Best of 2010

From Antiflux Wiki

Contents 1 Events 2 TV 3 Films 4 Books 5 Theatre / Other 6 Music 6.1 Albums 6.1.1 Electronic 6.1.2 Pop 6.1.3 Indie 6.1.4 Mixes 6.2 Videos 6.3 Live 7 Technology 7.1 Games 7.2 Hardware 7.3 Software 7.3.1 Desktop 7.3.2 Mobile 7.4 Cloud Services 7.5 Internet Memes 7.6 Light reading 8 Food & Drink 8.1 Lunch Spots 8.2 Dinner Spots 9 See also

Events

• Burj Khalifa (formerly Burj Dubai) opens as the world's tallest building
• 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver
• Eyjafjallajökull eruptions wreak havoc on air traffic
• Deepwater Horizon blows out and wrecks everything
• Isner takes Mahut 70-68 over three days at Wimbledon, documented in zombieriffic liveblog
• South Park Studios apologizes for copying Inception spoof and gets sued over What What (In the Butt) parody. EA denies plans to sue over Tiger Woods parody.
• NASA announces discovery of arsenic-based life

TV

• The Big C
• Boardwalk Empire
• Breaking Bad (season 3)
• Futurama started up again
• Louie starring Louis C.K.
• Modern Family
• The Walking Dead

Films

• American, The
• Hot Tub Time Machine
• Inception
• Kick-Ass
• Machete
• Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World
• Toy Story 3
• Winter's Bone

Books

Written and read in 2010:

• Adventures in Solitude: What Not To Wear to a Nude Potluck and other stories from Desolation Sound by Grant Lawrence (as heard on CBC Radio)
• Machine of Death

Read in 2010:

• Nelson Algren - The Man with the Golden Arm
• Shinmon Aoki - Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician
• Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
• Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore (metaphysical craziness)
• Marie Mutsuki-Mockett - Picking Bones From Ash

Theatre / Other

• Scottsboro Boys musical
• Wayson Choy: Are We There Yet? The Laurier Institute 7th Annual Multiculturalism Lecture
• The Tobolowsky Files (iTunes, home page) continued with excellent stories

Music

Albums

Electronic

• Miike Snow

Pop

• Emeralds - Does It Look Like I'm Here?
• Four Tet - There Is Love In You
• Jon Hopkins - Insides
• Lorn - Nothing Else
• Mimosa - Silver Lining
• Surfer Blood - Astrocoast

Indie

• Arcade Fire
• Stars 2010 album: The Five Ghosts
• Phoenix

Mixes

Videos

• Cee-Lo - No One's Gonna Love You (dir. Skinny)
• Die Antwoord - Enter The Ninja
• El Guincho - Bombay (dir. Nicolás Méndez)
• Mark Ronson - Bang Bang (dir. Warren Fu)
• Truckers Delight (I guess 2009, but I didn't see until 2010)

Live

• Jamie Lidell
• Mayer Hawthorne
• Moogfest, esp. the Lorn set

Technology

Games

• Angry Birds (iOS) Had to be on top!
• Cut the Rope (iOS) Fun puzzle game with just enough challenge to keep you interested until the end
• Problem Sleuth (web)
• Rage HD (iOS) Short, but worth $1.99
• StarCraft 2 (Windows/OS X)
• Trainyard (iOS)

Hardware

• Apple MacBook Air (2010) Not as revolutionary (over an MBP with SSD) as the Jobsian RDF would have you believe, but the smaller size is well worth it.
• HTC Aria Goes with Yelp and turn by turn navigation to make an impressive travel aid.
• iPad
• iPhone 4 with fancy Retina Display, 2 cameras, and controversial antenna design
• Kindle 3 with smaller size, better battery life, comparably decent display, usably fast display refresh, and only lacking epub support
• Samsung EX1/TL500 with fast f1.8 lens, RAW support, articulating AMOLED display, excellent Lightroom support, and pocketable size

Software

Desktop

• Adobe Lightroom 3.2
• ExpanDrive (still needs webDAV!)
• Launchbar
• Launchy
• Parallels
• VirtualBox

Mobile

• Cyclemeter (iOS) Pretty sweet activity tracking tool for only $5.
• Navigation (Android) Killer mobile app.
• MyTracks (Android) Killer mobile app.
• Yelp (Android)

Yelp and Google turn-by-turn Navigation combined are _the_ killer mobile app. Find a restaurant/event, click the directions button, and have the GPS take you there. Although the directions are still sometimes a little funky, this feature combination has revolutionized my opinion of "smart" phones and has changed the way I travel.

That's assuming you're OK with Yelp's business practices of course.

Just as OK with Yelp as with the new Borg (Google) owning all of my data. If Facebook was this useful, I'd be on there as well =)

Cloud Services

• Airbnb low overhead short term rental accommodation
• Couchsurfing lower overhead short term accommodation
• Google ebookstore on launch day had a book I couldn't find anywhere else, and I only had to remove a little bit of annoying Adobe DRM to get it to work on the device of my choosing
• Google Voice somehow didn't make it into the list back in 2006 when it was GrandCentral. Being able to send and receive SMS from a computer or phone is _fantastic_, as are voicemail transcriptions. Integration with Android is key.
• Netflix comes to Canada - streaming only (no discs by mail) and with less selection compared to US, thanks to licensing restrictions
• Pandora still not in Canada, but the iOS app is fantastic for listening on the go, plugging into your car, etc.
• DropBox Perhaps yesterday's news.

Internet Memes

• Antoine Dodson sings about rapists.
• Dan Savage creates the It Gets Better project because he is an awesome human.

Light reading

Food & Drink

Lunch Spots

• Salsa & Agave opened a second location, a few doors down from the first
• RIP Save On Meats

Dinner Spots

See also

• IMDb: Best Feature Films Released In 2010 With At Least 1,000 Votes
• iTunes Rewind 2010 (opens in iTunes) - top selling music, TV shows, apps, movies, audiobooks, and podcasts of the year
• Roger Ebert: The Best Films of 2010
• The A.V. Club: The best films of 2010
• The A.V. Club: The worst films of 2010
• The A.V. Club: The best music of 2010
• The A.V. Club: The best games of 2010
• JWZ: 2010 music round-up
• Wikipedia: 2010
• Best of 2009
• Best of 2008
• Best of 2007
• Best of 2006
• Best of 2005
• Best of 2004