Article written by myself: Net Neutrality and Open Source
I have received a few e-mails about this article from telcom trolls trying to get me to change my position on these topics because of this article. Since it went live on my website, I have gotten over 100 hits. I spent at least a week writing this article. It all stemmed from reading the ‘back of the package’ info for the song Flickr by Jonathan Coulton. That was a great article. It definitely should have raised the standard of the quality of the work LW showcases. I really wish that were true.
Article written by a LW blogger: Gaz’s Dwarf Fortress or Kieran’s articles
I went back through the whole year to find one. Of all of the articles for the year trying to find one that wasn’t written by myself that continued to entertain and was very well-written and presented, I found four. One was Dwarf Fortress written by Gaz. That one was very fun and really stuck out with me especially since it was later talked about on the TSG forums. The other three were all of Kieran’s articles. His writing was definitely some of the best we have seen. He is a great asset to the staff, and I hope he keeps writing for us when he has the chance.
New show on broadcast television: Community
Joel McHale, Chevy Chase, and Ken Jeong. Do I need to say more? To those of us have been to (or will soon return to) community college: yes, this show is 100% accurate. I am not joking for once in my life, community college is exactly like this show. The fact that they have actual comedians playing every type of student seen in the series just helps ease the pain. The fact that the show is teamed with the rest of NBC’s Thursday comedy lineup (called Must See TV when I was growning up) helps make a viewing block that cannot be messed with.
Returning show on broadcast television: 30 Rock
The show deserves it’s three Emmy’s. It is the best comedy on any network, especially when compared to the other crap other networks show. With Community, they bookend the NBC comedy lineup and are the best shows on most Thursdays. Alec Baldwin is the best actor on television these days across all genres. The show is unbelievably well written and produced. It will remain a top show until they all get bored and move on.
New show on cable television: Stargate: Universe
Stargate x Battlestar Galactica. The series really really is a cross between the two. They even have a Baltar character. I loved the other Stargate series. Battlestar Galactica was the best show in the sci-fi genre. I like that Stargate is using elements that made Galactica great. This is definitely a new direction for Stargate. I hope it works for them.
Returning show on cable television: Dirty Jobs or Deadliest Catch
Two great shows that do a great job of showcasing careers that nobody wants. Dirty Jobs has continued to bring unique and interesting jobs to light. The camel farmers, goose pluckers, and diaper cleaners were all among the jobs shown this year. So many great memories. So many ruined cameras. The drama on the Bering Sea is always interesting to watch. There is always so much on the line and death is always possible. The After the Catch special adds to the drama. We got to meet the captains’ wives this season, and I hope the trade of Jake for Jake is actually done. That would be great. I can’t wait for more episodes of both.
New (to me) anime series (that I will eventually finish): Toradora!
Hyakko is a very close second. I am moved by almost every episode for some reason. It usually has to do with Taiga doing something very touching. I guess I click with her. May be because I have a moe for smaller girls. I just sort of connect with the show as much with Hayate no Gotoku. Taiga is such a good, cute, and fun character. She shows a lot of Kugamiya Rie’s development. Very fun show. Hyakko is also another great show. Torako is such a fun character. The show is short and simple and very worth the time investment. A lot of great voice actresses make appearances too.
Movie: Star Trek
I love that movie. I have been a Trekkie for a long time. After the last few Next Generation era movies were hit or miss (as all pre-Abrams Treks were to date), I was wary of this movie. Then I saw Cloverfield and was convinced of Abrams’ skill in making a great movie. Star Trek Got so much right in reinventing Trek as well as keeping a lot of the cornier elements alive. The criticisms for the movie were all copy and paste from past Trek movies and the cast was well picked. Shatner was a moron for not taking the role that was eventually revealed in the scripts that came out. He would have been perfect. The movie was the best Trek since First Contact. (Like First Contact, it had a Star Wars cameo. R2-D2 appeared in place of the Falcon this time.) PS: The rating for the movie according to Rotten Tomatoes is 95% or almost four times the rating for New Moon.
New game for the Wii: NSMBW
In the land of crap, the gold bar is golden. With all of the crap and faux sequels that came out for the Wii this year, the top choice is obvious. There wasn’t much to get excited about for the Wii this year. At E3, this and Spirit Tracks were their only big games coming out in 2009. As you can read in my recent review of the game, this was a surprisingly well put together game. All of their next great games will be next year at the soonest (starting Jan 26th with No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle), so Nintendo has to hold on to what little successes they have now.
New game for the 360: Batman: Arkham Asylum and Assassin’s Creed 2
I’m not a FPS fan, so ODST and L4D2 are out. Rhythm games are crap so Rock Band and Guitar Hero are out. Of the rest, Arkham Asylum and Assassin’s Creed 2 were my favorite games on the console. Ghostbusters was a great game too, but these two were better. I love going around and stabbing people in this depressing holiday season. The story is a very good and deep one. Assassin’s Creed 2 is a great game overall. Batman is like being in a comic book. A comic starring the voice actors of the cartoon. But, this is not based on a comic book. It is one of the most awesome games ever. Some moron at Gamespy said it was stupid that there is no comic or movie tie-in for the game. That was what made the game better. Two great games. If it came down to is, Batman wins because no one can beat Batman.
New game for the DS: Pokemon Platinum
Take everything good about Diamond and Pearl and make them better. Fix a lot of the bad areas. Add many more Pokemon. Add new features. Add wifi events. Yummy, yummy wifi events. Free, rare Pokemon. Aside from those and many graphical enhancements, this is pretty much like Diamond and Pearl. Except for Spirit Tracks, there wasn’t too much to get very excited about in the DS area this year.
On the PSP and PS3:
I have only recently gotten these systems so I cannot properly give them a best new game yet. Next year, we all know they are going to be Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy Agito XIII.
Podcast: Penny Arcade/PvP/Wil Wheaton D&D Podcast Series 3
The only other contender in this realm was Memories of the Futurecast. I started listening to this podcast with episode 2 during PAX. I went back and listened to to the first two series to catch up. Every week as a wait until the next episode. Then came the last episode. That damn last episode. It is hard not to blame Binwin for what happened, but he doesn’t deserve all the blame or any hatred. It was an honest mistake of his. He was too wrapped in vengeance. Aeofel was being too good of a friend. They broke the cardinal rule and split the party. Mistakes were made. Recent tweets hint on the return of AQI. Series 4 should follow. That and Memories of the Futurecast Volume 2 are two podcasts to look forward to this coming year.
Song: Jonathan Coulton’s The Future Soon
Coulton ain’t new, and the song ain’t new. I just felt that this song best captured how my year has been. I’m a pathetic loser that has interests in science and technology with only glimpses at the idea of what love is. I also have the desire to make giant robots and use them mostly for good… eventually. Oregon and Iran get wiped off the map first then I go totally Iron Man with looser morals and more hatred for humanity. A nerd can dream. (If it proves my point any more that I could be the person in the song, I am currently on a Mac writing this in WordPress on Chrome with a Vocaloid theme and watching an open source Twitter program and listening to Code Monkey after The Future Soon. My Rei plushie is right next to me in case I need to hug someone that I want to hug.) [On a side note: it is almost 2010, shouldn't Ikari Gendo have cloned his wife by now? I'll give anything for one of those clones. If you have seen the show, you know who I am talking about.]
Book I actually read (out of the few I finished):
I am not sure I finished a book that qualifies for this. I’ve read mostly textbooks or graphic novels this year, as with any year. Some of the Japanese archaeology books were pretty cool. The books on physics are cool too since physics is only one step below mathematics which is less than or equal to God depending on your cardinality proofs. My textbook that I used to build neutron stars and white dwarfs was pretty cool too, but I read most of that last year. Oh! Wait! Reboot!
Book I actually read (out of the few I finished): Physics of the Impossible
The pompous and arrogent Michio Kaku proves that most of the cool sci-fi tech can be made some point in the future and all in languages you philistines can understand. This is a very great read. Pick it up.
Graphic novel: Kenjiro Hata’s Hayate no Gotoku Graphic Novel #7
Nagi put Tama in a washing machine. I love Futurama. To quote Free Waterfall Sr from Futurama: ‘We have them trapped like a tiger in a washing machine.’ The GN also features the [holiday doesn't exist] episodes, the Negima! reference issue, and Nagi’s date where Hayate is hidden on every page. All of that is in addition to the usual pure brilliance in comic, anime, internet and video game references. Oh! And the student body officers episode too. That features the moments that class president Izumi (aka Karin to Karin fans) fell for Hayata-kun.
DVD/BluRay: Star Trek
Second place goes to the release of the new Evangelion movies in the US. Since I now have a BluRay player (I love my PS3) [I never said they were a bad console. I just said they were too expensive and had hardware issues.], I can watch BluRays. I don’t normally buy video media since Hayate no Gotoku and Code Geass are the only series out on DVD that I collect. Into the Wild Green Yonder was a great movie as well. I had been waiting for Rebuild of Evangelion since the first moment I have heard of it. You can tell I am serious about a series if I don’t ‘acquire’ it in advance. But, Star Trek had a great release. All of the extras, as well as the DVD and digital copies were a great addition. Sorry Eva. There is always next year when you should be giving me Evangelion 2.0 and 3.0… unless Toradora! or Hyakko is out in the US by then. If that is the case… Well, Tron Legacy would have a December 2010 or January 2011 BluRay at the soonest… Hmm. Then Lucas owes us Star Wars on BluRay… Well. Damn. A lot of good crap is coming to BluRay by 2011. I guess that is one side effect of Obama, getting the BluRay industry to say ‘Yes We Can! (make consumers buy the same thing again)’
Webcomic: Penny Arcade
Daisy Owl, Looking for Group, and How I Killed Your Master were the top contenders as well. There were a lot of great moments in a lot of great webcomics. The ones listed are barely a cap of the iceberg of comics with great moments (the big LOLbat reveal in PvP for one). I felt that once again Penny Arcade were the kings. Just scanning through the first two months, there are many awesome moments in just such a short time. Love them. Plus, Jim and Omin didn’t kill Aeofel. Sorry Scott.
Sporting event: Omegathon 09
MLG is a sport. Therefore, the decathlon of gaming is the top event. I only made it to two of the events: The Beatles: Rock Band and the finals of Skeeball. They were pretty freaking awesome. The Omegathon is the gaming competition attached to PAX. The game tests the gamers in several areas: console gaming, PC gaming, tabletop gaming, rhythm gaming, and all-around gaming. Gamers have to prove themselves across all areas, thus no casual gamers would survive. The tabletop game is usually a board game, Connect Four if memory serves. Mario Kart Wii broke down, so they had to do Double Dash instead. That should have been a harbinger of things to come. Skeeball took over a hour to get working just so that it could break down after every other game. How the frak did they find a real Skeeball game?! That was too awesome. The best part was when Mike and Jerry did battle and Gabe schooled Tycho. It was great. Rock Band was Rock Band. Absolutely nothing special. At all. Because if you’ve seen one rhythm game, you’ve seen them all.
Japan-related event: The life-sized Odaiba Gundam
I was tempted to troll through all of my wacky links I posted throughout the year, but then one thing stuck out in my mind: the 40-meter tall Gundam. It wasn’t just any Gundam. It was Gundam. The original. For lovers of classical anime, especially those of us who grew up on Voltron, seeing Gundam at life-sized was a dream come true. Now all they need to do is make it move then fly then arm it with a laser cannon and everything will be perfect.
Event: January 20th, 2009 at 1200 (noon)
I really hope non-politcos get that. If you don’t, that was the exact moment Barack Obama became the current US President. I couldn’t stop smiling for a week after that moment. The other great event of this year was my graduation from Cal Poly SLO with a Bachelor of Science in Physics. I was depressed by the end of that day, so it definitely wasn’t my favorite event. I also flipped while at PAX, but we’ll get to that later.
Convention: PAX
Going to PAX was the greatest thing that happened to me since my Japan trip. I’ve watched PA TV a few times already since It lets me relive stuff I went through those days. I miss it so much. I finally found a place where everyone from the top-down are exactly like me. I really cannot describe what it is like to have the feelings I felt while at PAX. If you are watching PA TV, skip to part 2 of the pilot. Skip to 4:50 when Freezepop is on stage. Look at the sea of lights. Those are DS Bigs, DS Lites, DSis, PSPs, cellphones, and even some crazy fucker with a MacBook Pro waving to the music like lighters in just the generation before mine. Those are my people.
New software: Chrome
Okay, so Chrome isn’t the newest software, having been released last year. Chrome has become my favorite browser. It is faster and a lot smoother than any of the other browsers out there. It was made for the internet. There aren’t many good themes out there yet. (I’m using the Vocaloid one since my next favorite is the Good Smile Company one, and they ain’t that great.) Extensions can be enabled, and I know there are a lot of good ones out there, but I haven’t really hunted for them. And if I can say this completely uncensored when I heard that Chrome was available on Mac on Dec 8th, I practically came. Anything not to use Safari and it’s horrible slowness anymore.
New web-based toy: Wolfram Alpha
This is what wikipedia would be like if it were written by geniuses instead of morons. The mass of useless facts and magic math solvers and data analysis and pure nerditude makes Alpha the funnest toy any geek would want to play with. A few minutes on Alpha can quickly turn into a Turing test or a battle of wits until you get discouraged that the entry for ‘Penny Arcade’ doesn’t mention Gabe or Tycho.
This work by Elliot James Hayter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Tags: 30 Rock, Aisaka Taiga, Ayanami Rei, Chrome, Community, D&D, Dirty Jobs, Gundam, Hayate no Gotoku, Jonathan Coulton, List, Net Neutrality, Obama, Open Source, PAX, Penny Arcade, Star Trek, Stargate, Toradora
