Five Things I Liked About 2005

To get a completely non-work week off to a good start, here's five things that I enjoyed in my (rather sparse) leisure time this year.

Since age is creeping up on me and my speed reading marathons are getting rarer, I decided to skip the books - I read about seventy this year, but it would have been pretty difficult to pick out anything but Quicksilver (although a couple of Alastair Reynolds titles would probably make the cut).

• Battlestar Galactica knocks the socks off just about anything else I saw in 2005. The original series devolved into cheesiness after a few episodes, but this remake makes it darker, edgier, and a whole lot more entertaining - even if the acting isn't all perfect, the great camera work gives it an immediacy that no other Sci-Fi series has. It almost feels like a documentary, and the end result is something thoroughly enjoyable.
• Farscape was a close second. The massive Farscape bundle bundle (plus the Farscape miniseries) made for more than a month of viewing and did wonders for my mood. It isn't what I would call perfect (and was definitely off the wall sometimes), but it makes Star Trek seem, well... boring.
• Firefly (including Serenity) took me entirely by surprise (I'm not an inconditional Whedon fan, and think Buffy is, well... dumb). The plot line was a bit hazy and the original special effects were nothing much, but the acting work proved to be very enjoyable indeed - the characters grow on you, maybe more than in Farscape.
• Desperate Housewives has been tremendous fun (surprised? Hah. I watch perfectly ordinary stuff as well), although I won't presume to be keeping track of the plot - largely thanks to the rather erratic choice of screening times (I refuse to call it scheduling) in local TV.
• Finally, The Chronicles of Narnia was easily the best value for money I got out of a movie ticket this year (although I do have very high hopes for the Corpse Bride). Exquisite attention to detail, just the right amount of effects, and a well woven narrative. So what if it has talking beavers?

On other, more immediate terms, I've been tinkering with Snakelets and Prototype to reasonably good effect. It's amazingly easy to get a simple Wiki going, but it is insufferably hard to bolt on all that I'm used to in PhpWiki to what I've built so far - largely due to the fact that my NewWikiMigration has set the bar a bit too high.

Ah well. At least I've got the time to tinker with it for a while...