Adam

• Spoon – Gimme Fiction
  
• The New Pornographers – Twin Cinema
  
• Sufjan Stevens – Illinois
  
• The Mountain Goats – The Sunset Tree
  
• The Hold Steady – Separation Sunday
  
• Andrew Bird – The Mysterious Production of Eggs
  

The album I was stuck on for the first several months of the year was Abattoir Blues by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Then, a couple months later, I discovered The Mountain Goats, and pretty much listened to all of his albums non stop the last 9 months of the year. Then, near the end, I listened to both of the albums by The Hold Steady pretty heavily. And O’Brien’s Nocturne from M. Ward’s End of Amnesia I played over and over for 2-3 days.

Top Five Movies This Year

• Batman Begins
  
• Most of The Year Was Pretty Shit for Movies
  
• Then, Yesterday, Syriana
  

What a crappy year. Crap crap crap. Even Sin City was pretty much crap, even though I didn’t admit it at the time. Walk the Line was also made of crap, though the Townes Van Zandt documentary Be There to Love Me was very good, and in a way made up for it.

Sweet XBox Games

• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
  
• Psychonauts
  
• Burnout: Revenge
  
• Sid Meier’s Pirates
  

Lame Ass XBox Games That I Thought Would Be Sweet

• Destroy All Humans
  
• Hulk: Ultimate Destruction
  
• Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of The Warehouse In Level 2 That I’m Stuck On
  

Things I Did Well This Year (For Self Confidence Purposes)

• Stumbling upon the money-saving combination of modding my XBox and getting a GameFly account
  
• Buying all my Christmas presents through Amazon.com a month in advance.
  
• Researching things before making decisions. There were several instances this year where even just 5-10 minutes of cursory Googling in advance has saved me money or given me a major advantage of some other sort.
  
• Organizing information. The Tiddlywiki has helped, as have buying all those lousy notebooks and labeling them.
  

Things I Was Shit At This Year (To Record My Shame)

• Writing, blog entries and otherwise
  
• Not eating at fast food places as much
  
• Not making campaigns fast enough
  
• Not riding the bus for most of the year
  
• Nothing Else
  

Connie’s Top Fives:

Personal Increases

• Fiber consumption
  
• Holes in pants
  
• Naive optimism
  
• Willingness to use program called “DVD Santa” (it works on Matroska files)
  
• Bitter cynicism
  

MMORPGS Quit

• Everquest
  
• Everquest 2
  
• City Of Heroes
  
• World of Warcraft
  
• Guild Wars
  

Adjectives and Nouns Most Used

• Awesome
  
• Catass
  
• Chiaroscuro
  
• Foolish
  
• Human
  

Songs Stuck In My Head

• Go Hippie, Fountains Of Wayne
  
• Engine Driver, The Decemberists
  
• Hurts So Good, John “Cougar” Mellencamp
  
• Motherdust, The Bevis Frond
  
• Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen
  

Lists Containing Less Than Five Items

• Finished artwork I’m proud of
  
• Unfinished epic fantasy novels
  
• Video games actually beaten
  
• Blogs started and then abandoned
  
• Adventures had
  

Things Which Will Be Even Better Next Year

• Everything! Yeah!!! I’M GONNA WIN!!!!!