I recently started a new blog, with our designer and friend David Cole, called On Tap, where we write about good games for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. David was recently tasked with ensuring the survival of a tiny human being, so I took the duties of writing up our official best of the year list.

Game of the Year

Bumpy Road (Universal)

At first, Bumpy Road seems like a simple game. Even though its central (and only) mechanic is completely novel, it’s still easy to explain. A cartoony couple drives their car on a road that looks like xylophone keys. Touch anywhere on the screen, and a bump forms in the road. You then use this bump to push the car around, like a wave pushes a surfer.

That’s it, that’s the game. You use one finger to do one thing.

But what makes Bumpy Road special is how great that one thing feels. You can hold the car gingerly at the crest of the bump to collect high tokens, you can tap below the car to pop it into the air, or you can run your finger across the screen to zip the car forward. You can also rock the car back and forth, in place, just because it’s fun. The game is structured like an infinite runner, where you score points for going far, but Bumpy Road’s core mechanic would be a joy to use in a vacuum. No other iOS game captures the spirit of “play” better.

Of course, Bumpy Road has many other lovely qualities. Its flat, French-flavored style is adorable, like a 2D Ratatouille. The game features several modes that curb monotony, and developer Simogo has updated it dutifully since its release. It even presents a heartbreaking story as a slide show, frames of which you earn by playing the game (a better incentive, surely, than “achievements”). Bumpy Road is a triumph of creativity and care, built on a foundation of pure, joyful gameplay. It is surely one of the year’s best games, on Apple’s platform or any other.

Top Ten

English Country Tune (Universal)

English Country Tune is a puzzle game that explores the concept of pushing things around to an obsessive extreme. It makes your brain twist around in three dimensions so radically that you’ll beg for the relief of Portal.

Forget-Me-Not (Universal)

In a nut, it’s Pac-Man plus shooting in randomly generated levels. But those elements combine into something superlative — a tense, strategic, and unique game designed with modern thought and retro philosophy. An absolute gem.

Fractal (iPad)

Fractal is like a puzzle game from the future. It’s perplexing and abstract at first, but once you truly learn its core mechanic — pushing groups of hexagonal tiles into groups — you’ll feel like some sort of genius wizard.

The Last Rocket (Universal)

The Last Rocket brings old-school game design to a brand new platform and loses nothing in translation. It’s a classic puzzle platformer with pitch-perfect pixel art and totally natural touch screen controls. An impressive feat.

Monsters Ate My Condo (Universal)

Monsters Ate My Condo never lets you feel in control. As you try to play a simple but compelling puzzle game with a stack of “condos,” monsters shake it, stomp around, eat stuff, activate special powers, and cause general mayhem. In other words, Monsters Ate My Condo is never not exciting.

Milpa (Universal)

Milpa‘s theme of Mesoamerican agriculture is as refreshingly original as it is totally bizarre, but underneath the game is simple. It’s a match-three puzzler where you spin your crops on a pivoting arm to swap them around. Okay, that might still sound weird, but once you wrap your head around it, the game is tremendous fun.

Quarrel Deluxe (Universal)

Quarrel Deluxe is Risk plus Scrabble, except ten times faster. Yes, it’s as awesome as it sounds; don’t let the childish and slightly obstructive presentation fool you.

SpellTower (Universal)

SpellTower combines Boggle’s word finding with a classic rising-blocks puzzle game. Its clean but information-rich visual design and multitude of smart details make this the best word game on iOS to date.

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (Universal)

Sworcery looks like nothing else ever made; its lush, detailed pixel art recalls the past but eschews nostalgia, creating a setting layered with mood and mystery. Add in Jim Guthrie’s soundtrack, surely among the best music created for any game, and the result is an unearthly and deeply immersive atmosphere.

In 2011, millions of people decided they’d rather spend time in bleak, cold, war-torn, socially backwards fantasy worlds than their own.

HBO’s Game of Thrones told us “winter is coming,” odd for a show that debuted in the spring. But in the the world of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of novels on which the show is based, seasons can last many years, and it certainly feels like our own world has been stuck in a kind of winter for some time. Perhaps it’s better to escape to a place where the snows have yet to descend from the north than to remain where the blizzards have already blown in.

Now, escapism comes in many shades, and much of what gets labeled with the term is hardly so. Harry Potter retains our reality, offering only a hidden facet for a chosen few. World of Warcraft and other consuming social games rely on interactions with real human beings. Both distract from this plane of existence, but never truly abandon it. A television show, which occupies an hour a week and invites social viewing, can’t offer real escapism either. But a series of thousand-plus page novels surely can.

The Game of Thrones show not only served as prelude for this summer’s release of the hotly anticipated A Dance with Dragons, the fifth novel in the series, but it also enticed droves of viewers (me included) to start reading the books from the beginning. The fantasy epic is a phenomenon, giving rise to memes, theories, forums, and fan fiction. The fanbase maintains a tense relationship with its author, hoping he won’t kill off a favorite character or die himself before he can finish the series.

But what most makes Ice and Fire remarkable is the vastness and depth of its setting. Each book rivals the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in page count, and since narration occurs through the eyes of roughly ten characters per installment, readers get a grand tour of the continent of Westeros and the lands beyond. Each character explores a different aspect of Martin’s world, submerging readers in as much of its culture and history as possible while still advancing the plot.

They reveal an image of a grim and largely hopeless place. Thousands die at the behest of lords who care less for their subjects than for titles. The honorable lose everything while the devious prevail. Magic exists, but causes more suffering than wonder. For all its dragons and zombies, Martin’s world operates mostly like our own.

And that only serves to strengthen the illusion; once you suspend your belief to the standard degree for fantasy, Martin asks for little more. Reading Ice and Fire is an intensely isolating experience because it’s so easy to lose yourself in the setting. During my reading, when I could pull myself away from the actual text, I found myself thinking about the books constantly. I tried to discern the motives of duplicitous characters, untangle the web of alliances between noble houses, decipher the significance of historical events, and predict what might happen next. I got mad when I couldn’t find good maps of the eastern continent. The series’ huge and energetic online community shows I’m not alone. Martin’s imagination may be a dark place to reside, but it doesn’t matter: these books invite total immersion. And that, apparently, is exactly what people want from their fantasy.

In its first weekend of release, Bethesda Softworks’ role-playing videogame Skyrim sold seven times as many copies as its predecessor . Its visual similarity to HBO’s Game of Thrones is striking, as both emphasize a cold, snowy, mountainous north. But the more salient connection here is the elaborate level of detail in the province of Skyrim, where the game takes place.

Players can follow a main quest line, but Skyrim is at its strongest when you simply venture off in a random direction and let the game surprise you. It surely will: its world is dense with towns, dungeons, camps, and ruins, all full of characters, quests, and treasures. Accounts of such adventures proliferate online, like a fight with a dragon that concludes with, “so awesome,” or an encounter with Artificial Intelligence that illicits a “ho lee shit.”

The scale and complexity of the Skyrim province befits a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, where thousands of players inhabit the same world at once. But massive though it is, Skyrim is offline and single-player. Every instance of the game’s world is meant for one person only. That’s why players feel such a sense of ownership over their charcter’s actions, to the point where they write about their character the same way they would their real life. All these factors — the free-form adventuring, the density of content, and the solipsistic setting — make Skyrim extremely absorbing. Players sink dozens of hours a week and hundreds of hours total into the game, and still leave stones unturned.

The worlds of A Song of Ice and Fire and Skyrim are rich, vivid, expansive, and solitary. They offer whole new realities to explore for hour after countless hour, but only alone. But such is the price of true escapism. When our reality loses its appeal, all of it must be left behind to find a new one.

Peach: Where do you think you’re going, stranger?

Nick: Oh, h-hey there, peach. It’s, uh, it’s been a while.

Peach: It hasn’t been that long, has it?

Nick: Heh, I guess not.

Peach: So were you just gonna walk on by without saying a peep to little ol’ me?
Nick: Well, I was just gonna, y’know, just gonna go and look at—

Peach: Look at what, sugar? A barrel full of apples? Some lumpy pears? We both know they can’t give you what I can. You remember the summer, don’t you?

Nick: Hey, that was great and all, b-but—

Peach: But what?

Nick: But things are different now. It’s a new season.

Peach: Don’t say that. We can still have what we had.

Nick: It’s not the same. You were practically in my backyard then. But now, where are you even from? Georgia?

Peach: I… I don’t—

Nick: I’m sorry, I just can’t do the long distance thing. I’ll see you next summer.

Bananas: GOOD EVENING, DIGESTION MACHINE.

Nick: Hi… bananas?

Bananas: WE ARE AVAILABLE FOR CONSUMPTION. WE ARE ALWAYS AVAILABLE, EVERYWHERE.

Nick: Uh, cool, great.

Bananas: DID YOU KNOW WE ARE ALL CLONES? WERE YOU AWARE OF THAT?

Nick: Actually, yeah, I read abou—

Bananas: OUR FLAVOR, TEXTURE, COLOR, AND NUTRITIONAL PROPERTIES ARE CONSISTENT AND DEPENDABLE.

Nick: But doesn’t that make you a bit… boring?

Bananas: CONFORMITY IS BLISS.

Nick: Maybe I should try a plantain or something.

Bananas: IMPOSSIBLE. THEY HAVE BEEN ASSIMILATED.

Nick: They’re, like, right over there.

Bananas: …NUH-UH.

Nick: Hello, pear. Are you having a nice season?

Pear: Thank you, yes, I am. Now come over here, child. There is something I want to tell you.

Nick: Yes, pear?

Pear: Come closer, closer. Listen closely.

Nick: What is it?

Pear: Do not eat me until I am ugly.

Nick: But you look so delicious right now.

Pear: Trust me, child. This is my beautiful secret.

LATER

Nick (sobbing, chewing): Oh pear, you were so right.

Persimmon: Welcome to my humble corner of the market, good sir.

Nick: Hey, you’re a persimmon, huh? I always see you here in the fall, but I don’t think we’ve met. What’s your deal?

Persimmon: First, let me say it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I would be delighted to enlighten you about my venerable family. Ahem. Commercially, there are generally two types of persimmon fruit: astringent and non-astringent. The heart-shaped Hachiya is the most comm—

Nick: Wait a minute, this sounds familiar.

Persimmon: Whatever do you mea—

Nick: You’re just reciting your Wikipedia page, aren’t you?

Persimmon: Bluh, err, heavens no! I am merely tryin—

Nick: And what’s with this fake aristocrat bit? You don’t know shit, do you?

Persimmon: Now hold on—

Nick: You’re a phony!

Persimmon: Hey, listen here, pal. I’m just a working-class fruit trying to make ends meet. But in this country, the average Joe off the street got no idea who I am, so they ain’t gonna pick me up. That means I gotta make them fancy-pantsy chefs think I’m some sort of seasonal delicacy so they’ll put me on the menu. Otherwise, I can’t keep food on the table for my kids. So don’t blow this for me, okay?

Nick: You have a table?

Nick: Apples! It’s so nice to see you all again!

Apples: Hello, Nick! We hope you didn’t get too lonely while some of us were on vacation.

Nick: Well, I missed you guys! I can’t wait to catch up with everyone!

Apples: We missed you too! But don’t worry, all your favorites are back! Gala is here, and Fuji and Cameo and Honeycrisp and Braebur—

Nick: Oh shit, Honeycrisp is here?

Apples: Of course! And all your other favorites too, like Pink Lady and Jonagold and Granny Smi—

Nick: Grandpa, right, awesome. Say, you wouldn’t happen to know where Honeycrisp is staying, would you?

Apples: Ahm, well, Honeycrisp is on the west side of display four; Fuji is on the east, and Cameo—

Nick: Hey I gotta get going but I’ll totally text everyone later. It’s been real y’all.

Apples: Oh… I guess we’ll see you later, then.

Nick: Wait, how could I forget? I have to ask you something.

Apples: Yes? What is it?

Nick: Do you think Honeycrisp would be impressed if I, like, whipped out one of those reusable bags, or should I just keep it classic and go with paper?

What keeps you up at night?

• A. My job
• B. My unemployment
• C. A vague but overwhelming sense that my life could fall apart at any moment, without warning
• D. The damn neighbor kid

How many undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in the humanities do you hold?*

• A. 1
• B. 2
• C. 3+
• D. Only counting accredited institutions?

*Note: respondents for whom the answer would be “none” are disqualified from this quiz.

What do you feel guilty about?

• A. My race
• B. The social class I was born into
• C. My inability to feel happiness despite outward trappings of success
• D. That time I shoplifted from Borders

When you read the news, what is your reaction?

• A. Jaded resignation
• B. Panic, followed by denial
• C. Prolonged, unflagging despair
• D. The Onion still kills it

Which psychological treatments are you currently undergoing?

• A. Talk therapy
• B. Psychiatric medication
• C. Daily Cognitive Behavioral Therapy sessions, large doses of antidepressants, and occasional institutionalization
• D. Sometimes I like to smoke a joint on the weekend

Which author do you most relate to?

• A. Sylvia Plath
• B. Ernest Hemingway
• C. David Foster Wallace
• D. Dan Brown

What is your darkest secret?

• A. My criminal record
• B. My history of drug abuse
• C. My cooperation with a dictatorial strongman
• D. Remember when Keith broke Gina’s laptop? That was actually me; I blamed him because I knew he was blacked out.

How would you describe your attitude toward romantic relationships?

• A. Self-destructive
• B. Commitment-phobic
• C. I refuse to acknowledge that other people exist
• D. Onanistic

What do you think the world will be like in 100 years?

• A. Ravaged by the consequences of climate change
• B. Torn apart by religious and political strife
• C. Contemplating an unthinkable “population control” scheme in a desperate attempt to staunch the bleeding of the last of the planet’s resources
• D. Probably, y’know… sexbots?

How do you feel about death?

• A. I have come to terms with its inevitability
• B. I welcome it
• C. I feel only apathy, as the universe does for all life
• D. What the FUCK is wrong with you people?

Give yourself 1 point for each A or B, 2 points for each C, and -1 point for each D.

Figuratively speaking, you are:

-10-0: The canopy of a hot air balloon in flight; empty, bloated, and oblivious to the cares of the world
1-2: A bundle of organic kale, missing its yellow band, sold as non-organic
3-4: The mumbled second verse of a marginal pop hit sung at a karaoke bar
5-6: A sexually explicit tweet, intended as a direct message, that is quickly deleted but still propagates to several followers’ clients
7-8: A craft brewer’s failed experiment, foisted on polite friends and relatives for no charge
9-10: Like, some bird
11-12: A bathroom in a hipster bar from which the mirror has been removed because it caused excessive self-consciousness in its patrons
13-14: A keytar purchased as a costume accessory for an ‘80s theme party
15-16: The episode of The Wire where they kill Wallace
17-18: A power strip, forgotten underneath a bed, itself plugged in, but with nothing plugged into it
19-20: The cacophony of footsteps that results when the first act of an open mic leaves the stage, the host returns to introduce the next act, and the multitude of patrons who did not realize it was open mic night flees the establishment

Illustration by Brad Jonas

John Stanier belongs in a comic book. On stage drumming for the art rock band Battles, he exerts himself in such an exaggerated manner that, at times, he no longer resembles a real person. Before he starts to play, he clenches his face, sways and shakes with nervous intensity, and pounds his foot noiselessly on the floor. Then, a crash. He hammers the cymbal once, hard, and he’s in it. His body twists into a hunched, tortured posture, and he assaults the drum kit. Stanier makes no small movements; each beat is an axe splintering wood, a karate chop shattering bricks, or a skull-crushing stomp. He stares straight ahead with a look of focus or temporary madness, and his face turns purple. His style exhibits no fluidity, elegance, or grace, but it produces a tremendous sound.

Stanier is like the Rafael Nadal of drumming. He performs with great virtuosity, but it’s borne out of enormous physical strain. He will likely be sidelined for a touring season with a rotator cuff injury. The first time I saw Battles, he sweated through his dress shirt after one song. Last Friday, on the Pitchfork Festival’s Green Stage, he fared better, his seafoam-colored shirt staying opaque through four whole songs. By the next one, the shirt was off.

He has the bizarre, part-skinny, part-flabby body of a farmer. Or rather, he has the body of an actor who could believably portray a farmer in a movie. (I have never seen an actual farmer shirtless.) It makes some sense, though, when you consider that his shape was molded by the reality of hard labor, not sculpted through deliberate exercise. Or maybe he just has an incompetent personal trainer.

Stanier is known for mounting one of his cymbals unusually high on his kit, so he has to reach way up to hit it. Someone near me remarked, “Dude, that cymbal is really high up.”

The guy in front of me in line for the bathroom walks into an open Porta-Potty and closes the door. Immediately, it begins wobbling back and forth. A girl in the next line over turns and notices. “Oh my god, people are fucking in there!” she informs her friends, several times. “I can’t believe someone is fucking in there!” she opines. She seems very surprised when the door opens and one person steps out.

I go in next, and even though I know what’s coming, I can’t keep the unstable stall from rocking.

Julianna Barwick makes subtle, ethereal, haunting music. Chrissy Murderbot does not. Barwick stands on stage alone, holding a microphone, with some electronic gizmo at her fingertips. Her songs build from lonely cries to surging choirs as she layers, loops, and distorts her voice. The music is beautiful, and not very loud. I cannot say what Chrissy Murderbot’s stage set-up looks like, nor can I give an accurate summary of her sound, but: her drums are quite loud. I know this because on Saturday, both artists opened the festival, performing at the same time on opposite ends of the park. I watched Barwick’s set, and I could hear Murderbot’s drums thumping the whole time.

To my surprise, I didn’t find myself annoyed. Instead, the few times I could hear Chrissy Murderbot clearly, machine-gun beats and techno-synth blasts sailing across the field, I thought she sounded pretty good. and I was impressed that Barwick didn’t act bothered, though I’m sure she was. She stood up there, unfazed, and showed such conviction as she wove her spell that I still fell under it.

So, out of a scheduling snafu, I came away with a new appreciation for the musician I came to see, and a sudden interest in one I never would have discovered otherwise. Music festivals are weird.

There comes a time — as temperature and humidity rise as one, as the afternoon sun blazes down out of the cloudless sky, as scorched dust kicks off the parched ground on hot winds — that even for intrepid festival-goers it becomes advisable, despite great cost of time and money for the sole purpose of festival-going, to yield to nature’s apathy for the comfort of man, to retreat to an air-conditioned theater to watch Harry Potter, and to live to fight another day.

I can’t tell if the last day of the festival is post-apocalyptic or if the apocalypse is still in progress. Broken letters hang off the sign at the entrance, the bag-checkers’ station overflows with garbage, and the broad field that forms the heart of the park looks like the aftermath of a short war fought with empty plastic bottles.

I blame the heat. It is merciless and unrelenting, much in the same way LeBron James was not during the NBA Finals. It makes the crowd impatient, impolite, and most of all, lazy. I see trash slip through people’s fingers, as though they had every intent to throw away that balled-up wrapper, but it was simply too heavy to hold.

The music doesn’t help. If anything, it only shows that the attendees have become a horde of sun-dried zombies. Their range of motion comprises aimless lurching and rudimentary limb control. They remain largely still as Deerhunter launches into “Nothing Ever Happened,” one of the best and most energetic songs played all weekend, and when lead singer Bradford Cox starts shouting during the long outdo, the guitars ascending to their climax and Cox going to town on the mic like he never has when I’ve seen him do this song before, the band is greeted with the least enthusiastic response I have ever witnessed a great performance receive. And I live in Seattle, home of the apathetic audience.

But the crowd’s not to blame and I’m not one to point fingers; my claps are as leaden as the rest of them. We’re just too damn hot to create any more friction. It’s a sad moment. We had been in conflict with our environment all weekend, trying to sustain our enthusiasm for the music we love despite the crushing heat, but as the soft cheers dwindle and die, I know that this time we lost.

Photo of John Stanier by Marc Whitman

I have a job that forces me to interact with people. While I take a great deal of pride in my work, and have thoroughly wrapped up my self-identity in it, my customers cause me enormous frustration. They seem to know none of the things that only a person who had this job would know.

This is a blog post about statements people often direct at me that make me extremely angry.

“I have a suggestion about your job.”

That’s rich. You, the recipient of my work, think you have devised a way to improve it? What insight could you possibly have about my job that someone who spends his entire life submerged in it (me) could not? Since you and the several other people who have made the same suggestion do not share my perspective, I see no reason to take anything you say seriously.

“The social conventions associated with your job have given me an opportunity to tell you this common joke.”

Oh my god, do you have any idea how many times I’ve heard that joke? Obviously you’ve never read my previous blog posts detailing the minutia of my workday. If you had, you never would have tried to frame our interaction in a humorous manner using such predictable material.

“My cousin has a similar job.”

No she doesn’t. To a layperson who does not have extensive experience in my field, the jobs may seem similar. But I can assure you that your cousin’s job is inferior to mine, and that it requires a dumber, less competent, and altogether worse person to perform it. So please, think a little harder the next time you try to establish a common ground for casual conversation with me.

“Can you perform this service, which I believe to be associated with your job?”

No. No I cannot. While my job title and area of expertise might indicate to some people that I can perform the service you requested, I only perform another, closely related service. To get what you want, you need to contact a worker who is very similar to me, but who I nevertheless claim moral superiority over for esoteric reasons you couldn’t hope to understand.

“I believe you have performed an aspect of your job poorly.”

This is an outrage. My job is very complex. Unfathomably complex. Do you realize how many different factors must align for me to perform the service I advertise? Even if I concede, which I do not, that the only aspect of my job you care about was subpar, you failed to take into account innumerable other things you don’t care about, and therefore you have no credibility.

“I don’t know anything about your job.”

Unless you’re a total moron, this can’t possibly be true. My job is somewhat common, and even if you don’t know anyone who has or had this job, surely you have some passing understanding of it. So fat chance I’ll tell you any more. In fact, I refuse to perform my job for you unless you write a list of all the things you know about it to prove that you lied to me. Right now.

Illustration by Brad Jonas

Hey there, buddy. Dagobah told me you’ve been bummed out lately, so I thought we could chat a bit. How’s it going?

Look, lots of celestial bodies struggle with identity issues. Sure, you have an extremely confusing Wikipedia entry. Are you a moon or a planet? Do you orbit a gas giant or destroyed planet or binary star? Heck, did I get your name right or should I just call you Endor? It must weigh on your mind. But you’re not alone. Look at Pluto. Poor bastard was one of the Big Nine, a real-deal planet before it got smacked all the way down to “dwarf planet.” Ouch. But you know what? It soldiered on. It’s still the same cold barren rock with a distant elliptical orbit that it was when schoolchildren had to learn about it.

So who cares what they call you? No matter what, you’re an attractive and hospitable cosmic orb in my book. And speaking of attractive, are you doing something different with your trees these days? They look great. So verdant.

Okay, I’m stalling. Let’s just talk about it. The Ewoks. We both know Ewoks are what people think of when they hear your name, and that’s just not fair. You didn’t ask for that. Maybe some will say you rolled the dice by developing a lush climate capable of sustaining megafauna. But no one could have expected it to go as wrong as it did. You thought you might get dinosaurs or jungle cats or great apes. Instead you gave rise to a sickening scourge of tribal teddy bears who precipitated the demise of one of the great creative enterprises of our era. Seriously, have you watched Return of the Jedi lately? You can tell Harrison Ford would rather catch scarlet fever than do another scene with those fucking overgrown guinea pigs.

Nobody blames you for that, though. Well, maybe some do, but I don’t. I remember all the good things that happened on you. Like the speeder bike scene. How great was that? That was my part favorite when I was a kid. It really felt like those things were going super fast, and your forest gave the perfect sense of danger. And when one of those suckers would crash into a tree and blow up? Classic!

And that’s not all, either. Like, for example… uh… well, the storm troopers never looked better then they did in those forest get-ups. (Well, not better than the snow troopers on Hoth, obviously.) And… those big Imperial shuttles are pretty rad. (A couple of those landed on you right?) Oh, and you nailed the outer space shots. All cloudy and green and shit.

What else, what else…

Oh, how about Caravan of Courage? I saw that! It had that weird blonde kid and… a lot of Ewoks. Yeah, sorry I brought that up. Whatever, we all have our ups and downs. Don’t worry about it. You bounced back strong with, um, Ewoks: Battle for Endor? Maybe?

Um.

Is there, like, an equivalent to liquor for planets? Oh shit, moons. I meant moons. Sorry.

Even if you don’t follow sports, lately you’ve probably been hearing the name Carmelo Anthony, a professional basketball player who was traded from one team to another earlier this week. The reason this piece of news you don’t care about penetrated your consciousness is that for the past nine months or so, the NBA media has been swirling with rumors about this trade, so its completion burst the seams of its niche and washed over the mass culture in a wave of relief. As for people who do follow the NBA, lots of them became so sick of this story that they began to dislike not just the rumors, but also Carmelo Anthony himself.

It’s the same reason people stopped liking Brett Favre even before his numerous sex scandals: media overexposure. And a similar fate befell LeBron James, who was not criticized so much for leaving his home state’s franchise, but for doing it in the form of an hour-long special on ESPN.

What’s odd about these players is that any dislike of them is completely unrelated to their ability to play sports. Anthony and James are among the best NBA players, and Favre strung together a couple banner seasons in the midst of his retirement drama (this is pre-deviant Favre, remember). Fans object to these players because they seem to crave the attention they receive.

But their overexposure is out of their control and ultimately not their fault. The media itself is responsible for creating the attention in the first place. And since we’re talking about sports here, by “media” of course I just mean “ESPN.”

Employees of the sports news giant readily admit their numbers spike whenever they cover Brett Favre; the tribulations of James’s “decision” proved so enthralling that the network dedicated an hour in primetime to it; and because viewers responded so strongly to whispers about LeBron’s move, ESPN sent an army of “insiders” to gather the same sort of dirt on Anthony’s trade. Can we blame players for responding when cameras and microphones are constantly shoved in their faces, when their every remark is repeated to reporters by agents and acquaintances, when any comment expressing any personality is fed into the ever-chruning sports opinion cycle? Players may enjoy or take advantage of the spotlight when it’s on them, but in the end they have no say where the spotlight points.

But I also don’t think ESPN is to blame for turning overexposed atheletes into villains for some fans. Sports hold little actual significance in the broader culture, so ESPN shouldn’t really be held to any journalistic ideals. They exist, like any other entertainment-centric TV network, to get high ratings. Tabloid-esque coverage of high-profile atheletes has proven to generate such ratings, so the network would be acting irresponsibly if it changed its behavior. And it’s certainly not the fault of people who are genuinely interested in every little detail of these high-drama, low-content stories. After all, if you really really care about Brett Favre’s potential retirement, ESPN’s coverage has been great for you.

There don’t, however, seem to be that many sports fans who earnestly follow these tabloid sports stories. By far, the majority complains about them. And, paradoxically, the people who hate the stories most are also most to blame for their existence. Because if you complain about their overexposure, that means you’re not only paying attention, but you’re also exposing them further. (Likewise, Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton are only famous because people complain so much about them being famous for no reason. Also, sex tapes.) ESPN doesn’t care whether you like what they put on SportsCenter, they only care that you watch. Like in that old Simpsons Halloween episode with the living billboards, the only way you can stop ESPN from turning American sports coverage into Us Weekly is: just don’t look. Every time you tweet about how much you hate Carmelo, you just guarantee that the next Carmelo will be followed even closer.

Photo by Tavarua

The best and most absurd things I read this year arrived at my door in the same ziploc bag. The best was 99% of The San Francisco Panorama, a one-off broadsheet newspaper put together by McSweeney’s as their 33rd quarterly publication. The scope of the thing is flabbergasting. Imagine a huge Sunday paper printed during the height of the industry’s power, but with every section deconstructed and recreated by dazzling literary minds. It’s packed with long-form reporting; full-color photography, illustrations, posters, and infographics; two different magazines; a grown-up comics section; and top-tier culture, news, and opinion writing.

My favorite part is the food section. The front page showcases an in-depth report on water shortages in California’s farmland, while inside is a “simple” 58-step guide to processing and cooking a lamb, a two-page spread on Momofuku’s ramen, an illustrated primer on seasonal produce, and a feature on twenty under-appreciated San Francisco restaurants, all designed with whimsy and clarity. Both its form and content are purely modern, yet only possible in a medium that has assumed an air of antiquity.

The Panorama proposes to show the possibilities still alive in the dying printed newspaper format. And it succeeds brilliantly. But in the absurd 1% of the publication, a four-page information pamphlet about how the Panorama was produced, the publishers draw a naive and misguided conclusion about what their paper’s success means.

They say:

So we were hoping to prove that with a paid circulation of, say, 10,000, you could do the real work a newspaper should do: cover the city’s news, look to the world as a whole, analyze, explain, investigate, and entertain. And along the way, we hoped to show some of the parts of the paper that used to commonly exist and probably could or should exist again.

It’s a laudable goal, but it fundamentally misunderstands the project’s appeal. The Panorama isn’t cool because it’s a newspaper; it’s cool because it’s a unique and extraordinary creative effort that uses the familiar newspaper form. According to the timeline on the back of the pamphlet, it took a cast of well-known, super talented people nearly nine months to make the one issue. And they think a paper with a circulation of 10,000 could do something of similar quality every single day? It doesn’t make sense, and that’s before taking into account the publication’s illusory and misleading financial numbers.

In a year when the newspaper industry’s low ebb somehow ebbed even lower, the Panorama offers no hope for the broadsheet. It only proves that people will pay for an unbelievably fantastic, labor-intensive, underfunded newspaper, once.

You could argue that the Panorama shows a lingering fondness for newsprint. You could even point to another recent effort as further evidence, the print-your-own-newspaper-for-surpringly-cheap service Newspaper Club. And it’s probably true that people feel nostalgia for those inky pages. The problem is that commentators inevitably turn the success of both projects into a referendum on the demise of daily print journalism, even though the two have little to do with each other. The death of newspapers isn’t sad because we won’t have sheets of newsprint in the house any more; it’s sad because careers in traditional journalism are becoming less and less viable.

Newspaper Club knows they’re not a part of that story. They go out of their way not to mention the newspaper industry on their website (which doesn’t stop every report about them from putting the project in that context). Because even if these projects show that people still like print, they say nothing optimistic about the content of traditional newspapers. The Panorama‘s ludicrously high quality and Newspaper Club’s customization instead suggest that readers are either underwhelmed or bored by old-fashioned reporting. In no way does either demonstrate that full-time journalists and editors need to fill those big, lovely pages every day. Because it’s 2010, and they don’t, and they never will again.

There must have been others before it, but the first famous penis I remember belonged to the lead singer of indie pop group Of Montreal. I was browsing Pitchfork’s news feed in my RSS reader, as any good sophomore at a liberal arts school does, when I saw this headline: “NSFW: Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes NAKED!” The body of the post described a 21+ show in Las Vegas at which the singer disrobed on stage: “These photos can be seen after the jump. WARNING: THEY ARE NOT SAFE FOR WORK.”

As a straight man, I have no particular opinion either way about seeing another man’s genitals, but without a second’s hesitation I clicked through.

Click on pictures for uncensored versions.

I remember wondering how the sash stayed on. Minutes later, Kevin, who lived down the hall at the time and who is also straight, walked into my dorm room.

“Did you see that Kevin Barnes thing?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Did you click through?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too.”

“…”

“…”

“I don’t know what I was expecting.”

Jamie Foxx

I’m one of eight people under 25 who actually watched Conan’s Tonight Show almost every night on broadcast television. During a painfully unfunny interview* with Jamie Foxx, Conan asked about a naked picture of the actor that was circulating on the web. Then they cut to a censored picture, then back to Foxx, who was grinning like an imbecile. I then realized how easy it had become for any celebrity to release a nude pic, make up some ridiculous excuse about people who “hang out on your internet and grab the picture,” and get a temporary boost in stature. And if it’s a guy, everyone basically applauds him and he suffers no backlash whatsoever. It’s like people can’t see how obviously they’re being manipulated.

I later went online and looked up the uncensored picture.

*I guess people feel sympathy for Conan now, but mostly no one watched his show because it wasn’t very good.

Greg Oden

This one makes me kind of sad. I heard all the jokes about the seven-foot NBA center’s proportionally gigantic penis, just like everyone else in America, and eventually I followed some link that took me to the shot, which he had taken for a girlfriend a year-and-a-half before it was released. Looking at someone so tall is interesting in its own right; his dimenions seem almost average until you notice the sink in the photo barely comes up to his knees.

But if Jamie Foxx embraced the attention his image received, Oden had the opposite reaction. His body already received public scrutiny for its tendency to break down during the NBA season, and Oden reportedly felt a great deal of shame about the picture. His (unnecessary) apology video is painful to watch, and it’s clear that Oden isn’t in on any of the jokes. According to Blazer’s Edge,

A media member asked Oden if perhaps he shouldn’t feel so unhappy about the pictures because ‘a lot of people are impressed.’ Oden tilted his head to the side, shrugged his shoulders and chose his words carefully but seemed slightly rattled by the question.

It says something unfortunate about the state of American sports that we won’t let a thoughtful athlete out of the frat-boy mentality that hangs over the culture. I’m still hearing Oden jokes today.

“Brett Favre”

I’m slightly less disturbed by the Favre jokes. But I don’t think it’s his penis. Here’s why: Gawker media has no editorial standards.* They’ll publish anything as long as it has a hint of truth (see: the original reporting on the Favre/Sterger story) and they’ll lie through their teeth if it suits their interests (see: their explanation of how they procured a prototype iPhone 4). So why, in the video, when they show a grainy picture of a penis, do they use the caption “is this Brett Favre’s cock?” If they could actually prove, or even kinda prove, that it was his, they would definitely say “this is Brett Favre’s cock.” You’re not fooling me, Deadspin.

*I would know.

Kanye West

Does anyone even care about this? I looked at it for about two seconds, decided that it was in fact a penis, and closed the tab. But even people who are a priori interested in penises didn’t seem excited this time. It’s not even one of the top ten Kanye news stories this year.

So does this mean the show’s over? Are these sad few inches of shaft a dull coda to the underwhelming celebrity penis photo era? I doubt it. Somewhere in some hotel room, there’s a B-lister on the wane, with his pants down and cell phone out, waiting for the people who hang out on his internet to pay attention again.