The Crummy.com Review of Things 2013

I've been travelling for most of the month, but I managed to scrape together a year-in-review post. Here's 2012. I'm a little disappointed right now, because I just woke up from a dream in which I'd savvily combined several middle-tier Kickstarter rewards into being able to go to the International Space Station whenever I wanted, so let's start with a self-aggrandizing montage of my waking accomplishments in 2013:


The big one was RESTful Web APIs , a radical reimplementation of RESTful Web Services that takes the lessons of the last seven years into account. My accompanying talk is the time-travel extravaganza, "LCODC$SSU and the coming automated web" (see commentary from outside the framing device). And after the book came out we released the predecessor book under CC-BY-NC-ND.

I didn't finish writing Situation Normal but I got pretty close; I'll finish it this year and hopefully sell it.

Autonomous agent mania! I achieved a measure of fame (for Rob) with Real Human Praise, the bot whose 20,000 remaining followers proves that most people don't use Twitter the way I do. (Here's a behind-the-scenes.)

But I'm most proud of Ebooks Brilhantes, the bot that proves there's a better way to make *_ebooks bots: by reverse-engineering the actual @horse_ebooks algorithm instead of being lazy and using Markov chains.

Honorable mentions to the lovely Smooth Unicode and the ribald Dada Limericks. In non-bots, there's Apo11o ll and In Dialogue. And my explanation of comedy ethics for computer programmers, "Bots Should Punch Up".

The big NYCB posts of 2013 were my film roundups, which I really like as writing (I mean, check out the review of Norman Mailer v Fun City, USA), but which are ultimately not standalone pieces of prose. They're my impressions of the films, impressions I will be condensing into the "Film" section below.

Here's the best of the remainder:


I remembered my friend and occasional crummy.com liveblogger Aaron Swartz.
I solved the mystery of "Spacewar!"'s title.
I exposed Billy Collins's poetry hacks.
I feel like no one appreciates my Loaded Dice updates, but I like them so I'll at least keep collecting the data.

Now let's take a brief look at contributions from the not-me community:

Literature: The category that suffered the most from 2013's focus on film. I didn't read that much, and my writing is slowing down because of it. This is a strange alchemy that I can't explain but I'm pretty sure other writers recognize it. Anyway, I've got some new books I'm excited about so I'll get back on this in 2014.

For 2013 I'll give the nod to Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel's Atari Inc.: Business is Fun, a book that... well... this review is pretty accurate, but the book has a lot of good technical and business information, plus many unverifiable anecdotes. It seems I read nothing in 2013 that I can wholeheartedly recommend without reservation... except Tina Fey's Bossypants, I guess... yes! In a late-paragraph update, Bossypants has taken the award! Wait, what's this? In a shocking upset, the ant has taken it from Bossypants! Yes, the ant is back, and out for blood!

Games: 2013 was the year I finally learned the mechanical skill of shuffling cards. Maybe this doesn't seem like a big deal to you, but I've been trying to figure this out for most of my life.

The crummy.com Board Game of the Year is "Snake Oil", a game about fulfilling user stories with lies and shoddy products. The Video Game of the Year? Man, I dunno. I'm playing computer games a little more than in 2013, but still not that many. "Starbound" is really cool, and is probably the closest I'll get to being able to play "Terraria" on Linux.

Audio: As I mentioned, I'm travelling, and away from the big XML file that contains my podcast subscriptions, so I'll fill this in later, but there's not a lot new here. But I can tell you the Crummy.com Podcast of the Year: Mike "History of Rome" Duncan's new podcast, Revolutions. The first season, covering the English Revolution, just wrapped up, so it's a good time to get into the podcast.

Hat tip to Jackie Kashian's The Dork Forest. Probably not going to have to update this one, actually.

Film: Ah, here's the big one. As I mentioned earlier, I saw 85 feature films in 2013. By amount of money I spent, the best film of the year was Gravity, which I dropped about $40 on. But by any other criteria, it wasn't even close! Well, it was close enough to get Gravity onto my top twelve, which I present now. I consider all of these absolute must-watches.


The General (1926)
Nashville (1975)
Ishtar (1987)
Ball of Fire (1941)
Calculated Movements (1985)
The World's End (2013)
No No Nooky TV (1987)
Gravity (2013)
The Godfather (1972)
Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
No (2012)

As you can tell, only films I saw for the first time in 2013 are
eligible; we call this the "The Big Lebowski rule".

There was no movie that really changed my aesthetic sense this year, the way Celine and Julie go Boating did last year, but Nashville gave me insight into managing a large ensemble cast. Hat tip to Fahrenheit 451 for getting me to understand why I keep lining up for French New Wave films even though they keep pulling the football away from me.

I still don't feel like I know that much about film. I treat films like they're books. I'm not that interested in what people do with the cameras. I have no idea what the names of actors are. I find the prospect of making a film quite tedious. They're fun to watch though.

For the record, here's my must-see list from 2012, which I didn't spell out last time:


Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
Brazil (1985)
A New Leaf (1971)
All About Eve (1950)
The Whole Town's Talking (1953)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Paper Moon (1973)
Marathon Man (1976)

Okay, I think that's enough. Nobody reads these things until the centennial anyway.