One sentence micro-reviews of each film, show, book, and game that I watched, read or played over the last year. Each item recieves a letter grade from F (terrible) to A (a must watch/read). This year, I add some additional signfiers:

(B)

Reserve for items that are so good and re-watchable/readable that they deserve to bought as a physical addition to my library.

(R)

This is a re-read or re-watch of a volume in my library.

(S)

A multi-episode show, an ongoing comic, or series of books instead of a single contained volume.

Film & Shows (48)

Q1 (11)

Rogue One B+

This is only the second new Star Wars film and I’m already getting franchise fatigue. Nonetheless, an excellent addition – likable characters and an exciting premise that plays out like an old Star Wars FPS game.

Secret Life of Pets C

An unremarkable animated feature that did nothing particularly novel or groundbreaking but was enjoyable none-the-less.

The Shining A- (B)(R)

I am rather fond of the works of Stanley Kubrik, and the Shining is an outstanding film although perhaps not in the same catgegory as Clockwork Orange or 2001.

Gosford Park A (B)

A strange favorite of the year. Gosford Park is a standard murder mystery with the added take of Brittish black comedy and insights into Brittish classism.

The Black Cat B+

Great horror from the Italian director Lucio Fulci.

The Big Sleep A- (B)

Continuing the noir theme. Good film. Not mu

Eyes Wide Shut B+

Not sure what to say. The film was good. The charaters and scenario interesting. But for the folks involved, I kind of expected more.

Necromancy B+

Fun schlock horror anthology

Kafka the Last Story D

Just an atrociously boring

The Saga of Tanya the Evil C (S)

Not quite sure how I started watching this, it did turn out better than you would think.

Flip Flappers C (S)

Beautiful scenary, but the show didn’t really seem to know where to go. After a handful of nice episodes it just loses all steam.

Q2 (12)

Point Break D

Bad acting. Mediocre plotting and filming.

Ex Machina C

Ok science fiction film of the Hollywood variety

Lost in Translation B+

Friends have recommended this film to me for some time. I found myself, actually disappointed in it, but perhaps it was due to the hype.

Lavendar C

Another forgetable horror film

Vertigo B

Hitchcock at his finest

Lars & The Real Girl A-

This film starts out making you feel really uncomfortable, but by the end you love it.

Escape from Alcataraz B+

Good old film

The Arroyo F

Stupid

Dazed and Confused A+

Started a theme of “night” movies. This is one of those quotable films that somehow never actually get watched. Excellent social commentary, atmosphere, a kind of film that takes you back.

Before Sunrise C

Continuing the night theme. I see where the directory has started a kind of reputation for making movies where people hang out and talk.

A Brighter Summer Day A (B)

This film is absolutely brilliant! But do set aside the time to watch it. I didn’t realize that it’s novel length.

Night on Earth B

Night theme. A series of short stories interconnected by the late night taxi rides.

Q3 (13)

The Life of David Gale D

Forgetable Kevin Spacey film. Starts with an agenda and doesn’t get far.

Baby Driver B-

Big name Hollywood film. Good music. Surprising lack of actual car chases.

Shutter Island B

Finally finished Shutter Island. I’ve started this film three or four times. A good dark mystery, a psychological thriller of the mind-fuckery variety

What We Do in the Shadows A-

Fun mockumentary comedy out of New Zeland

The Dark Tower C

Sort of a mess, but that was my view of the books as well.

Blackwell Ghost D

More forgettable horror films

Mulholand Drive A-

Starts out slow, but transitions into a much better film. It is oddly obvious when Lynch got the funding to take this from a TV Special to feature film.

The Great Gatsby B+

Brilliant big-cinema film that captures the excess of the period and highlights much that might be missed by a contemporary reader of the book.

The Warriors B

I keep telling the pets to “Come out to Play”

The Black Swan B-

A Perfect Blue rip-off.

Escape from New York B

Love John Carpenter’s various takes on the Science Fiction genre. His visuals continue to live up and the characters are fun.

Jurassic World C+

Kickstarting Jurassic Park again. Hollywood blockbuster. On the better end of the scale for these kinds of films, but still not worth it.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 B+

Just as good as the first.

Q4 (12)

The Conjuring 2 C+

Better than average horror, not great cinema, but entertaining.

The Maltese Falcon A

The source of the maguffin! A must watch for the noir and film history buff.

The Battle of the Sexes B

Watched this in downtown Durham. Fun. Worth it if you were burning time on a double feature.

The Woman in the Window B+

Short noir film, but one that really captures all of the different themes and styles of the genre.

The Oblong Box B+

Help! I am running out of Vincent Price films!

The Thaw D

Dumb

The Lady in the Van B-

A nice feel-good film

Skyfall C

I am so far behind on James Bond films.

Valarian and the City of a Thousand Planets B

Beautiful! Wonderful blockbuster with all the giant special effects. A pitty

Kiss the Girls C-

Described as a “neo-noir psychological thriller,” I didn’t really find it worthy of being called nor, nor pyschological

Intruders D

Dumb

Red Skeleton Holiday Special A

Great way to end the year.

Books (18)

Statistics in Plain English by Timothy C. Urdan B

A helpful, straightforward introduction to statistics that is perhaps useful to the social scientist but unfortunately skips most of the math useful for Machine Learning which was why I was reading it.

Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister

Didn’t find much use out this business book.

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman (B)

Very fast read and, as expected of Gaiman, a very well written contemporary interpretation of Norse myth.

The Book of Yokai by Michael Dylan Foster

Deep dive into all things Yokai and a great overview of thse Japanese monsters.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (B)

Extremely well written short Science Fiction. Every single one of these is a must read.

IQ84 by Haruki Murakami F

An astonishingly boring and disapointing thousand page read that rehashes the tropes of Murakami’s earlier books.

The Great Gatsby by F Scots-Fitzgerald

Following watching the Film, I had a sudden urge to read the book. It holds up well and continues to be relevant to our divided nation.

Wizards First Rule by Terry Goodkind

Adolescent drivel and wish fullfilmment. A novel that I would have probably eaten up as a teenager, but can’t stand as an adult.

Opus by Satoshi Kon B+

Satoshi Kon’s unfortunate early demise leaves this book unfinished. Yet, it remains a fun run.

Nijigahara Holograph by by Inio Asano (B)(R)

Asano’s take on horror. This is my third run through Holograph, the narrative is exteremly dense requiring close attention to untangle the twisted motivations of these characters.

Ryuko by Eldo Yoshimizu C+

Beautiful artwork, but dreadfully cliched plot. The French edition is an easy read for a beginner in the language.

Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind by Hayao Miyazaki (B)(R)

Miyazaki’s masterpiece of manga. A darker take on the environmental themse present in Nausicaa.

Genshiken by Shimoku Kio A (B)

I found myself relating rather uncomfortably with the characters of Genshiken. A realistic and non-romantic take on the situation. I hear the sequel rather undermines it’s themes and ending though.

Yoon-suin by David McGrogan (B)

A strange, far-eastern themed OSR book.

Micropend6 by Sigil Stone Publishing

Sure would be fun to find a group to play these games with. The D6 system was a favorite for me as it focused on cinematic gameplay over crunchy numbers.

Tiny Dungeon by Gallant Knight Games

Another attempt at a paired down rules system for easy play.

Dungeons & Dragons: The Players Handbook 5th Edition A (B)

5th Edition is a truly exciting return to what I enjoy in a D&D game. If only I could find a group to play with these days.

The Misty Isles of Eld Aby Chris Katulik and Robert Parker (B)

An adventure that would be fun to play, but was quite a fun read non the less.

Games

The Legend of Zelda A (B)

Never played the original until I got it on the 3DS virtual console. The title has aged well and is still worthy of a playthrough.

Pillars of Eternity B

I really wanted to like Pillars of Eternity as I’ve been reminisce for the old Infinity Engine style games. Yet, Pillars just couldn’t quite keep my attention and started to be feel like a grind.

Borderlands 2 A (B)

Endless piles of content and all of it a wonderful. Perhaps one of the best PC titles this decade and a blast to play with friends.

Don’t Starve Together A (B)

Another fun multiplayer title. Don’t Starve is a survival game that really tests your teamwork to survive.

Team Fortress 2 A (B)

A fun FPS that has a strong community and plays well on almost any system. Valve is still patching and updatingthe content so it doesn’t go stale.

Windswept D

Beautiful, but shallow game. It took roughly a single evening to explore the full potential of the game and put it back on the virtual shelf.

Minecraft A (B)

Finally took the dive into Minecraft and found it just as fun and addictive as I always feared it would be.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds A (B)

A perfect return on the handheld to the traditional Zelda formula.

Paperclips A

Free online game and a really fun take on the paperclip maximizer thought experiment.

One of my professional goals this year is to make a marked improvement on my shell (zsh) and editor (vim) skills. I know enough commands to get me through the work day, yet every time I see a real shell or vim poweruser go to town, I am reminded that I am probably only confident in 10% of the commands that I could be using.

Every now and then, I’ll force myself to use h, j, k, l instead of ←, ↑, ↓, → to navigate in Vim and my Tmux panels. The skill lasts about a week before I’m back to the arrow keys and mouse. Every now and then, I’ll try to expand beyond ls, grep, cd, cp, mkdir, mv, rm, pwd, clear and cat, in the shell. I always rebound after a couple weeks, because I can get 90% done with those nine programs.

Hence, a series of articles summarizing the man pages for different applications. A process that hopefully sees me making more regular use of them.

Less

My typical solution to navigating a read-only text file is clear && cat $filename and then scrollback with the mouse or to pipe. My solution to log files are to pipe them into text files and open them in Vim (not recommended on memory-limited systems). So my first Unix command for the year is less, that wonderful program that I get dumped into by Git all the time.

Less is a program that outputs a text file or stream with a buffer to display either more of the stream or page up to previously output lines.

Less gives me something that I’ve been trying, incorrectly to do with clear && cat all along: display a buffer of just the text file. With my old solution, on long file outputs, it was easy to scroll up past the start of the file and into old commands. With Less, this isn’t a problem. The buffer starts and ends with the contents of the text file. Likewise, I frequently output formatted excerpts from my Todo List using the XP and LSGP/LSGC add-ons and pipe them into text files or open new terminals to have a clean buffer to scroll back on. Less solves this by outputing the multi-screen-height output into a single buffer.

Useful Commands/Options

We started 2017 with the simple goal of settling into our cabin in Alpine, exploring the nearby trails and outdoor opportunities, and reconnecting with side project long abandoned to hiatus. As the year progressed, it took on an increasingly fever pitch that left us longing for that empty stretch of winter duldrums.

Sprint Highlights

Sprint A

Hotelled at the Wigwam Village in Holbrook, AZ

Sprint B

Started waking early and walking three miles each morning

Sprint C

Explored downtown Raleigh, NC

Sprint D

Spent the weekend at La Posada in Winslow, AZ

Sprint E

Spent the sprint sick with norovirus

Sprint F

Exploring creating a single-player Damasca using Solarus

Sprint G

Visited Wisconsin for my niece’s baptism

Sprint H

Visited my grandparents in Cleveland, OH

Sprint I

Investigating growing Orchids

Sprint J

Camping trip to Blue Crossing

Sprint K

Writing retreat at Cottonwood Campground, Reserve, NM

Sprint L

Jess visited Portland

Sprint M

First time playing Dungeons & Dragons in five years

Sprint N

Cabin trip in Bluff, UT

Sprint O

Converted my blog to Jekyll with a new design and posts

Sprint P

Attended funeral for Grandpa James in Cleveland, OH

Sprint Q

North American Mycological Association Regional Foray in the White Mountains

Sprint R

Backpacked West Mount Baldy Trail

Sprint S

Jess on Fire

Sprint T

McBride Mesa Trail #26 (13+ Mile/16 hour Hike of Doom)

Sprint U

Quarterly Vacation to Durham

Sprint V

Clint Visited & Apache Box

Sprint W

Katie Visited

Sprint X

Grandma James’ Funeral in Cleveland, OH

Sprint Y

Zend Framework Fundamentals Class

Sprint Z

Christmas in Spearfish

Personal Highlights

Q1

• The most relaxing quarter. Found time to play – games, films, reading; and to pick up time for writing and pursueing creative projects.
• In exploring, found George’s Lake Trail. A beautiful oak glade at the base of Escudilla and just outside of town (indeed it’s within a half mile walk of the house). A complex of old roads in the area affords over six miles of hiking end to end.
• Started the year at over 215 lbs in weight which puts me into the obese category for my height. Started the RealAppeal program, offered by my health insurance and through my employer, with a goal of dropping to 180 lbs. Dropped my weight to 194 lbs at it’s lowest, but spent most of the year at 198 lbs.
• Explored a lot of culinary delights: crawfish casserole, shrimp in pesto-tomato sauce, turkey breast with almonds, butter chicken, celery and sausage frittata, lentils and rice, squash and browned butter pasta, chicken scarporiello, caldo verde, creamed spinacha nd cauliflowr soup, lamb chops, and miso chicken
• Replaced the single-pane windows on the house and officially became a resident of Arizona, although saddly not in time to put in for an Elk tag (need six months of residency.)
• Started a dialog with Dart Zaidyer about the Solarus Engine and its potential for creating a single-player Damasca game. He converted the old Magrathea maps into the Solarus engine format and we began working to fix linking them together as I researched Lua and the API that powered the game engine.
• Home adventures included hotelling at the Wigwam Village in Holbrook and La Posada in Winslow, AZ as we explored the delights of North-Western AZ.
• Followed Jess to a training session in Flagstaff
• Started taking extra time in the Quarterly meeting to really explore the Triangle area. If I am to be flown across the country, I ought to take the chance to look into museums, buy souvenirs, attend concerts and such.
• Dana visited and we took her to Sante Fe.
• Ended Quarter with trip to Rhinelander for Felicity’s baptism followed by my last trip to see my Grandparents before their funerals later in the year.

Q2

• Culinary delights continued: quinoa pasta and burnt butter sauce, french onion stratta, schnitzel and beat sandwiches
• Continued exploring and hiking, cover over seventy miles and adding Lamphier Trail, Juan Miller Road, MS Mountain Trail, Pueblo Park Interpretive Trail, Indian Creek Lookout, Cottonwood Canyon, Bonanza Bill, and Goose Point road to the list of trails that I explored.
• Rewrote joehallenbeck.com from Wordpress to Jekyll including a new mobile-friendly design. Implemented a system for updating the site, analytics via a personal Pikwik install instead of Google spyware, and several new posts. Took down the Wind-Up blog and imported the posts into my Portfolio site. Started working on a similar treatment for Dreamscapes, but never got around to it.
• Played D&D at Flying Rook Games while Jess was out in Portland, but just couldn’t find the time to make the commitment to the three-hour round trip biweekly to attend.
• Picked up zazen over lunch and kept at it through the summer, although tailed off by Q3. It is a practice that I have long wanted to make routine, but also find that my life is plenty busy without adding another daily item. I have been interested in the Zen center in Silver City, and perhaps if I could make it down there, I could find instruction in the matter and better practice. As such, I’ve put meditation on the back burner of things to do, time permitting.

Q3

• Completed the third year of a “social media fast,” with several interesting introspections coming from it. Namely the observation that Social Media creates the illusion of being connected to friends. That smaller, more tight knit communities create better interactions. That I ought to spend more time seeking friendships among my immediate peers, or at least maintaining relationships through direct contact. Also, that I largely get nothing from Facebook. Find Twitter and Hacker News amusing, but ultimately distracting. That I would be better
• Found time to regularly play Team Fortress 2 with Will and Clint
• Celebrated our sixth anniversary with a trip to Bluff, UT to stay at the Comb Ridge Bistro and explore Bear Ears National Monument (our interests in the area pre-date the creation of the Monument).
• Grandpa James passed away, necessitating an emergency trip to Ohio to attend the funeral.
• Attended the Regional North American Mycological Association Foray at Sunrise Ski Resort. Learned a ton about mushroom collecting in the area and set about amassing thirty-some pounds of mushrooms (pre-dried). Signed up for a membership with the organization and looking forward to future mushroom hunting next year.
• Moved into the house as I disposed of three bags of the prior owner’s linens. Purged an exsessive amount of old paperwork to the fire bin. Decorated the Arizona room.
• Ended the quarter with a two night backpacking trip to the top of Mt Baldy via the western trail. Sprained an ankle.

Q4

• Got cat, Tilde!
• Started the quarter with a 13.5 mile all day hike of the McBride Mesa Trail. A volunteer activity for the Forest Service as we checked the trail conditions and determined the true path of the trial via multiple GPS unit.
• In total we hiked a 100 miles this quarter, and according to my Garmin, took half a million steps.
• Jess came along on the Quarterly trip to Durham this time. We saw a Robert Cray concert, toured the triangle area and had a generally good time.
• Clint visited. Took him on the grand tour of the area.
• Katie and Ben flew out to visit.
• Grandma went into hospice and for three long weeks we wondered about her condition. She passed away in November on Thanksgiving Week. This necessitated a wild drive across the country to Cleveland, trailer in tow, for a second funeral.
• Returned home for two weeks before needing to leave again for our Christmas plans in Spearfish. Two days driving up, celebrated over the weekend, two days driving back, and then back to work.
• Ended the year with lobster at the Foxfire in Alpine

Professional Development

• Peopleware book club
• Started a Modern React and Redux UDemy Course; took a deep dive into the React ecosystem but really I don’t do enough front-end UI/UX work these days to keep on top of it or make much use of it on a daily basis.
• Abandoned Pomodoro, it isn’t an appropriate technique for development except as a means of breaking a procrastination cycle.
• Big research into accounting platforms, from Quickbooks, Freshbooks, Zohobooks, and their integration pain-points for a business interested in offloading a bespoke accounting system (integrated into a software monolith). The particular painpoints where the need to export over ten years of pre-existing accoutning data, and also create an automated platform that could record a large volume of daily orders from an external system. Found Zohobooks perhaps the easiest platform for this use case. Would spend the next two quarters implementing this integration.
• Create a self-sylalbus for studying Machine Learning. Started with reading and completing the example problems in Statistics in Plain English and Statistics: A First Course. Read through the Tensorflow documentation. Completed the first half of Coursera’s Macine Learning course.
• Work signed us up for Zend Fundamentals I. Completed the course before the end of December.