Ringing in the New Year

It’s the beginning of the new year, which means the blogosphereoversointerwebtube is a buzz analyzing the previous year. Here’s some interesting highlights of the last week:

• Heidi over at The Beat sent a survey to a group of comics professionals about the biggest story in comics of the past year and what’s to come in the new year. While there are many similarities, there’s a lot of interesting predictions.
• Meanwhile, Rich Johnston, professional comics rumor-monger, gave out his rumor of the year awards. Though usually mainly interesting to industry-junkies like myself, the year end awards are consistently hilarious in their own right.
• Did you know that the program Dancing Monkeys that makes Stepmania files for the DDR clone from your songs has gotten some hefty upgrades? I can’t wait to try it on all the songs the original Dancing Monkeys didn’t work for.
• GeekIdiot has a solution to those of you who are dissapointed with the lack of games for the Wii and PS3. His solution… play Gamecube and PS2 games! He lists the best from both systems.
• The Transformers Movie held a contest for fans to submit lines for Optimus Prime to say during the movie. They narrowed it down to 10 and had the voice of Optimus speak each of the lines, which you can hear on their site. From there, they selected the winner: “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.” I think there are better ones on the list- sounds a little too political for the Transformers movie- but it’s interesting the role of the Internet in filmmaking nowadays. And of course I’m disappointed that they didn’t pick my favorite: “I have had it with these motherf@*$ing Deceptacons on this mother f@*$ing energon!”
• Finally, though it didn’t happen in the last week, someone called my attention to the fact that there are two other D&D documentaries that I didn’t cover in the DVD Gift Guide. One called The Dungeons and Dragons Experience is reviewed here, but it seems to be impossible to find. As with all the DVDs I profiled, I’m hoping this is available at Origins this year.

By next week, all the boardgamers who are much more organized than myself will submit their Five and Dime lists of games they’ve played at least 5 times during the previous year. Usually somebody collects them to see what games were popular in boardgaming this year, so I hope to be able to report on that. (I tried taking note of all my games, but I only lasted into July.)

Bartoneus and I are hard at work on Critical Hits 4.0, so stay tuned!