[Photo above: "There's probably no god, now stop worrying and enjoy your life." —This advertisement was briefly emblazoned on city buses in a suburb of Vancouver a couple of years ago. Apparently there were complaints(?!) and it was pulled from circulation, but still. EPIC WIN.]
After a mentally exhausting week at work, this seems like an excellent time to rummage through the old Pinklog and steal from myself. Fortunately, I’ve been collecting facts that blow my mind for about 25 years now, so the well is pretty deep.
I originally published this list of lists in December 2017. I’ve been doing year-end roundups for a looong time! Some of these things have aged better than others, but shockingly, some are even more relevant now… And the ones that aren’t, are just plain hilarious to read in 2026. (“How to set up outlook 2010 IMAP email account with existing pst data file,” I’m looking at you!)
So, without any further disclaimers, let’s dive right into the funniest, most anachronistic list of all…
Funniest Google Searches in My Browser History 2017
If it’s not linked, it means I didn’t find what I was looking for.
1. how to set up outlook 2010 IMAP email account with existing pst data file (This marked a low point in the month-long process of reinstalling everything in the wake of a catastrophic failure/BSOD-run-amok/system wipe of my laptop in May. Shout-out to Mr. Pink AKA in-house tech support/sysadmin/network ninja.)
2. how to care for aeonium succulents indoors (answer: nobody fucking knows)
3. why is my laptop making a noise like a stationary bicycle (Yes, after the failure. LOL/CRY)
4. vancouver sun newspaper front page photo 1999 capilano suspension bridge baby
5. jim cummins braineater painting aliens (Yes, motherfucking still.) Note from 2026: I still can’t find that painting, and I’ve been periodically searching the internet going on two decades. The story is, back in 1998, I saw a painting for sale in an art gallery—for $250 I think, which makes the fact that I didn’t just buy it then SO much worse, but hey, that was a lot more money to me back then…
Anyway, it was this huge abstract futuristic cityscape with a couple of blockhead-shaped aliens in between the buildings, and a caption overlaid that said something like, “Now Braineater Knew… Not. Alone.” If by some miracle anyone reading this has any knowledge of this painting, I desperately want it!
6. wall centre penthouse red lights Vancouver (Google didn’t help; binoculars did. It was just a party.)
8. Fran Lebowitz quote children are sticky
9. innovative sadistic bicycle theft prevention devices (I don’t even own a bike. I just love this idea of booby-trapping/rigging up a theft-protection device designed not to deter (because nothing does), but to gravely injure or maim a perpetrator who tries to remove the lock or carry the bike away—something like a chain lock wrapped in razor wire or a seat that the owner, when leaving the bike unattended, could easily replace with a long, sharpened spike to deter (or emasculate) any unauthorized riders. Can you dig it?)
10. amazing ad exec objective statement html5 more less confident (I will never fucking know where I found this site, but it was amazing. Sigh...)
11. how did pirates keep their flags and sails black (again, no good results found)
Five Things that Blew My Mind in 2017
1. Lemming mass suicide is a pernicious myth, perpetuated by the horrifically unethical producers of a 1970s nature doc called “White Wilderness.” A Disney nature doc... Shame. Shame.
2. Harvey Weinstein? Harvey Fierstein? Two totally different people. Apparently I’m not alone in this.
3. Wealth inequality has increased dramatically over the last 30 years, with median white household wealth nearly 10 times that of median black and Latino households.
4. When typing emoticons/emojis, men tend to add a nose :-) while women do not ;) and there are major differences between eastern and western interpretations of facial features. Table flip is by far my favorite emoticon now. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
5. Voyager 1 just fired its trajectory thrusters for the first time since 1980
6. This entire interview between Joe Rogan and world-renowned mycologist (or “mushroom doctor,” as they’d call him if he was a character on “Zoo”) Paul Stamets is just one mind-blowing revelation after another.
Worst Idea of 2017
How to pick just one..?? But let’s just start with Lyrebird, the evaluation demo app brought to you by the same folks who inflicted Facebook and Twitter on us. The app records one minute of a user’s voice and uses it to create a “Digital Voice” which can be used for any number of purposes, e.g., reading audiobooks or “tweets” out loud, creating a video game avatar with your voice or—and this is from their FAQs—”Freeze movie actor’s voices to make them available forever even if they age or die.”
Yeah... there’s nothing creepy AF about that. I bet they wish they’d invented it in time to vocally clone Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles and—aww, Jimmy Stewart. (Have they considered the implications for voice impressionists? Here we go—AI is stealing all the good jobs.) Note from 2026: Yiiiiiikes!!
Some technologies are just so batshit and ripe for abuse, their creators are at a loss when tasked with setting the public’s fears to rest, that they end up saying things like this on their “Ethics” pages: “Imagine that we had decided not to release this technology at all. Others would develop it and who knows if their intentions would be as sincere as ours.” Well shit, since you put it that way.
Best TV Shows of 2017
Game of Thrones (It’s like with The Wire. Everyone recommended it to us for so long and we were always like, Look, we tried watching the first episode. We get it— beheadings, incest, fancy dresses, it’s just not really our thing. Well. We gave it another try this summer and—okay, fiiiiiine. Yes, yes, we love it already. You can go ahead with your season 7 spoilers........ wait... Okay, now. Sigh... ugh, I miss it already.)
1. Mindhunter
2. Legion
This show is so weird and great, it’s like someone bet the showrunner he couldn’t spin an entire series out of the epic YouTube parody, What if Wes Anderson Directed The X-Men? Only he got the last laugh because Legion is fucking awesome. It also felt somehow more like my experience of reading Marvel comics as a kid/teenager than most of the movies that have been made about my favorite characters—with the exception, of course, of Logan (maybe it’s all those consonants they have in common).
Speaking of Marvel characters I enjoyed as a teenager but never thought I’d see onscreen (no, not Dazzler—the reason we won’t see that onscreen is—well, are twofold. One, they would probably feel the need to modernize her and I don’t have to tell you how much that would suck, unless they made her sort of an early Lady Gaga-style performance artist. (Hmm, actually...) and two, guys roughly my age are running Hollywood right now and every guy my age thought Dazzler was stupid.)
Note from 2026: This Begins a Loooong Digression about Cloak & Dagger (in case anyone doubts my nerd credentials!)
Anyway, earlier this year I somehow stumbled across the news that a Cloak & Dagger series is actually in development. Part of me (my inner 12 year old) was like <screech> OMG!! But the other part—the part that watched every episode of Iron Fist and 13 Reasons this year—is dreading the almost certain train wreck this story in particular could be in the wrong hands. It all depends on who’s in charge and what message they decide will make Cloak & Dagger relevant and appropriate for the kids of 2018.
And we have zero reasons to be optimistic about that. I mean, nostalgia aside, 1980s Cloak & Dagger was a 4-issue miniseries about two painfully two dimensional characters whose mutant powers are basically shorthand racial stereotypes. Tandy is rich and white with a neglectful father and Tyrone is poor and black but sweet—with a stutter (but wait, it gets better!).
Through a series of unlucky accidents and foolish decisions, they end up meeting in a meat-packing district warehouse, where they’ve been kidnapped and injected with massive doses of some experimental drug by a shadowy cabal of evil men. Other unlucky teens are dying grisly, drug-induced deaths all around them, and soon they’re the only survivors.
The drugs that killed the others trigger their latent mutant abilities which, through fate or happy accident, somehow mirror each other’s in what kids today would call a kind of ultra-racially problematic symbiosis.
They manage to escape, swimming across the toxic wastewaters of the East River to safety, only to find that they can no longer return to their old lives. Their mutant powers make them effectively inseparable—in Tyrone’s case anyway, because being apart from her for any length of time results in painful and increasingly dangerous withdrawal symptoms.
She can generate daggers of light that either kill, maim or heal (him anyway), depending on what the situation calls for. He can transport himself, her and others within the fabric of his... uh, well, it’s a big, black and blue striped blanket he found lying around the warehouse and wrapped himself in it the night they were kidnapped? Now he and it are inseparable and it’s the magical portal he uses to teleport around the globe and absorb bad guys—I mean, he just wraps them in it and they disappear, forever.
No one knows where they go, not even him. Is his body like a Portal ™ or Hell Mouth or gateway to Limbo or Purgatory or some other dimension where bad people go to be punished? Is he the Devil? He seems to think so, since of course he’s one of a handful of inconveniently religious members of the Marvel Universe (see also Wolfsbane, Daredevil and Nightcrawler). Oh yeah, and then there’s her costume. Not even going to go there.
So they’re symbiotically bonded and teenage, so that’s awkward, but not as much as you’d think. In real life, they’d probably just spend the next decade locked in a bedroom somewhere, but this is Marvel in the 80s, so of course he falls in love with her, but she not so much with him. (Sigh.)
They’re stuck with each other, though, because they’re equally confused, alienated, emotionally stunted and damaged, and they pretty much stopped developing in any dimension that might make them interesting the night they got their powers.
Over the next 30 years or so, they continued to pop up here and there to help Spider-Man or the X-Men save the day and then when they were asked to stick around, they’d give some lame speech about how they’re “not heroes” before teleporting away to not have sex with each other. (Sigh.)
So, yeah... the only thing worse than a horribly Nerfed™ Cloak & Dagger might just be a completely faithful rendering. I mean, how do you even craft plausible backstories in 2018 to set in motion the kidnapping, drug dealing, addiction, human trafficking and shadowy government experiments on society’s disposable underclass? I guess you set it in 1984 like Stranger Things.
3. Better Call Saul
4. American Gods
5. Fargo
6. Narcos (The best entry in Netflix’s endless roster of Pablo Escobar-related original programming co-stars Oberyn Martell (aww, yeah—shout out to those of you who know!) and his fabulous Burt Reynolds/Simon & Simon mustache. Benedict Cumberbatch can take a break now. I want to see Pedro Pascal cast in literally everything for the next ten years.) Note from 2026: Holy shit, that worked out well! What should I wish for next?!
7. iZombie
8. Ozark (Netflix proves once again that their algorithm-to-table creation formula still works!)
9. GLOW
10. Taboo
11. Wanted (AUS)
12. Stranger Things
13. Fear the Walking Dead (for the first half of season3, it was so much better than The Walking Dead... and then... well, it is The Walking Dead, so we’re used to this.)
14. The Crown
15. The Keepers (Netflix documentary series)
Best Video Games I Played in 2017
I probably played more video games this year than ever before—which is fitting for a year that literally began with my sudden realization last Christmas that a new Telltale Walking Dead game was probably due out soon. Seconds later, I discovered via Telltale’s twitter account that the new season was indeed due THE NEXT DAY—but only for Xbox One, which we hadn’t yet bothered to upgrade to.
Cut to: me 10 seconds later, flying into the living room, breathlessly shoving my laptop in front of Mr. Pink, the twitter post center-screen, repeating “we have to get an Xbox One” over and over until he finally grasped the meaning of the words coming out of my mouth.
So here are my top five games played this year...
5. Oxenfree (Night School Studio)
This supernatural teenage adventure/mystery game felt more true to my teenage interactions than any other game or TV show that’s attempted to trigger the same nostalgia. Imagine “Stand by Me” or “The Goonies” with a female lead, or “Stranger Things” without Eleven (though that would be a sad, sad Stranger Things indeed).
Anyway, the dialog feels real and the characters seem familiar. Even the plot is weirdly nostalgic—a group of friends plan a weekend camping party on an abandoned island, where supernatural mysteries and existential fuckery ensue, accompanied by the expected interpersonal drama and hair-trigger loyalty-switching we all knew and loved in high school.
The repetition of running and climbing all over the quasi-arcade style 2D+ map or whatever they call it is occasionally tedious, but the eerie island is full of interesting details and every screen is beautifully rendered.
Dialog is half the battle, just like in a Telltale Game, but the rhythm and pacing of conversation is totally different, more natural, e.g., you can interrupt and talk over each other if you want to. I didn’t test it thoroughly, but it seemed like the more you did it, your interactions with that character actually changed, so how and when you speak have as much impact as what you actually say. The quality of your relationships, of course, factor heavily into the final outcome of the game, as much as your concrete decisions and actions.
4. What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow)
This is one of the most original games I’ve ever seen, basically a quasi “open world” where a young woman, the last living member of a large family, returns to her childhood home to unearth the life/death stories of her family members. You walk the grounds of the sprawling house—kind of a whimsical, Pacific Northwest version of the Winchester Mystery House—and you know that every tale ends in tragedy, so it’s not a rescue mission—you’re just there for closure.
The most memorable thing about this game is the house itself—an incredible labyrinth of rooms lined with bookshelves and picture windows, hidden ladders and secret passageways. Every inch of wall space is covered with framed photos, posters, artwork, instruments, toys and other memorabilia mirroring the personalities of the house’s former inhabitants.
Something about it feels familiar in a weird, subliminal way, like that scene in Dreamcatcher (shout out to the 12 people who’ve seen it) where you see the guy’s mental library and it’s this incredibly elaborate crowded spiral tower lined with bookshelves and filing cabinets and secret side rooms (and if you’re like me, but the version that could stand to live in the country, it starts to look like the perfect fixer-upper with enough space for you and all your friends and family to live happily ever after... You know, if it wasn’t, like, cursed).
My favorite room was one shared by two young brothers; one half decorated in a space theme and the other like the tree fort of a boy scout or army ranger. The room is divided down the middle with a velvet museum rope, with built-in staircases traversing behind each bed leading to separate lookout towers. One looks like a log tree house and the other like the control panel of a space capsule. You can imagine the two boys facing off, crouched in their separate towers, each in their own fantasy, but playing together.
Some of the stories are brief and poignant, others maddeningly repetitive—like life, I suppose. Each story takes you into a game-within-a-game where the dynamics, controls and objectives are totally different. In one, you climb out a bedroom window onto the branches of a tree to chase a bird. The object of the game takes a darker turn once you catch it. In the most frustrating chapter, you’re a toddler in the bath and your mother leaves the room to answer the phone; you can’t stand up or move on your own.
You pull both triggers and mash all the buttons on your controller trying to figure out what will hasten your escape, growing ever-more impatient to bring about the little fucker’s watery demise already. After 20 minutes of ineffectual splashing, I finally gave up and started fresh the next day.
In the end, I’m not sure what the point of the game was, or even if it was genuinely fun... There are even a couple of mysteries teased throughout the game only to be yanked away before we can discover the truth behind them. (The game developer has said he doesn’t think video games are the proper medium for telling narrative stories.) But as an experiment in disorientation and for the sheer weirdness and beauty of the visuals, it’s definitely worth the day or two it takes to play it.
3. Game of Thrones (Telltale Games)
Playing this game is a lot like watching Game of Thrones in that major characters can die gruesomely at any moment. Replay from the start of the chapter as often as you like, there’s nothing you can do about it. Of the five members of the fictional “Forrester” clan you play in this game, the one I found the most tense was the young girl who’s a handmaid to Margaery Tyrell at King’s Landing.
Trying to navigate the backstabbing, treacherous politics of life at court, being polite to everyone without getting caught between two competing egos, and sucking up enough (but without arousing suspicion) to both Margaery and Circe (often at the same time!), all while trying to subtly promote your family’s business interests so they don’t lose their lands (and probably lives), all without trusting the wrong man’s offer to help and getting yourself beheaded.
I played through her final chapter three times and never made it out with my head attached. When you’re watching the show, your favorite character might have their head crushed by a zombie knight, but at least you never have to make a final life or death decision between two characters you’ve grown attached to. That’s a special gift that only Telltale Games can deliver.
2. The Walking Dead, Season 3 (Telltale Games)
It took us halfway into the second chapter to come to terms with the fact that Clementine is not a playable character, except in a couple of brief flashbacks where you learn the unfortunate events that took place after Season Two, depending on whether you ended up with Kenny or Jane or alone in the wilderness with baby Alvin.
The new characters are interesting and their (inevitable?) ;) deaths are tragic, but season three didn’t come close to provoking the kind of emotional attachment and devastation the first two seasons have become famous for. One more season to go... Telltale announced that the first chapter of season four is coming in early 2018 with Clementine once again in the lead. I’m already bracing myself for lasting trauma...
1. Murdered: Soul Suspect (Airtight Games)
In this game from 2014, you are Ronan, a tattooed bad boy cop who dies and has to solve his own murder. The setting is a fictional Salem, famous for its history of witch trials and executions, which leads to a wide-ranging investigation of a serial killer somehow connected to a series of historic murders from the 1600s.
You investigate corrupt, dangerous cops within your department and enlisting the help of the daughter of a police psychic who’s gone missing. To further complicate matters, there are constant flashbacks and clues about the recent murder of your wife, who we learn about—and about Ronan himself—through her many diary entries and letters found scattered throughout the game.
The city streets are overlaid with ghostly buildings, old shipwrecks, a crumbling quarantine hospital from some ancient epidemic, etc. In fact, the first thing you notice is that half the buildings are either partially or completely on fire, but a ghostly blue fire indicating a long-ago catastrophe that’s imprinted itself and will forever be a part of the building’s sense memory—cool, no?
I mean, think of how many cities have been burned to the ground and rebuilt—Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle... um, pretty much all of Europe? Just imagine what you’d see if you walked through any of those cities with “ghost cop vision.” Lots of ghosts, sure—but also ghost fires, floods, plagues, wars... skyscrapers. (Ooh.)
So of course, the streets are also lousy with ghosts, some recently dead, some ancient, some mere outlines that flicker and vanish as you get close, and some that engage you, entreating your help to solve the mystery of their death or to convey a final message so their souls can finally rest and move on. Some want to share their story of pain and regret, but there’s nothing you can do for them—their punishment is being trapped in this parallel realm forever.
So the game is full of deep, interesting concepts like that, and yet those are all peripheral to your actual objective: solve your murder and those of several girls whose ghosts and gruesome deaths you encounter along the way. Oh yeah—and find the teenage girl’s mother... and your wife’s killer. And probably some other things I’m forgetting.
You’re constantly finding clues, picking up bits of paper and unearthing endless fragments of side mysteries, and it’s not always clear what’s relevant to your objective. Normally, I’d say if it’s in the game, you should pick it up and solve the mystery, but there are just so fucking many, you get to the point where you’re like, ugh, I don’t have time to deal with this century-old cold case!
Every person you pass on the street is a potentially “playable” character in that you can “possess” them temporarily and hear their thoughts (although this gets old quickly, since most people tend to be thinking incredibly inane, mundane things—commentary from the developers?). Sometimes you can use people to “hide” from nearby demons or to get by obstacles that you can’t go through as a ghost—ghost fire, ghost walls, etc.—also, there are deadly obstacles that the living can’t see, like demon lava pools and smoking geysers that erupt from the floor.
There are so many little details about this game that made it fun to play, like this trick you don’t learn until halfway through where you can “teleport” through holes in walls and up to high places you couldn’t reach otherwise. It’s actually so much fun I quit walking in most cases after I learned to teleport.
And then there’s “cat mode!” You can “possess” a cat just like a person, and it enables you to get into places you otherwise can’t. Running and jumping around as the cat is so much more fun than you’d think—best of all, the fucking demons don’t detect you when you’re in the cat.
But you can’t stay there forever. At some point you have to figure out how to kill enough of them to escape the areas where they cluster. They’re creepy as fuck and a huge pain to kill, but it’s very satisfying when you finally do. I wish more games were like this.
Note from 2026: That’s a wrap on my trip back to 2017! Have a great week, everyone!