This year I did not play as many new games as in previous years. I was deep in my graduate degree and most of my free time was during work travel. Since I don’t have a powerful laptop (and Steam on Linux was just taking off early on this year anyway), most of that time was spent reading. Still, I did play some great games and still managed to log in quite a few hours.

Once again Scarlett had a hand in determining the year’s winners. However, sometime around June she stopped requesting Disney music all the time, allowing others a chance at the spotlight. Still, while other artists were able to take the top artist spots, I didn’t listen to any one song often enough to undermine the Disney songs taking the top spots there.

Artists

1. Alan Menken (450 listens) - THE Disney songwriter 2. Mandy Moore (332 listens) - 100% all of these are from the Tangled soundtrack 2. Five Iron Frenzy (332 listens) - I just enjoyed the heck out of FIF music this year. 4. The Beatles (329 listens) - As usual, this is a mix of me picking something different when the family’s together and just enjoying listening to it myself. 5. Anberlin (247 listens) - I had Google Music load all the albums to my phone in preparation for the concert. This means when I listen to music in the car, Anberlin is very likely to come up. 6 .I Fight Dragons (207 listens) - As I mentioned in the Q4 post, most of this is due to the new album coming out this year. 7. Donna Murphy (139 listens) - A great performance on the Tangled soundtrack. 8. Chance the Rapper (116 listens) - Many of these are from early in the year. I still really enjoy Acid Rap, but am also ready for something new. 9. “Weird Al” Yankovic (115 listens) - A new album produced most of these scrobbles. It’d be slightly higher if the Android app didn’t have a problem with the quotation marks in the artist name. 10. Childish Gambino (113 listens) - I went through as part of listening to my music in alphabetical order. It reinforced that I probably am done with him for now. Lyrically my wife can’t stand it and I shouldn’t listen to it in front of the toddler. 11. Celia Cruz (100 listens) - The Queen of Salsa. 12. Brad Kane (97 listens) - From the Aladdin soundtrack. 13. The Beach Boys (96 listens) - I continue to love Pet Sounds. 14. Billie Holiday (93 listens) - She’s so great it’s too bad she isn’t really played on many radio stations anymore. 15. Jonathan Coulton (92 listens) - Wow, didn’t realize I listened to so much JoCo.

1. Five Iron Frenzy (147 listens) - Many of these came from me continuing to go through my collection in alphabetical order. 2. I Fight Dragons (102 listens) - IFD’s Kickstarter album finally came out. I really like it a lot. I’ve been listening to the B side more than the song cycle, but that’s mostly because those are more easily listened to here and there while the song cycle is best heard all at once. 3. Anberlin (98 listens) - Tried to listen to a bunch of Anberlin to get ready for their farewell concert. 4. Fantastic Plastic Machine (71 listens) - Also from the alphabetical listen. 5. Fall Out Boy (63 listens) - Partly from the alphabetical listen and partly from Scrobbles from Spotify of their new singles. 6. Final Fantasy (Soundtracks) (50 listens) - from the alphabetical listens. 7. Edith Piaf (44 listens) - from the alphabetical listens. I’d completely forgotten we had a bunch of her music. We used to listen to it more often. 7. Doctor Octoroc (44 listens) - from the alphabetical listens. I really don’t like the albums anymore. 9. Willy Chirino (43 listens) - Mostly from listening to his great Christmas album. The only Spanish-language Christmas album I have. 10. Relient K (41 listens) - I felt nostalgic for some Relient K. Still love the earlier stuff. 11. DC Talk (40 listens) - While I still like some of the songs, others have not aged well. 12. Dj CUTMAN (39 listens) - I just love these remixes. 13. Celia Cruz (38 listens) - Put on some Celia because Scarlett really likes to dance to salsa. 14. Elvis Presley (35 listens) - Going through my collection of #1s. 15. Taylor Swift (32 listens) - Danielle got the new album and, unsurprisingly for Ms Swift, it’s quite catchy.

Poker Night 2 (2 hrs) - Played with Danielle thanks to Steam in-house streaming. Also played alone to unlock some more skins.

Xenogears (1 hr) - After having wanted to play this for around 15 years, finally started. So far my best friend is getting married, I was raised by the Elder, and people fight with found ancient tech giant robots. The anime cutscenes are well animated, but the voice acting is flatter than a mathematical plane.

I only have a bit of free time each day - usually no more than about two hours when you add it all up. So whichever of my hobbies tends to catch fire is the one that gets the majority of the attention. 2013 was a pretty good year for video games, but in 2014 I did not play very many. By contrast, 2014 was an AWESOME year for reading. I track my reading on Goodreads for a variety of reasons including having conversations around books (most people I know don’t read and those that do read different books than I do). I looked at previous years and decided I’ve give myself a goal of reading 23 books.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While the first book was a satire of reality TV (including the wrap up episode), this book is about the importance of controlling messaging and of revolution. Collins explores how The Capital controls what the districts see and know in an effort to limit the likelihood of rebellion. Having seen the Arab Spring and movements like the 99%, it’s clear that this book is one of the more realistic science fiction rebellion portrayals. (It really drives home the lack of the info wars in the canon star wars movies. Where are the accusations that the rebels are terrorists? )

The latest curl works with XBMC (now Kodi) so it’s time to upgrade my main Fedora computer.

fedup --network 21 --product=nonproduct

So that started running at 1427. The d/l finishes at 1500, but as usual some stuff to take care of. Mostly packages left over from previous versions of Fedora.

WARNING: problems were encountered during transaction test:
 broken dependencies
 kmod-nvidia-3.17.7-200.fc20.x86_64-1:331.113-1.fc20.x86_64 requires kernel-3.17.7-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.4-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.3-200.fc20.x86_64
 kmod-nvidia-3.17.3-200.fc20.x86_64-1:331.104-1.fc20.x86_64 requires kernel-3.17.7-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.4-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.3-200.fc20.x86_64
 nautilus-actions-3.2.2-4.fc20.x86_64 requires libgtop2-2.28.5-1.fc20.x86_64
 xorg-x11-drv-r128-6.9.2-1.fc20.x86_64 requires xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.14.4-13.fc20.x86_64
 directfb-1.6.2-3.fc19.x86_64 requires libmng-1.0.10-12.fc20.x86_64
 kmod-nvidia-3.17.4-200.fc20.x86_64-1:331.113-1.fc20.x86_64 requires kernel-3.17.7-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.4-200.fc20.x86_64, kernel-3.17.3-200.fc20.x86_64
 libipoddevice-0.5.3-8.fc12.x86_64 requires libgtop2-2.28.5-1.fc20.x86_64
 libbtctl-0.11.1-13.fc19.x86_64 requires openobex-1.5-9.fc20.x86_64
Continue with the upgrade at your own risk.

Time to sort that out. I also remove some of the really old stuff, stuff it lists as not having an upgrade - that I’ve had in there since Fedora 13 or so. In the end I’m left with the usual issue I have: my kmod-nvidia packages are tied to the Fedora 20 kernels. So, as usual, I’ll probably have to remove them and reinstall when I finish the upgrade.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As I mentioned in my first status update, I’d always dismissed The Hunger Games as a European Battle Royale. And, superficially, it appears to be an apt comparison. High school kids are forced to battle each other until only one is left. With all the white-washing and remaking of Japanese movies and TV shows (still upset at the possibility of Keanu Reeves as Spike Speigel) I didn’t want to give it a chance. Then I got The Hunger Games as part of an audio book humble bundle. The entire trilogy plus a bunch of other books for a minimum of $15. So if it sucked, I wouldn’t feel gypped. (As of now I’ve only listened to the first book, so no series spoilers in the comments, please)

Love Hina, Vol. 11 by Ken Akamatsu

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I started reading this series 10 years ago. For whatever reason, I stopped a couple books short from the end. Last year I started re-reading them for a series over on Comic POW! ( http://www.comicpow.com/thread/unders… ) Overall, I’ve enjoyed the story almost as much as I did the first time around (when I was closer in age to Keitaro). Many manga and anime are full of Fan Service and, as you’d expect from a series involving a college guy living with HS-College age girls, there’s plenty here. But this entire volume was essentially just one giant fan service episode for 100 or so pages. Given that Akamatsu has actually really provided some of these characters a lot of emotional and personal growth it was just annoying and repetitive. The entire volume feels as though Akamatsu had to make, say, 100 issues and he realized his story only required 95 issues so he’s stalling. Instead of one nonsensical issue within the volume, the whole thing hinges on the girls being fired or quitting over and over as they fight with Keitaro’s sister, who’s running things while he’s in America.

Jumper by Steven Gould

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Quick note: If you don’t like sci-fi - you can probably still enjoy this book. The main character can teleport and that’s it. The reasons, science, etc are not explored. It’s just a plot device and the rest of the story is pretty much devoid of anything sci-fi.

Boy this kid really starts off in a crap sack world. It’s no wonder this was the most banned book in the 90s.