[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“375” caption=“Super Potato in Akihabara”] [/caption] As is typical of me, I played a ton of video games this year. Here’s a listing of what I played along with a few short (or long) words on each game. For the most part, this list is restricted to games released in 2010 unless I did not play them until this year. It’s also mostly in chronological order, with some skips here and there. ...

There are many reasons I love baseball, but you know what my favorite little quirk is? It’s impossible for a pitcher’s performance on the mound to win a game by itself. In fact, the only active thing a pitcher can do on the mound is lose a game. Not to get too technical, but a win in baseball is determined by the pitcher on the mound when one team pulls ahead of the other. The rules are slightly more complicated than that, but that’s the general idea. ...

I saw Anamanaguchi live for the first time in March and it was everything I could have hoped for on a night that was damn near a disaster. Min and I assembled in Baltimore in front of a tiny club we’d never seen before. Sonar isn’t that far from the harbor. It’s a tiny club about the size you’d expect a band like Anamanaguchi and its 8-Bit Alliance traveling partners would be able to draw. Small and intimate. Scarily intimate, actually. I calmed myself by remembering that it’s rare for people other than myself to show up on time for a rock show. ...

I don’t like snow. This isn’t a secret to anyone who’s met me since I went away to university. Growing up in Florida made snow something of a novelty to me once. It was fun to experience every couple of years. Fun to get a day off from school once in Oregon. Fun to go skiing a couple of times in my life. They there’s snow like the snowpocalypse of 2010. You know, the storm that knocked the state of Maryland out of commission for practically a full week? The one that started right on my birthday? The one that had me stranded in my apartment for days at a time? ...

About a week into January of 2010 Eric found and installed one of the best wordpress plugins I’ve ever seen, Wordpress.com Stats. Thanks to that, I’ve got some performance numbers for the site to share. Top Posts Remixed Objection, No Yakuza 3?, L4D2 (Again), and Pokémon Cosplay [Game Overview] (1,182) I know precisely why this link is top of the list. It features a stunning picture of Jessica Nigri very liberally cosplaying a Pikachu. It seems sex sells. Surprise! ...

Time sure seems to pass pretty quickly. By now it’s been about six years since I was in high school. Maybe the growth is actually an illusion, but it sure feels like I’m miles away from the kid I was at 18, which makes it extra jarring to run into relics from my past. Tami and I both transferred to Sickles High School our sophomore years. My switch was the result of a move up north, but Tami came to SHS because private school life didn’t suit her. Both of us were on the swim team, took the same bus to and from school, and lived in the same neighborhood, but neither of us really hung out much beyond the season. Tami went to school in the south and I went to school in NY and moved to MD. I pretty much thought I’d never see her again. ...

Unless you happen to understand Japanese, you probably have no idea what a fukubukuro is. The word literally means lucky/mystery bag and it’s a New Year’s Day tradition in Japan where retailers sell bags of merchandise for deep discounts. Since these are “mystery bags”, customers have no idea what they’ve purchased until they open them and the prizes could be anything from a new blu-ray player to a sock. The idea to turn this concept into a series of articles was not my own, but something that tim rogers first did in 2001. As far as I know he doesn’t still do them, but I fell in love with the idea two years ago and only just now managed to implement it. ...

Thanks to last.fm, I can tell you what my personal favorite music of 2010 has been! Top 10 Artists of 2010 1. The Beatles (989 listens) The re-release of the entire catalog reinvigorated my love for The Beatles as I more thoroughly explored their catalog and loved songs I’d never realized were by the Fab Four. Heaping praise on The Beatles is almost ridiculous, so I’ll leave it at that. ...

Listened to the audio for this on the drive to work today. I love Brazilian music.

The DLC category took a whole hour of podcast time to resolve! Enjoy another day of quick summaries.