Most of my gifts over the holidays were books or gift certificates, so I have been on a media binge every since. Here are some of the more interesting consumables.

I’m Just Here for the Food, Alton Brown

I wouldn’t say that I’m much of a cookbook reader, but then this isn’t exactly a cookbook. Alton likes to discuss the science behind food, and he spends a lot of time debunking common misconceptions or coming up with creative ways of doing things. He covers searing, grilling, roasting, frying, boiling, braising, brining, and microwaving, as well as some details on sauces and eggs. Most of the techniques and recipes in the book are fairly complicated, but I like the fact that he provides a rational for every step. I probably won’t build a fire pit in the back yard — but at least I know why such a thing would be desirable. If you are interested in food, this is a fun read.

Bioshock

I finally broke down over break and installed Windows on my laptop using Apple’s Boot Camp. Ostensibly it’s to facilitate the C# development I need to do for my research, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered the gaming possibilities afforded by a dual-boot system. I’m not much of a gamer anymore, but I enjoy it from time to time, and Mac gaming situation has gotten progressively worse since the Intel transition.

I picked up Bioshock on sale for $25 on the strength of its reviews (and Wired’s piece), and I can heartily recommend it to fans of dystopian science fiction.

The game is set in the 1960s in an alternate reality where genetic modification has become commonplace. As the result of a plane crash, your character finds himself in the undersea city of Rapture, a sort

of Objectivist haven that allows people to pursue their interests without legal or ethical interference. Of course, things haven’t gone quite as planned, and you find the city in ruin and populated by twisted monsters addicted to genetic material.

Though the gameplay is fairly standard first person shooter fare, the setting and story are very well done. The voice acting is superb, and lends a great deal to the luscious art deco decor (think Batman’s Gotham City). The story seems to lag a bit midway through the game, but I’m hoping that it will pick back up.

All and all, it’s nice to see a game (an FPS, no less) with a sophisticated story that raises interesting ethical questions and is still fun to play.

Futurama, Season One

Like the Simpsons, Futurama was a formative show for many of my peers (it also shares writers with the Simpsons, and both were created by Matt Groening)

I was even more intrigued when I read a Wired article calling Futurama “The Geekiest Show on TV” and revealing that the writing staff contains a number of self-professed math geeks, many with PhDs in the sciences. As a self-respecting math geek myself, I had to check it out.

I got the first season, and I must admit that my reaction is mixed. Despite Wired’s proclamation, I’ve been somewhat disappointed with the “geekiness” of the show. I think my expectations were just too high. I was expecting xkcd, and got, well, the Simpsons. There are certainly some clever jokes, but there are also a lot of physical gags and thinly veiled scatological references.

I was pretty much ready to write the show off after watching the first half of the season, but I’m glad I didn’t. Once I stopped looking for references I started to appreciate the whimsy of the show. In some sense I had forgotten how to watch cartoons, and it took half a season to remember.

Futurama isn’t exactly a children’s show, but it does remind me of watching cartoons as a kid. Cartoon shows have a certain kind of creative freedom that other shows don’t, and it’s just kind of neat to see what the writers and illustrators come up with. A lot of the science fiction I’ve read/seen/played recently has either been dystopic or set in the near future, and it’s good fun to see a vision of the far future with flying cars and transport tubes and all the other stuff that the Jetsons promised us.

I’m not sure I’m going to rush out and buy the second season, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I pick it up somewhere along the way.

Blankets, Craig Thompson

I’ve long been intrigued by graphic novels, but I’ve read very few. I did read Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which tops pretty much every top 10 list I’ve seen, but I found it too preoccupied with the Cold War paranoia of the 1980s to really draw me in.

I decided it was time for me to try again, and this time I chose Blankets, another critical favorite. It’s a semi-autobiographical work about growing up in a religious family in rural Wisconsin that manages to touch on many of the coming-of-age themes. I sense it may be very generational in its appeal, but it’s beautifully written and illustrated, and it does a good job of portraying many of the trials (both real and imagined) of growing up.