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Andrew at Geek Mountain State asked me to write a post looking back at nerdy stuff in 2011. I didn’t see every movie or play every video game, so this isn’t an all-encompassing year-in-review post, but as I made my notes preparing to write the thing, I realized it was a pretty full year, as nerdy pursuits go. What follows is a subject-by-subject look at some of the nerdy things that I personally enjoyed in 2011.

SUPER HEROES, SEQUELS & PREQUELS
There were several super hero films this summer (which seems to be typical nowadays). I missed the one most folks were panning (Green Lantern) but I think I caught the rest of them. The production design was lovely in X-Men First Class, but the film suffered from egregious retconning and some fairly blatant racism and sexism (I know the film is set in the 60s when these were bigger cultural problems than they are now, but did they really have to kill the black super hero first? Really?). I think I would have enjoyed seeing a whole movie devoted to scenes of Magneto jet setting around in the 1960s and hunting down Nazis.

My favorite super hero film was Captain America by a mile. It managed to live up to its source material and tell a compelling self-contained story (unlike Thor, for example) and managed to perk up my interest in anticipation of next summer’s Avengers film all at the same time.

My actual favorite genre film of 2011 is a straight up tie between Stephen Soderbergh’s Contagion and Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s The Thing. Contagion is really more of a science thriller than a science fiction film. It’s beautifully shot, directed and edited and it will make you hyper conscious of just how much you touch your own face. It’s the 2001: a Space Odyssey of pandemic films in that it nails the science behind the story so well. Narratively, Contagion plays out a bit like Soderbergh’s war-on-drugs polemic, Traffic, as it’s populated by an ensemble cast of loosely connected characters in different parts of the world who are affected by the outbreak in various ways.

The Thing is something special and something I’ve never seen done on film before. Here’s what I wrote in a Candleblog post that I never published:

Remakes are tricky. The problem is that nobody wants to remake crappy movies — everyone wants to remake classics, which is problematic because the classic films are already great. Remakes have an uphill battle trying to live up to these great original films and few succeed. Go ahead. Try and think of a great remake. The list is really short. Indeed some will  argue that John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing is actually the best remake ever (though technically, Carpenter’s film is not so much  a “remake” of Howard Hawkes’ 1952 classic, The Thing From Another World, as it is a retelling of John Campbell’s science fiction short story, Who Goes There).

Prequels are even trickier. Just ask George Lucas. A successful prequel has to not only stand alone as its own film, it has to live up to the quality of the film it’s setting up and it has to do so while explicitly revealing the on-screen actions that led to what may have been merely throw-away backstory elements in the original. Think of all the acrobatic shenanigans Lucas had to go through at the end of Revenge of the Sith to get all the characters in the right places for the beginning of Star Wars — wipe the protocol droid’s memory, but don’t bother with the R2 unit, he seems harmless enough; Bail Organa always wanted a little princess; Yoda is the greatest Jedi master in the galaxy but he dropped his lightsaber once so now he must exile himself to a swamp world, etc.

Keep these issues in mind as you watch Matthijs van Heijningen’s new version of The Thing, because this film has done something I think no other film has ever done: it’s both a successful remake and a successful prequel. It achieves the goals of both.

I wouldn’t change a word of that. Van Heijningen made a film that is a loving tribute to the original, recreating the basic plot, tension and (nearly) specific scenes of Carpenter’s iteration. The characters’ names and faces are different, but the monster is the same, the setting is essentially the same, and up until the film’s final moments, the basic narrative is the same, as the eponymous Thing picks off the ice station crew members one by one. So it works as a remake of Carpenter’s film, but it’s also a very specific prequel — so meticulously crafted that an uninitiated viewer watching the films back to back might think they were made at the same time. And despite the perfect attention to detail spent getting all of the various pieces in place for the start of Carpenter’s film, almost none of it feels forced or tacked-on (one exception being the ice station crew member who commits suicide by cutting his own throat, just to establish one shot in the 1982 film). I’m hoping van Heijningen has started a trend and that Ridley Scott’s Prometheus will be the next example of this sort of film.

Honorable mention: Attack the Block.

Special Worst Genre Film of 2011 Award: Transformers: Dark of the Moon (see my review here)

WORDS WITHOUT PICTURES
I’m a terribly slow reader so my best-of list of genre books will be short. I recently finished Stephen King’s 11/22/63, which is part time travel adventure, part historical fiction and part romance, none of which immediately strike me as Stephen King genres. It’s a great yarn but the SF nerd in me kept asking needling questions about the mechanics of time travel that King never bothered to answer.

Speaking of time travel adventures and historical fiction, my favorite SF book of 2011 was Connie Willis’ All Clear, which was part two of a two-part story begun last year (the first part was called Blackout). These books are set in my favorite of Willis’ universes (visited before in Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog) in which our heroes journey from the time-traveling future of Oxford, England circa 2060 to various points during WWII and then get stuck there.

On my bookshelf now, waiting to be read next are two other 2011 publications, Neil Stephenson’s REAMDE and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. Those will have to wait for my 2012 year-in-review post.

ALIENS, ZOMBIES & DRAGON EGGS
Game of Thrones is the obvious 2011 champion of genre TV. Its loving devotion to the source material is inspiring and its slow-burn storytelling is something I’d like to see more of on TV. Matt Zoller Seitz (one of the best TV writers working now, IMO) described the second half of GoT season one as “The Godfather with swordplay and dragon’s eggs.” Yup. It’s that good.

2011 was also the year my wife and I finally caught up with Fringe and I can safely say that seasons two and three of that show comprise some of the finest SF TV I’ve ever seen.

I should also mention that SyFy’s version of Being Human turned out to be surprisingly good. (As good at the BBC version? Opinions vary.) Falling Skies is the show V really should have been and Walking Dead had a marginally better season than last year.

I couldn’t do a year-end round up of genre TV for 2011 without mentioning the insipid and blisteringly stupid NBC show, The Cape. Cancellation is too good for this turd. Every copy must be destroyed.

PRESS START
I should mention at the outset that I am not a fan of RPG video games. I like my RPGs the classic way — with dice. I mention this because Skyrim does not top my 2011 list, nor does it even make an appearance. I played a little bit of Oblivion once and let’s just say it doesn’t matter how much better Skyrim is, I’m not going to play it.

I did, however, spend a few too many hours playing L.A. Noire from Rockstar Games. I’m a sucker for anything even vaguely GTA-related and LA Noir is like GTA in 1940s LA, only you have to question witnesses. If you play it, do it in B&W. It was designed to be played that way and it really adds to the experience.

Dead Island had the best video game trailer of the year, for sure. Game play is your standard zombie romp, but set in a beautiful tropical locale.

The best video game of 2011 for me was Portal 2. I actually finished it (I rarely actually complete video game stories). It one-ups the brilliant original in two important ways: first, it expands on the physics, introducing new ways to navigate the crazy puzzles that are just as fun as the stuff in the first game; and second, the story is greatly expanded, including a compelling back story, new characters (Wheatly FTW!) and some of the funniest writing in any genre of any storytelling medium this year.

MEANWHILE…
I wanted to include a best-of comics section in this post but I read so few comics this year it just wouldn’t be worth a damn. But I’ll take the opportunity to plug my friend Alex’s excellent SF romance webcomic, Artifice. I’ll make it a New Year’s resolution to read more comics in 2012.

MEATSPACE ADVENTURES
I had some pretty great nerdy real-life experiences this year too. In Austin in March during SXSW I saw Harry Knowles from Ain’t It Cool News interview Guillermo del Toro about horror/fantasy movies on the stage of the Paramount Theater. Also at SXSW, I caught a couple of podcast tapings of Doug Loves Movies, featuring Simon Pegg, director James Gunn (Slither, Super), Rain Wilson, Dave Foley, Kevin Pollack and others. That was pretty great. I also saw They Might Be Giants play a show with Jonathan Coulton on a beautiful late summer evening in Norwich, VT. I interviewed biologist Craig Venter for a magazine article last January. Venter is the guy who created “artificial DNA” in a laboratory and was on the team that first sequenced the human genome. And my wife Emily’s knitted creations got some podcast and twitter love from the Nerdist himself, Chris Hardwick.

I’m sure 2012 will be even nerdier. The Mayans predicted it! See you next year.

• This is old, but I love it. Free speech is not a pony.
• My friend Spine got one of these and we wants it, precious.
• Some thoughtful thoughts by Casey Re: the onerous Stop Online Piracy Act.
• Alan Moore reacts to Frank Miller’s BS.
• It’s true. William Shatner and Carrie Fisher are fighting over whether Star Trek or Star Wars would win in a space battle, via YouTube.

Thus my life as a participant in this democracy began. Tonight, I was back at Memorial Auditorium as a participant in the process once more. Standing there, holding my caucus ballots in the exact spot I’d taken Vermont’s Freeman’s Oath 23 years and eight months prior, I couldn’t help but feel a little giddy at how awesome Vermont politics are. I mean, Town Meeting, right? That process alone makes Vermont so much cooler than the other 49 states, politically. But even in Burlington, where we eschew Town Meeting for a more traditional election day, it feels really personal and meaningful in a way I imagine most other Americans have never experienced.

Case in point: today’s Democratic Mayoral Caucus.

Here’s the deal, for those of you not tuned into the nitty gritty of BTV politics:

Burlington is really a three-party town. There are the Democrats, Republicans and Progressives. The Progs are the new kids on the block but they wield real political power in Vermont and Burlington’s current embattled mayor, Bob Kiss, is a Prog. The 14-member City Council is dominated by Dems but has GOP, Prog and Independent members too.

Due to a series of debacles that I won’t get into here, the current administration is foundering. Democrats see an opportunity to reclaim City Hall. If they nominate a really good candidate, the argument goes, they can unite left-leaning Burlingtonians and win the mayor’s office in March. But the Progs haven’t said what they’re going to do. If Mayor Kiss runs for reelection or if he doesn’t and the party nominates a strong candidate, liberal and progressive Burlingtonians will be split and perennial Republican Mayoral candidate, Kurt Wright, is waiting in the wings to swoop in and take advantage such a situation (it’s worth noting that this is the first mayoral race since BTV voters decided — stupidly, IMO — to kill IRV, meaning a so-called “spoiler” candidate can take advantage of a three-way race and win without a majority of the support of the voters).

So going into today’s Democratic Mayoral Caucus there were four strong Dem candidates: Tim Ashe, Bram Kranichfeld, Jason Lorber and Miro Weinberger. The caucus works like this: you show up and register. Any registered Burlington voter can participate, regardless of party affiliation. Then you vote in the first round. Then they count all the first round ballots and announce the results, right there. As soon as a candidate gets more than 50% of the total votes cast, that candidate becomes the Democratic nominee for mayor. Simple, right? In this case, just over 1,000 votes were cast in the first round and with four candidates, nobody got more than 50%, so we went to a second round. At that point, Jason Lorber (a friend of mine and a real mensch), who was the lowest vote-getter in the first round, dropped out voluntarily, leaving three candidates competing in round two.

We still lacked a nominee after round two. Bram Kranichfeld (the candidate I supported, BTW), received the least amount of votes in round two and he dropped off the list leaving only Ashe and Weinberger to battle it out in round three.

At that point, with our man out of the running, Emily and I cast our round three votes (my ballot was for Tim Ashe, my second choice going in) and headed back to the car and home. Apparently, a whole lot of people did the same thing, assuming that getting a 50% majority with only two candidates remaining was a sure thing. Ha. Famous last words.

Once home, the #BTVmayor hashtag on Twitter lit up. 1,085 ballots were cast in the third round, meaning 543 votes were needed to win. The final count was Ashe: 540 to Weinberger: 540, with 5 ballots spoiled for one reason or another.

What I’m still not clear on is why the caucus didn’t then go to round four. The ballots had already been printed and handed out in anticipation of a fourth round. I know a lot of people (including me) left the auditorium after the voting in round three, but it was made perfectly clear up front that if anyone left and wasn’t present to vote, they were SOL. The Dem leadership decided to wait and hold a run-off caucus at some future date to decide the winner, but it’s unclear who will vote in that or who will be eligible to be on that ballot or how it will all be handled. There was a process in place and the decision was made to abandon that process following the tie. I wasn’t there and I don’t like Monday morning quarterbacking, but I’d sure like to know why they didn’t immediately proceed with round four with the voters remaining in the auditorium or those close enough to race back there before the close of voting. Then at least we’d have an answer, assuming there wasn’t a second tie.

However this all winds up, I’m certain of one thing: It was important that I was there. It was important that every single individual was there. Every vote mattered. Good on you, BTV.

Seven Days’ Andy Bromage has a good write up of the event with all the voting totals here. Haik Bedrosian offers his two cents here. Fox44 has some more quotes here. WCAX has a headline claiming the caucus ended in “disarray.” Sigh. There was a tie. That’s hardly disarray. Seriously, WCAX. The Fox channel is kicking your ass, editorially. Time to do some soul-searching?

So great, except all day there’s been this thing nagging at me, taunting me, double dog daring me to ignore it. And now I’ve just given in. Ignoring it isn’t working so I’m diving into shark-infested waters. It’s time for me to tell some very smart people just how utterly misguided and foolish they’re being.

Some context:

I’m a liberal. Like most liberals in this country, I supported Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. I mean I really supported him. I even gave him some of my money. For the first time in my life, I had the experience of voting for someone that I actually wanted to be president rather than for the guy who wasn’t as awful as the other guy. It wasn’t just vague platitudes about “hope” or “change” that I liked, it was the specific stuff he said he was going to do as president that won me over, along with his enormous intellect and seriousness of purpose.

Since President Obama’s 2009 inauguration, the Obama administration has made some decisions I don’t agree with 100%. It’s a long enough list of things ranging from actual policy positions I disagreed with to overly conciliatory negotiating tactics to not being forceful enough rhetorically on certain issues I care about. The most recent example is the administration’s decision to scuttle planned EPA rules that would have toughened lax Bush-era smog standards (it’s bad policy, and at a minimum, a missed opportunity for a bargaining chip).

Seeing the guy I supported doing things I disagree with is frustrating. I want him to be perfect. I want him to be Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, JFK and Jed Bartlett all rolled up into one guy. President Linceddyveltlett would have made sure we got the public option. The Linkeddyveltlett administration would have gotten Gitmo closed and would have played hardball in the debt ceiling fight.

I think it’s important to hold the President to a higher standard and expect him to meet it. And when he doesn’t, when he fails to live up to our President Linkeddyveltlett ideals, it’s important we let him know and complain about it and write blog posts and tweet and stomp our collective liberal feet.

But I also think that while we express our frustration, we need to keep our wits about us.

Recently, some friends of mine, who I tend to think of as very smart most of the time, have taken their liberal indignation to some rather absurd places.

For example, Gerry Canavan recently wrote this on his excellent blog:

Historically, primarying a sitting president is tantamount to just giving the presidency to whomever the other side nominates. But if it’s Romney, given the extent of the Obama disaster, that’s a tradeoff that could potentially be reasonable; Romney would likely just be a more effective version of Obama, putting forth generally the same sorts of policies without the scorched-earth opposition from the other side. Let Romney 45 govern like Bush 41 and regroup for 2016/2020.

And then the other day, Casey (The Contrarian) Rae-Hunter wrote this on his blog:

My wife made the observation that we might actually fare better under Mitt Romney. Yes, I know that sounds weird, but it makes sense if you think about it. First of all, Romney’s record indicates that he’s a fairly moderate Republican. Earlier in his career, he very plainly supported a woman’s right to choose. If elected, I doubt he’d push to overturn Roe v. Wade (he’d probably just leave it to the states, which is kind of what Obama is doing by default). Romney’s health care solution in Massachusetts looks a lot like what the President promoted (and ultimately got). On the campaign, Mitt has to tack rightward to appease the teabaggers. But those positions wouldn’t necessarily carry over to the Oval Office.

My wife’s most interesting point was that, instead of negotiating against himself, like Obama, Romney could end up giving the left more of what they want. It’s not hard to picture him telling his party that he “had to make concessions” in the course of negotiations. And those concessions might very well be more than we get out of Obama, due to the fact that he gives away half the store BEFORE entering talks.

Seriously? Mitt Romney would be “more effective” as president than Obama? We might “actually fare better under Mitt Romney?” Guys (and Mrs. Contrarian), I think you’re letting your emotional reactions to some individual disappointments get the better of your brains.

First of all, literally the same day Casey posted the piece quoted above, Mitt Romney delivered a big speech about the economic plan he’d pursue if elected. What’s in it? Massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the elimination of all new safeguards to reign in Wall Street, widespread deregulation, and a crackdown on labor unions. He also wants to enact a spending cap that would gut most of the federal budget and require brutal cuts to programs like Medicare.

In what universe can you look at that sort of economic plan and think a Romney presidency would anything but a disaster?

Well maybe Romney is a secret moderate, as Casey suggests. After all, one of previous versions of Romney’s many personas was actually quite moderate. But to accept this premise, one would effectively have to believe, “Maybe every word Romney has said over the last four years about his agenda and worldview has been a total lie, and he’s secretly a sensible centrist.” In other words, let’s trade a pragmatic progressive president for a Republican who *claims* to be a conservative, but who might possibly turn out to be shamelessly lying to the entire country. Romney *says* he’ll be super right-wing on everything from the economy to the judiciary to foreign policy, the argument goes, but maybe it’s all just an elaborate, half-decade-long ruse.

That seems like an awfully big risk to me.

What’s more troubling about Casey and Gerry’s posts is that they seem to assume that the Obama record of accomplishments is thin and underwhelming. That’s wrong.

If you had told me three years ago that Barack Obama, after 32 months in office, would:

• pass an $800 billion stimulus that ended the recession
• pass a breakthrough health care reform law 100 years in the making
• enact Wall Street reform
• rescue the auto industry
• repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
• pass a terrific-but-overlooked student-loan bill
• ratify the New START treaty
• pass the first overhaul of food-safety regulations in 70 years
• pass new consumer protections against the credit card industry
• expand stem-cell research
• and add two solid new Supreme Court justices,

I (and a lot of lefties) would have been doing cartwheels. If you then told me at the time that Obama would also get Osama bin Laden, withdraw troops from Iraq, and oust Moammar Gaddafi from power, all within the president’s first 32 months in office, I would have suggested saving room on Mt. Rushmore.

But if you had told me at that time that all of this would happen and liberal voters would not only be apoplectic about Obama’s perceived failings but would also start eyeing Mitt Romney as a credible alternative, I would have said that you’d clearly lost your mind.

And there’s a finer point here too that’s largely overlooked. Voters don’t just elect a president — they elect an executive branch and an expansive regulatory bureaucracy. Under a Democratic president, that bureaucracy works towards progressive ends — on everything from consumer safety to worker rights to the Justice Department’s prioritization of civil rights cases — while the exact opposite happens under a Republican president. Almost no one even realizes the importance of well-below-the-radar governance, but in countless ways that affect millions of Americans literally every day, it matters.

I get frustrated by the Obama administration sometimes too. But suggesting that handing a radicalized Republican party even more power might not such a bad idea because Romney was sort of moderate once upon a time is not a reasonable position for sane people to hold. You’re smarter than that.

It’s actually a lot like the stuff Dr. Tanzeem Choudhury was working on when I interviewed her for a Technology Review video back in 2008. In fact, when I first read about the Fitbit (thanks to friend-of-Candleblog, Robot Kasten), I assumed it monitored other sorts of telemetry too, like your heart-rate, skin temperature, the local barometric pressure, etc. As Dr. Choudhury showed me, with those additional data points and some clever software, you can learn all sorts of fascinating stuff about how you’re living your life day-to-day.

The implications for this sort of technology are pretty amazing. Yes, it can encourage us (through a combination of social-networked peer pressure and sheer geeky awesomeness) to live healthier lives, but it can also keep us honest with our doctors when they ask us how active we’ve been since our last visit. It can tell us other unintended interesting things, like how often we have sex and for how long. I can imagine Fitbit data being subpenaed in legal cases involving violent crimes or even car accidents. And this is just one data set involving an accelerometer. Imagine what these things will be like with microphones and video cameras gathering data and generating reports about our activities. Now imagine all that data searchable via an engine like Google (searchable by you — nobody is forcing you to publish this data, though there is a privacy can of worms here too, obviously) — how useful would that be?

What did I eat for dinner last week? click. What was that book the guy at the coffee shop recommended a few days ago? click. What was it my boss wanted me to do again? click. How many calories did I consume in 2012 compared to 2011? click. How many times did I ride the elevator last month vs. taking the stairs? click. What percentage of my life is spent sitting in front of a screen? I dare not click.

When we look back at the lives of our parents and grandparents, we see them through photographs, letters, maybe some home movies if we’re lucky. From here on out, the definition of what we mean by “history” changes. Future generations will have more data about the lives of their progenitors than they will know what to do with. What will your data stream say about you?

This is merely intended to be an emblematic example. The dumbness of this film is too deep to contemplate. Seriously. It’s blisteringly stupid. I lost brain cells watching it. It follows a narrative logic than insults anyone over the age of eight. I hate Michael Bay for this. I truly do. Fuck that guy.