The Year's Best

Since I am not that social or mainstream I don't have too many categories to name my favorites from the past year.

Most of my reading last year was various comic books, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and back issues of Physics Today. I didn't read many novels this year and there were no standouts that I will mention.  However there was a lot of graphic novel reading going on over here.  I am by no means a Comic Book Geek but a majority of what I read came from The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman and Birds of Prey written by Gail Simone.  Most of these volumes I found to be very well done.

Probably the best pickup of the year though was getting a copy of The Ship that Sailed to Mars. WOW! Thanks to Paul Di Filippo for writing a review of this book in a recent Asimov's (Jan. 2013) that made me want to pick up a copy. This is an illustrated children's book done by William Timlin and published in 1923. I thought the story could have used some help (you won't get any spoilers from me) but the art included is just amazing.  Did I mention how good the art is in the book? I am tempted to get a second copy of the book so that I can take it apart and the hang the illustrations on my walls. Thanks to the folks at Dover (their Calla imprint) for making this available.

For my favorite game pickup I liked We Must Tell the Emperor, part of the States of Siege series of solitaire games published by Victory Point Games, which allows you to run in an abstract way the Pacific Theatre during WWII from the Japanese perspective. The first part of the war is pretty easy going unless you have bad luck, but once the game takes you into the later periods of the war you get a sense of the hammering the Japanese took. Another game I liked was Onirim published by Z-Man Games in the USA.  Think of it as a type of solitaire. The object is to play a series of three cards of the same color but with different symbols on them to open a door. To win you need to open eight doors, two from each of the four different colored suits, to escape the labyrinth before the nightmares get you by depleting your draw pile. There is also two-player variant of the game. A good game but I'd like it a lot more if it weren't for all the card shuffling.

I didn't travel much this past year but I enjoyed walking through Cave of the Mounds and also Mission San Jose.

As much as I've cooked this past year I don't feel like I did enough.  At least I tried making some new things like dill pickles, purple cauliflower, and cranberry sauce to name a few.

Unless I've lost a ticket stub I saw 10 movies in the theatre this year. I saw nothing that was fantastic. Every movie I saw had some kind of flaw, but The Avengers was probably the most solid. I would have liked this movie a lot more if they deleted Bruce Banner and The Hulk from it. Puny human says Hulk bad. Prometheus seemed to be a flop but I liked it, probably more than I would have had I not saw it in 3D. It was cool to watch that way. I will say the same thing about The Hobbit. For some reason my eyes kept bugging out on me during the showing. I'll leave it to others to pick that movie apart. The movie that surprised me the most was Total Recall. I really was expecting to have two hours of my life wasted so I was surprised walking out of the theatre that I did not feel that way, probably because it wasn't exactly like the original. The effects were cooler too.

My best food find last year was Luncha Libre. Their quesadillas are very good and creative. I've had several different kinds: mushroom and roasted potato (the pot head), roasted potato and green chile (papa verde), bulgogi (the koreadilla), and steak and mushroom. (Why no special name??) Their tea and fruit drinks are good too. Thanks to ASU for inviting local food trucks to a spot near campus on Wednesdays. The Wednesday lunch time routine is to stop at Luncha Libre and then visit the nearby Pop Culture Paradise to see what new Comic Book Day brings.

That was 2012, what's in store for 2013?