News You Can Bruise for 2024 January

Mon Jan 01 2024 14:27 The Crummy.com Review of Things, Part 1: Film: 2024 already, eh? Well, I'll do the easy part. I've updated Film Roundup Roundup with the best 25 films I saw in 2023. Actually 27, since I'm counting the entire Before trilogy as one entry. After 10 years of Film Roundup, there are nearly 300 movies in my "recommended" list. Amazing!

And as long as I'm messing around with this spreadsheet, here's a top ten of the films I first saw in 2023:

1. Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight (1995/2003/2013)
2. Godzilla Minus One (2023)
3. When Harry Met Sally (1989)
4. Polite Society (2023)
5. Barbie (2023)
6. Oppenheimer (2023)
7. The French Dispatch (2021)
8. Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)
9. What's So Bad About Feeling Good? (1968)
10. The Blind Man Who Did Not Want To See Titanic (2021)
11. Asteroid City (2023)

Sat Jan 20 2024 11:32 Happy Snak: While making a list of books I read in 2023 I realized there was one book that I wanted to give its own post: Happy Snak by Nicole Kimberling, published in 2018. I was recommended this book by, I believe, Liz Henry, who said that she recommends Happy Snak and Constellation Games as a package deal, since anyone who likes one will like the other. As the author of Constellation Games, I had to test this hypothesis.

Well, I can tell you that Happy Snak is a lot of fun, and definitely has a similar feeling to Constellation Games. It's got weird aliens, cultural exchange focused on low culture, and a snarky main character whose reaction to first contact is to start a business—all things I love reading and writing. It gave me a fun "You're probably wondering how I got into this situation" feeling, so check it out!

(1) Sat Jan 20 2024 18:25 The 2023 Crummy Review of Things, Part 2: Books and Games: OK, I've finished looking over my records and I'm ready to do book and game recommendations. As often happens, the Crummy.com Review of Things will proceed in fits and starts this year, but I'll eventually get it all done. I've discovered that this is now how I keep track of the passage of my life, rather than blogging the things I do right as I do them like a normal person.

The Crummy.com Book of the Year 2023 is Happy Snak, because it's the only book I wanted to do its own blog post about. Other good books I read in 2023 include Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects That Changed the Modern World by Thomas P. Hughes, and the conceptually very similar The Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin, by Francis Spufford.

The Crummy.com Game of the Year is Mr. Sun's Hatbox by solo developer Kenny Sun, which sets roguelike combinatorics in a platforming environment with a slapstick style to create a comedic, customizable Spelunky-style experience. Other games I really enjoyed include: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Mosa Lina, Factorio and Void Scrappers.

Finally, Sumana and I added a few new games to our irregular daily rotation:

• Diffle, a Wordlelike that, apparently, fits with the way we think about words.
• Connections from the NYT.
• Metazooa, Metaflora, and Birdle, games of cladistics.

Next up: something else!

(1) Wed Jan 31 2024 14:12 Schickele Mix Archive: To commemorate the recent passing of composer Peter Schickele (R.I.P.), I've created The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive. This site presents all of the extant information online about Schickele's amazing music-education radio show Schickele Mix, which stopped airing in 2007 and has been in copyright clearance hell ever since—an inevitable but undeserved fate.

I've scraped the now-defunct official Perl CGI that gave out Schickele Mix listings, and reformatted the listings with links to archived recordings of all the episodes that have been saved by fans. About 130 of about 180 episodes total have been archived, thanks entirely to two people, both of whom show up in this Reddit thread to take credit. Thanks, Frodo_Picard and gattgun, from a grateful world.

All this metadata is now available as a big JSON file (so no one else has to download those old listings from the Wayback Machine and rewrite my scraping code), and I also created a podcast RSS feed that lets you experience Schickele Mix in its haphazard original broadcast order. (This is different from the benofsky.com Schickele Mix podcast mainly in that it includes the gattgun archive, not just the Frodo_Picard archive.)

I've got one more big piece of this project planned, but this is enough to tell the world, I think. The web page makes it clear which episodes of Schickele Mix are still missing fan-archive recordings. If you think you might have one of the missing episodes on an old cassette tape or something, please email me at leonardr@segfault.org.