the girly who shall end all girls

picked this up on Tumblr, where I think you're supposed to have people pick the questions but meh. I like this list better than the classic questionnaire I've used before

End of the year Asks

1. Song of the year? I Don’t Wanna Dance with Nobody by Sub-Radio
2. Album of the year? I don’t think I listened to a full album that was new-to-me this year. I feel like singles are bigger than ever, and between that and my not being particularly connected to drivers of new music (other than Spotify) I just don’t discover or listen to albums end-to-end.
3. Favorite musical artist / group you started listening to this year? I think I technically discovered Sub-Radio last year, so it would have to be Kishi Bashi. I went to his film Omoiyari at SIFF Docs Fest, kind of on a whim, and it was quite good.
4. Movie of the year? Recency bias, but god damn Godzilla Minus One is amazing. Crying at a monster movie over a dude with PTSD was definitely not on my bingo card for 2023.
5. TV show of the year? Oof. There were all the queer love stories - Our Flag Means Death, Good Omens, Interview with the Vampire. The one-two punch of Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks (and the crossover!). There was my indoctrination into dropout.tv. I think, in spite of being uneven overall (no, the musical episode wasn’t good) it would have to be Strange New Worlds.
6. Episode of tv or webisode that defined the year for you? Probably the one that’s been quoted constantly in my house since it first aired: Lower Decks “I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee”. Moopsy!
7. Favorite actor of the year? While not technically a 2023 joint, I watched it in 2023 - Eric Bogosian in Interview with the Vampire was a favorite performance.
8. Game of the year? Jedi Survivor. It’s always good to be a Jedi, and the storytelling in this one was top-notch.
9. Best month for you this year? This year was complicated. It might have been January, when I went to Disneyland with mimerki.
10. Something that made you cry this year? Well, my best friend died and that generated a lot of tears both before and after. My runner-up for “movie of the year” is Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. I encourage folks to watch it, it’s sweet and funny. But if you have seen it: I saw it after mimerki had started palliative care, and the end absolutely wrecked me. (I do not recommend ugly crying in an n95 mask, it gets hard to breathe.) And she died the next day, so yeah
11. Something you want to do again next year? If I can find the time and money, I’d love to do a quick trip to Disneyland and get C to Galaxy’s Edge. It’s really not hard to do from here and I love how walkable it is inside and out.
12. Talk about a new friend you made this year Not something I managed: first I was being very covid-cautious, then I was very sad (and busy), then I was just busy.
13. How was your birthday this year? Dismal. I had covid and lost my sense of taste for a couple weeks.
14. Favorite book you read this year? The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard. On the one hand, it’s a fantasy novel about implementing UBI, and burnout, and friendship. It’s also about someone who leaves home and is successful in ways that aren’t meaningful to their family of origin. (While I think it could have used a ruthless edit, I also think that might have stripped out most of what is good about it. It’s just a long warm bath of a book.)
15. What’s a bad habit you picked up this year? Buying coffee and a pastry way too often (because neither of us could manage to consistently plan for breakfast).
16. Post a picture from the beginning of the year [the Millennium Falcon in a spaceport setting with rock spires in the background]
17. Post a picture from the end of the year
    [the view from Kerry Park in Seattle, featuring the Space Needle and Mt Rainier]
18. A memorable meal this year? Our anniversary was a significant one and we kind of forgot about it, then managed to snag a last-minute reservation at The Herbfarm a few days after. They were absolutely brilliant with C’s dietary needs. It’s totally worth the money.
19. What’re you excited about for next year? I remembered our anniversary earlier this time, and we finally snagged a reservation for a cabin at a resort on the Pacific Coast that’s well-known for being dog friendly. Looking forward to walking the beach and/or watching the waves roll in by the fire.
20. What’s something you learned this year? When you die in the US, you become a business for tax purposes. The SSN is retired, and the estate gets an EIN just like a business.
21. What’s something new about your place of residence (room, home, or general location) now vs the start of the year? My whole place of residence is new! I am sitting in front of my fireplace right now, looking at the lights of the cityscape out my window. It’s awesome
22. Favorite place you visited this year? Galaxy’s Edge. If you love Star Wars, it's a delight. (yes, I really liked Disneyland)
23. If you could send a message to yourself back on the first day of the year, what would it be? You always feel better after you get some exercise, don’t skip it.
24. Did you keep any New Year’s Resolutions? I don’t think I made any
25. Did you create any characters (in games, art, or writing) this year? Describe one Currently playing Worlds Without Number with the Friday group. Our party is all from a somewhat isolated coastal island and we’re slowly exploring the wider world. I rolled randomly for pretty much everything and then crafted a character based on the stats. So he’s Buck, the butcher’s apprentice; he’s strong and kind but not very bright. I found a picture of a rugby player that I really like for him - square-headed and plain with a great smile.

we finally made an order with Saint Javelin for some fun swag that supports humanitarian aid in Ukraine. (for US peeps, the prices are in CAD.) i grew up on a farm* so one of the things i got was a sticker inspired by this and other Ukranian farmers towing away military equipment with tractors.

an incompetent person at work is getting fired for being incompetent. i might have felt bad about it a couple weeks ago because they were a nice person who seemed eager. but at this point i can't wait for them to be gone so i can stop worrying about what they will break next. maybe i'll find time to write a locked post when the dust settles.

holy shit the Obi-Wan Kenobi teaser trailer dropped. i have read novels upon novels worth of Kenobi fanfic during the pandemic and am heavily emotionally invested in the character... so I am both thrilled and terrified by this thing. it reminds me of waiting for Wonder Woman. i'm worried that it's going to retcon his final scene in Star Wars in some awkward way, among other dumb things Disney is capable of. (and i know there's stuff that just isn't happening here; he's not going to have a cry about Satine and if we ever do find out what happened to Korkie it will be elsewhere.)

one of the side-effects of the war in Ukraine is that C and i are having rich conversations about geopolitics and the Cold War. a) the conversations are just good b) this is totally how we ended up dating originally, talking for hours about this kind of shit. so while everything is awful, this is also nostalgic and by association kind of sexy?

i am kind of in love with what sounds like a Goth cover album that i would have worked into my college radio show every week but is actually the Chipmunks on 16 speed.



*insert rant here about John Deere's current practices and also, hey it's Ukranian hackers that help farmers around the world do their own tractor maintenance

Stephen Sondheim is dead. he was in his 90s, it was a good run.

few have been so great or influenced so many.

that's the thing - he was an artist's artist, making expensive and cerebral cult classics...it's difficult to lift any song from its context because they were so firmly woven into the scene and characters, and his shows rarely ran for long on Broadway. he was mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II and he went on to mentor many others including Jonathan Larson and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

i always loved singing his music, which was full of uncommon rhythms and harmonies that flirted around dissonance. every story he told was bittersweet. i deeply admire him, and the news hit me hard.

he was the pinnacle of the "book" musical and we won't see his like again.

i was going to share some songs, but as noted above they're not the same out of context. i'll try anyway:

got into a conversation on a locked post about when and how we cancel creators, led me to to do a bit of personal spelunking.

i used to be a big fan of Joss Whedon, at one point he was even my stated answer to the "free pass" question. (i was over that by at least ten years ago, recent news was sad but no surprise.) i noticed two things via that search: Whedonesque is just gone (i had heard, but i forgot how many times i used to link it), and you can't view LiveJournal with an ad blocker enabled.

there's something scary here - since i couldn't load it directly, i thought i would look up what was a public ElJay post about why Xander Harris is horrible on the Wayback Machine. and i discovered that the Wayback Machine crawl of ElJay is very shallow and broken. i'm sure it's too late to rescue that content now :(

at least The Secret Life of Dolls is archived elsewhere.

there was a question posed in my comments back in 2007 that's still valid:

we had our first Saturday night session of D&D with our eight-person,* four-time-zone party. the DM and half the party are folks i played RPGs with in college and haven't seen since i moved to the west coast. it went surprisingly well both from a gaming standpoint and in terms of picking up like we never stopped hanging out.

it was interesting to see how other people use Roll20 + Discord.

this game (D&D): Discord video chat, Roll20 text chat and rolls.
Friday game (Savage Worlds): Discord audio, text chat, and rolls.
Tuesday game (D&D, same group as Friday): Discord audio and text chat, Roll20 rolls.

C and i have to train ourselves out of having side conversations in Discord chat, no one is looking at it. (and C has to figure out how to get Discord to recognize his camera.) the other thing is that in terms of using the character sheet, the Friday gamers are much more sophisticated, in terms of using the chat features and the GM tools the Saturday gamers know more. i'm really missing the money we put into the Friday game, where we have copies of all the sourcebooks for our GM and therefore available to everyone in the game. working with just the SRD (a limited free version of the rules) is limiting...but the Saturday gamers know tricks with having other players that own the books do character sheet updates. so it's hacky but workable.

---

this afternoon (after i finished fussing with my character sheet for the evening game) i added Fate die rolling to my Discord bot, Chewie. it's very basic right now (like it shows your default username instead of your server nickname when it attributes the roll) but it works and in the process fixed an existing bug Chewie had with commands. i need to look at the rulebook to think about what other Fate features it needs after i get the name thing right.

i started by looking at another Fate roller project on GitHub, but it didn't work as written. i know the guy advertised the project on Reddit, but i had to change enough things that i'm not sure that it worked before it was apparently abandoned. or maybe the discord.py library changed drastically between when it was first written and now.**






*our DM asked eight, expecting 30% or so to say no, but no one did.
**i don't know, though. there was a math function that had nothing to do with discord.py that didn't work. and they didn't know how to format line breaks. still, they saved me a ton of time finding the right formatting for displaying emojis for the dice and had a folder of the dice art itself. i should try to contribute back my changes.

unlike many folks in the US, my family Thanksgiving was not traditionally a home-cooked meal. we took it as a true day off - no cooking or doing dishes for anyone in the family. we always went out (and we didn't eat out very often, so it was a big treat). i would say that nothing will be right about Thanksgiving this year, but that is untrue.

it's still feeling like a holiday:

• i felt oddly comforted by moving the cold drinks out of the fridge and onto the balcony to make room for the turkey and sides. this ritual, of using the outdoors as extra cold space around an event recalls my childhood.


• an apple pie is in the oven. i still think of pie as my mother's domain, but (like knitting) i've found my own style and it is a thing i do well, but not the same. the smell of apple pie is the smell of family.


• we have a magic box of turkey and sides from the good grocery store, so i'm still not having to slave all day in the kitchen tomorrow or do a ton of dishes. i'm going to have a lot of stuffing and gravy in my future.*

*and i'll be making turkey stock, something you don't get to have when you get the buffet at Ray's. does it make up for the freshly-shucked oysters and the salmon and the prime rib while the sun sets into the sound? let's pretend it does.

as was foretold, the kigurumi is here, it fits*, and it's a good thing they didn't have these when i was in college because my first roommate and i would have lived in them. (among other things, we used to go to an 8am class with wet hair still wrapped in a towel. at least we showered?) kigurumi is the modern fulfillment of Mike Daisey's admonition to new college students:

If comfort was our only goal as a species, we’d all be wandering around in velour sacks, idly masturbating, and eating fistfuls of pudding.

for today, my homework is done and i can get down to reading fluffy romances and/or watching Tudor Monastery Farm in this velourfleecy sack to my heart's content.
i do too many video meetings to get away with wearing it on normal working days, but Halloween is coming 😈


*it's made by a Japanese company and came with Japanese tags. at 5'9" i am a giant by Asian clothing standards; the XL was a good call, it just reaches my wrists and ankles

i hated math when i was in school. not because it was "hard" but because i hated anything that required rote repetition, nor did i enjoy manipulating numbers for the sake of manipulating numbers without an application. i generally grasped the concepts right away and found sheets of practice problems to be torture. i was the flip side of most of my class, who were happy to do sheets of dittos but quailed at word problems, which were my favorite.

once we got to use variables (algebra) and then calculators (trigonometry) i was much happier. most favorite was geometry where the work was in figuring out how to get to the answer, not so much the numerical result. i was in a college-level Calculus class as a HS senior but found the teacher's style incomprehensible; it was the one course i dropped in my entire academic history. (i didn't need it to graduate, it just would have been nice for placement. frex, i literally tested myself out of the distribution courses for college English and History.) i only took Statistics in college; i passed but it was my worst grade ever.*

this week's unit in my Python class involves basic math operations. which is how i learned that somehow i never fully absorbed PEMDAS. one of the examples in the class reading was this:

number = 1 + 2 * 3 / 4.0

now, that's something where you would use parentheses for clarity in real life, but it was meant to show how Python follows a built-in set of rules. i honestly had to go on StackOverflow to get an improved lesson in something that i should have had engraved on my brain in primary school. were there other basic concepts that i didn't take in because i dreaded the math portion of the day? or maybe just things i fully erased in order to store more trivia? i guess i'm going to find out.


*there's another story to be told here about how between my total inexperience with needing to ask for help on anything academic and being culturally unaware of how to use office hours, i didn't take advantage of the resources available to do better. also, still hated math.

digression that sort of belongs here: in spite of years of piano lessons, voice lessons, and a solid performance record, i can't truly read music. i used to ace written theory tests, i can totally tell which notes to play and relative pitches to sing, but i can't sight read based on time signatures. if i haven't heard a recording or performance of the piece i can't produce it correctly. but i guess i've always been good enough at compensating that no one really got how illiterate i am, including me. i didn't truly understand until i read someone else's account of their experience.

(is this my new five questions? mmmmmmaybe.)

via musyc:

1. Comment to this entry saying 'Ooo Shiney!' and I will pick 3 of your icons/userpics.
2. Make an entry in your own journal (or just reply if you prefer) and talk about the icons I picked!

musyc chose:

image of Rachel Bloom in a cactus dress, looking pensive.
keywords: arty, cactus, CxG kernels

this one is relatively new, i made it after abandoning my LJ to the Russian TOS. i use it for artiness and surrealism, sometimes for being a fashion victim or being prickly or awkward.
it's a still from the big song in the Craxy Ex-Girlfriend season 2 opener, Love Kernels.( video clip )


image of a US "Don't Walk" sign that has been vandalized to resemble ASL for "I love you"
keywords: don't walk/i love you
this was an actual Don't Walk sign in Seattle. it was across from the old Capitol Hill Bauhaus Coffee (for folks who know where that was). that sort of charming vandalism is something that used to be Very Seattle. IIRC solcita took the original picture. most often used when i want to say "I love you" or "I love this" or otherwise express support.


image of a Japanese condom label featuring koalas wearing little condom hats
keywords: bears
back in the day, someone linked to an article with a gallery of charming Japanese condom label art. i loved how sweet and wholesome this image was. this is an icon that is sadly underused, but when i remember it comes out for discussions of birth control, STIs, and sex education (and sometimes bears).

scarlettina took me to see the revival tour of Les Mis on Friday evening. ultimately i enjoyed it a great deal, even though what i saw on stage was constantly fighting with my memories of the original Broadway production and the cast album. as we noted, we both knew the songs much better than we realized.

obligatory THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS for a 30-something musical and an 1862 book.

***

my first exposure to Les Mis was as a teen; it was my first national tour (I later saw it again during its loooong run in New York) and before i went all the way to Philadelphia to see it with my French class, my mom's boss made me a tape of the cast album and i listened to it obsessively in preparation.

my mind was blown by that show. hearing the music live was great, sure. but it was the stagecraft. i don't think it was the first play i saw with a turntable, but it was the most dynamic use i'd ever seen, where it wasn't used just for quick scene changes, but for motion within scenes to give a feeling of traveling and distance, and to change POV. then there was the barricades, where the revolutionaries literally pulled the buildings down and locked them together! Valjean's run through the sewers, with the slices of light from the gratings and the ripping reflections of water on the floor! Javert falling to his death, arms pinwheeling, center stage! at the time i didn't know that any of it was possible. seeing that production is probably why i have a theatre degree.

i then spent years singing arrangements of it in various choruses, etc etc as you do.

***
this production skips the turntable and the pivoting tower units in favor of projections and (i think) some sliding floor sections that are only used for set changes. the dynamism comes instead from moving the background behind the actors and it works well. projections are finally getting to the point where i don't entirely hate them.* it was especially nice for creating a sense of time and distance in the sewer scenes.

i thought the tempo was a bit too fast for most of the music - not just because i have an older production memorized, but because i could hear the orchestra leading the singers on several solos and was losing lyrics.

BUT there were some really lovely touches of business and lyrical interpretations. for the first time i genuinely liked Marius, who at one point let his voice crack in his duet with Cosette. it was easy to follow Javert into his role as spy. in Valjean's death scene, the voices of the dead are lightly processed to sound a bit unworldly and unlike the living, which sharpened the storytelling of the moment, as did the the bishop welcoming Valjean with open arms and hugging him.**

i still don't know exactly how Javert's fall is done, which brings me such joy. i think i might have caught his signal that his harness was secure, but i'm not sure. YAY.

over all it was a great trip down memory lane and a solid production of a show that's held up remarkably well.

***
over intermission scarlettina and i talked about our feelings about Eponine. On My Own was my first favorite song from the show, and i always hated the Marius/Cosette storyline. like, he literally sees her once and he's in love; he's been friends with Eponine for however long and she can't get the dude to see her as more than a friend or to understand her feelings for him until she's taken a fucking bullet for him.*** scarlettina always saw her as selling herself short - why hasn't this girl moved on? being a teen when i first heard the song, it was the perfect expression of my real-life frustration; the people in my life who i thought were right for me were romantically interested in people that they literally couldn't hold a conversation with (but who had a certain look).

I'm going to be thinking about me and Eponine for a few days.




*although i still think it forces under-lighting and the older i get the less i am able to enjoy that without strain. you have to be really careful of getting actors too close to the projection surface because you don't want to throw shadows on it or wash it out when you light the actors. and of course there are issues with resolution and getting the colors to match the set and on and on.

**maybe that hug was there before, but it certainly didn't mean anything to me mumble mumble years ago when there was no one i might hope to see in an afterlife

***is Eponine a "nice guy"? ultimately i don't think so. she doesn't decide to hate on Marius or Cosette and she understands that it's not going anywhere and that saying something at this point is going to make things worse.