1. Olive Mrgan
Ten months old now, she’s a stellar baby. Her current repertoire includes lightning-speed crawling, confident assisted walking, occasional freestanding, eating small bits of fruit and cheese, iPad use, the early stages of dancing and clapping, and the syllables “na”, “da”, “ba”, and “la”, infinitely repeated. In a year of somewhat rough seas for the economy, politics, art, and culture, it was good to have a cute little human to anchor me.
2. Horse_ebooks
This year, one brave and hard-working comedian captured the zeitgeist like no other. He delivered a reliable stream of slice-of-life observations and character work, all monetized not in your usual movies or TV, but with an interesting web-based, crowdsourced scheme. No, not Louis CK - I’m talking about Horse_ebooks.
He’s likely a Russian spambot, grabbing random chunks of text from online ebooks and scammy websites, peppering this stream of nonsense with ad links. As far as the horse is concerned, those ads are the real meat here; the rest is padding meant to throw off any automated spam detectors. But to the rest of us, these garbled fragments, from extreme proclamations found only in self-help writing to cut-off sentences, from poorly parsed PDFs to self-aware tweets - to us humans, this is all brilliant comedy… Delivered by a beautiful, automated horse. Who’s into ebooks.
Next time he tweets something, paste the whole line into google. It’ll lead to some goofy ebook, confirming that no human is currently writing these with the intent of making them funny. But even if Horse_ebooks gets hijacked by his human creator, or if he is otherwise ruined, we’ll always have the memories. The horse has earned his stripes, and for my money, he can decide at any point to ride himself off into the sunset.
3. Horace Dediu
Horace is an industry analyst with a fondness for Apple’s greatness, an eye for charts, and an education in Clay Christensen’s disruptive theory. He’s a rare voice of reason in the area of Apple-tea-leaf-reading, and an educator by nature. He makes the theory of business - a dry subject by any standard - exciting and instructive. I will gladly follow, buy, or attend any Dediu-related outlet, product, or event. If there were a way to one-click-subscribe to someone’s entire creative output, I’d subscribe to Horace’s. Catch him on his blog Asymco, or his podcast The Critical Path.
4. Portal 2
I have no idea why I resisted Cabel’s insistence that I would love the heck out of Portal if I just gave it a shot. The truth is, I just don’t play many long-form games, and definitely not many FPS’s. See my problem here? Portal and Portal 2 are definitely not FPS’s. They’re clever, patient, beautifully written room puzzles. Every single aspect of the design is effortlessly impressive. Portal 2 is the best movie of 2011.
5. Nau
Earlier this year, I looked in my closet and realized that I hated most of my clothes. A drastic change was in order. While I couldn’t pull off a Jobsian single-outfit uniform, I figured that focusing on one good brand could work. It would reduce my frustration with choosing what to buy, and it would align my wardrobe with a good brand’s direction.
The brand I picked was Nau. They’re a Portland-based shop designing urban and outdoor apparel. I’ve been extremely happy with most of my purchases. I hope to continue to buy fewer, better clothes.
6. Chili pan mee
Out of nowhere, this Malaysian dish became my favorite food ever. Ok, not quite out of nowhere: it came from issue #1 of Lucky Peach, a fantastic food magazine started by David Chang of Momofuku fame. I’ve made several tweaked versions of his recipe for this mix of ragù, chili-shallot sauce, fried anchovies, and soft egg served over noodles, and they were all great: from the superspicy bowl to the tomato-rich one, from Thai chiles to Mexican ones.
I hope you also found some new favorites last year. Let’s find more in 2012, and let’s work on making things that become other people’s favorites!
