I wasn't going to write one of these this year (too busy playing Skyrim) but had a flood of requests and complaints (ok one of each), so anyway here, this will be as terse and desultory as possible:

Books! Books mostly sucked in 2011. I read mostly fiction books this year, mostly genre novels and stories; a few non-fiction books, a lot of comic books, and even a non-fiction book about comic books (Supergods by Grant Morrison which is actually a stealth autobiography: Morrison knew that very few people would want to read his autobio so he pretended it was about Superman and Batman then wrote mostly about himself. Gee, thanks.) I read Richard Kadrey's "Sandman Slim" novels about a wizard detective fresh out of Hell; Larry Correia's novels about an institutionalized gang of monster hunters; Suzanne Collins' novels about a society that forces its children to fight to the death; and, possibly the least plausible of them all, Michael Connelly's novels about a lawyer who works mainly from his car. I read four or five of the Jack Vance novels I had not read before (sadly leaving just two).

Favorite Book of 2011: Ready Player One by Ernie Cline.

Most Surprising Book of 2011: Reamde. I think Stephenson is probably writing a gothic romance about a school for teen vampires next.

Most Disappointing Book of 2011: There were several high profile fantasy novels published this year that were disappointing. I try not to read much fantasy (and end up reading a fair amount of it anyway), but I do read Joe Abercrombie, Patrick Rothfuss, and George RR Martin. Each published a book in 2011 and I found each one disappointing. If you want to know why, too bad.

Movies! Movies mostly sucked in 2011. There were a bunch of superhero movies that were formulaic and dull: Green Hornet was crap, Green Lantern was crap, Thor was crap, X-Men: First Class was slightly better than crap, and I haven't see any of the other ones yet because there are too many superhero movies. I saw maybe two comedies: Horrible Bosses was pretty good. Hangover 2 was pretty bad. Are we done? Oh, The Adjustment Bureau sucked too. Phtheeew!

TV! TV mostly sucked in 2011. I didn't watch as much of it this year as I used to; I spent more couch time staring into the hand-held screens of my Kindle and IPad than into the considerably larger screen just beyond them, and the big screen usually showed me sports, CNBC, or one of those strange little reality shows that have been breeding on the History, Discovery, and A&E Channels (most of them are sort of a cross between Antiques Roadshow and Jersey Shore). I kind of lost interest in most TV shows: I still have episode backlogs of Breaking Bad, Dexter, Bored to Death, Sons of Anarchy, Chuck, Walking Dead, Boardwalk Empire, even Curb Your Enthusiasm. I managed to watch Fringe but I didn't like it as much as last year; I missed the alternate universe plots and the alternate Olivia (who is somehow ten times sexier than the dull normal one). I probably would have enjoyed Game of Thrones more if I had not known what was going to happen all the time. Doctor Who was a disaster as expected. I liked Rubicon and Suits. I hated Terra Nova.

Music! Music entirely sucked this year.

Games! 2011 had Skyrim in it! I didn't play any other games but I will soon try to squeeze in Portal 2. I wonder if I can smith my own weapons in Portal 2....

If you share my Doctor Who affliction you may find this infographic the same as I found it: AWESOME!

About a year ago I bought an XBox 360, mainly because there was a big gaping vacant space in the bottom of my TV stand and the game console was just sitting there in the store going to waste. I bought a few games (Call of Duty: Whatever, Madden: Same as Last Year, A Two Guys Fighting Game, etc) and played them once in a while but not often. I didn't like the controller for FPS games, and the other games bored me. I kept thinking, "Hmm, I could be reading about starships and inscrutable aliens right now instead of watching my TV screen pivot around chaotically as I try to steer my soldier guy toward the enemy." Eventually I never turned the XBox on at all, and for months it just sat there waiting for my cleaning lady to dust it, going to waste again. But then -- then! -- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released. I had played previous editions of Elder Scrolls on the PC, and I was dubious about a console translation, but I *did* have the XBox after all, and I couldn't play it on my PC since I don't run Windows anymore.... So anyway, since then I pretty much do nothing but play Skyrim. I shirk my job, ignore friends and family, eat junk food, and ride my couch playing Skyrim. This guy sums it up well. It's a real problem.

People keep trying to get me to inject flu into my blood so it must be November. I need a post for November or else the archives page will get screwed up (don't ask -- it's a homegrown blog tool), so yay, here ars some books I've read this month:

• Reamde by Neal Stephenson: I enjoyed this book but I never expected it from Neal Stephenson. Even his trilogy of enormous historical novels was less surprising than this for some reason. Basically it's a thriller, and there's not much more to say about it. But what were the odds that both Stephenson and Cory Doctorow would write books about virtual gold farming at the same time?
• The January Dancer by Michael Flynn: This one started great, especially the second chapter which had a nice tall tale vibe to it; I almost felt like I was reading a modern Washington Irving. But then oh no! it got dragged down and down into tedium, and I got bored with it. Sigh.
• What's The Worst That Could Happen by Donald Westlake: a fun caper novel by the master of the genre. A classic.
• The Magicians by Lev Grossman: a fantasy about a boy who goes to a wizard school! Yes. But it was billed as "adult" and sophisticated or something. I didn't hate it but the protagonist was a twonk and I enjoyed seeing bad things happen to him. The book is about how he learns that the things he most desperately wants are delusions intended to mask his deep dissatisfaction with himself. Or something. I will skip the sequel.
• 11/22/63 by Stephen King: I got about a third into this before it got too boring to continue. Maybe I'll go back but I doubt it. Stephen King is not what he once was.
• Aloha from Hell by Richard Kadrey: this is the third book in the Sandman Slim series, which is in that newish Fantasy/Horror Noir sub-genre popularized by Jim Butcher. I guess it's a bit edgier than Butcher's Harry Dresden books

I've been reading The Hunger Games, a trilogy of extremely violent Young Adult novels by Suzanne Collins. These books were recommended to me by a co-worker and others with a near religious fervor -- and not just the normal you're going to burn type fervor I get from my mom, but that serious mad-eyed Missouri fervor, the kind that marches a body door to door to hand out pamphlets to people greatly annoyed to see them. I suspect these Hunger Game fans are composed largely of Harry Potter devotees in remission, desperate for some substitute, something to help ease the sense of loss and loneliness left in the barren halls of their inner Hogwarts. I can sympathize with that; I felt the same way after Outer Space Astronauts was canceled.

The first book was actually pretty good. Not great: absolutely ridiculous in every way, but entertaining. At first it reminded me a bit of Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky, in which a class of high school students have to survive alone in an alien wilderness; but really it was more like that crazy Japanese movie Battle Royale in which a bunch of kids are sentenced to fight each other to the death on a deserted island because they were disrespectful to their elders. There were also bits of The Running Man too because the Hunger Games are televised. Did I mention it was violent? This is a book about kids killing one another. Brutally. Sometimes gruesomely. On TV. And yet it actually is pretty entertaining.

Whoa but the second book faltered. The weight of the idiocy of the setting began to crush any kind of plot that might live there. In the first book it was largely possible to ignore this problem because of the story's other qualities, the way one can continue escorting a beautiful girl who smells a bit off, and scratches herself like a monkey. The first book was inventive and ruthlessly bleak and compulsively readable. But the second book offers nothing new so the reader must spend more time contemplating the nonsensical setting, the absurd behavior of the characters, the silly mindless evil of the antagonists. And the fun fades away.

So far I have not been able to read more than a few pages of the final book; it's just too silly. It's a soy burger. And I have the new Neal Stephenson sitting on my Kindle like a huge piece of delicious filet mignon....

I love this: new evidence that our oceans may have been delivered by comets -- like tanker trucks pulling into the back of Sea World. Sea World is cool.

I spent the weekend with my eyes bolted to my Kindle reading Ernest Cline's first novel, Ready Player One. This book is fiercely dedicated to raising gigantic smiles on my face. It's about (briefly) a contest in a virtual reality world created by a billionaire obsessed with 1980s pop culture, which as a geek who grew up in the 1980s seems specifically designed for me to enjoy. While it fell down on the verisimilitude on occasion, and was sometimes predictable, this is one of those rare and priceless books that makes you want to do nothing but read it. So friggin' read it.

I've gone back. I tried the new Ubuntu Unity desktop for a couple months before I decided I couldn't take it anymore. This was unusual for me: typically if I dislike something I will get rid of it right away, especially if I have to deal with it on a constant basis (like a computer or a car or a wife or those horrible children she gave me, eeegh), but with Unity I managed to endure for quite a while. It was not *terrible*, just not as good as GNOME 2. So I switched back to GNOME 2 using Ubuntu 11.04's "Classic Ubuntu" login option, but then I started having video, sound, and performance issues that I didn't have before I upgraded. So yesterday I wiped everything out and reinstalled Ubuntu 10.10, which was -- and is -- perfect for my hardware. I guess I will be sticking with it for the next year or three.

Despite the tropical storm of controversy swirling around the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in DC (and honestly, how can you paraphrase a man renowned for his oration?; and seriously, how can you order such a thing from China the way Wal-Mart orders pallets of underpants?), it is quite impressive to behold. I suspect the most common remark upon seeing it is "Wow! That is larger than I suspected!".

The monument describes the culmination of a great struggle, wresting towers of stone from mountains; the figure of the man emerges from the mountain itself and takes a human shape. Some consider such sculptures imperialistic: Mt. Rushmore gouged brazenly into the face of a native tribe's holy mountain. And perhaps there are some parallels there if you look hard enough: the native tribe becomes the pre civil rights American establishment, the holy mountain their social order. But to me it suggests the action of man imposing himself upon the face of nature and seizing immortality from it.

This really seems like a bad idea. I have no choice but to veto it. Veto, I say, Veto! Why won't they listen?

Here are some goods and bads wrt the IPad from a longtime non-Apple cretin:

Good:
It's great for casual, occasional Internet, which is the main reason I bought it. Oh really? Three examples please! Okay, so I'm sitting on my recliner yesterday watching the Phillies play the Nationals and I wonder what minor league player salaries are lately. Before the IPad this data would not have been worth the effort of making the cross-manse journey to the office, but now it is at my regal fingertips. (I suppose this could have been done with a phone but I've never embraced phones that do much other than make calls.) Later I am reading Martin's Feast for Crows and I wonder what a Dromon looked like and whether it was contemporaneous with the trebuchet. Even later I wonder if my favorite Kindle game Triple Town is available for IPad or if it might run through the Kindle app (no and no).

Bad:
It's still too heavy. Presumably Moore's Law will help to improve this in the coming years.

Good:
It's great for PDFs. Much better than Kindle. I've already read several PDF books on investing on IPad.

Bad:
The pseudo-multitasking needs better usability. I say pseudo because it seems like most apps just suspend when you switch out of them (some still receive notifications and I guess ITunes still plays music but I don't use IPad for music). The problem is switching between and closing active apps is a little cumbersome and a little annoying. IPad needs an Alt-Tab equivalent and a dedicated close button inside the running app. Also -- and I am reluctant to question the design masters over in Cupertino -- but there is a bit of an aesthetic disconnect when you have to switch from using the touchscreen to using the mechanical button for certain tasks.

Good:
It's great for comics. I've gotten back into reading comics because IPad is so perfect for them.

Bad:
No Flash. No Java. This actually bothers me less than I expected. Sometimes I see a dead Flash box and feel annoyed, but otherwise I hardly notice the absence. YouTube's HTML 5 support helps here: I don't spend a lot of time watching YouTube but not having access to it would be irritating. As for Java, there are simply things I can't do with IPad that I never intended to do with IPad anyway: I can't use it to VPN into my office computer or run any of the 9000 Java programs I've written; I can't use it to write code for my job (and couldn't imagine using a tablet for software development anyway).

Good:
I think a lot of the appeal of IPad is how quickly it wakes up when you want to use it. There is no power-up delay.

Bad:
File transfer and management. Apple has this weird, counterintuitive (for me) application-centric philosophy where files only exist for the programs that can run them. If there is no program that can currently run a file of a certain type then those files cannot live on IPad. Even worse I have to choose between using ITunes on my laptop or Dropbox over the Internet to transfer any files at all. The IPad needs a USB port.

Bad:
No support for many common video file formats. Most of my video files are in Xvid. Most of my video files won't play on IPad. There is an app called CineXPlayer that may do the job though, so hold on....

Bad:
The fonts in most web pages are a bit too small for the IPad screen (in portrait anyway) so you frequently have to zoom in. Safari needs the ability to increase and lock font sizes.

Bad:
The camera sucks.

Ermm... that's four bads without any goods, so here's another final good: all the rest of the stuff people love about IPad and all the reasons they sell so damn many of them. The IPad is surprisingly cool. I've had a Fujitsu touchscreen tablet for about five years so the whole concept is not novel for me, but IPad is better, much better than that tablet, even though the Fujitsu runs Windows and can do anything Windows can do, and has a convertible keyboard attached.

I ordered an IPad from that irritating company in Cupertino, the one with the insulting advertising. The order was sent to shipping on Tuesday morning, left China Tuesday afternoon (yes, China, because Steve Jobs doesn't care about American jobs, hurrrumph and pftheeeeew), and arrived here in PA at 10am Thursday. It picked up a day at the IDL but that's still pretty damn fast. UPS is Amazing!

This one finally watched HBO's Game of Thrones series, and would have enjoyed it more without knowing the plot beforehand yet enjoyed it very much anyway. Often the screen was affected by budget limitations: Khal Drogo's khalasar of 100,000 fierce Dothraki bloodriders seemed reduced to about twelve guys on horses; and the vast, beautiful metropolis of King's Landing was mostly hidden behind a few brown walls or looming in the direction the camera wasn't pointing. The casting was good though: most of the actors appeared much the way I imagined them, although certain characters were made older than in the books (mainly in consideration of nude scenes I expect). The costumes were excellent. Peter Dinklage was great as Tyrion. And just as in the books, the segments featuring Bran were a boring distraction, so a job well done!

I now feel sufficiently intrepid to read through the subsequent volumes in preparation for Dances With Dragons, although I fear another decade-long gap between that book and the next. It might be quicker to just wait for season six.

I finally upgraded to the latest Ubuntu release. I was hesitant because A) I had everything the way I liked it, and B) Canonical's new desktop vision seemed weird and scary. The new Unity Desktop replacement for Gnome is an attempt to distinguish and differentiate Ubuntu from the other similar distros, which isn't necessarily bad, but the effect of the Unity panel bar thing is pretty Apple Too (there is one icon for any open app, and menus are in the top panel), and it lacks customization options. I disliked it at first for those reasons and because it really changes the way one works (I've been using a taskbar since Windows 95) but by day two it has grown on me. I've decided to try to give it a trial week. Worse than the panel is the new "overlay-scrollbar" concept: scrollbars don't appear until you mouse over the side where they should be, and you can't click in the scrollbar gutter to move the page. I hated this and quickly killed it. Screenshot.

The sensors-detect utility tells me I need the max6650 driver to read my CPU sensors. This is wrong! The correct driver is coretemp. max6650 my ass! Here's a list of drivers.