KJ

The Scavenger Door by Suzanne Palmer : The third book in The Finder Chronicles; as much fun as its predecessors, and the end had me immediately turning around to start book four. ( Spoilery thoughts. )

Um Actually live show: I don't subscribe to Dropout, so I'm sadly unfamiliar with most of their shows, but during high pandemic, they dropped a bunch of Um Actually episodes on YouTube, and T and I spent a lot of time watching them. So when we learned that there would a live show at this year's SF Sketchfest, we immediately decided to get tickets. The panel, which was not announced in advance, was Janet Varney, Marc Evan Jackson, and Tawny Newsome; they were an awesome group who played well off the hosts and each other, and we had a great time.

I started the day with a crumpet and shopping at Pike Place Market, then headed over to the con, where I attended a panel and three readings.

• A panel on writing for corporate IP with Rebecca Roanhorse, G. Willow Wilson, and Diana Ma (with whom I wasn't familiar; she's written various works for hire, most notably Power Rangers). It was an interesting conversation about the upsides and downsides of working in other people's sandboxes.
• First reading: Fonda Lee, who read from a forthcoming sci-fi novel about warriors who are essentially samurai who work for multi-planetary corporations.
• Second reading: Rebecca Roanhorse, who read a bit of her breakthrough short story ("Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience", which won a Hugo some years back), a bit of the third book in her epic fantasy series Between Earth and Sky, and a bit of a forthcoming story set in The Sixth World. I would note that in both her panel and her reading, she mentioned being a Hugo finalist for Best Series but disclaimed any expection that she might win, which made what happened at the ceremony tonight even more exciting.
• Third reading: Marie Brennan, who read a short story that came out a year or two ago. It was a good story, but particularly interesting because it was originally going to be a fantasy trilogy. But for various reasons, she never wrote those books, and eventually she decided the big concept -- a revolutionary who decides the figurehead of the revolution needs to be assassinated -- could be told in short form.
• And then of course the Hugos. As I mentioned earlier, I didn't vote this year because I wasn't engaged reading, watching, or critical analysis at all this cycle, but I still wanted to watch the ceremony. Lots of surprise winners -- at least, surprises to my circle, and also apparently to Rebecca Roanhorse herself in the case of Best Series. Some high points: Abigail Nussbaum on the importance of critics to fandom, Diana Pho's call to stand up to fascism, and Roanhorse and Lodestar winner Darcie Little Badger on the need for diverse voices in fiction. (Have multiple indigenous people ever won Hugos in the same year before?) The ceremony was okay, some hiccups in production -- particularly the lack of pronunciation guides. Worldcon also needs to decide once and for all how to handle nominees with large production teams, because long lists of participants are still getting laughs in the room, which I don't feel great about.

The con continues into tomorrow, but I'm taking off in the morning to move into the second phase of this vacation: an Oregon coast road trip with some friends who are flying into Portland tomorrow and Monday. So I say goodbye to con space for now, and consider whether I'll go to Los Angeles next year.

It's not that late and yet I'm tired -- it was a long day. I think expending so much social energy all at once took more of a physical toll than I was expecting. Still, great day! In bullet form:

• Slept in a little bit, then quick Starbucks breakfast before the first panel, which was on being a fan of problematic things; it covered some of the same ground as mentor monsters yesterday (and with one of the same panelists, Jessica Finn (pelicanismo

• A nice laid back lunch of pasties with forestofglory in the Capitol Square

• Attended two afternoon panels, one on fanfics that have outsized influence on their fandoms (and sometimes even beyond their fandoms) and one (featuring the one and only readingtheend!) called "How Dead Is the Author, Really" about applying the critical principle of "death of the author" in the age of social media, when most authors are not only very much alive but able and willing to engage with readers and reviewers, for good or ill. The latter was an excellent panel, another best of the con, with some thinky thoughts that I'll have to chew on more when I'm more awake.

• Last panel of the day was my third as a panelist: City as History, City as Liberator. This had almost the same panel description as the virtual panel I was on in 2020, but even with the same moderator we had a fairly different focus: we talked about how the pandemic has changed our relationship to the environment, about how cities can inspire and reflect social change movements, about cities as characters, about non-traditional SFnal cities like spaceships and space stations. We got a lot of kind words afterwards, and if you're a con attendee with access to the Discord, I highly recommend checking the thread out -- we had a few notetakers who provided a really good sense of what we talked about and saved all our recs.

• A quick dinner, a little room relaxation, and then the annual dessert salon with GoH speeches. For COVID safety reasons, we did speeches and presentation first, then dessert to go after. First they replayed Rebecca Roanhorse's excellent GoH speech from WisCONline in 2020 -- which still resonates two years later, but in some different ways than it did before -- and then Sheree Renee Thomas gave one of the most beautifully poetic speeches I'd ever heard.

• The Otherwise presentation, which focused on the 2019 and 2020 winners because the jury hasn't selected winners for 2021 yet, and then the traditional filk which was instead about the persistence and resilience of WisCon in the face of all the adversity it's faced these last few years.

• And finally, speaking of that adversity, we got an update on the Save WisCon fundraising and volunteer recruitment effort, which was a resounding success: SF3 raised more than enough money and got enough support to not only succeed in running the con this year, but committing to WisCon 46 in 2023. This was followed by the announcement of next year's amazing guests of honor: Rivers Solomon and Martha Wells!!!

So, it's been a great con, and I can only hope next year is even better -- and maybe a little less fraught with pandemic concerns, although I've given up even guessing at this point. But it's not over yet -- one more panel for me, and then my flight isn't until 5:30 so I'll attend the postmortem and maybe get to hang out with folks a little more.

I took a look at my past goals and how I felt about them, and I've decided that, unlike writing goals, reading goals are a source of stress rather than motivation. Better, I think, to set habits of reading and reviewing, while still keeping an eye on things like creator and character diversity. But I will commit to these things:

1. Update StoryGraph within 24 hours of finishing a book. I don't need to write a full review, but I do need to make a note of when I finished and a star rating.

2. Set 30 books as my annual StoryGraph goal for 2022. Last year's goal was 36; StoryGraph says I read 24, which seems about right, but I don't discount the possibility that I might have forgotten a couple.

3. Continue to prioritize books by authors of color. Last year's numbers on this are pretty bad -- 7 books by 4 authors. In part that's because I did more re-reading than usual. I reread all of Murderbot and a good chunk of October Daye, and while I enjoyed both of those projects very much, it skews my total very white. As I revisit my TBR (which I did manage to cull quite substantially) I plan to keep an eye on this aspect of which books I choose.

1. I finished Fugitive Telemetry, the new Murderbot novella, and immediately felt the need to read Network Effect again. Not that I didn't enjoy the new one -- I definitely did -- but it felt more like backstory than a prequel, and it made me want to revisit all that tasty, tasty character development.

2. I've been in 2.5 hour meetings every morning for a project management training at work. It's a year-long program that traditionally kicks off with an in-person event at our main office in DC; I was originally nominated for it last year, but it took them until now to figure out how to transition it to a virtual event. It's working pretty well, although it's a long time to be on Zoom, especially multiple days in a row. It's been interesting, and I can see how it will be applicable not just to my dayjob work but to some of my fandom projects as well. But today was the first of two days on finance and budgeting and I can already feel myself start to glaze over. After this week, I'll be assigned a mentor and there will be various follow-up sessions throughout the year. I do hope we're able to do an in-person event at some point -- it's always nice to meet my distant co-workers face to face.

3. Speaking of distant co-workers, it's now been over a month that I'm not assigned to an office and am officially "remote". It's weird. I don't like it. I hope we find out who gets to be assigned to the Oakland office soon.

4. In other media news, we finally started The Mandalorian. We're enjoying it, but T is unmoved by The Child and its cuteness. I am flabbergasted by this.

5. One week and two days to Palm Springs! I can't wait.

Your main fandom of the year? I don't think I can really say I had one, given that I wrote so little fic or meta.

Your favorite movie seen this year? Palm Springs -- I'm a real sucker for a time loop story, and this was a particularly good one.

Your favorite book read this year? Network Effect by Martha Wells

Your favorite album or song to listen to this year? No good answer for this one, either. Nothing comes to mind, and since I don't use any of the music streaming services, it's harder to check stats. I do want to mention Sting's musical The Last Ship, which was my final in-person media experience before the start of the lockdowns, in the last week of February. I enjoyed that performance very much, and I bought the studio album based on it, which I listened to a fair amount.

Your favorite TV show of the year? Given that TV watching was one of my primary both social and time-consuming activities of 2020, I feel like I ought to know this off the top of my head, but I really don't have a good, quick answer. I watched many shows, and many of them I enjoyed (though there were some duds, too), but maybe nothing I really truly loved.

Your favorite video game of the year? I don't know that either of these is objectively the "best", but I sure had fun playing Untitled Goose Game and Among Us.

Your best new fandom discovery of the year? I don't know that this is a fandom discovery, exactly, but I went down a bunch of YouTube video essay rabbit holes and found a number of favorites, notably Be Kind Rewind and Yhara Zayd

Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year? The new romance in Persona 5: Royal. I enjoyed revisiting the world and story of this game very much, but I'd hoped that the romance with the new character would add more to it, and instead it just fell flat for me.

Your fandom boyfriend/girlfriend of the year? So disconnected from fandom that I can't really answer this.

Your biggest squee moment of the year? The finale of The Good Place, though it was a bittersweet squee.

The most missed of your old fandoms? Dragon Age for sure. I have some plans to revisit the source material coming up very soon -- more on that in my writing goals post.

The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to? This may be a pipe dream, because who knows when we'll get new content for it, but the Arrowverse still calls to me even though I've not spent much time there creatively.

Your biggest fan anticipations for the coming year? The final book in the Green Bone Trilogy. The new Murderbot novel. More Dragon Age trailers? The new Leverage series!!

How can it possibly be almost the end of the 2010s? Sometimes it feels like this decade has lasted a million years, especially the latter half of it. It's a cliche that time moves faster as you age, but it's one that I'd found to be true until 2016, the year that never ended and then somehow stretched into three more. But maybe that makes it even more important to look back on what we did and where we came from, and best-of-decade lists is one way to do that. Even if dates and quantities divisible by 10 are an arbitrary way to measure things, in the end. And it was a fun exercise to go back and think about the things I was enjoying several years ago.

This list isn’t meant to be comprehensive, or some grand statement of objective quality, just a list of works, from all genres and in various forms of media, that I really loved and/or that have stayed with me, released wholly or in part between 2010 and 2019. It's not really "best of", more like "favorites of". I limited it to 20 because otherwise this project could gotten way out of hand (see: my honorable mention list). Even when I feel like I'm not reading or watching as much, I still discovered some great stuff, and I hope some of them are among your favorites, too.

In alphabetical order:

( The Top 20 )

And now here are a whole bunch of honorable mentions, most of which I at least considered for the top 20, but they go here because I had to cut off the list somewhere.

( Honorable Mentions )

So that's a lot of stuff! Too much great stuff, too much to list even within the honorable mentions. What are some of your favorites of the last ten years?