Podcasts

• The Seanwes Podcast. Creativity and business topics, released weekly. I listened to a handful of episodes so far which I really enjoyed:
  • 381: Why and How to Start an Exercise Habit. I had a pretty great exercise habit going last year, but I let it slide in 2018 while we were expecting our second child. I finally broke my 465 day move streak on my Apple Watch, and since then exercise just hasn’t been a focus for me. And I’ve noticed it! This episode has helped to give me a kick to start to work on this again. Ask yourself each day: what have I done to exercise my body today?
  • 375: 3-Month Guide to Waking up at 6am Consistently. My morning routine isn’t entirely under my own control, as I have both a 3 year old and a 3 month old kid. But I love the idea of a relaxed morning routine with time intentionally set aside to start the day right and think or stretch or exercise or write.

While I can’t completely control when I’ll need to be awake on a given morning right now, I can control my evening routine. Listening to this episode made me realise I need to make sleep more of a priority, and I’ve already incorporated some of the ideas into ‘shutting down’ slowly in the evening and getting to sleep at a decent time.

The other big takeaway for me was thinking about a proactive vs a reactive morning. If I’m woken up by my son yelling that he wants to get up, I’m starting the day in a reactive state. The same goes if you’re checking your email or Twitter as soon as you wake up – you beginning by reacting to what the world is throwing at you. Instead, think about being more proactive and setting your own agenda for the morning.

• Hurry Slowly, “a podcast about being productive, creative, and resilient, through the simple act of slowing down”. I’ve only listened to 003: Craig Mod - I Want My Attention Back! so far, but it definitely made me think about what an attention suck my smartphone is.

Productivity

• Start your days right with a consistent shutdown routine – The Sweet Setup. Cal Newport discusses a similar idea in his book Deep Work.
• Seventh Week Sabbaticals. More from Sean McCabe, this time the idea of taking a sabbatical week every 7 weeks to prevent burnout and create margin.
• Taking a Depth Year by Leo Babauta at Zen Habits. I don’t think I’d go so far as doing this for a whole year, but I like the idea of finding more depth and value in the things you already own and the activities or hobbies you’ve already started. Improving existing skills, watching media you already have, reading that stack of books you haven’t got to yet or rereading your favourites.
• Also from Zen Habits: Simplify Technology with Limits. I really liked the limit of “No phone use in the car, at the dining table, while in line, or while talking with other people”.
• Finally, a tweet (or rather, a short thread): https://twitter.com/clairejlew/status/1072910212573495296. In 1:1 meetings, ask specific questions and suggest ways you can help instead of just asking an open-ended “how can I help you?”.

Books

• I just finished Atomic Habits, by James Clear. It’s a really concise, practical guide to creating good habits and breaking bad ones.
• Also, inspired by the morning routine episode of the Seanwes Podcast mentioned above, I’m currently reading My Morning Routine.
• I came across a great top 100 list of books from 2018. I downloaded a bunch of samples to my Kindle while going through this list.
• An older post, but Shawn Blanc has an interesting idea of creating an alternative index for a nonfiction book while you’re reading it. Normally I wouldn’t even consider defacing a book, but I can see this would be a really useful approach with nonfiction books. I current try to mostly read Kindle books, as I want to minimise the amount of physical ‘stuff’ that I own, but flicking through a physical book is definitely much easier and you get a better spacial awareness of your notes and highlights. I’m still not sure what the best balance for me is here. See also: Ryan Holiday’s notecard system.

Misc

• Matt Gemmell posted about mechanical keyboards. I’m now lusting after a WASD keyboard, and started following them on Instagram.
• We’ve been prepping Wholefully’s overnight oats for a while now as quick grab-and-go breakfasts, but I just discovered their instant oatmeal recipes. Easier to make than porridge, easier to clean up, and you can prep the pots days before. Just add water.

A first step to achieving this: on the 1st of January, I deleted Tweetbot from my phone. If I want to check Twitter, I can do so on my iPad, but I’ll only look once a day. The payoff has been great, even after only one week:

• I used to be a timeline completionist (I had to read every tweet), but now I’m letting it go. It’s freeing.
• I’ve found I’m no longer carrying my phone around the house, everywhere I go. Why did I do that before? What was so important?
• It’s not just that I’m carrying it around less though. I’m using it less in general. I feel less attached to it. I don’t feel anxious if I don’t know where it is. The other day I left the house to go and work from a cafe, and accidentally left my phone at home because the need to have it didn’t really occur to me.
• I’ve started charging my phone in a different room at night (not the bedroom), so it’s not the last thing I look at before bed. I also don’t rush to get it first thing in the morning – I’ll generally pick it up before work. Again, it’s one less thing to think about.
• Instead of constantly checking my phone, I’ve started ensuring my Kindle is always to hand. Before bed, I’ll read some of a book. Any downtime I want to fill, I can read some of a book. As a result, I’ve already read two books in the first week of the year, and that’s unheard of for me in recent times.

Hey, and here I am writing a blog post.

Movies

The ‘Frosty’s Movie of the Year’ award goes to… Scott Pilgrim

This year, I fell in love with the Scott Pilgrim books, and the film version brings it to life with style. A fantastic ensemble cast, stunning special effects, and stays pretty faithful to the source material. The ending differs somewhat, but I think the whole thing works pretty well as a more concise version of the books. Good plain fun.

The ‘Runner Up Movie of the Year’ award goes to… Inception

WHUUUUUUUUUUUM
Inception is about a dream within a dream within a dream. But is it really a dream? The film piles rules upon rules upon rules on you about the way the dream world works and just as you’re starting to get a handle on things, you’re told that actually, it doesn’t work in the way you’ve just been told unless it’s a Tuesday and the wind is blowing in a North-Westerly direction. Brilliant ideas and a brilliant film, but your brain will be frazzled by the end of it. Some nice ambiguities in the film mean that there’s loads to discuss afterwards.

Honourable Mentions

• Sherlock Holmes
  Came out in 2009, but I didn’t see it until early January, so it counts for me!
• The Brothers Bloom
  Nice little quirky heist movie. The ending confused me a bit, but I think it was supposed to.
• Whip It
  Hooray for Ellen Page! Fun movie about roller derby.

Games

The ‘Most Engrossing Game of the Year’ award goes to… Mass Effect 2 (XBox 360)

Wow, wow, WOW. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so connected to a game as I do / did to Mass Effect 2. The first game was great, but the second one built on it in spades. Tightened combat that borrowed a lot from Gears of War, gorgeous graphics, a deep and completely believable universe filled with diverse planets, locations, and alien races, a crew whose respect you have to earn and who you come to really care for, and of course an immersive story where everything is at stake and you know that if you make the wrong choices then you and your crew might not make it to the end. Utterly fantastic, and I can’t wait for part 3.

The ‘Game That Keeps Me Coming Back For More Because It’s Awesomely Fun’ award goes to… Just Cause 2 (XBox 360)

Just Cause 2 is just plain fun. A huge game world is your playground to do what the hell you want with. Fancy storming an enemy base, stealing a plane, attaching a jeep full of enemy soldiers to it with an elasticated grappling hook, flying for miles across a beautiful island, standing on the roof of the plane and admiring the view before leaping off and freefalling towards the ocean, opening your parachute and gliding to safety as your abandoned plane crashes into an oil rig and explodes in a ball of flames? Sure, you can do that.

The ‘Best XBLA Game I Played This Year’ goes to… Shadow Complex

Shadow Complex is an Arcade game only in name: the quality of the game is on-par with fully-fledged boxed retail games. It has great graphics, gameplay, and story, and sees you infiltrating a mysterious underground bunker filled with enemies. The length of the game is in a sweet spot where it’s not too long and not too short, and there’s also a lot to go back and explore once you’ve finished the main game. Highly recommended, and it’s still one of the best XBLA games available.

The ‘Best Gamey-Game’ award goes to… Super Mario Galaxy 2

Mario is gaming at its purest. It doesn’t try to emulate the real world, or offer you an immersive ’experience’. It’s just good, clean, awesomely designed, ludicrous fun. And Mario Galaxy 2 improves on the original Galaxy (who’d have thought it was even possible) with a great range of new galaxies, improved game structure, and everyone’s favourite fictional rideable dinosaur, Yoshi. If you’re any kind of fan of video games, you must play Galaxy 2. It’s gaming at its absolute finest.

The ‘Mobile Game of the Year’ award goes to… World of Goo (iPad)

I only got this in the final week of the year, so it very nearly didn’t make it into the list. Believe it or not, I hadn’t until now played the full World of Goo before, only the demo. I loved the controls on the iPad - multitouch lets you drag about multiple goo balls whilst panning around the level all at the same time. The basic mechanics are great, and much like Popcap and Mario games new variations and types of goo ball are regularly introduced to mix things up a bit. To cap it all, the game has a brilliantly quirky setting and a nice little story that leads you through the game. I was engrossed from start to finish.

The ‘Sweet Zombie Jesus I Can’t Believe Those Graphics Are On A Phone!’ award goes to… Infinity Blade

On an iPhone 4’s Retina Display, Infinity Blade looks god-damned unbelievable. Stunning. Wow. It runs on the Unreal engine, and was made by Chair, the guys responsible for Shadow Complex. I can’t say the actual gameplay wows me in the same way, but it sure is pretty.

Honourable Mentions

• Limbo
  Dark, moody, and mysterious, Limbo starts quietly and offers you no explanation as to how to proceed. One ‘boss’ fight in particular was delightfully creepy. I felt the game was a little let down by its rather sudden ending, and that the mystery of the first half of the game (for example, glimpses of other people in the forest you’re in) didn’t follow through to the second half. But nonetheless, I’d recommend it.
• Red Dead Redemption
  I still haven’t finished Red Dead Redemption, so I don’t think I can really give it an award. The setting is great, and there have been some truly stand-out moments and exciting missions, however for some reason I haven’t found it particularly immersive. I’m not sure what it is about it, but some of the missions felt a bit ‘grind-y’, and I felt always reminded that I was playing a game.
• Helsing’s Fire
  Nice puzzler with a unique gameplay mechanic and high production values. I loved this game.
• Cut the Rope
  Great, charming, physics-based puzzler, with a Lite version.
• Words With Friends
  The best online Scrabble clone for iOS, and one of the games I still keep playing. There’s a free ad-supported version.
• Trainyard
  Fun, mindbending puzzle game. The free version, Trainyard Express, has a tonne of levels and… is free.
• Carcassonne
  An extremely well done board game to iOS conversion, which just received an update with an iPad-native interface.

Books

The ‘Awesomely Awesome’ award goes to… the Scott Pilgrim series by Bryan Lee O’Malley

I hadn’t heard of Scott Pilgrim until earlier this year, when the hype around the movie started to ramp up. I bought all 6 books in the series and loved every one of them. Really, if you’re reading this you probably already know all you need to know about Scott Pilgrim: he falls in love with a girl named Ramona, and must defeat her 7 evil exes. Infused with great characters, dialog, and some brilliant nods to geek and videogame culture, I can’t get enough of everything Pilgrim.

The ‘Ongoing Series of Books That I’m Reading and Really Enjoying’ award goes to… the Sherlock Holmes Books

I’ve currently read 23 of the 54 short stories, and 3 of the 4 novels in the Sherlock Holmes canon, and I’m really really enjoying them. My favourite collection so far is probably The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and my favourite novel is either The Sign of the Four or Hound of the Baskervilles. The first novel in the series, A Study in Scarlet, was the weakest in my opinion - so don’t be put off if you choose to read that first. Highly recommended. I’ll finish off the series in 2011.

The ‘Most Enjoyable Novel of the Year’ award goes jointly to… The Magicians by Lev Grossman, and Mystery Man by Colin Bateman

The Magicians
I’ve actually just started re-reading The Magicians, such is the extent that it stuck in my head. It’s an amalgam of a lot of existing real world / fantasy fiction: many ideas are taken from the Chronicles of Narnia, and the main character attends a school for ‘real’ magicians which is hidden from non-magicians (which sounds a little Harry Potter when you put it like that). However, it brilliantly combines these elements and twists them into something new. The school, and indeed the magic performed feels much more based in reality than something like Potter, and it’s all a bit more grown-up, too. I don’t want to go into too much detail and give too much away, but something about the book just struck a chord with me. I got chills when you first meet the book’s main villain, and I love the idea of other worlds hidden away within our own. And of course, who doesn’t like to think that real magic could exist in the world. Really enjoyed this one.

Mystery Man
I got this for Christmas, and just finished it before the year was up. It’s a darkly comic detective novel set in Ireland, and literally had me laughing out loud. The main character runs a mystery / crime bookshop situated next to a detective agency. When the detective agency closes down, its customers start coming into the bookshop looking for help, and… well, you can guess how it goes. Things are made more amusing by the fact that the main character suffers from pretty much every mental illness and physical ailment you can think of: he’s paranoid, asthmatic, allergic, has brittle bones, seems to suffer from OCD, you name it. My unexpected hit of the year, bookwise.

The ‘It Took Me Ages, But I’m Very Glad I Finished It Because It Was Awesome’ award goes to… Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Epic is the first word that comes to mind when I think of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It’s a massive book. It details the revival of true English Magic to England in the 19th century, and is so richly detailed. I ended up listening to the audiobook (which was really well done), and thoroughly enjoyed it. Whilst it’s extremely long, I didn’t want it to end - so interesting was the alternate history it sets out. A must-read.

The ‘What A Pile of Shite, Why Did I Bloody Bother?’ award goes to… Wuthering Heights

Everybody’s miserable, the plot’s rubbish and I didn’t like any of the characters in the slightest. Sorry, Miss Bronte, but it was just terrible.

Honourable Mentions

• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stephenson
  A true classic that I hadn’t read until this year. A good, fun, piratey romp with real danger, wooden legs, parrots, and buried treasure.
• The Inverted World by Christopher Priest
  A rather different sci-fi book, recommended to me by @gimboland. Written by the same author who wrote The Prestige (on which the Christopher Nolan movie was based), The Inverted World tells the tale of a city which moves. Its citizens move it every single day along giant railway tracks which must be taken up from behind it and placed down in front of it. The book pulls you into this bizarre world, and keeps you guessing the whole way along as to what drives the city’s inhabitants ever onward.
• Moab is my Washpot by Stephen Fry
  I’ve never really read a biography before, but I very much enjoyed Stephen Fry’s. Well written and engrossing, it was an interesting look into his childhood. Rather rude in places, so reader beware.

So there you have it! My top movies, games, and books of 2010. Did I miss anything out? Likely it was because I didn’t see / play / read it, but let me know in the comments. What were your picks of the year?