Just Some of the Things We Liked in 2013

Whatever kind of year it was for you or for everyone, the stuff it gave us was plentiful, and not all terrible. Like, that mysterious photograph above. Or these things below—some of which may be especially reflective of this interesting moment in time. Or may simply be worth considering as you prepare to stare down another pile of new things. —Alex Pasternack

Space Oddity by Commander Chris Hadfield: Self-explanatory. It has everything. Badass dude. Badass song. Badass backdrop. Badass. Plus, NASA's PR revival, even as the private badasses take over the baddest launch pads in Florida. Space is cool again (again). —Alec Liu

Drone-launching eye shadow: artist Katia Vega's refreshing take on the wearable technology thing involves metallic eyelashes and eyeshadow, which completes a low-voltage circuit, and which she's used to fly a drone. Also important: the make-up that makes you invisible to drone cameras. —Victoria Turk

Silicon Valley blues: By George Packer's New Yorker telling, Silicon Valley is the new Wall Street. But way worse because they still believe their own shit smells good. Somehow, they haven't yet realized that everything we do still just amounts to messaging, looking at maps, taking photos. It's still just computers on a network, both of which were invented by governments, Britain and the US respectively. "You didn't build that." At what point does the tech scene become self aware enough to realize that they only care about making money? Which is fine. Just drop the "changing the world" crap. Because, barf. —AL

Crazy Ants: According to the Times, they're unstoppable. They love electronics. They're crazy. WTF. Is there some Darwinian-like biological reflection of ourselves here? Some sort of interspecies karma, given our impact on the environment and animals? Evolutionary fitness of surviving creatures are subject to the parameters we allow, right? Sort of like rats in the city. Who knows. —Alec Liu

Bitcoin grew up: “So 2011,” an insider, one of a few big fish in what is still a tiny pond, said of the new attempts at building exchanges for everyone's favorite cryptocurrency, when I went to the Bitcoin conference earlier this year. There’s no shortage of minnows taking the bait, however, eager to claim their share of a growing $1 billion pie. Beneath the cushy camaraderie I could smell an undercurrent of ruthless, sometimes desperate competition. As my colleague Derek Mead told me, “there’s blood in the water.” —AL

The megaphone that reads "nobody listens" tweets in the forest: Rachel Knoll's bummer megaphone "Listen & Repeat" is at turns darkly comic, poignant, and downright tragic. Even, in the context of Adam Lanza, scary. Also important: Real-time Wikipedia sonification, which I return to daily, no kidding, to chill the Fear (listen/view at http://listen.hatnote.com). The rise of animated snowfalling features. Fuzz, by Ty Segall's Fuzz project. Microdosing. —Brian Anderson

"Party at the NSA" (Remix): Who (but Spotify) knows what music the government's most elite hackers listen to? Skrillex, probably, maybe a bit of Nas. Still, YACHT set out to make a song the NSA couldn't ignore, which meant making a microsite (PartyAtTheNSA.com) where the MP3 could be downloaded in exchange for pay-what-you-want donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They boosted the signal by enlisting the comedian Marc Maron, who has previously partnered with the EFF to fundraise against patent trolls, to shred a guitar solo on the song. That helped fuel the Stop Watching Us protest in DC, where they played the song. It's a good song and it benefits work that matters in probing the year's biggest revelations. —AP

Silver Wilkinson, Bibio: so nice and chewy and organic but electric and demanding but also ambient, and at times, relentlessly poppy. (Read an interview with Bibio.) —AP

Computer Chess: I asked Andrew Bujalski how he decided to follow up his mumblecore arrested development films with a documentary-style yarn about a 1980 computer chess tournament shot on a primitive video camera. It was the result of a dare, he wrote back.

This whole thing was kind of a leap off the cliff. It just had to keep going and going and going. It was a long-time fantasy project, thinking about how to earn a living, I would run off to a fantasy place that was this movie. Anyway, during a conversation with a friend a few years ago, he dared me to write a treatment for the film in two weeks. I did it, I wrote ten pages, and that was right before my son was born. Then I had a kid and my memory was erased. The project got marooned. I had a bunch of actors I needed to cast for a period piece and an experimental camera that we had to invent.

And the rest is fake, weird, funny computer nerd history. Watch it here. (And read Tao Lin's interview with Bujalski here.) Also important: Adam Curtis vs. Massive Attack,a [mind-twisting tour of late 20th c. capitalism / documentary-triphop concert](http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/adam-curtis-massive- attack-review). (Read an interview with Curtis.) —AP

Google Street View mapped Machu Picchu, Chan Chan, and the Galapagos Islands: Google continued to take people all over the world without making them leave their living rooms. The Street View team finally got permission to map the Galapagos Islands and Machu Pichu, two of the South America's most highly-regulated sites. —JK

Streaming sports: As part of their buyout of Premier League soccer licensing in the US, NBC streams every single EPL game online. I finally have zero reason to keep cable. It totally revolutionizes the viewing experience. You can watch highlights during the game on-demand and much of that is now being complemented by online platforms, communities like reddit (which is beta-testing a new feature for live updates specifically for sports subreddits). On screen anchors are being replaced by online volunteers. GIFs everywhere. Pre/post-game analysis. Live discussion with regular/repeat fans around the world. Twitter: In a way, it's come full circle finally. One of the main reasons I really got into watching soccer as an American was because of YouTube. Then, one of the only ways we could watch it live was through illegal streams. Now, Americans have easier access to English games than… the English. —AL​

"Jack and Ellen": a radio story by the ever inventive Love and Radio podcast, about one woman's pursuit of the art of pursuing pedophiles online, for the purposes of blackmailing them and earning a better living than that afforded by, say, "sandwich art" at a Subway.  —AP

Upstream Color: After watching Shane Carruth's new movie (he directed and starred in it, produced, edited, personally filmed, and is self-distributing it), the video started playing again (it was a streaming version), and in the middle of reaching for the spacebar, I stopped myself and just let it play. It was like the dream that startles you like thunder in the middle of the night, and the one you need to return to in order to figure out what's happening and what happens next, or just feel it wash over you. Symbols galore, beautiful stuff, chemistry and botany and piglets—all bewildering, frustrating at times, tedious too. Enchanting, and not for any reason you can easily detect. The music, which Carruth also wrote, is a big part of wanting to go back. Listen below, and download it all at Shane's site. —AP

This gif from Upstream Color:

Pocket: With this app and bookmarklet I can save most web articles to my phone in a nice readable format, saving my eyes and my sanity, and I can read them even when I'm underground or out of range. I’m looking forward to the new Longform app, which I’ve heard will be like Twitter for articles, and from only the people you want to hear from. Sometimes, I prefer that kind of promise to, say, jetpacks. Also important: http://cachemonet.com. —AP

High Frontiers: The beauty of a mushroom—and its many deep and hidden connections to so many other amazing things—is the sort of topic that sends Claire Evans (yes, the singer of the NSA song above, and editor of the OMNI reboot) off into space, surfing on streams of clear, glistening, trippy sentences. She's compiled some of those, in the form of essays about science, art and technology—some of them for Motherboard—into this slim volume. You can get the paper or e-reader versions. —AP

The Dismemberment Plan returned: and with a new album called Uncanney Valley, which I spoke to them about. Also important: Blackfish and the discussion it sparked about animal cruelty (and the changes, like India banning cetacean capitivity), the first lawsuit to challenge terrible ag-gag laws, and the idea of tangible gifs. —Lex Berko

Wickr: Call it ephemeral texting as the perfect antidote to NSA snooping. Self-destructing text messaging that uses Perfect Forward Secrecy encryption, and actually deletes messages, unlike Snapchat. I call them the Trystero of digital communication. (I recently [interviewed the founder](http://motherboard. vice.com/blog/wickrs-self- destructing-communications- take-aim-at-surveillance-and- skype).) —DJ Pangburn

The Olinguito: For a couple weeks in July, this tiny guy, a distant relative of the raccoon, stole the world's attention by becoming the first carnivorous mammal discovered in the Americas in more than 30 years. Since then, researchers have identified a new(ish) jungle cat and tapir. —Jason Koebler

Drugs: Good news for anyone who likes drugs—according to a report released this year, heroin, cocaine, and marijuana are cheaper, more potent, and easier to score than they've ever been. —JK

FOIAs: Whether they like it or not, we learned a lot about the government's behavior and misbehavior this year—both through various leaks and through the thousands of new Freedom of Information Act requests those leaks inspired, like those that are helping to form the basis of the Drone Census. —JK

The Dirties: How do Americans talk about school shootings? They debate gun laws. How do Canadians talk about school shootings? They act them out in improvisational, low-budget comedy films. Well, at least that's how Matthew Johnson and Owen Williams went about it in The Dirties. Johnson recently talked about the little groundbreaking film (which I've watched three times in 2013) with Patrick McGuire, and about guns, bullying, and a shortage of youth voices in the discourse. "I fully expect older people who haven't seen the movie and just hear about it to be really disgusted and think it's this tasteless awful young filmmaker trading on the issues of the day to try and make a popular film. I'm fully prepared for that. But I hope that doesn't overwhelm that the fact that the movie is in many ways fun and about young people trying to be themselves." Also important: Vine. [Gifmelter](http://motherboard. vice.com/blog/gif-your-own- adventure-with-these- interactive-net-paintings). —Dan Stuckey

Shooting a gun out of a helicopter: which I did while testing out a laser-guided rifle, and more conventional experiences, like snowboarding in Wyoming and wakeboarding in Arizona. Also important: I really like my Nexus 5 telephone. The screen's big enough to read books on, and it was cheap enough to stay off a phone contract, which totally suck. I usually wait five years before listening to an album so I don't have to listen to other people talk about it, but the best albums this year were the self-titled Run the Jewels and FIDLAR albums. My favorite overall? Windhand's doomsaying first record. —Derek Mead

Dysnomia: The new record by the Brooklyn-based trio Dawn of Midi is about time: "an expression of the fractal unfolding of the present, demonstrated through rhythm,” bassist Aakaash Israni said. And while it shimmers and beats with the heavy influence of computerized pioneers like Aphex Twin or Can, the band plays acoustic instruments only. —AP

Amani, Zach, Eric, Tatiana, Andrew, and Arseniy: our wonderful interns this year—a year in which we got a magazine for and by interns, and a year in which the American unpaid internship finally began to unravel. —AP

Music videos from the uncanny valley: 

"Water Me" by FKA twigs. Directed byJesse Kanda.

"Bound 2" by Kanye; directed by Nick Knight.

"IFHY" by Tyler the Creator. Directed by Tyler the Creator (Wolf Haley).

"Boring Angel," by Oneohtrix Point Never. Directed by John Michael Boling. —AP

NEVERSHAKEABABY: a helpful child-rearing tip from the NSA, in the form of one of their strange codewords for surveillance programs and methods (whatever this one refers to is still a secret.) —AP

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