Let’s start with the elephant in the room: the most time-consuming and best thing I did this year was parenting. I hope that continues to be true for many years. However, that doesn’t seem like something I should be generally recommending to everyone, so I still have the rest of this list. TV: Ted Lasso
Before writing my new recommendations, I reviewed my past recommendations and noticed mostly games and long-form content. I usually like those, but that’s not what I found this year. This year, it was mostly shorter, non-interactive online content. That fits with my 2020. I also have written about several of these recommendations already, so I […]
When I was in middle school, a friend’s older brother showed me Baldur’s Gate, a computer game where you controlled a party of warriors and wizard exploring a fantasy world so big that the game came on five CDs. On my following birthday, my friend gifted a copy to me, and my RPG obsession began.
If you’re familiar with Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, it’s probably having watched a reaction video like this. I’m not certain if he actually played this game for 12 hours: that seems a tad long (especially for how far he is), but I guess it’s possible. On the other extreme, the current record speedrun […]
I have written much about my relationship with video games. Over the past few years, I have found a few stand-outs such Bioshock Infinite, Braid, and the Mass Effect series. However, I have found it more and more difficult to just sit down and play a video game by myself. I tried to diagnose why. […]
I have been incredibly fortunate to have developed some cool and valuable side projects. Most notably, Spawning Tool went from an all-nighter hack to a much beloved and very significant resource in the StarCraft 2 community. However, most side projects don’t work out that way, and I too have a litany of failures. I usually […]
2019 has been a very different year of likes from 2018. In 2018, I had a pile of video and tabletop games that I had to debate amongst to fit in. This year, I’m grasping at games. In 2018, I wasn’t totally happy with my book choices. Yes I liked Crucial Conversations, but it isn’t […]
Many bloggers write a “Books I Read Last Year” or “Recommended Movies” post at the end of the year. Frankly, I think most people do it because other people do it and because they’re really easy to write. It’s a total cop-out for generating content. In fact, it’s such a good cop-out that I’m going […]
I play all of my video games on my 2012 MacBook Pro, but recently, it has been showing its age. The 100GB Windows partition is too small, so I actually didn’t have enough space to install new games. Over the past year, I saw a few games that my computer no longer met the minimum […]
In 1996, Deep Blue played competitive Chess against world champion Garry Kasparov. In 2011, Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy. In 2016, AlphaGo played and beat Lee Sedol in Go. And in 2018, OpenAI Five played 2 games against professional Data 2 players, and the humans survived 2 very fun games. But in another year, I think […]