Siskoid Awards 2023 - Technical Achievement Ceremony

As usual, the Siskoid Awards are followed by a Technical Achievement Ceremony, hosted by someone famous parallel to the main event, and by technical, we mean a grab bag of categories and jokes that would have made a mockery out of the actual ceremony.

And to host, someone who's deservedly doing great these last few years, between Russian Doll and Poker Face - Natasha Lyonne! That mess of curls, that smokey voice, that take-no-shit personality... she's exactly the sort of performer who say no to this fake awards show. But that's the great thing about fantasy... Ms. Lyonne? I hand it off to you. yes, you can have a drink on stage, let's Golden Globe this up.

Best role-playing-related product of 2023 - The nominees are...
5. Play Dirty (John Wick)
4. Designers & Dragons series (Shannon Applecline)
3. When Cosms Collide (Torg Eternity)
2. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
...and the Golden Typewriter Monkey goes to: Apex Predator (Torg Eternity). I have always wanted to inject a bit of Toontown into my Torg game, and have often included in plans that then didn't materialize. Fellow gamer Scott Schomburg obviously had the same idea, but he made it real and put his extremely fun 3-Act adventure on the Infiniverse Exchange for all to find. Great mechanics for creating that rapid-gag-action cartoon feel, and it gave us three of our most memorable sessions this year. Thanks again, Scott!

Best role-playing moment of 2023: The cartoon world COULD have snatched a victory here, but I'm going the other way. The original Torg Eternity crew had a timid character called Lyaksandro, and he died. Now. he was always SUPPOSED to meet a certain fate and leave the group so that a parallel self could join (this was hidden from the other players, but baked into the character concept, we're in fact on the third parallel now, but they don't always die). Lyaksandro was haunted by the Kikimora, a Ukrainian witch/spirit, all through his life. So going home to confront her, where he could also play a Martyr card and shuffle off this mortal coil seemed the thing to do. The moment itself was impactful though. Fabien, Lyky's player, had sent me a sad Ukrainian dirge to play if the moment arose, and the other players did a good job with their tearful eulogies (some of those tears were real). And the clincher, a cut scene in which his soul is sucked into the Gaunt Man's chest... Lesson: Don't die under Orrorshan conditions.

Best video game of 2023 - The nominees are...
3. Sleeping Dogs (third playthrough, but with all the DLC)
2. Saints Row (the last one)
...and the Golden Typewriter Monkey goes to: Watch Dogs: Legion. I even called it last year after only a few missions. Here's what I had to say when I finished it: "Give or take some of the achievements (and the DLC) - I finished Watch Dogs: Legion this week. A great little evolution from past Watch Dogs games, DedSec London has its own flavor, of course, but also an interesting mechanic where you can recruit anyone of hundreds of NPCs in the game, building your own team of avatars with their own voices, fashions choices and abilities (by the end I was mostly rotating through Carmen the cargo drone-flying construction worker, Carolyn the former cop with a heart of gold and machine gun of steel, and Harriet the kooky cosplayer, but others from more than a dozen occasionally. The story has London turned into a fascist city-state in the near future and has as many side-missions as you want, really, with the recruitment stuff (I was still sad to hit the limit because I considered recruiting all of London). It ends on a surprisingly emotional note, which for purposes of continuing to play, has an epilogue mission that undoes aspects of the endgame, but is ALSO done with feeling. It asks you to run around the city a lot, so it's most effectively done while you sweep the town for all the collectibles - nicely done, Ubisoft! And there's a lot of replay value to Legion thanks to more difficult modes, in particular one where your agents' deaths are permanent(!), requiring you to mourn and recruit again and again. I'd be game, but I need to buy a new controller. The top left trigger, which is used for hacking, broke the next day (preventing any fooling around for achievements). I hacked a LOT."

Best and Worst Comics-Related Moments of 2023
-The Nadir Monkey goes to... Superheroes at the movies. And on TV, for that matter. The MCU finally started to crumple under its own weight as Disney tried to over-connect the different shows and movies, making the films opaque to casual audiences, and further muddying the waters by introducing distracting new characters in each one. Then they compounded the problem with some extremely lacklustre shows (Secret Invasion, Loki) and no movies really worth seeing except for Guardians vol.3. The DC movies didn't do much better, with Shazam 2 and The Flash being particularly dire. This is the year I finally felt enough disinterest to either wait for these movies to stream (as in the latter two DCEUs, but I didn't go to The Marvels and have no plans for Aquaman 2).
-The Apex Monkey goes to... Dawn of DC: While there are things about Mark Waid's new tenure as creative director that don't speak to me (I'm not in love with the events we've gotten, but that's not anything new), I've got to say a LOT of the Dawn of DC offerings have made me a fan of their monthly comics again. Anything BY Waid - World's Finest (Batman/Superman and Teen Titans) and Shazam - are great. I'm also enjoying Green Arrow, Fire and Ice, Cyborg, The Flash, Superman (but not action), the various JSA-related books, Nightwing (still) and Titans, Batman & Santa Claus, Unstoppable Doom Patrol... Sure, there are still too many Bat-books, Power Girl has been completely mangled, and Tom King is crapping on Wonder Woman, but you know what? We've finally got a rebranding that mostly works. (Now can they rescue the Legion?)

Best new (and old) podcast of 2023: Disaster Girls. I came in just as the show was on the wane, but there's a huge back catalog of this very funny exploration of disaster films and creature features. It's got the same vibe as my own oHOTmu OR NOT?, so I'm all in.

Best refresh of an older podcast in 2023: I was already enjoying Delta Flyers even if Voyager was never my favorite Trek, but during the strikes, they pivoted to nice interviews with Trek alumni, and then, AND THEN!, headed for the Wormhole, with Terri Farrell And Armin Shimmerman joining "Tom & Harry" to discuss Deep Space Nine, which IS my favorite Trek! Well... I'm not made of duranium!

My YouTube Obsession of 2023: Would I Lie To You? I fully admit it. I fell into a vortex of game show insanity. Which also made me follow David Mitchell to Peep Show, so let's add 9 season of that to WILTY's 16 (and going). At the deepest end of the pool, I was tryng to make friends play the game with me. I recognize my foolishness, but I don't regret a second of it. Runner-up: This James Bond theme medley was my background music through the last quarter.

Dumbest Move You Just Knew Hollywood Would Make: Quite separate from the frankly terrible working conditions the various unions were fighting against, we have to look at Barbie's phenomenal success. For a few months there, you couldn't go to the movies without seeing mobs of pink-clad patrons snapping pics by the poster. The lesson Hollywood took from this, of course, was to greenlight a bunch of Mattel-related films. Do they actually think Hot Wheels, Magic 8 Ball, Uno and Boglins have what it takes? What Barbie's success proves is that women will show up in large numbers to movies that speak to them, fun, high-end, female-led, feminist films. It's NOT about toystalgia. Studios also failed to understand why Wonder Woman, Crazy Rich Asians and the Taylor Swift movie experience were so successful. It's dead simple: A starved demographic!

I'd like to end the ceremony with a few movie statistics and prizes, courtesy of Letterboxd, which says I logged 508 entries (465 new) to last year's 506 (close!), and here are the top 10 stars who most appeared on my screens:

If Jennifer Aniston sticks out as an anomaly, watch for an upcoming podcast that explains it, but Isabelle Huppert, Parker Posey and Natasha Lyonne are the three I actually went out of my way to watch. Christopher Lloyd is probably the most REWATCHED actor as I revisited the Back to the Future trilogy, Star Trek III and the Addams Family movies. Robert Englund appears courtesy of my Nightmare on Elm Street marathon. Martin Donovan? Well, you can't watch a lot of Hal Hartley and not have him show up as often as he did. Speaking of which, here are the directors most represented:

Hartley and Mike Leigh share the top position thanks to the Criterion Channel which added a lot of their early films and well, I want a complete set. I rate every director in the Top 10 and actively made a point of watching more of their movies at some point this year, except Wes Anderson who MADE 5 films (some of them shorts) this year!

If Letterboxd is my movie tracking platform, GoodReads has that job for my reading. I managed 66 books this year (almost 40 proper books when you discount graphic novels and RPG manuals, though I admit a lot of them were short reads). Here's a graphic of the year's reads:

This was the "year of series", either continuing them (like Star Trek S.C.E. and Doctor Who) or starting them (like Time Wars, Designers & Dragons, James Bond, Fafrhd and the Gray Mouser, Reacher), though I did started looking elsewhere in the third quarter, including my first ever William Gibson novel and yet another Julian Barnes (NOW, I've read everything). Looking forward to next year, I think I'll be a little bit more ambitious with my choices since I did feel "series" fatigue THIS year.

And there you have it, folks. Another year, another completely meaningless awards season. My thanks to Ms. Lyonne and thank YOU for sticking with us all these years. The Siskoid Awards will no doubt return in a year's time, unless upcoming movies have it right, and it's the end. (No, really, is it just me or are half the new trailers about dystopias and global disasters?)