While 2019 didn't had many fancy tech discoveries, it was an entertaining year.
This is a short summary of the best of people and things for 2019.
Tim Rogers is my friend out of nowhere. I discovered him when I randomly clicked a review of Forza Horizon 4. I was not interested in that game, yet I'm not sure why I clicked this video. I'm happy I clicked this video because now I think of TR in the same way Charles Bukowski was thinking about John Fante1.
It is likely that if you like a single video of TR you will eventually watch all of them.
Some of my favorites are the slow translation of Final Fantasy VII2 which touches my linguistic nerve and Death Stranding Pre-Review which I may play (or may not) in 2021. The later lead me to discover an author that almost instantly became one of my favorites3 - more on that below.
I don't finish games that I don't like because life is too short for that.
With classic adventures games remaining one of my favorite genres, I try to play a few each year:
I tend to like games that I can play with a controller because it's much more relaxing:
I tried so many games this year (partly because you get so many titles for free) that I won't even list all of them here. The following two were special to me and I will try to finish them in 2020:
At some point I decided that I wanted to play a good long game. Luckily W3 was on sale so I thought, my not giving it a try.
I'm not a Fantasy fan but this game was a blast!
It took me about 65h to finish it4. I did a decent number of side quests and watched all the dialogs. No, I didn't even thought of collecting all the Gwent cards. Maybe someday though ...
And now I have watched the show, bought the first book (in Greek), playing the expansions, bought a sword (jk) etc.
In the first half of the year I read three books by Haruki Murakami (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Kafka on the Shore, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage). I enjoyed all of them, even though I don't recommend reading Murakami's books in a row. It feels like there is a repetition of patterns (characters and ideas) in his books that can become quite noticeable.
In the Death Stranding Pre-Review video by TR, a number of literature works are mentioned. I haven't read any of them, but I did knew most of the books and/or the authors. What I didn't know were the Strugatsky brothers. This was weird because I was reading Russian books now and then and I do like Sci-Fi.
Being a native Russian speaker I like reading Russian things well ... in Russian.
I was planning on reading the The Time Wanderers book just to realize it was part of a trilogy.
This is how I entered the Noon Universe.
I started by reading the Maxim Kammerer's trilogy: Prisoners of Power, Beetle in the Anthill and The Time Wanderers.
This is probably the best work I have ever read5.
I continued reading those two authors frantically by picking, Roadside Picnic (which was the basis for the Stalker movie), Hard to be a God and Четвёртое царство (apparently this hasn't been translated to english).
Unfortunately only Roadside Picnic has been translated to Greek6.
There were some nice movies this year that I had a great time watching (The Green Book, Capernaum7, Frozen 2) but John Wick 3 was my favorite movie of this year, and it was the most enjoyable action movie in quite some time now.
I have spent way too much time in 2019 being a witcher, so The Witcher Series shouldn't come as a surprise.
A friend recommended Better than Us. This is a Russian soapy TV show with lots of AI and Robots. Nothing special really but quite joyful.
The mandatory section when you are a software developer.
I'll have a dedicated post regarding my favorite artists and albums at some point.
Discovered The Growlers. Hung at Heart and Chinese Fountain are two albums that are very close to my heart.
It is hard to explain why [Kino](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kino_(band)) is so special to me.
After many years I started again actively playing guitar and practicing a fingerstyle arrangement of Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer by Rynten Okazaki.
There are lots of plans for 2020 but I'll not list anything for now.
Technically it's impossible to know how Bukowski was thinking about John Fante. I need to find the poetry reading where Bukowski is mentioning Ask the Dust.
↩Note that I haven't played any FF game and I'm not interested in this genre.
↩You could say that the Strugatsky brothers are two authors but for some reason they are still a single entity in my mind.
↩This is way too long. You could listen to two of Dostoyevsky's masterpieces in that time.
↩Similarly to the Strugatsky bothers themselves, this trilogy exists as a single entity in my mind. Even though the first book is a bit of a different entity of the other two.
↩Which is unfortunate because it's not possible to recommend those books constantly to all your friends.
↩Great time is a relative term for this movie.
↩Note to self, read this paper.
↩That doesn't mean that GraalVM is a simple project.
↩