Yeah, it's a not-uncommon white European last name. There's a theorist in my former field of science named Steve Park. For years I pictured him as an Asian man, until a 60-something white dude with a mustache gave a seminar one day and I was VERY CONFUSED.

Dooo eeeeet!
Appropriate, also, since I finally bought it after hearing Tom Francis (of Gunpoint fame) praise it to high heaven constantly.

^__^
One note about Invisible Inc: it has *very* customizable difficulty settings, so if something seems too difficulty / too easy, it can easily be changed. Re: pacing, some folks have found the standard campaign too short, though the new DLC has mitigated this a bit (and made it a LOT harder). Personally, I like it…

Yeah, it took me a LOT of failures before I finally finished Regular. Playing a Custom setting which was Regular + level reloads helped a lot, actually, in teaching me how to play the "harder" levels (and geez is that last level hard!). The character and starter program which unlock when you finish Regular make it…

This is the #1 game this year I wanted to love, but just couldn't click with, mostly because of the pacing. On the one hand, the long times between islands helps create a fantastic feeling of loneliness and isolation. On the other hand, geez is it slow. I looooove the writing and worldbuilding, but once I read the…

AAA releases left me mostly cold this year - while I enjoyed Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3 for the time I spent with each of them, open world fatigue caught up with me eventually and I finished both of them far sooner than I thought I would. Meanwhile, most of my favorite things this year were old things (modded KOTOR2…

*Nods in approval at your excellent taste!*

To be paired with this terrifying MIDI-ization of All I Want For Christmas Is You:
http://staff.tumblr.com/pos…

Speaking as a scientist who's an atheist but generally speaking respects religion and is really bothered by reddit-y STEM-fetishism and uncritical "Fuck yeah science!" culture:
A) I really enjoyed The Martian and found its optimistic focus on the the triumph of international cooperation and scientific ingenuity in the…

*Sigh*, I would give my left kidney for another season of Hannibal…wait no-

Yeah, I liked large parts of it (mostly, uh, the sexy parts), but I felt like I had gotten as much as I really wanted to out of the show, and things after that could only either become depressing or aggravating. See the awful rapey bits the episode after the wedding (which I also watched, and then went "nah".)

I would like to know the answer to this question as well. I assume it means "Gritty ambitious prestige drama that we have to talk about because it's HBO even though it's actually not necessarily that good?"

The Southpark comment sections even on this website seemed like a weird basement leak from the reddit facility next door.

iZombie is persistently fantastic.

Oh man, I need to get back to Outlander at some point. I stopped watching right after the wedding with the expectation that THE STORY WAS OVER AND NOTHING BAD WAS GOING TO HAPPEN TO ANYONE NOW OKAY.

Oh, decidedly. Though they're still unbelievably strong on comedy (Silicon Valley is on my list). Netflix had by far the more interesting and exciting docket this year otherwise.

Unsorted things I felt strongly about this year (in a good way):
Hannibal
Penny Dreadful
Sense8
Silicon Valley
Jessica Jones
Master Of None
Daredevil
iZombie (EDIT because I horribly forgot it and do love it so)

It's not my number one (which would be Hannibal), but Sense8 is decidedly on my hypothetical top 10 of the year, for its pure joyfulness. It's only rivaled by Parks and Recreation in its sheer optimism.

*Cries a tiny tear for Dredd.*

String Theory is still the ultimate "purely theoretical" boondoggle (they CAN'T be proven!), but sterile neutrinos are a good deep cut. I worked on regular neutrinos until recently, and the whole experimental sterile neutrino field is basically "We did a half-assed experiment to find sterile neutrinos. We didn't…