Best of 2012
From Antiflux Wiki
Contents |
Events
- Amy and Warren got married
- Madeleine and Ben got married
- Guelph Park is unofficially renamed to Dude Chilling Park
- A 5125-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar ends, triggering cataclysm-themed random hysteria instead of simply incrementing the b'ak'tun to 13 (Long Count 13.0.0.0.0).
- John McAfee, of anti-virus software fame, goes totally bananas in Belize, flees to Guatemala, and is caught thanks to GPS data in a Vice photo.
TV
- Girls
- The Mindy Project
- New Girl (started towards the end of 2011, but close enough)
Films
- Live at the Beacon Theater (November 2011, but close enough) - Louis CK releases his comedy special through his web site for $5 instead of through HBO or another distributor, and makes Internet history. Also, it's funny.
- Dangerously Delicious - Aziz Ansari went the same route as Louis CK and it was also funny.
- Samsara, the HD (8K) eye-candy followup to Baraka for your balls tripping pleasure.
Notable HD Releases
- In The Mood for Love (2002)
- Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Film Technology
- High frame rate (48Hz+) enters the movie mainstream with The Hobbit (2012), hopefully putting an end to juddery 24Hz vomit vision.
Books
Written and read in 2012:
- Andrew McCarthy - The Longest Way Home
- Hugh Howey - Wool Omnibus
Read in 2012:
- Annie Dillard - An American Childhood
- David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
- John Jeremiah Sullivan - Pulphead Essays (written late 2011)
Theatre / Other
- Venus In Fur on Broadway. Wickedly sharp, funny, and erotic. Nina Arianda won 2012 Best Actress at the Tony Awards for her performance.
Music
- Alt-J - An Awesome Wave
- Dominik Grötz - Freunde von Freunden Mixtape #26
- Gonzales - Solo Piano II
- Japandroids - Celebration Rock
- The Weeknd - Trilogy
Live Music
- Gonzales supporting Solo Piano II
- Moogfest 2012
Music Videos
- Chilly Gonzales - Kenaston in Pianovision
- Die Antwoord - Baby's On Fire
- Macklemore and Ryan Lewis - Thrift Shop feat. Wanz
- Psy - Gangnam Style at 933 million views, how can this not make the best of list?
- Quakers - Smoke (feat. Jonwayne)
Technology
Games
- Letterpress
- Sega's been doing some good work releasing classic Dreamcast games for iOS, like Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio. Also Sonic CD.
Hardware
- 13" MacBook Pro with "Retina" Display. Finally some high DPI love in a compact laptop! Also of note is the belated acceptance of USB 3, bringing cheap accessories with reasonable performance to Mac Land.
- T+A DAC8 High end DAC performance at mid-range prices. Computer audio (USB inputs in addition to SP-DIF/AES) DACs are finally coming into their own in ~2012.
Software
- Fusion Drive - Because spinning drives are slow and SSDs are small and expensive. I'm classifying this as software instead of hardware because the cool business is in the logical volume special sauce that makes the 2 discrete drives work together.
- Mountain Lion (10.8)
- Pixelmator 2.0 (late 2011, close enough) introduced content-aware fill and other fancy features
- Tower is a pretty good Git GUI for OS X, although it's pretty slow with big repos
- Waze crowd-sourced commute traffic data is just what I need now that I drive a million miles to and from work every day
- Windows 8 Microsoft steps out on a limb and makes some significant changes to their desktop OS. Including in this Best Of list for their risk taking (compared to the OS X 10.7 -> 10.8 evolution) rather than any specific feature of the new OS.
Food & Drink
Lunch Spots
- Cafe Rolle, Sacramento
- Meat and Bread, Vancouver - Seriously, why didn't I eat there sooner? That's a tasty sandwich.
Dinner Spots
- Magpie Cafe, Sacramento
