Kung-Fu Panda 2: Completely Rad! Po the Dragon Warrior Panda is full-on in a sequel I’d been waiting eagerly for. The story wastes no time throwing Po neck-deep into hordes of kung-fu fighting jackals. The bad guy has discovered gunpowder, and is intent on conquering China with his (beautiful!) fireworks of doom. The ending kindof sets itself up from the beginning, but I thoroughly enjoyed the ride. A special shout-out to the animators of Master Viper – contorting a line with boogly eyes into a deadly kung-fu master took exceptional talent – she’s definitely my favourite of the Furious Five. A lot of the film is set in the evening, I suppose to make the fireworks really pop – but it results in a few of the big battle scenes being uncharacteristically muddy. The first film had really amazing layouts, but I found this one a bit harder to read some of the time.

Tangled: Cute and Fun! Adrian and Sara and the kiddos lent us Tangled to watch while we were at the in-laws place, and it was pretty sweet! Super great animation and production design. Storywise, it starts out strong as a fish-out-of-water, escape-from-the-tower adventure and ends up becoming a sappy but weird romance – Fynn is literally the first man she’s ever met and she’s all bonkers for him. The soundtrack isn’t quite as memorable as in previous Disney franchises, but it was pretty good.

If I was keeping track of these things – and I’m not – I’d make note of another weird instance of Disney Princess movies being about escaping from your (usually awesome if overprotective) parents to hook up with some handsome boy (usually a criminal) you barely know.

Cowboys vs Aliens: An effective waste of time. Trapped on the flight to Winnipeg I finally got around to watching Cowboys vs Aliens. While it had it’s moments, it was mostly disappointing – the aliens flew millions of light years to steal our gold, fly around abducting people, and getting into fisticuffs with cowboys. The weird thing is that I’m totally open to watching an hour and a half of this, but there was so much garbage plot cruft piled on top – resurrecting alien ladies and gang politics and a delinquent son – and not a single pew-pew laser-gun high-noon standoff in the whole film.

Also – dumbest, aliens, ever – they use something like a nuclear strike on a bunch of cows, but run around punching the cowboys to death while barking like dogs. Intergalactic conquerors?

Crazy, Stupid, Love: Mildly Depressing Fun! Ryan Gosling shows Steve Carell how to be smooth with the ladies following a divorce that blindsides him. Caught this one with Natasha on the flight back home, and enjoyed the weird cocktail of depressing humour. It was pretty amusing considering the exceptional amount of time the main characters spend looking miserable. I have a slight beef with the way the film shakes it’s finger at the kind of adult relationships it portrays – almost like it’s working at cross purposes. This guy is divorced! I’m not sure the ex-wife who dumped him has any right to harangue him for spending time in the company of consenting women.

The odometer in my 2003 Kia Rio reads 66666 today – the mark of the beast! The end of days is upon us! Someone call an exorcist!

On a less theologically cataclysmic note, this demonstrates how little we use the car – it’ll be 9 years old in a few weeks, putting my annual driving total just under 7500km. Not that you’d know it from the outside: there’s no rust, but we’ve got a few good dings in the body panels and the tires are nearing the end of their lifetimes. So long as everything keeps running smoothly I’m happy to drive it for another 9 years, but with its resale value sliding down below $2000, the minor fixes are starting to add up to a large fraction of the car’s value. It’s weird that we have a system where a perfectly usable vehicle can be more costly to maintain than it’s worth.

I’m hoping we get 10 smooth years out of it, and by then I’ll be prepared to start shopping for a new ride.

Prolific game designer Louis Dozois released his second game just before the end of the year, this time a card and dice game he calls Shake Out! which he self-published (very cool) through a service called GameCrafter. I really like this one!

The cards are laid out in a 3×3 grid, and each one features a goal set of dice. You roll a set of five (everyone has their own colour), and distribute your dice on the cards as you manage to match up patterns. Sortof similar to Yahtzee, but with a random assortment of challenges instead of a scorecard, and a more competitive feel.

The cards have different point values based on their difficulty, and you get a bonus for collecting cards of the same colour that make a set. The trick is that your neighbors can bump you off the cards if they get a better match, so the competition for cards gets pretty fierce. The whole thing plays in about 30 minutes, and it’s really easy to pick up – but the scoring system is complex enough to allow for some interesting strategies to evolve.

My strategy – losing very badly, involves rolling lots of snakeyes when I don’t need them.

All in all a very fun game that I’m happy to recommend. GameCrafter shipping is a bit steep, but you get a heap of dice in the box and a set of goal cards – they’re slickly designed and easy to read. Great game for kids and adults to play together, and rounds are over quickly enough that you can squeeze a few in during a gaming session.

It’s 2012! Happy new year!

I’ll wait for the formal introspection stuff until my 35th birthday on the 28th, when I plan to have a full-on mid-life crisis. But in general terms, 2011 was a pretty stellar year – one we worked pretty hard to make happen. I feel very lucky to have an awesome partner in life who works really hard with me to achieve our goals. We seem to be doing a lot of stuff right and making really good decisions, and they’re paying off with really exciting opportunities and experiences.

We made lots of amazing new friends over the past year who deserve a shout-out, kudos to the awesome people I hang out with who keep blowing my mind with their incredible accomplishments.

2012 will probably be mostly about fine-tuning things that are already working, and finding time to spend on cool people and projects. I’d also like to focus more on charity – my employer fosters a really altruistic work culture and I’m happy to run bake-sales until I’m blue in the face, but I’m really inspired by some of the “on-the-ground” work my friends are doing to help people and I’d like to somehow give more of my time and skills to the community. (Short of flying to Africa and starting a music festival – jeez louise you guys set the bar high!)

Have an amazing 2012!

Over the Christmas holidays I picked up and fiddled with my grandfather’s Rubik’s Cube between family visits and catastrophic shopping trips. I finally solved it last night watching TV with Natasha, after about 45 minutes of twisting. I’ll probably scramble it up again for my father-in-law – a solved cube looks nice, but it’s zero fun.

My friend Desiree taught me to solve cubes at Waterloo, where they had a competitive Speed-cubing team. (She’s waaaaay faster than me) The bottom half of the cube is easy to solve just by working at it, but there’s a couple of handy algorithms for cleaning up the tricky top corner cubes that are otherwise really frustrating to deal with. They don’t take a long time to learn, but recalling them years later took some doing.

Cool fact: The 3×3x3 cube has 43 quintillion possible arrangements!

I’ve somehow gone my entire life without ever shopping on Boxing Day, but this year Natasha wanted to pick up some off-season Christmas decorations and we had to return a sweater to the mall, so we braved it. Polo Park was crazy busy. There were multiple accidents on the streets leading to the parking lot. One of the escalators had broken down. There was a 50-yard lineup to get into LuluLemon. People were trampling the Xmas decorations at the Bay, and then:

A knife fight broke out, and someone pepper-sprayed the Apple store. As we were leaving I a grabbed a picture of the  police and fire unit who showed up to bring 3 people to hospital. Pretty sure I’m _NEVER_ going to go boxing day shopping again.

Got to spend a fantastic Christmas with Natasha’s family in Winnipeg – my favourite part of the night is rocking out with Ron and Uncle Jim on guitars while we all sing Christmas carols and eat cookies. Happy holidays!

Caught some deer out by the airport as we drove out to pick up Mom from work – and got a great panorama of Winnipeg while I was at it. Sorry if I’m reinforcing stereotypes – it’s not all fields, airports and grain elevators.

I finally got around to reading the much-talked-about Hunger Games Trilogy and really enjoyed them!

The series documents the life of Katniss Everdeen, a miner’s daughter in a dystopian future where the government annually selects children from the colonies to fight to the death in an arena as punishment for a failed rebellion. Katniss volunteers to save her sister, and gets pitted against 23 more kids who go on to brutally maim and murder eachother. It was shockingly up front with violence – a risky move for Scholastic Publishing that apparently paid off big-time. I don’t know how they’re going to present the arena scenes in the film coming out next year without going way over a PG13 rating.

Thematically it may be similar to the famously shocking Japanese movie “Battle Royale”, but it’s more character driven – we learn more than we often want to know about Katniss’ fear, failings and her increasingly pathological emotional boundaries while the tension constantly rises.

I’ve seen Suzanne Collins in interviews, and she looks like a nice person – but she seems to have a boundless capacity to torture and murder her characters. Given that it’s a story about government sanctioned killing games, it’s not spoiling anything to warn that predictably few characters make it through the entire series – it’s probably best you don’t get too attached.

It’s worth reading if you like dark science fiction. The first one was definitely the strongest, but the second book has some very cool ideas in it too. Meh on the third, but once you’ve read that far you might as well.

A bunch more things we’ve seen lately, if only to get that cow picture off the top of my blog newsfeed.

Our Idiot Brother: Sweet! Paul Rudd plays a chronically optimistic and naively trusting brother to a bunch of cynical sisters who are ignoring their problems, and as he couch-surfs through their lives he inadvertently destroys everything he touches. Not a really fast or deep film, but goofy and cute and sweet.

Happy Feet Two: Penguiny! For her birthday I took my god-daughter to see what may be the greatest dancing penguin film I’ve ever seen. There was actually less dancing than I expected, for a dancing penguin movie. I found the accents really difficult to understand through the first half, since you can’t really lip-read a beak. I can get behind puffins having an Icelandic accent, and even Robin Williams pretending (?) to be Latin-American given that some penguins live on the tip of South America. But how did that leader penguin end up with a Scottish accent?