So, in honor of Meat Loaf’s passing (and with Jim Steinman gone as well), I thought it appropriate to make sure everyone knew the truth of what Meat Loaf would not do, despite his willingness to do anything for love. I’ve actually known the truth since 1999, when Meat revealed it on VH1: Storytellers, which was also where I learned about Steinman’s ( Read more... )

A meme asking which authors you read the most is going around. Now, I've only been keeping a detailed record of the books I've read since 2015, so I can give the numbers for the most recent seven-year period, then fill in some history.

In that time, I've read 241 books by 174 authors. Simple math tells you that most of those books were the only ones ( Read more... )

In terms of TV shows, I had a decent spread across streaming services, with a decent number of seasons of shows on Netflix, but also entries from Hulu, Amazon, HBOMax and Disney+. I also watched a lot of movies with a similar spread (22 that I logged, but I know I missed a few) and haven’t seen the inside of a theater all year.

Things that stood out ( Read more... )

This was another big year for replays, but in a somewhat different manner than 2020-more of the games I replayed this year were hacks or randomizers so at least there was something new going on.

I did a noteworthy video game project: What the heck is on this $10 Retro Game handheld? Let’s find out!, an exploration of a cheap Chinese famiclone ( Read more... )

In late 2020, we got into jigsaw puzzles and family reading time as a way to spend our evenings, since we were getting Zoom burnout but still couldn’t go anywhere. Then I got my dad into jigsaw puzzles, which meant I got a steady supply of them, so we kept up the trend. I slowed down over the summer as things opened up again, but I suspect I’ll ( Read more... )

If I thought last year’s book list was disappointingly short, it has nothing on this year: 15 prose books, one of which was an RPG rulebook that I skimmed big chunks of. Some of that was getting a ReMarkable and reading scads of comic book pdfs. Some of that was my up-and-down moods as the year’s covid headlines played themselves out. And some of ( Read more... )

Shantae: Risky's Revenge - Director's Cut - I bought and tried this as part of a bundle in 2016. I maintain that the third game was better in a bunch of ways, but I think my opinion of the difficulty curve has softened in the interim. I think my big complaint this time was that while the game feels very open, it’s actually really linear (without ( Read more... )

I only read 15 books in 2021, and three of them were in the last week of December.

Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanen McGuire - Each book is the Wayward Children series is about a child going through a magical doorway into another world and how that experience changes them. This one is nominally about a girl who loses horses and finds herself ( Read more... )

Power Blade (NES, Played on Nestopia) - A later-era NES platformer that straddled the line between being an explore-em-up and a Ninja Gaiden clone by having six stages, available in any order, that had multiple mazelike paths; and in each one you have to find the contact with a keycard before you could go through the door to fight the boss. The ( Read more... )

Legends of Tomorrow (Netflix, Season 6) - This show knows exactly what it is and starts off with an incompetent-but-well-meaning bang to remind you of that. There’s a ton of logic that totally falls apart if you squint at it (Gary’s been an alien this whole time? How did that work with the demonic nipple if his glasses are just a hologram projector ( Read more... )