!

I compile this list from the Netflix Watch It Again page. The code I use follows this list, if you’re into that kind of thing.

I run this code in Firebug to generate the Markdown that Hugo then converts to the HTML you see above. Note that you have to scroll all the way down the Watch It Again page so that all the titles are loaded before running this script.

var movies = [];
var result = '';

function titleSort(a, b){
   var aTitle = a.title.replace(/^(a|an|the) +/gi, ''); 
   var bTitle = b.title.replace(/^(a|an|the) +/gi, ''); 
   return ((aTitle < bTitle) ? -1 : ((aTitle > bTitle) ? 1 : 0));
}

jQuery(".mdpLink").each(function(index) {
   var title = jQuery(this).text().trim();
   var tv = title.toLowerCase().indexOf("episodes)");
   if (tv <= 0) {
      movies.push({
         title: title,
         href: jQuery(this).attr('href').replace(/\?trkid=[0-9]+/gi, ''),
         loved: jQuery(this).closest("td").siblings(".cell-starbar").find("span .sbmf-50").length
      });
   }
});

movies.sort(titleSort);

jQuery.each(movies, function (i, movie) {
   var title = movie.title;
   if (movie.loved) {
      title = '**' + title + '**';
   }
   result = result + ' - [' + title + '](' + movie.href + ')' + '\n';
});

console.log(result);
Fri, Aug 21, 2015

Why I Liked Mad Max

Everybody liked Mad Max: Fury Road, and everybody wrote about it already. I’m not going to let that stop me, but I’ll keep it brief.

≻ I had forgotten that there’s nothing like real people doing real stunts. This movie is the child that points at green screen movies and says, “but they aren’t wearing any clothes!” Sure, there’s CGI aplenty, but it’s the garnish, not the steak.

≻ The star is a kick-ass disabled woman:

“I am turning 30 years old next week. I’ve been a fan of action film my entire life. And I have NEVER seen a physically disabled, kickass, female lead character in a Hollywood movie EVER – not once, until yesterday.”

(I am reminded how I felt watching How to Train Your Dragon and realizing that it ends with our hero maimed. If that isn’t unprecedented in a kid’s film, it sure is rare. A buddy of mine with a disabled daughter told me how much that meant to them.)

≻ The fact that I cared about these characters is like a magic trick that I don’t understand. I was sad when people died, but everyone is so (seemingly) minimally developed it’s like these emotions were conjured out of thin air. That said, I can absolutely see where this could break the other way for somebody. If you don’t care about the characters, that’s going to blunt the impact across the board.

≻ But the biggest magic trick is the fact that the movie got made at all. I mean really, how the hell did that happen?

Fri, May 29, 2015

Hello Hugo!

Total site rebuild! I have a new responsive design that uses Skeleton, and a new static site engine in Hugo. I’m really happy with both tools, and am particularly impressed by Hugo’s speed. Even with 1,400 plus posts it builds the site in just over two seconds! Not only that, you can start it up as a server and it’ll auto-load your changes to the browser. I’d often save a change and by the time I’d tab over to the browser the change would already be reflected there.

I’m pretty happy with my new site logo. I had drawn Stan, as we call him, for our work break reminder app Stand Up!, but feedback was mixed. So I’d shelved him, but I’m happy he’s found a home here.

And he’s SVG, which means he should look good at any size, and on Retina monitors. And since the circle and background is CSS, I can just push him out of the frame some for my 404 page.

Sat, May 2, 2015

5,271,009

On a recent episode of Roderick on the Line the guys has some fun with dentists. I think I will forever associate dentistry with a bit from one of Alfred Bester’s short stories, “5,271,009”, in which our hero is presented with a variety of “last man on earth” fantasies, and must face the flaw in each. You can read the whole thing in Virtual Unrealities, a collection of Bester’s short stories (or you can read it here), but the bit I remember is from one of the shortest “last man” excursions:

He was the last man on earth.

He was the last man on earth and he howled.

The hills, the valleys, the mountains and streams were his, his alone, and he howled.

Five million two hundred and seventy-one thousand and nine houses were his for shelter, 5,271,009 beds were his for sleeping. The shops were his for the breaking and entering. The jewels of the world were his; the toys, the tools, the playthings, the necessities, the luxuries… all belonged to the last man on earth, and he howled.

He left the country mansion in the fields of Connecticut where he had taken up residence; he crossed into Westchester, howling; he ran south along what had once been the Hendrick Hudson Highway, howling; he crossed the bridge into Manhattan, howling; he ran downtown past lonely skyscrapers, department stores, amusement palaces, howling. He howled down Fifth Avenue, and at the corner of Fiftieth Street he saw a human being.

She was alive, breathing; a beautiful woman. She was tall and dark with cropped curly hair and lovely long legs. She wore a white blouse, tiger-skin riding breeches and patent leather boots. She carried a rifle. She wore a revolver on her hip. She was eating stewed tomatoes from a can and she stared at Halsyon in unbelief. He ran up to her.

“I thought I was the last human on earth,” she said.

“You’re the last woman,” Halsyon howled. “I’m the last man. Are you a dentist?”

“No,” she said. “I’m the daughter of the unfortunate Professor Field, whose well-intentioned but ill-advised experiment in nuclear fission has wiped mankind off the face of the earth with the exception of you and me who, no doubt on account of some mysterious mutant strain in our makeup which it make us different, are the last of the old civilization and the first of the new.”

“Didn’t your father teach you anything about dentistry?”

“No,” she said.

“Then lend me your gun for a minute.”

She unholstered the revolver and handed it to Halsyon, meanwhile keeping her rifle ready. Halsyon cocked the gun.

“I wish you’d been a dentist,” he said.

“I’m a beautiful woman with an I.Q. of 141 which is more important for the propagation of a brave new beautiful race of men to inherit the good green earth,” she said.

“Not with my teeth it isn’t,” Halsyon howled.

He clapped the revolver to his temple and blew his brains out.

Mon, Feb 24, 2014

Letterpress Thoughts

There are lots of iOS games I love, but Letterpress is far and away the one that has kept my interest the longest. It launched on October 22, 2012 and I’ve been playing it ever since. Recently Brent Simmons posted his Letterpress rules, prompting Daniel Jalkut to post his. I only have a couple generally applicable rules:

  • No cheating! No cheat apps, no looking up words during play. Of course, you can work on your vocabulary offline as much as you want.*
  • After a win, pass the first move on the rematch. There’s an advantage to going first.

Otherwise, when playing strangers, anything goes. But I have some other house rules I sometimes set up with regular opponents:

  • If you reach 50 moves, the game is a tie. Sometimes the game devolves into trench warfare. Some like this, some don’t.
  • Word variations that are the same length or shorter than any previously played works are off limits. So if somebody plays STOPPER you can’t play STOPPED, but you can play STOPPING or STOPPERS. This can get hard to manage if you aren’t also playing the 50-word cap.
  • Tournament format: a win when you go first is worth nothing, a win when your opponent goes first is a break, and is worth one point. Play to five. Loser of previous game goes first.

As for strategy, definitely read Ted Landau’s posts, Win at Letterpress: Start Second, Finish First, Exceptional Letterpress Strategy, and Stealing Wins at Letterpress. (Cool thing, I’m the second victim in the games detailed in “Stealing Wins”! I’ve played Ted five times now, going first each time, and I’ve lost ‘em all.)

Anyway, those are terrific, and I don’t actually have too much to add. He even covers the “trench warfare” scenario (he calls it see-saws). A few additional things I do:

  • When the game starts I don’t always try to take the easiest corner to lock up, I try to figure out where the hardest area of the board is, and then I try to take the opposite side. So if the NE corner has bad letters, I’ll focus on securing the SW, even if the NW and SE are temptingly easy. If the bad letters are centrally located in the north, I’ll try to lock down the south. If I’m right, and the hard tiles are what’s open at the end of the game, and I’ve managed to lock down the opposite, I’ll be able to secure a larger base than my opponent in the endgame.
  • If my opponent goes first and it seems like they are going after the corner I want (so the corner opposite the badlands), I’ll often emphasize dislodging them rather than trying to lock up a different corner (although doing both simultaneously is ideal). I’ll try to lock up a tile as close as possible to the desired high ground and build from there.
  • Scan the board for suffixes at the beginning of the game! See if any can be compounded. I first started playing Daniel when he tweeted that he had ended a game with JOVIALNESSES and I was like, “ooh, I gotta play that guy.”
  • I often find that if I content myself with merely flipping my opponents tiles, no matter how big a swing that seems to produce, my advantage will wither away. If you’re ahead, you have to keep taking new tiles in addition to flipping. I find when I’m not aggressive about this, I end up in a trench (or worse). Sometimes a move that just flips is too good to pass up, but it’s easy to get complacent.
  • Take your time, a better word than what you were considering will come to you.

Anyway, Letterpress, great game! Check it out if you don’t already play.

* I’ve only been learning various Q-no-U words as I’ve been burned by them, but if you want to be more proactive about it, here are all the Q-no-U words in the Letterpress dictionary. No fair looking at this list during a game, though!

Faqir, Faqirs, Fiqh, Fiqhs, Inqilab, Inqilabs, Mbaqanga, Mbaqangas, Niqab, Niqabs, Qabala, Qabalah, Qabalahs, Qabalas, Qabalism, Qabalisms, Qabalist, Qabalistic, Qabalists, Qadi, Qadis, Qaid, Qaids, Qaimaqam, Qaimaqams, Qalamdan, Qalamdans, Qanat, Qanats, Qasida, Qasidas, Qat, Qats, Qawwal, Qawwali, Qawwalis, Qawwals, Qi, Qibla, Qiblas, Qigong, Qigongs, Qin, Qindar, Qindarka, Qindars, Qins, Qintar, Qintarka, Qintars, Qis, Qoph, Qophs, Qorma, Qormas, Qwerties, Qwerty, Qwertys, Sheqalim, Sheqel, Sheqels, Talaq, Talaqs, Tranq, Tranqs, Tsaddiq, Tsaddiqim, Tsaddiqs, Tzaddiq, Tzaddiqim, Tzaddiqs, Waqf, Waqfs, Yaqona, Yaqonas

If your opponents didn’t think you were cheating before, they certainly will after you roll out TSADDIQIM!

Fri, Jan 17, 2014

Instamorph Magnetic Doorstop

Our mudroom door has an annoying tendency to close part way, so I wanted to hold it open, and yet we go behind that door all the time for aprons and mops and stuff so it needed to be easy to open (I didn’t want a rock or whatever that I’d have to kick out of the way and reposition all the time). The off-the-shelf magnetic doorstops I’ve tried have sucked, because they are too strong, make a loud noise when they engage, etc. So I whipped up something with the existing doorstop, some Instamorph, and a couple rare earth magnets I had on hand. It’s not pretty, but it’s the mudroom and behind a door we keep open, so that’s okay.

The hacked doorstop (I removed the existing rubber head, and buried one of the magnets in the new Instamorph head) and door plate with magnet (underside view):

doorstop 1

The door plate installed:

doorstop 2

Engaged!

doorstop 3

I had to heat up the surfaces a couple time to remove extra Instamorph and then reflatten them because they were initially too thick for the magnets to attract enough through. I just set the stove burner (glass cooktop) on low, put down some foil, then some wax paper over that so the Instamorph wouldn’t stick, and pressed the piece down on it to melt it.

Sun, Jan 5, 2014

What About Removing App Store Ratings Entirely?

This post by John Gruber touched off a lively debate on whether and how developers should prod users for ratings. The nag screens sure are obnoxious, but good ratings are pretty important in bringing your app to the surface in a very crowded App Store. Rather than enter the debate, I wonder why users have to explicitly rate apps at all, when they are implicitly rating them all the time? What if, instead of reviews, Apple were to score apps by a variety of criteria, awarding some number of (undisclosed) points, on a per-user basis, for:

  • Being currently installed
  • Being in the dock
  • Being on the first page
  • Being on the second page
  • Being on the same page (or in the same group) with a bunch of other apps that get a lot of use
  • Being regularly updated
  • Time spent in active use (maybe just for games, as it’s tricky given the wide range of usage patterns across app types)
  • Having push notifications enabled and sending them with some regularity (it is implicit that the user finds this valuable rather than annoying, and this catches apps that serve a purpose but that the user doesn’t launch often, so aren’t in a prominent screen location)

And an app would lose points (or at least not score) for:

  • Being on a page or in a group with a bunch of other apps that mostly never get launched and never send push notifications
  • Crashing (maybe?)

This is a half-baked thought, and you’d want to weight these somehow, but it seems to me like this would be a decent measure of ongoing value to the user. Certainly, when I consider my own phone, these criteria give a very accurate picture of current value to me. Sure, there will be users that don’t organize their phones at all, but they would be pretty easy to discard (or deemphasize) from the dataset based on usage patterns, I’d think.

Apple could then incorporate this into App Store search weighting, along with category, search keyword, download trends, etc. Maybe they could also start spidering the web (if they don’t already) looking at incoming links for an additional weighting factor (in addition to direct links to apps in the App Store they could look at links to developer websites associated with those apps (which they have on file)).

This won’t solve the “rich get richer” problem (which does seems pretty baked into capitalism), but Apple could blunt the feedback loop a bit by:

  • Introduce some randomness into the search result ordering
  • Mix in some relative newcomers each time

So the rich will keep getting richer (as they should, in many cases) while still exposing some up-and-comers.

Finally, under a scheme like this developers aren’t penalized for updating their apps (currently an update wipes out ratings).

Mon, Dec 16, 2013
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