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OK, this is only a year-in-review post because I was really bad about posting my music and gaming loves during 2012. Too busy? Not enough stuff? Hard to say.

What a year in hip-hop I had! First and foremost:

Spotify: I've written about it before, but once I moved over to Tokyo I gave in and did something I swore I'd never do: sign up for a subscription music service. It has made fantastic sense living here, since $10 a month gets international and mobile access, aaaaaand my phone has truly unlimited data transfer. 

It's also way cost-effective for how quickly I've started consuming music. I remember in high school when a single burned CD would stay in my car stereo for months at a time. I'm pretty sure every note to every early Incubus, Telepopmusik and The Avalanches album is planted firmly in my head. 

Now? It's a new album on heavy rotation once in two weeks. Incredible. I'm almost concerned that it's skewing the economic value I place on a musical album. 

So where have I ventured off to? Mostly in search of a jazzy hip-hop beat. I'm amazed at how prolific some of Nujabes' old collaborators are. Check it:

Funky DL: This cat drops albums like he's hungry. It's seriously like more than once a year. Tons of beats, tons of rhymes. Starting in late 2011 I had Blackcurrent Jazz 2 on heavy rotation in my car, and that album has followed me around for a lot of nights out. It's pretty awesome the whole way through. For more hotness, check out The Lawshank Redemption instrumental collection. The latest, NANE, isn't my thing, but DL is active on Facebook and is promising a new album pretty soon.

Substantial: Another Nujabes collaborator. A talented MC that could be described as mellow, mature and deep - both in voice and personality. I personally think he shines the most when collaborating with other DJs, but his new one Home is Where the Art Is has such an intensity of message that it's hard to pass up. Don't miss the tracks "Spilled Milk" and "Check My Resume":

Marcus D: Oh. My. Goodness. People. Go listen to Marcus D. Constant awesomeness and atmosphere from this guy's beats. Last year's Melancholy Hopeful is hard to argue with, but I'm possibly more partial to his earlier one, Shoshin. The guy's a legit Japan freak and spends time in Tokyo collecting old-school 8-bit games. 

Substantial and Marcus D: As a duo known as Bop Alloy, these two are the peanut butter and chocolate of hip-hop. The whiskey and Coke. The … ok, I'm out of amazing combinations. Still. Marcus D's beats and Substantial's vocals make for some of my favorite stuff I've come across in years. You need these two tracks in your life:

For the times when you're about to paint the town red:

For the times when it's so dark outside that it turns you dark inside:

I hate myself for not being 23 anymore when these guys came to Tokyo a few months ago. I just could not stay awake for a show that started after midnight. That settles it: I'm taking time off work next time.

Kero One: I've followed this Korean-American hip-hopper with a deceptively svelte voice since a visit to Tokyo's Tower Records in 2009 introduced me to the track "Welcome to the Bay." I've reviewed his albums before, and his last album didn't quite do the job for me. But 2012's Color Theory is back on form. 

Want to fall in love? Put on this little jam:

Dela: Oh man, so much atmosphere. So perfect for a year that sometimes seemed a little.. desolate. The catalogue is a little thin, but the original Changes of Atmosphere is definitely stuck in my head somewhere. The exemplary track is a collab with Talib Kweli:

Think Twice: I finally found an album on Spotify I had been looking for: a live-instrument hip-hop album from the beatmaster of Specifics. This one's a little off the beaten path. Maybe it's better for jazz lovers who are open into wading into hip-hop. Start with this little funky number:

Hmmm, 2012 wasn't good to me for gaming. I spent most of the year without any appreciable hardware. But I finally snapped up a Nintendo 3DS (which will get its own post soon). Spoiler alert! I adore it.

I've also finally picked up a new computer with a discrete 3D card. I'm taking the opportunity to catch up on my Blizzard releases. Pretty sure I'll fail my challenge to myself to finish the first StarCraft II installment campaign before Heart of the Swarm comes out, but at least I'm staying in character: I'm still a terrible RTS player!

Otherwise, gaming is just too much in a state of transition to really settle into any rhythms. It'll be great to get back on a rental service in a year or two and fly through a catalog of 2012 and 2013 releases.

Happy 2013, peeps!

2012 wasn't that bad - I had a roof over my head and food on the table and full-time employment, and a lot of people didn't - but relative to my expectations and goals it wasn't satisfying at all.

Still, I survived, and I've spent my holidays celebrating that accomplishment. 2013 looks much better on pretty much every front: career, financial, enjoyment, gaming, travel, you name it.

I've never been much of one for resolutions, but over the last year I learned a bit about goal-setting and how to do it properly. So, here's a specific checklist of stuff I'm dying to do this year:

-Snowboarding and hot springs in Hokkaido

-Visit Korea or Taiwan

-Scale Musivu

-Attend the F1 Japan GP

-More nights out with the boys from work

-More nights out in somewhere Tokyo

-Play more games

-Some misc. professional goals that wouldn't make sense outside our intranet

Let me know if you'd like to join me!

Also, there's a couple things I do less of now, or would like to do less of:

-Instant messaging. The closures of AIM and MSN this year were signs that that era has ended. Living in the wrong time zone means nobody's online when I get home from work. And when a message does come, it's a live conversation, which often is more inconvenient than it used to be. 

I just got a new machine and I'm (probably) not installing Adium on it. My phone now does a much, much better job of IM-style conversations, and I can do it at my own pace. IM is dead. Long live smartphones!

-Facebook. I'm an obsessive user. It's time to go out and make action happen, rather than sit and watch the screen and wait for it to happen.

Pictures from the end of 2012 coming soon!

Since the first time Steven Colbert said the word, I've been obsessed with truthiness. That 3 minutes of satire - hell, those 3 syllables - has set the entire tone for the Colbert Report and also spoke a lot of truth about the United States in 2005, in the deepest depths of the Bush administration.

I'm going to skip the entire chapter about how sides selecting their own facts has come to dominate American culture, election cycle, blah blah blah.

While it's easy to say all the blah blah blah of truthiness is deplorable in the public square, it is totally awesome in my private life.

In fact, the fellow pictured in this post is actor Jeff Daniels. In a different context, however, the man in the picture is Will McAvoy, the character Daniels plays on The Newsroom, drawing from someone not unlike Keith Olbermann: equal parts TV blowhard and Edward R. Murrow. 

Daniels is truth; McAvoy is fiction.

He has a Twitter account. To clarify: McAvoy has a Twitter account. @WillMcAvoyACN speaks with his own voice and interacts with real people on Twitter. 

There are a few other "people" like him on Twitter: @JoshuaLyman, @Toby_Ziegler, @Bartlet and @sam_seaborn, to name a few.

Indeed, there are entire casts of Aaron Sorkin TV shows on Twitter. 

On Twitter, this is nothing new. Inspired by Fake Steve Jobs, CEOs and celebrities have had shadow Twitter accounts that exist entirely for parody. Hence the Verified Accounts feature letting you know when a Twitter handle really belongs to the famous person in question.

But whereas the parody accounts are simply parodies, these Sorkin characters break the fourth wall in an incredible way. They're convincing. The characters behave on Twitter exactly the way you'd expect them to, based on the shows. @sam_seaborn speaks in short, pithy sentences. @JoshuaLyman yells at Donna across Twitter (OK, that one's a little cheesy). @Bartlet speaks with the authority and poise of a former president (which he would be today), with subtle biblical references sprinkled in. They humorously needle each other and they respond to real-life current events like the 2012 election debates.

None of them are Verified Twitter accounts. But you wouldn't want them to be, because it would break the illusion. Under the way Twitter runs that feature, a Verified mark would give away that the account is purposely manned by HBO or NBC. And if it's manned by a Hollywood studio, it's for promotional purposes. And if it's for promotional purposes, it's cheesy and lame because it's being written by an intern who got stuck on the social media desk because they're the youngest person there.

Yes, if you pull away the smoke and mirrors, it's almost certainly a Sorkin fan writing tweets to entertain fellow fans. But the same applies to any entertainment: The West Wing was just Martin Sheen walking around and saying things in an authoritative voice. The smoke and mirrors can always be pulled away, but sometimes we willingly go along with it.

We allow suspension of disbelief to enjoy the great stuff Sorkin writes. And now there's a compelling case to allow it in our very real Twitter feeds every day. This is big.

Jeff Daniels is truth; Will McAvoy is truthiness.

Back in last fall, I had the pleasure of becoming a part of 3DayStartup, a 72-hour pressure cooker that sees people of all disciplines create and pitch companies in a single weekend. 

Coming off a contract gig at a startup, I had had some exposure to what's generally known as a startup incubator: an invitation-only space where companies come together, get some funding, share common resources and advisors and try to land a round of venture capital money.

This isn't an incubator, despite the presence of the common space, attendance by invitation, Important People as advisors, access to money, or common resources in the form of free Web hosting and productivity software.

It's more like a pre-incubator, or an audition round for an incubator. Perhaps the rock stars of this weekend could go on to interview for a real incubator. In fact, a few 3DS alumni have gone on to join the ranks of the great incubators like TechStars and Y Combinator.

But perhaps it's even better to drop the seriousness and look at it as a fun weekend for the entrepreneurially curious, a hiring opportunity for the individual rock stars, and a pressure cooker that comes with a demo day and some serious sleep deprivation.

I'll share my own 3-day diary to give you an idea of what I went through. 

Pitch competition: Somehow, 40 people turning up with 40-ish ideas have to whittle down to a suitable number of projects to work on. 

We first split into ten 4-man rooms, where people produce ideas and settle on a consensus idea to bring back to the big room. In my room, 4 ideas are produced. Two ideas from clueless young undergrad business majors quickly get thrown out, and it's down to a deadlock between myself and a talkative MBA named Dan. Personally, I felt pretty sure that my idea was better, but the guy was damn persistent. Our room takes by far the longest to settle the debate, even with a whole stack of Austin-area entrepreneurs coming into the room to hear the advice. It's a dead tie. Out of exhaustion, I intentionally blink first just so we can get back to the big room and hear everyone else's pitches.

The pitches are, for the most part, ehhh. One idea has all the pieces in the right place. Some ideas are really intriguing but lacking in technical answers, like a crowd-sourced amateur record production platform. Others, like the ones pitched by the UT Law students, are founded upon legal loopholes, are cut-and-dry, but will make money if they're legal. Others are completely lacking in direction and clearly have no business logic behind them. Within this crowd, the CEO of the aforementioned Austin-area entrepreneurial crew pulled me aside and asked why I'm not pitching.

1. Why the hell did I give up?

2. Who cares if the rules said one pitch per room?

So I sent a quick email, with CEO guy's endorsement, and got squeezed onto the tail end of the pitch contest in front of everyone. Everyone else got 5-6 minutes to pitch, and I got about 2. I still pulled it off pretty well, had a lot of interest signaled, and got compliments on the presentation throughout the weekend.

(Note - I still have my slides but won't post them publicly. Let me know if you want to see them!)

Next up was voting. Everyone lowers their head and closes their eyes and then raises their hand when their favorite idea gets called out. The top 5-ish ideas, out of 10-ish, will actually see teams formed immediately afterwards. 

I make it in just under the wire, and after people go to their desired teams, I'm suddenly de facto leading a startup of 7 people and Demo Day is in 48 hours. Dear God.

I go back to the house where I'm crashing and spend a sleepless night thinking about what I'll assign this ragtag team of people to do in the morning.

I come in around 9am a total mess from being sleepless the night before. Some people went home earlier than me, others later. My team is scattered, but as soon as I come in the project dies. 

A couple of girls stayed up doing more market research and found that other startups existed doing what I had proposed. With that, interest and morale had fallen behind the wayside. They ask my permission to leave, and given my lack of technical people I grant it and disband the project.

1. "Some projects die. Some get revived. It's 3DS" - various 3DS veterans (paraphrased) 

I wasn't disappointed. In fact, I was more relieved at not having to lead the project without a team lacking in hard skills. I relished knowing I could just float through the day, do some good work to help someone else, and sleep that night rather than spend it sleepless prepping for Demo Day.

So I floated onto ReQwip, a new idea that had been born overnight by Dan, the guy who had generated the deadlock the night before. While his old idea made little sense, the new one tapped his many connections in sports to create a peer-to-peer marketplace for used sports gear. So while the deadlock had been completely unnecessary, I was glad to see that he had gotten behind a better idea. 

I occasionally visit other teams on breaks and find two big things.

1. Hackathons with young people will tend to attract "sexy" ideas, such as music- or photo-related, over ones that have solid business plans. The young people will move toward those ideas, so your idea has to be sexy if you want those people to work on it.

2. Too many cooks. Some teams just got way too big and went off in five different directions at once, depending on which clique you talked to. Sure enough, their Sunday pitches were materially the same as they had been on Friday and there was no prototype to show off.

3. I need to learn how to sleep when stressed.

Satisfied with my work, I call it a night early on and crash.

After a good night's sleep, I come in a bit before noon. Demos will happen around 6 or 7pm, so we have the afternoon to get it together. 

The demo isn't really coming together, but we start squeezing together something serviceable (with help from lots of advisors roaming the halls). 

The founders - who are starting to sound serious about taking this thing to market after the weekend ends - ask me multiple times to present, given how well I had done it on Friday. I insisted that the CEO present, since he's going to be the one eventually asking for funding. I know it'll produce ugly results, but he needed to have that failure to learn from.

Sure enough, he does fail. He crashes and burns during Q&A. It was cringe-worthy being on stage at the time as part of that team, but it was for the best. 

At the end of the whole shindig, there are some traditions that exist only for 3DS participants. I'll keep up the mystique - and not cause any trouble - by staying quiet. I will say that they're a meaningful reward for having survived the weekend with your brothers in arms. 

With several months' retrospective, reQwip launched. Two other projects launched, too: an online pet boarding reservation service (which had been the good presentation) and a daily deals site for photographers, which had pivoted out of one of the bad ideas.

I can also say that the experience is worth it, especially for those who don't have access to the serious stuff going on in Silicon Valley. Hackathons may be everywhere, and they may not be special. But this one has a greater sense of long-term value, networking and camaraderie. I'm still connected to the global 3DS family and they may become a valuable network in the future.