Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: What Are Some Books, Movies, Documentaries and Shows From This Year That You Liked and Recommend To Others?
As we prepare to end the year, several readers have suggested we asked one another about the things we liked. We encourage everyone to participate.
... try me again next year.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Sexual assault.
Trump Lewd Conversation about Women
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Books: Black Widow and House of Spies by Daniel Silva Film: John Wick Chapter 2 TV: haha, none
I read this after over a decade of software development. Despite already following a number of good practices and writing functional code sans a bug here and there, my code has markedly changed and has become easier to read and test.
I think the video of the year is of Lennart Poettering repeatedly interrupting a presentation by Wolfgang Draxinger. It really gives a lot of insight into the sorry state of systemd and PulseAudio, and in many ways it explains why such software has caused so many problems for so many Linux users.
Homo Deus is a powerfully insightful book that brings down the curtain on modern man and contemplates the species that will replace us, some sort of artificially-evolved, highly-augmented, post-human organism. When our descendants are indistinguishable from Gods, their motivation becomes a matter of great importance.Harari asks the profound question: "What do we want to want?" This is a dazzlingly brilliant book.
Brilliant documentary by Adam Curtis. Long, but worth it: https://vimeo.com/191817381
I read The Rust Programming Language. It's one of the best programming books ever written, I think. It is very clear and it has lots of practical examples. I already knew that Rust was going to be the language of the future, but this book really shows just how powerful Rust is. In the 1990s we talked about how great the K&R book was. Well in the 2020s I think we'll be talking about how great The Rust Programming Language book is, and how it has changed computing forever.
I recommend watching the solar eclipse that crossed the United States on August 21, 2017.
When you watch, you'll see the light of the chromosphere, protuberances, and corona on the back of the moon. You will then know:
Space is fake. The Earth is flat. The eclipses prove it.
Solar Eclipse: https://vimeo.com/230976895
"But i reeeeeeeeeeally wanna be president, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" (originally released 2008, now upgraded to 2016 edition, with even more crying)
The Spark by David Drake
The Gathering Edge by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
Challenges of the Deeps by Ryk E. Spoor
Tim S.
Both Forgotten Weapons and The Slow-Mo Guys have put out interesting stuff this year.
The Undoing Project by Michael lewis -- made me rethink everything I thought about how human make decisions,
The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carre -- his amazing life, wonderfully told by the author.
So, Anyway , by John Cleese -- his funny autobiography
Ghost of the Tsunami, by Richard Lloyd Parry -- the saddest story ever, of school children lost in the Tsunami.
The Island at the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto -- Dutch New York was way different than whatever you think it was.
And The Weak Suffer What They Must?, by Yanis Varoufakis -- How the world's money systems actually work.
The Quartet, by Joseph Ellis -- the story of the US Constitution.
Ratification, by Pauline Maier -- about the miracle beyond miracles that the US Constitution was ever ratified.
A Legacy of Spies, by Le Carre -- The final finale of the George Smiley story.
Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande -- the cary end of life decisions we all get to make.
Was that this year or last?
Otherwise, I got nothing.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
BBC America's Orphan Black. The series ended this year, if you never heard of it, best you watch the first few episodes of Season 1 before you look to see what is is about. All I will say it is a SIFI type series that what goes on in it is either possible now or will be in the near future.
The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
You can't call yourself a JavaScript programmer until you've read "You Don't Know JS" by Kyle SImpson. Most JavaScript programmers know enough to get a JavaScript framework working but not enough to figure out how to solve a problem.
The Genius (South Korea) is probably the smartest television show I've ever seen. They did four seasons from 2013 to 2015. Each season, 13 players (many minor celebrities/presenters, some non-celebrities) are brought in to play social/intellectual games (no physical challenges or stunts. It's all about how smart you are and how social you are.) Each week, they play one Main Match, where there are one or more winners and one or more losers (and everyone else, who are neither winners nor losers that week.) Out of the losers, one is chosen as the Elimination Candidate, who picks one of the non-winners to compete against in the Death Match, a 1v1 game that sends the loser out of the competition.
A very nice lady who goes by the nickname Bumdidlyumptious subtitled all four seasons. Most of her episodes recently got taken down from DailyMotion but you can easily find download links for episodes on Reddit. Here's her YouTube Season 1 playlist (her stuff is still up on YouTube):
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9suu7e7YWZ0rw06g9_cOi_cnzpeXeUCc
Season 1, Episode 7 (Open Pass Game) probably has the greatest 3 minutes of television I've ever seen.
Zero chance they ever make anything like it here in the US because we are idiots who cannot have nice things.
The Holy Bible, King James Version, is all you need for everything in life. Repent and be saved, sloshditters!
As an older millennial born in 1983, I watched and thoroughly enjoyed the CNN documentaries The Sixties, The Seventies, and The Eighties. Fascinating stuff.
I haven't watched a lot of them in 2017 but my top picks are "Shot Caller" and "Wind River".
Where?
A book by Hillary Clinton.
In it she writes candidly and truthfully about how Drumpf colluded with the Russians to ruin her chances at becoming the True President of the United States. It also goes into detail about how much more qualified she is when compared to Drumpf, and most importantly, it points out that she is not an orange cheeto, unlike a certain monkey that hacked the elections.
I mean, who names their kid Drumpf? What a stupid name!! LOL.
CaptainDork snorted:
... try me again next year.
Movies: Colossal, Dave Made a Maze, Atomic Blonde (despite the critics' naysaying), and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, just for starters. All excellent in their very different ways.
TV: Legion, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (season 2 - or "series 2" in Brit-speak - was even crazier than season 1), Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell, Ken Burns' The Vietnam War, Marvel's The Defenders, The Orville (uneven, and it suffers from some pretty lame scriptwriting, but I expect it to improve in future seasons, as Seth Macfarlane shows always do), and BBC's The Alternativity (I've only seen the doc, not the performance that goes with it), off the top of my head. I'm sure I could think of more, if I tried.
Neal Stephenson's The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., and his three-volume masterpiece The Baroque Cycle (not new for 2017, but the best thing he's ever written, IMnsHO). I could go on here, too, but I'm being called away for Xmas brunch.
Cynicism and snarkiness are not nearly as hip - or as entertaining - as you might believe ...
Check out my novel.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. A fun book to read. The audio book read by Whil Wheaton is fun to listen to.
Today's "Democracy Now" with Noam Chomsky for the hour, is fresh on my mind and must be high on the list.
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/12/25/noam_chomsky_in_conversation_with_amy
It was in theaters, but really it's something of a documentary. (I'm sure they dramatized a bit of course - this is still Hollywood.)
Ajin, Castlevania season 1, Horizon Zero Dawn, Persona 5, Stranger Things, Qorvo's 5G RF for dummies.
No documentaries because they're mostly insufferable. Hey documentary makers: if your topic really is so interesting then you can stop hitting the audience over the head with how fucking interesting it is every fucking 30 seconds. And if you have stunning visuals of nature, have the narrator shut the fuck up for a few seconds and just let us appreciate what we're seeing.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt22...
I'm as suprised as anyone.
Best of the year? No. Fun? You betcha.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
And like a big Van Jones nothingburger, it will be tossed into the trash bin of American history.
I appreciate his criticism of U.S. foreign policy, but he knows virtually nothing of economics.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/chomsky-on-libertarianism/
Creimer affiliate spam. Mod down and report to Amazon.
A worthy sequel to a great movie.
http://www.darkhorizons.com/or...
But its trailer looked awful. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Math:
Introductory Calculus For Infants
Sport:
Objects in mirror are losing
Small business:
How to be a drug-dealer
Lifestyle/Wellness
Castration: The advantages and disadvantages
Health:
Diseases caused by masturbation
Movie tie-ins
Star Wars: Karma Sutra
Pets
How to talk to your cat about gun safety
Arts/Crafts
The manly art of knitting
Childcare
How to traumatize your children
Romance ... You're a horse
But
Feminist studies
Men are better than women
Relationships/Dating
Everything I know about women, I learned from my tractor
Food/Cooking
50 ways to eat a beaver
Nature/Wildlife
F U, penguin: Telling cute animals what's what
5 good reasons to punch a dolphin in the mouth
Lennart, it's clearly a link to a YouTube video. If you don't want people to watch a video of you making an arse of yourself in public, maybe you should have just let that fellow speak without disrupting him.
Podcasts: "The Magnus Archives" is a collection of short horror stories, each narrated by the Head Archivists of the eponymous Magnus Institute. Each of the stories works as a stand-alone, but the writers have been slowing tying threads together into larger story arcs. Season Two finished in August and Season Three just started up last month. I also recommend "King Falls AM", which about a pair of late-night AM radio talk show hosts and the weirdness in their town. It's similar to "Welcome To Nightvale" but hasn't achieved WtN's level of pretentiousness.
For television, I recommend: "The Punisher" if for no other reason than the fight scene at the end of the first episode set to Tom Waits' "Hell Broke Loose", "Defenders", because Iron Fist is not nearly as annoying when he's part of a group,
For movies: "Gaurdians of the Galaxy Vol 2", "Valerian", "Wonder Woman", and "Going In Style" are not transcendent works of art but are are very entertaining.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
The documentary Icarus about the decades of Russian cheating.
I come here for the love
Another stellar David Attenborough documentary.
For a movie, "Arrival". Not dumbed-down science fiction.
peaking lights - fifth stage of consciousness
kaitlyn aurelia smith - the kid
colleen - a flame my love, a frequency (
kassel jaeger & jim o'rourke - wakes on cerulean
jan st. werner - spectric acid
ellen allien - nost
clairo - ep
teresa winter - untitled death
visible cloaks - lex
tim heidecker - too dumb for suicide
colin stetson - all this i do for glory
laurel halo - dust
biosphere - the petrified forest
wolf eyes - strange days II
richard youngs - this is not a lament
golden retriever - rotations
yelle - ici & maintenance
bardo pond - in the pines
jim o'rourke - steamroom 32
kara-lis cloverdale - (can't remember title)
felecia atkinson - (can't remember title)
sarah davachi - all my circles run
mount eerie - a crow looked at me
that's all i can remember off the top of my head. GREAT year for music.
I know you want to read about tech but this book will change your life. Most Slashdot folks are already strong on tech. Start building on the soft skills. You won't be sorry...
Russian police procedural. Perhaps the best I've seen. The story arc over the first season is just brilliant. Also, a brilliant title sequence which acquires meaning throughout the season. I understand there's a second season coming, but I suspect it can't compare to the first. I hope I'm wrong.
Persepolis Rising — book 7 in the The Expanse series, by James S.A. Corey.
Shame games aren't part of the 2017 bash otherwise the very geeky games Silicon Zeroes and LogicBots would be on the list.
huge music nerd here. 2017 was an exceptional year.
peaking lights - the fifth state of consciousness
jan st. werner - spectric acid
teresa winter - untitled death
jim o'rourke - steamroom 32
biosphere - the petrified forest
laurel halo - dust
richard youngs - this is not a lament
colleen - a flame my love, a frequency
kaitlyn aurelia smith - the kid
kassel jaeger & jim o'rourke - wakes on cerulean
golden retriever - rotations
ellen allien - nost
jim o'rourke - steamroom 35
visible cloaks - lex
konrad sprenger - stack music
no UFOs - nu LP for RS
growing - disorder
bardo pond - under the pines
rafael toral - moon field
wolf eyes - strange days II
mount eerie - a crow looked at me
colin stetson - all this i do for glory
kara lis coverdale - grafts
félicia atkinson - hand in hand
bhob rainey - from null lands led, starrily
yelle - ici & maintenant
zola jesus - okovi
tim heidecker - too dumb for suicide: trump songs
ahnnu - special forces
cicely irvine - excavations
fever ray - plunge
lea bertucci - all that is solid melts into the air
sarah davachi - all my circles run
tarawangsawelas - wanci
Stuff I liked this year, although some of them started before 2017:
TV:
American Gods
- Supernatural good-versus-evil pre-armegeddon road trip show
The Orville
- Good Star Trek clone, biggest negative is the random insertion of McFarlane's dull family-guy-style one-liner jokes, otherwise does a good job of channeling the ST:TOS
Red Oaks
- Coming of age series set in the 80s about a guy who works summers at the local country club
Trollhunters
- Guillermo del Toro's animated show about teenagers who discover that trolls exist and become their defenders
Search Party
- Black comedy, like black as night, about a bunch of useless people obsessed with finding a missing friend they barely knew in the first place. Second season really amps up the darkness.
Future Man
- Time-travel save-the-world comedy, lots of fun
The Good Place
- Self-centered girl dies and goes to heaven by accident, tries to impersonate a saintly person so she won't get sent to Hell, hilarity ensues. Lots of levels to this show, very funny but critical viewing is rewarded.
Dice
- Andrew Dice Clay plays himself as a washed up comic in Vegas
Preacher
- A grifter preacher gets (sort of) possessed by the offspring of a demon and an angel. Ultra-violence. Supporting cast includes Joseph Gilgun (of Misfits) as a vampire. 2nd season storyline isn't as a focused as the 1st season, still fun though.
Big Little Lies
- Poor mom moves to hoity-toity town for the school system. Everybody has secrets, and all the yoga moms are vicious in their own ways.
Fortitude
- Isolated town on the arctic circle is mainly a research station that's never seen violence. Then some really crazy shit starts going down.
The OA
- Ambiguous supernatural-ish show about a disappeared blind daughter who comes back after 7 years with her sight restored. If you know Brit Marling movies (The East, I Origins, Another Earth, The Sound of My Voice) then this is exactly the kind of tv show you would expect from her.
Vice Principals
- Two sad-sack vice principals take their competition for the job of principal way, way, way out of bounds.
Crazyhead
- British girlfriends deal with life as demon-fighters and all the other crap life throws at them.
Legion
- Crazy powerful super-hero deals with his schizophrenia and those looking to take advantage of his disease
GLOW
- Dramedy about the real-life, Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling from 80s.
Humans
- British alternate reality where human-like androids are ubiquitous and are starting to become self-aware.
The Handmaid's Tale
- Better than expected, near-future theocracy comes to power in response to global
People of Earth got its second season in 2017.
Its about a reporter who does a human-interest story on a bunch of people in a support group for alien abductees. Turns out they aren't all crazy. Well, they are kinda crazy, but the abductee stuff is kinda real.
The Young Pope is my favorite in this years television series, this shows is imbued with the delirious journey into the divinity of a young Pope, elected by chance or an accident and without a consensus but as a surrogate. However ''Lenny" has a lot of questions and plans in his mind, this show takes you on a journey for love and search for god. I give it a 5/5.
I gave as gifts books from Seneca and Epikur (Epicurous in English?). Epiktet would be one I'd recommend aswell.
Better than any holy scripture, way smarter and more effective at leading to a good and useful life. With way less guilt. I.e. none.
These days I would pretty much call myself a stoics or Epicurean much more than anything else.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Stare Into The Lights My Pretties (2017)
The average adult spends the majority of their waking hours in front of some sort of screen or device...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5qJjNM2Kx0
I'm sure it'll rattle some /. noses... :)
What Are Some Books, Movies, Documentaries and Shows From This Year That You Liked and Recommend To Others?
My list, mind you some of them I've read them before, but I took up to re-read them again in 2017, some are just brand new. Some of them I hear on audible first and cross reference and annotate the books for the passages that I find most interesting or pertinent (I keep an notebook indexing specific topics and headlines, plus footnotes on my kindle.)
I have a busy work/parenting life, and audio books are the only way I can get through books. When I'm working out or driving, that's what I do.
Re-visited in 2017:
New Reads in 2017:
In Progress in 2017:
I hoping to see some discussion about Halt and Catch Fire: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt25...
I've watched a couple seasons of it via Amazon Prime video.
On one hand, it prioritizes drama and style over reality and technology. I have not watched Mad Men but I assume it is a Mad Men wannabe. One of the characters once says, "all hat and no cattle." And many scenes in HCF are indeed all hat and no cattle.
On the other hand, many of the depictions of the technology of its day are detailed and on point and very few dramas, if any, have created so many moments of "yes! I have experienced that very thing!"