November doings

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I feel like I spent a lot of November having various tedious thoughts about online spaces and my place within them (as if that’s not what I do every month anyway) … I don’t particularly want to go into detail about this, but in the new great categorisation of society into Bluesky enjoyers and Bluesky haters, I have found myself in the latter group. Accordingly I deleted my Bluesky account, and also, via some very tenuous logic, my Discord account. I’m sad to have left behind what I referred to in last month’s roundup as the only drama-free Discord server in the entire world, and also my extremely obscure reference of a username, but it is what it is.

1. Fict writing

  • Having reached the end of my main editing pass through the WIP, I’m now being very normal about typesetting and have introduced some ill-advised ligatures (of which “Final Æon” is probably the most alarming).
  • I’ll make a proper WIP update post sometime this month, but I still think I’m on track to start posting this pretty much as soon as we get into January, yikes.
  • Several smaller WIPs remain on the go, some relating to FFX, some not, but nothing is a priority tbh. I might try getting some stuff finished this year in order to have reasonably accurate annual stats, but who knows.

2. Home

  • Celebrated the 7th anniversary of my relationship with @adt by spending the evening doing the following: going out to Presbyterian Badminton (him), taking loads of screenshots of Auron (me).

3. Music

  • Sang Purcell in G minor in A minor for the first time in actual years; I’d forgotten how much of a banger it was, especially the Gloria in the Nunc, which Purcell didn’t even write. Link is to a recording with trebles instead of sopranos, which goes against everything I stand for tbh, but recordings with sopranos seem to be absent from YouTube.
  • The orchestra’s Christmas concert was last night; as punishment for being scheduled too early in the year, it was … actually not that great. We played the Hallelujah chorus at the end (in @adt’s words, “finally some good fucking music”), which made me wish we were just doing the Messiah instead of all the other shite we were actually playing.
  • Here’s a fairly rough playthrough of Calm Before The Storm from FFX on the piano, which I should probably aim to write down soon; I did a similar thing with the Costa Del Sol theme from FF7 a few months ago, but I think I’ve lost the video of that one and probably wouldn’t remember how I did it.
  • Due to a strange moment of nostalgia, this month’s additions to the CD collection consisted of the CDs we recorded back in my semi-professional choir days; I even bought the score of one of the works we recorded, but will almost certainly never do anything with it.
  • Latest completely unfounded music opinion: Breezy from FF8 has the same vibe as Mother Nature’s Son by the Beatles.

4. Reading

  • Still reading L’assommoir, with more success at staying engaged than when I tried Germinal ten years ago.
  • I’m also in a “reading more fic” phase atm; currently enjoying this canon-divergence-ish novelisation of FF6.
  • Read one book for work.

5. Recs

6. Techbro

  • I was doing fic comments on my site via Discord webhooks, so I had to change that when I deleted my Discord account; ended up setting up a locked GoToSocial account and having the POST request deliver stuff there instead, so the comments show up in my fediverse feed without having to use any third-party services at all 😎. I think it’s working well (although I very rarely get comments on my site so who knows, haha).
  • Enacted various tweaks to my latest static site generator in service of my new wholesome online hobby, too wholesome to discuss in a cynical space like this one.
  • November posts on my website/Dreamwidth: notes on the Guadosalam section in FFX, RSS feeds for social media sites.

7. Work

  • Article 1 is written and needs to be submitted, now I’m deep in data analysis for article 2. This must be how scientists feel.
  • Received a copy of a book in which I co-wrote a very short chapter … then a few days later I got another (unexpected) copy of the same book … maybe this will never end and every week or so I’ll just be sent a copy of this book until the house is completely full of them?

8. Upcoming

  • It’s an even year, so we’ll be heading to the motherland for Christmas.
  • /yuletide is a thing that is still yet to happen, but, evidently, will happen.
  • More obscure fic editing stuff will also take place; I’m planning to make a post soon about the various editingy things I’m doing and how I’ve been using Emacs to leverage that.
  • I also want to make a post about Yevon … I’ve wanted to make this post for like 3 years or something, but accountability, I guess.
  • Playing in another Christmas concert next Saturday, at a more seasonally appropriate time, with a better orchestra. Still not doing the Messiah, though, alas.