Score

2015.

• 31 movies (best: Ex Machina, Short Term 12, The Man In The High Castle)
• 54 books (best new novels: Wonderland, The Peripheral, Angelmaker. old novel: The 39 Steps. nonfiction: Prune. more analysis to come)
• software discovery: Sketch Club + Sktchy. Sketch Club is a drawing program for the iPad with a community tacked on. The drawing tools are good, though not best in class. The community, too, is deeply flawed. Sktchy has no tools and a bizarre community: the idea is that everyone uploads photos of themselves and then you draw other artists. In practice, Sktchy has a lot of teenage girls and a lot of professional illustrators and comic-book artists because, if you're having a hard day at the office and your boss chews you out because your Thai character doesn’t look very Thai to her, this is a place where you can go find twenty Thai faces to draw for practice. Between them, I’ve finally improved my drawing a notch.
• cooking discovery: paté sucrée, or just plain pie crust. A spoonful of sugar really does help the medicine go down, and even in savory pies – I improvised a salmon-crab-shrimp pie and did a lamb pie this holiday season – the sugar makes the crust flaky. Do not omit the salt, even in sweet pies – and especially not in pecan.
• coding: it’s been a year of consolidation and refinement, but not an idle year. Tinderbox: 6.1.2, 6.1.3, 6.2.0, 6.2.1, 6.3.0, 6.3.1, 6.3.2, and 6.4.0. 68 backstage releases in all. Storyspace 3.0 – including the book-length Getting Started With Storyspace. Plus a big pile of incident that will eventually become at least a collection of Storyspace examples and possibly a hypertext novel.
• life hack: it’s efficient to drive a car until the wheels fall off, but costly to attempt to drive it after that. The little red bean is a delight.