My 2024 time off came in January, and therefore so are my 2024 memes. This one came from [personal profile] kingstoken.


Your main fandom last year?
That would be Baldur’s Gate 3, to such a life-consuming degree it was basically my only fandom in 2024. I played 400+ hours over the course of six months. I have one NPC quest boss battle and the final battle to complete, and then I will have finished the game. I have been avoiding doing either because once they’re done, I will have finished the game. 😭

Your favorite movie watched last year?
My favorite 2024 release was, hands down, Deadpool & Wolverine.

My favorite older but first-time watch was Colossal, which I thought was going to be a kaiju movie, but which is is actually a feminist horror film, and an absolutely excellent one at that.

My favorite documentary was Coded Bias, which was so infuriating I had to repeatedly pause it to go take agitated walks, despite having already read the scholarship it’s presenting.

Your favorite book read last year?
Of the new-to-me books I read in 2024, this is probably a four-way tie between Ann Leckie’s Translation State, Amy Lipcott’s The Outrun, Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, and Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits, which I inhaled in a day and which is still lodged in my brain a week later. Of these four, only the first has a fandom presence (although Glorious Exploits is ripe for one).

Your favorite TV show of the year?
Say Nothing. I rocketed through the book in two days in March and immediately went poking around online to see what others' thoughts were. This revealed that Disney+ had optioned the rights for a screen adaptation. That will never happen, I thought. Fast forward to November, when I saw that it in fact had. But there’s no way it’ll be any good, I thought. It was indeed very good. So good, in fact, that the GC (who doesn't like documentaries or historical dramas) ended up eagerly watching the entire thing.

Your favorite video game of the year?
See: “Your main fandom this year”, above.

Your favorite song, album, or artist to listen to this year?
Song: Crows’ Bored. This song is a freaking banger. As is the album it’s on. As is Crows’ entire catalogue.
Album: Robbie McGowran’s The Irish Way. Just classic, artful playing all the way through.
Artist: Russian Circles. Their albums are phenomenal, as was their live show this fall.

Favorite podcast of the year
The only podcast I listened to start-to-finish this year was Tortoise Media’s Master, which was horrific, excellently written, and wholly believable.

In terms of as-yet-ongoing listens, I enjoyed the Grimfrost and History Fuzz podcasts immensely. The first is a wonderfully in-depth look at various aspects of Norse and Viking history that focuses on the historical record even when that might contradict the dearly held positions of various likely audience democraphics. The latter is an enjoyable look at European and pre-Columbian American archeoastronomy, although listeners will have to put up with a fair amount of purile academic cattiness from the host alongside the good stuff.

Your best new fandom discovery of the year?
While not a “big” discovery per se, I remain tickled by this BG3 Easter egg.
Specifically, this book, entitledYoshimo Is Willing.


Larian sees you, OG BG players.


Your biggest fandom disappointment?
Pulling a full-on “Troy meets LaVar Burton” when meeting Coinneach MacLeod. How does this happen? I am always so smooth in my head.

Your TV video game boyfriend of the year?
Astarion, aka the Felix Harrowgate of Faerun. What a freaking fantastic character arc.

Your TV video game girlfriend of the year?
Karlach, whose IRL girlfriend I would be in a second, if she existed IRL.

Your biggest squee moment of the year?
Finding myself less than two feet away from Pac, Cesaro, and Jon Moxley as they made their Dynamite ring entrance last month.


       


Mox turning his cold, cold stare on me for a solid 7 seconds as he stalked by was An Experience.


(Bonus: the GC and I have a friend who wrestles for *mumble mumble* promotion out West. We both wore his t-shirt to the show. He saw us wearing them while watching the live broadcast and was over the moon.)


Fandom resolutions for next year?
I don't really have any? Ideally, I just keep reading, writing, and watching.

Your biggest fannish anticipations for the new year?
I’ve already written about my excitement for Paraic O’Donnell and Natasha Pulley’s new books. To this, let me add the publication of Katherine Addison’s The Tomb of Dragons, which comes out in March.

My full 2024 Multimedia List is here.

これで以上です。
lebateleur: A picture of the herb sweet woodruff (Default)
( Mar. 10th, 2024 10:09 am)
...makes a post. I was too busy on Sunday and the past few Wednesdays to post, so let's do something out of schedule. Behold, a week of things:


AEW: Revolution We used this PPV as the impetus to engage in a marathon cleaning session (8+ hours with one break for a regularly scheduled weekend video call with friends). Few things are a more powerful motivator to tackle all the eternally put-offable tasks than having a bunch of people over. Baseboards were dusted. Dead plants were culled. The fridge was cleaned. Donation items were actually donated. Reader, it is NICE to live in this clean space.

The PPV itself was a blast. All the regulars were here, plus one person who had never watched sports wrestling entertainment before but immediately grokked what makes it so ridiculously fun (and was a genuinely cool person to talk to in general). A BS technical snafu with the provider for the first thirty minutes meant we missed the two opening matches: one we didn't care about and one we unfortunately did. But there were still a lot of really great matches to watch; like everyone, we dug Ospreay vs. Takeshita, and, of course, STING.

Birthday! We went out for sushi to celebrate my having survived another 366 days. The food was excellent, the atmosphere was great, and there were some amazing people-watching opportunities to boot. I talked to ma soeur and mes parents, who took great pains to make sure I knew they hadn't sent a present yet but would do so "soon." (Narrator voice: They won't.) That entirely predictable untruth aside, I received several albums and intriguing new books from other sources and have been enjoying those all week.

I also received a bottle of local olive oil from a dear friend that occasioned no small amount of concern, and then hilarity, when, several weeks later I randomly received an apparently handwritten postcard sent by "Whiskey Victor" that began with "Hey there Partner", included among its hey-we're-old-pals body the sentences "it's been a while and well, hope to see you back here soon", and signed off with "Don't be a stranger!"

"Who the fuck is Victor?" asked the GC.

"I have no fucking idea," I responded.

"He seems to think he knows you," said the GC.

"...Yeah," I responded, prompting us both to burn several cycles trying to figure out who overly familiar creepster Victor was, what his evident connection to Geek BBQ whiskey club was (because that was the logical explanation for the name but whiskey club is a tight group and no one named Victor has ever taken part), whether this was a case of mistaken identity (but the postcard was addressed to me-by-my-wallet-name and mailed to my actual address), and what frequency and level of potential future communications might warrant involving the cops, before realizing that "Whiskey Victor" = NATO alphabet = initials of the company that manufactured the olive oil sent to me by actual good friend whom I actually know.

Pro tip to marketing directors: If you've made your customer communications so folksy and familiar that customers get weirded out because they don't know it's you, you just might be doing it wrong.

Building Bullshit: The cops were here at least three night last week (including one memorable evening when we got back to find 5+ cars outside and about twice as many officers swarming the lobby), and the fire alarm went off once, but none of the above made much of an impact on my floor, so...yay?

Concerts: Namely, the Dandy Warhols. We were the first show of the tour, which means we were part of the first audience to hear the material off of their new (as yet unreleased) album live. That was extremely cool. They were also playing a different venue than the last time we saw them, and the difference in sound quality was night and day. The instrumentation and vocals were all perfectly crisp. The band played a great mix of new, recent, and old stuff that I've been alternately singing and humming to myself in the days since. These guys are so much fun to see live, and I'm counting down the days until the new album comes out.

Geek BBQ: A packed weekend sandwiched between two workweeks of 10+ days meant I tapped out pretty early this week. Sometimes it's like that. This week's selection was 1792 Bourbon, though, so it was definitely worth it to go, even if I didn't have much staying power this week.

Socks: Namely, my socks, which the new work crew started to pick up on this week. The rainbow stripes, jolly roger, and kraken socks were big hits (especially as I tied the latter to an overall marine theme that day), as was Friday, when threw everyone a curve ball by switching out cool socks for a pair of bubblegum Docs. I am going to have to up my game next week.

これで以上です。
...for a long time now, but seeing it go down will never get old. )

June 26, 2011 - August 20, 2021. IT'S BEEN A LONG DAMN WAIT.

これで以上です。
Tags:
Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring a chubby brown and red bird surrounded by falling snow. Text: Snowflake Challenge: 1-31 January.



In your own space, remix an existing work into a new media, and/or rec three or more remixes that do the same. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.


Becky Lemme Smash: Goose edition )



Shahar Vashal - Nothing On Roar Bloom Affair )



All Elite Wrestling Reenacts 'A Christmas Story' )



これで以上です。
Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring a chubby brown and red bird surrounded by falling snow. Text: Snowflake Challenge: 1-31 January.

Challenge #3: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

In your own space, tell us who, from one of your fandoms, would you most want to have dinner with (or tea, or a random afternoon visit), And why? This could be a creator, an actor, a costumer, a set designer, a director, a character, a composer, anybody! What would you talk about? What are you dying to know? Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Easy. I choose the Concrete Rose, AEW's Sonny Kiss. I love his talent, attitude, and optimism. I'd love to geek out with him for hours over dance and blending perfume oils and 90s pop culture. (Because, dance! And perfume oils! And 90s pop culture!) It would also be ton of fun to dream up sequels for last year's extended What's Next? promo.

To further liven things up, I'm adding Aubrey Edwards and Tony Schiavone into the mix, to duplicate the configuration from this podcast, because they are also fascinating and delightful human beings who have great rapport with each other and would be a blast to talk to about anything.

これで以上です。
lebateleur: A picture of the herb sweet woodruff (Default)
( Dec. 27th, 2020 08:31 am)
Giftsmas

Was delightful, if low key; alas, multiple packages that had been moving steadily through the postal system over the preceding 10 days suddenly ended up parked in warehouses as of Monday, where they languish still. But people seemed pretty pleased with the gifts that did arrive on time, and now there's the promise of more to come.


Yuletide

I got three delightful gifts for Yuletide:

take a right, bang a left by ideal_girl, All Elite Wrestling, Trent Barreta, Orange Cassidy, Chuck Taylor, multiple other cameos, rated T.
Written in linked 100-word segments, this totally captures the feel of the Dynamite Diamond match between Orange Cassidy and MJF. There are some great backstage moments with Chuck and Trent, and OC's characterization is on point.

Snowflakes by Dorey G, Blake & Avery Series, William Avery/Jeremiah Blake, rated M.
The enduring OTP of my heart, I am always thrilled to see--and even better, get--fic in this microfandom. The story picks up my snowstorm prompt and runs with it. There are so many good little moments here: increasingly worldly Avery, enduringly cynical and resigned Blake, the back-and-forth and humorously pointed observations between them. Good stuff.

Waffle Cone Bruise (log in to AO3 to see this one), All Elite Wrestling, Sue Barreta, Trent Barreta, Chuck Taylor, Orange Cassidy, rated G.
This double drabble in response to my 'what came next?" prompt for the Best Friends-Santana & Ortiz Parking Lot Brawl hits all the right notes. I love Mother Hen!Sue here.


Shenanigans

We set the temperature to a pleasant 66 degrees before retiring, only to wake up in extreme discomfort at an obscenely early hour and discover that the thermostat had malfunctioned and heated the apartment to a "cozy" 87 degrees. About half of the houseplants--most of which had already been expressing their extreme displeasure at finding themselves in the winter sunlit, arid indoors instead of the humid, sunny balcony of summer past--said 'F-- this' and croaked. I am gently coaxing the survivors into hanging on until spring. Meanwhile, the humidifier still produces warm mist, but the fan that projects it throughout the house is broken.


Language Learning

Mango Japanese: Chapter 2: Units 1-7
The course did introduce the "apology as a form of 'thank you'" this week, then dove directly into native Japanese numbers from 1-10 and ways to ask whether someone speaks or understands the languages you do.

Mango Korean: Chapter 10: Units 2-8
A lot of useful grammar in this week's units: progressive tense; verbal nouns; and admonitions and advice. The latter in particular is well presented. On the flip side, the course has given up teaching particles entirely, so that learners are (possibly unbeknownst to them) presented with a very colloquial form of the language that might make particles even more confusing and tricky to learn further on.

Podcast Gaelgagh: 70-76
We've progressed to a pretty gratifying place where the students (and listeners) have learned enough to correctly form new grammatical constructions by inference. There are still a fair number of silly practice sentences, but far more that sound like something you'd actually say to someone in a conversation, and that's pretty neat.


RIP
I was very, very sad to hear that Brodie Lee passed away yesterday. What a freaking shame.


これで以上です。
lebateleur: A picture of the herb sweet woodruff (Default)
( Dec. 4th, 2020 06:33 pm)
...did the New York Times just name AEW's very own MJF as one of its best performances of 2020?

OH YES THEY DID. )

It is consistently some of the best stuff going on TV.

これで以上です。
Tags:


Prompt 2: Orange
Orange is a warm color that is associated with a variety of things including: excitement, vitality, invincibility, speed, vigilance, dedication, loyalty, family, success, friendship, power, change, harvest, and warmth.

Right now the color orange has one association for me, and that is Orange Cassidy.

What is Orange Cassidy, you say? I'm glad you asked. ) It is just pure, ridiculous entertainment, and I love it.

And so, in the spirit of that ridiculousness, I present this freshly-squeezed AU.

Title: Shootout At The O.C. Corral
Fandom: All Elite Wrestling, Professional Wrestling
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 1377
Characters: Orange Cassidy, Chris Jericho, Sanchez, Ortiz
Summary: Jacksonville was a lawless town...


これで以上です。
lebateleur: A picture of the herb sweet woodruff (Default)
( Jun. 8th, 2020 12:01 pm)
Food & Fandom
The past few weeks have found us increasingly subsumed into AEW's entertainment ecosystem. I suppose it was only a matter of time: we already watch Dynamite and now AEW Dark pretty regularly. To which we may now add AEW's online cooking segment; a timely discovery since we've already watched each episode of HU's in the kitchen? several times. And anyway, I am a sucker for cooking shows where the hosts eyeball the ingredients, because that is how I cook too.

June 6, or The Gaming Day That Wasn't
We logged on to the Destiny servers at 1:03 to watch the live event. Virtually no players were there, although a few rando NPCs were pointing up at the sky. Had the event already ended? Was Bungie waiting for more players to show up before starting whatever it was that we were there to see? We checked back in after half an hour or so of grinding, but nothing had changed, so we logged off.

Of course, everything went down right after that. So we missed all the missiles and the Almighty crashing to earth. A bit of a bummer, but not so much of one that I regret not sitting around for 90 minutes on a Saturday afternoon to see it.

Larian was also set to preview new Baldur's Gate 3 content on the 6th, but #GuerrillaCollective announced on the 4th that they were pushing this back to June 13-15 to allow for Black Lives Matter demonstrations, which was a very cool thing to do.

これで以上です。
...Enhanced with Gratuitous Lists.

Some interesting things we’ve heard in the last 10 days in our nearly traffic sounds-free world:
  • The Blue Angels flyover. (Yay, I guess?)

  • Some nutjob shooting up the Cuban Embassy.

  • Lions roaring.
This last one one is cool, and one that we’ve heard intermittently before. But now we hear it several times a day.


I don’t watch much TV, but I’m certainly watching more these days.

AEW )


Bojack )


The Dragon Prince )


これで以上です。
My household reached peak coronavirus living. )

On the RPG front, our online homebrew campaign continues to exceed the heights of last month's epic three-hour in-game shopping extravaganza as the party accidentally seduces random NPCs with terrible saving throws and sets pretty much everything we encounter on fire. As a character whose fault is "makes jokes at inappropriate times," I am uniquely positioned to capitalize on this, and boy do I make hay.

I've also used the pandemic's reduction in diversions to catch up on AEW and oh man, it continues to be everything I love about wrestling: great storylines, great matches, and while I have mixed feelings about Jericho as a wrestler, as a commentator he is an absolute delight and I would tune in each week on the strength of that alone.

But then you combine Jericho with the puro resu shenanigans/awesomesauce that Kenny Omega et al. are bringing, and it's just that. Much. Better.

And on top of all that, Brodie Lee continues to kill it with his promos. )

これで以上です。
And now for the better stuff.

Acquiring the overpriced, POS laptop (now dubbed Oppos) meant I was able to join one of my two regular D&D groups for last night’s session. I always look forward to these sessions, and even more so now that they are the main social event left to most of the players. Read more... )

In other news, Charles Yu has a new book!


I can’t believe I only found out about this the other day—especially since it’s been out since January 27th, and Yu’s How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is one of my all time favorite books. I have been eagerly awaiting another volume from him, and I am super excited to finally get to read one.

In other book news, a very good friend became the first person I know well to catch coronavirus; they have spent the last few weeks isolated in their bedroom while their partner leaves them meals and other necessities outside the door. This is objectively awful and could not have happened to someone who deserved it less. On the bright side, I sent them The Goblin Emperor to read, so here comes one more into the fold.

In televised entertainment, AEW has steadily moved in to fill the wrestling void since I—for Reasons—abandoned WWE for good in 2018, to the point where I finally gave in to the inevitable and started watching Dynamite. I have not been disappointed. And then came THIS. )

Keep cutting those promos, Brody Lee, because I will keep eating them out of your hand.

And finally, Castlevania season 4 is confirmed!


これで以上です。
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