I came back home from a night of drinking, and you’d think I’d just want to take it easy, but no, I was in the mood to do an episode of the Codex, and so here you have it. Since it’s the last episode of the year, I felt like it didn’t really make sense to play new music, so instead I cover some of my favorite tracks from film soundtracks of the past few years.

You can download the episode below, and find the playlist, or also subscribe to an RSS feed so as not to miss any future episode. The show is in the iTunes Store as well.

Codex 12 (36.6MB)

1. Sex Bob-omb – “We Are Sex Bob-omb”
2. Sondre Lerche – “Family Theme”
3. Wreckless Eric – “Whole Wide World”
4. Mulatu Astatke – “Yekerme Sew”
5. David Holmes – “165 Million Plus Interest (Into) The Round Up”
6. Stephin Merritt – “Epitaph for My Heart”
7. Karen O and the Kids – “All Is Love”
8. A R Rahman – “Paper Planes (DFA Remix)”
9. The Breeders – “Bang On”
10. Meaghan Smith – “Here Comes Your Man”

For some reason I’ve always avoided doing year-end lists of favorite things — I don’t really know why — but I just felt like doing one this year, and so here goes. Now, of course, this is all based on what I’ve actually seen/played/used/listened to, and so consider this a personal compilation of the favorite things I experienced this year in the world of media (it’s not a “best of” thing) — and note that it is limited to things that were released in 2010. Two categories that may be conspicuous by their absence are books and magazines — I just don’t feel like I read enough books to justify a proper list, and for magazines, I don’t have five truly favorites that come to mind.

So here then is my highly unscientific, truly subjective list of favorite media obsessions of 2010. Each category includes five items in alphabetical order (I think it’s silly to rank them in order), and I’ve occasionally included a few honorable mentions, things that I really wanted to have in those favorite fives.

FAVORITE GAMES
As you’ll see, my favorite genre tends to be RPGs (with a strong emphasis on action RPGs), and then racing games too. I could probably have done a separate downloadable game category as well, but decided to just put them all together.

• Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
• Fallout: New Vegas
• Mass Effect 2
• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
  
• Red Dead Redemption
• Honorable Mentions: Costume Quest, Fable III, Limbo, Heavy Rain, Split/Second
  

FAVORITE IPAD APPS
There are many more apps that I really like, but these are the ones that I use the most, that I have in my dock. I decided to only list iPad apps and not iPhone apps (same for games), since I do really spend a lot more time on my iPad, and my iPhone is just something I pull out when I’m bored waiting somewhere (most used apps on that would be Twitter, Instapaper, Camera, and listening to podcasts).

• Cloudreaders
• Instapaper
• NYTimes
• Reeder
• Twitter
• Honorable Mentions: Air Video

FAVORITE IPAD GAMES
I’ve kept this to real iPad versions of games only — I did play a hell of a lot of DoDonPachi Resurrection on my iPad, but it’s really just an iPhone release.

• Carcassonne
• Infinity Blade
• Plants vs. Zombies HD
• Robot Unicorn Attack HD
• Word with Friends
• Honorable Mentions: Highborn HD, Small Worlds, Space Invaders Infinity Gene, Canabalt, Puzzle Agent HD
  

FAVORITE TV SHOWS
This year was absolutely amazing for TV, and you’ll see that my tastes are definitely on the cable series side of things (Community is the only network show to be included) — that fact that you can be truly mature is one thing, and the shorter seasons (and so more focused storylines) is another.

• Eastbound & Down
• Dexter
• Mad Men
• Sons of Anarchy
• True Blood
• Honorable Mentions: Community, Treme, The Walking Dead, Louie, How to Make It in America, Bored to Death
  

FAVORITE MOVIES
This was difficult because I obviously haven’t seen a ton of movies that came out in theaters in recent months in North America, so my list could honestly have included movies that came out towards the end of 2009 as well. I know the two Mesrine films originally came out in France in 2008, but I felt like I could include them since they came out in North America this year.

• Cyrus
• Inception
• Mesrine: Killer Instinct/Mesrine: Public Enemy #1
• The American
• The Ghost Writer
• Honorable Mentions: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Kick-Ass, The Social Network, Exit Through the Exit Shop
  

FAVORITE ALBUMS
Music is also very difficult, since I listen to so much of it, and to such a variety — which is one of the reasons I started Codex — but I think I was still able to come up with a list of favorites, in part based on the “most played” count in iTunes.

• Record Collection (Mark Ronson & The Business Intl)
• Swim (Caribou)
• There Is Love in You (Four Tet)
• The Suburbs (The Arcade Fire)
• The Way Out (The Books)
• Honorable Mentions: The Social Network Soundtrack (Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross), King of the Beach (Wavves), Not Music (Stereolab)

FAVORITE TRACKS
Again, these are mostly based on the “most played” count in iTunes.

• “A Cold Freezin’ Night” (The Books)
• “Bang Bang Bang (feat. Q-Tip and MNDR)” (Mark Ronson & The Business Intl)
• “Happy Up Here” (Royksopp)
• “Threshold Apprehension” (Black Francis)
• “Odessa” (Caribou)
• Honorable Mentions: “King of the Beach” (Wavves), “Rococo” (The Arcade Fire)

FAVORITE COMICS
This was the hardest category for me, because I read A LOT of comics, and so it was hard to narrow it down to just five — and these five are basically the things that I could remember really liking — and the reason I don’t even include any honorable mentions is because it would be ridiculously long.

• Justice League: Generation Lost
• Richard Stark’s Parker: The Outfit
• Scott Pilgrim
• Sweet Tooth
• The Unwritten

I hope you saw the article recently on SNOW Magazine about the upcoming launch of TOO MUCH magazine, and if you didn’t, get to it. It’s the new magazine by Editions OK FRED — yes, OK FRED magazine is no more, but they have still been publishing one-off projects, and with TOO MUCH they return to the world of magazines.

And just as a reminder, the official launch happens this Friday (November 19) at HAPPA gallery in Kami-Meguro (pretty much between Yutenji and Nakameguro), and it’s also followed by a weekend event they’re calling the “Romantic Geography Biannual” — you’ll find more details here. One of the activities during the festival is a showing of Mike Mills’ Does Your Soul Have a Cold? on Saturday (November 20) at the Llove Theater in Daikanyama.

When the latest issue of Wallpaper came out, I posted about the plans to also release an accompanying iPad app featuring works by the issue’s two guest editors, David Lynch and Robert Wilson. Well, it’s now out as a free download, and you should go and take a look.

It’s quite simple as an app, but does what it should do well — give you some extra video content by each creator, with the only other extra a brief intro to who they are after you click on each name. Wilson contributes quite a few “video portraits,” but I was especially interested in Lynch’s section, which is comprised of a short that revisits the main character from his seminal film, Eraserhead.

Every time I hear that song (“In Heaven”) I can’t help but think of the great Pixies cover, which is still one of my favorite b-sides from them.

Here’s the first trailer — in the form of a TV commercial — for the upcoming live-action Space Battleship Yamato film.

Studio Ghibli has announced that it will be releasing a new film next summer, to be directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, an animator for the company (this will be his directorial debut). The film’s title is The Borrower Arrietty, and is based on the British story The Borrowers, “an enchanting story about miniature people living under the floorboards of a home.” Via Spoon & Tamago.

Satoshi Kon’s next film is called The Dream Machine, and unlike his previous complex and adult work (Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paprika, Paranoia Agent), is being described as a family-friendly film. Here’s what Kon has to say about the film (taken from this interview):

On the surface, it’s going to be a fantasy-adventure targeted at younger audiences. However, it will also be a film that people who have seen our films up to this point will be able to enjoy. So it will be an adventure that even older audiences can appreciate. There will be no human characters in the film; only robots. It’ll be like a “robot movie” for robots.

The film’s official site now reveals a few images from the film, including the one pictured above. Via /Film.

How’s this for a promotion: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds opens in Japan on November 20, and the distributor is offering a money-back guarantee during the first four days of release. This means if you leave the film within the first hour of the film, you get your ticket refunded. Not a bad way to promote the film. Via Japan Probe.

The next film from Mamoru Oshii (Patlabor, Ghost in the Shell, Sky Crawlers) is Assault Girls, a live-action sci-fi flick starring Meisa Kuroki — who I must admit I have a crush on — and Rinko Kikuchi. It’s a follow-up to a planned trilogy that started with the short “Assault Girl ‘Hineko the Kentucky,’” below. Via Warren Ellis.

Following the Live from Tokyo trailer, here are some more visuals from Tokyo, this time courtesy of Joan Jimenez.

Live from Tokyo is an upcoming documentary on Tokyo’s independent music scene, directed by Lewis Rapkin. And yes, that’s Marxy that you see pop up a few times in the trailer.