KJ

Your main fandom of the year? I wrote the most stuff for and paid the most attention to Dragon Age -- getting back into the games definitely helped with that, although my replay time dropped off a lot when I started revisiting Ace Attorney, and now it's all about Hades. But I'm about done with Hades, so going back to DA again (next up is Awakenings) is definitely part of the plan for 2022.

Your favorite movie seen this year? Nothing really stands out. Maybe Free Guy as the most recently memorable, anyway.

Your favorite book read this year? Toss up between Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee and The Mask of Mirrors by M.A. Carrak.

Your favorite album or song to listen to this year? Probably the most honest answer to this question is the Ace Attorney Trilogy soundtracks and other Ace Attorney music.

Your favorite TV show of the year? Maybe Ted Lasso (both seasons) or Only Murders in the Building, although Arcane was also excellent.

Your favorite video game of the year? No question, Hades. We haven't reached the epilogue yet -- and may decide it's not worth the grinding it would take to get there -- but it's one of the most perfect mergers of gameplay and storytelling I've ever seen, and its Best Game Hugo award was richly deserved.

Your best new fandom discovery of the year? Not sure I have one.

Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year? WorldCon. I decided somewhat last minute not to attend in person (it sounds like I made the right decision), the timing made it impossible for me to engage virtually, and while for the most part the Hugo ceremony and the slate of winners made me really happy, the last minute announcement that weapons manufacturer Raytheon was sponsoring the ceremony cast a serious shadow over the whole thing. There's a bunch of reasons I haven't talked about that issue in more detail here, but I can say that the finalists were as blindsided as everyone else by that piece of information, and almost everyone was extremely unhappy about it. Probably I should write a real post about this later. I do want to make clear that I do not include the fact that Best Fanzine was awarded to Nerds of a Feather in that disappointment -- NoaF is a fantastic blog run by an amazing team, and their recognition with a Hugo rocket was long overdue.

Your fandom boyfriend/girlfriend of the year? Zagreus (from Hades) and Vi and Caitlin (from Arcane).

Your biggest squee moment of the year? The SF Giants winning the National League West. I wish they'd gotten further in the playoffs, but just watching them pull off that accomplishment was a huge rush.

The most missed of your old fandoms? As usual the answer to this is everything. How do I even fandom anymore?

The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to? Not sure. Maybe Arcane? Hades?

Your biggest fan anticipations for the coming year? Top of this list is Horizon Forbidden West, the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn that is due to be released in February.

Arrowverse update: I'm currently caught up on Supergirl (to Episode 5) and have watched The Flash through Episode 6 (one episode behind as of this writing. I'm not sure how long the main storyline of Supergirl is going to hold my interest. ( Spoilers )

I enjoyed *The Flash"'s recent take on time loops -- I'm a sucker for a good time loop episode, and this one tried some new things I liked.

Soul: I've been aware of the latest Pixar movie for awhile, but T only recently heard about it, and now that we have Disney+, he wanted to watch it. So we did. Enjoyable as a sweet and funny buddy comedy, with some lovely ideas about music and creativity and finding your purpose in life. I'm not usually a jazz person, but I thought the music was wonderful - the main character is a jazz pianist, and Jon Batiste of Late Night with Steven Colbert performed his works (as well as composing most of the original jazz in the score, along with gorgeous ambient tracks by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor). This score definitely earned its Academy Award.

Almost all of my favorite music that plays in the background on Critical Role is from the Pillars of Eternity soundtrack by Justin Bell.

This has been a public service announcement.

Rehearsal tonight, tomorrow, and Thursday; concerts Friday night and Sunday afternoon. We're doing Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms -- new to me, and I've come to like it quite well although it will never be in my top tier -- and Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, which is easily among my favorite pieces to sing, maybe in the top five. It's just so much fun, and takes you through so many moods and emotions. The Bernstein a boy treble soloist; he came to rehearse with us last week, and I was impressed. Looking forward to the show, although I can already tell this is going to be a long week, between all the rehearsal and everything I need to do at work.

And now is the time for daily writing and posting in hard mode as we move into a concert week.

This quarter, we're doing an all-Italian program: two pieces by Verdi, the Easter Hymn from the one-act opera Cavalleria rusticana by Pietro Mascagni (our conductor assures us that it's very famous, but I'm not familiar with it), and two movements from a mass by modern composer Giancarlo Aquilanti. I wish we were doing the whole Aquilanti -- it's a bit jazzy, and super fun to sing.

Concert week is a pretty full schedule: rehearsals tonight, tomorrow, and Thursday; concerts Friday night and Sunday afternoon. Fortunately I was able to shuffle around my work schedule so that I don't have to go in on Wednesday, so I get one day completely off (almost -- I do have a couple of meetings that I'll need to call into). My chorus basically always has a concert the weekend before Thanksgiving. If I'm being honest, this is one of the reasons I've never attempted NaNo. It's difficult enough to write even a little bit every day during a concert week, and I really don't know how I'd manage a large number of focused words.

So if I'm a little distracted the next seven days, that's why. Now time to settle in a little bit before sleep.

I came across this via alias_sqbr.

Rules: we’re snooping upon your playlist. Set your entire playlist on shuffle and report the first 10 tracks that pop up and then choose 10 some friends whoever feels like it can play. alias_sqbr tagged anyone who happened to be listening to music while listening, a nice idea; I qualified by that metric and also because I can never resist this meme.

1. As the Bell Rings the Maypole Spins - Dead Can Dance
2. Superman's Song - Crash Test Dummies
3. Bring it Round - Boiled in Lead
4. The Temple Player - FFX Soundtrack
5. Deal with the Dark Lord - The Empire Strikes Back Soundtrack
6. Running out of Ink - Stephen Page (live version, Winnipeg Fold Festival, 7-12-09)
7. You Will Be Waiting - Barenaked Ladies
8. One in a Million - Pet Shop Boys
9. Broken Arrows - Jose Gonzalez
10. Hydra - Captain America: The Winter Soldier Soundtrack

This long weekend in Los Angeles was just what I needed. We did too much for me to go into depth about everything, but here are some highlights:

Friday: Drove down, taking the Central Valley (I-5) route. I got to LA (actually Orange County) around 5pm, not too bad considering that I drove through most of the LA Basin during the first part of afternoon rush hour. There I met my friends A and AM (whom some long-time readers might remember as luvmoose and letters_to_ed; they were both regular players on the "guess the song lyrics" game that I used to post every week). We stayed with friends of A's, who were excellent hosts. I was tired from the drive, and A and AM were on East Coast time (they had flown in from Boston early in the morning), so we just had dinner and then found ice cream for dessert. And when one of the top hits on Yelp was Creamery N7, I knew where we had to go.

Saturday: The initial reason A and AM planned this trip was to attend a concert on Saturday night. (I'll explain my reason for joining them a little later.) But first, it was time for a spa day. We dropped by A's favorite nail place in Hawthorne for pedicures, then spent the rest of the afternoon at Burke Williams in Santa Monica. I got an excellent massage and then mostly lounged around reading my book, Heroine Worship, chosen because I thought it might be good vacation reading -- and I was right. Afterward, we drove up to downtown LA for the show, 80s Weekend 4, which is one in a series of concerts that bring together a bunch of New Wave bands, hosted by legendary DJ Richard Blade. The lineup: Berlin, Colin Hay (lead singer for Men at Work), The Fixx, Belinda Carlisle (my main draw to the show), The Psychedelic Furs, and Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark (aka OMD). I didn't know all the songs, but I knew at least a few things played by every band, and they were all engaging and high-energy performers. I sang, I danced, I had a good time. Right before the Psych Furs came out, Blade announced the line-up for 80s Weekend 5 in January, and A bought tickets before the show was over. (I might join them; depends on what else is going on then. One of the bands is the Violent Femmes, so it is tempting.)

Sunday: And now we get to my reason for traveling to LA this weekend. But first, a bit of context. A lived in LA for a couple of years a little while back, and while she was there she took a class at The Magic Castle, a private magician's club in Hollywood. She went to the club on a regular basis (that's actually how she knows the friend we stayed with), and still gets back whenever she has reason to be in the area. A few years ago, she mentioned that she had recently seen one of her favorite close-up magicians: Steve Valentine.

Yes. THAT Steve Valentine.

After recovering from my fangirl freak-out, I made A promise to let me know if she ever went back to the Magic Castle at a time she knew he was performing. Unfortunately she only got advance notice once, and the dates conflicted with FogCon, so I'd never managed it. (However, on that occasion she did somehow convince him to leave a message on my voice mail). So it remained a pipe-dream... until A called me about a month ago to inform me that he was performing his one-man show on July 30th and I was coming down to see it, and I concluded that she was right. So thanks to the cosmic good timing of the universe, the three of us went to see the show. It was splendid, an excellent blend of magic and memoir and storytelling, and afterwards I was brave enough to go up and say hello and get a picture.

( omg I still can't quite believe this really happened )

He was very sweet and gracious, and if he didn't actually remember the voicemail incident, he did an excellent job of pretending. They say "never meet your idols" but I think it went pretty well this time.

Monday: AM got us day passes to use the pool facilities at the Hyatt in Newport Beach. It was swanky and nice, a relaxing way to spend the afternoon. I dipped in the pool but spent most of the time lounging again, switching between my book and my phone. This was the day that Anthony Scaramucci's brief moment in the sun came to an end, and the three of us had enjoyed reading each other our favorite Tweets and Facebook posts about the Mooch. That night, we went to the Magic Castle, where we saw three magicians (two of whom were women, which is unusual). The Castle is a neat place, and if you ever have the opportunity to visit I recommend it. (A took me once before, back when she was taking her class.)

Tuesday: Time to go home. I took the coastal route back (US 101 version, not Highway 1), which only takes a couple of hours longer and is a nicer drive. The return drive was mostly uneventful, except that I got rained on in the Santa Barbara area, highly unusual for August. I got home just before 7pm, missing the worst of SF traffic, and settled in for a nice evening flop on the couch.

Even after this brief a trip, I've still had some readjustment to normal life. But it was the perfect break, and I'm really glad I took it.

Concert week ahoy. Today was the first dress rehearsal and it went quite well. The main piece this quarter is Durufle's Requiem, a lesser known work that happens to be one of my best beloved ones -- right up there with Brahms' Requiem and Beethoven's Mass in C. I know it because I sang it my senior year of college. I fell in love with it and have longed to do it again ever since, but this has been my first opportunity to do so. When it was announced at the end of the last term for our Fall 2016 concert, I literally gasped in joy. It incorporates many elements of Gregorian chant along with more Romantic and Modern touches (it was composed in 1947) and is unusual in tone and structure compared to many other classic requiems -- no Dies Irae movement, many other movements shortened, hardly any solo work.

If you're curious, there's a full-lenghth video here, although I haven't heard the whole thing and can't vouch for the quality.

We also have a guest conductor, who was the long-time director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He's a brilliant musician, very demanding, but it's been worth it -- the music he's been pulling out of us is gorgeous. First show is Friday, and I'm looking forward to it.

As it typical for me in the third week of November, it's a concert week, which means I don't have time for much outside work and rehearsal. This year's main piece is one I've done before, "Dona Nobis Pacem" by Ralph Vaughan Williams, and it's one of my favorites. This cantata is a setting of several texts, including three poems by Walt Whitman about his experiences as a Civil War nurse ("Beat! Beat! Drums", "Reconciliation", and "Dirge for Two Veterans"), various Biblical passages, and a speech by the British orator John Bright opposing the Crimean War. Vaughan Williams was himself a veteran of the First World War, in which he served as a medic, and he wrote this piece in 1936, with the dark clouds of the Second looming clearly on the horizon. It is a meditation on the horrors of war, and a plea for peace, ending on a note of hope for the future, and I can think of nothing more appropriate to sing right now.

I found this article with some background on Vaughan Williams himself as well as "Dona Nobis Pacem, and a complete recording on YouTube in case you're interested, and my concert is too far away for you to attend. (But if you're local and would like more details, let me know!)

I'm making good on my personal threat to attend lots of cons in 2016: I've now registered for FogCon (as always), WisCon (which I've been meaning to attend for a few years now and the stars finally aligned), and WesterCon (SE's suggestion; Scalzi is the guest of honor, and it's in Portland, which is a city I've always meant to spend more time in). So that's the first half of 2016 scheduled up.

I finally watched Daredevil. I'd been meaning to get to it for awhile; wanting to finish before Jessica Jones drops next month finally pushed it up the queue. Overall I enjoyed it, although I also had some issues. Some of the more pressing complaints are detailed in this Tumblr post ('ware major spoilers). I want to write a longer post about it soon.

Instead of other things I'd been meaning to read, I picked up the biography of Alice B. Sheldon (aka James Tiptree Jr.). I've never read any of Tiptree's fiction, but I've heard the bio is excellent, and so far it has delivered.

Finally, just because I haven't posted about it here doesn't mean I'm not caught in the full throes of a Hamilton obsession. If you've been wondering what the heck Hamilton is, or this is somehow the first you've ever heard of it, the short answer is that it's a Broadway musical based on the life of Alexander Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The cast album was released a few weeks ago, and made available to listen online shortly before that, and half the Internet has been freaking out over it ever since. Here's a good primer (thanks to umadoshi for the link). If you want a taste of it without committing to the whole album (although it's free on Spotify), check out Miranda's White House performance of an early version of the first song. Warning for highly addictive earworms.