fast away

Following the ancient Ulster custom of “a year about”, we spent Christmas in my homeland with my family, which never amounts to much more than a miserable reminder that everyone is extremely old and only getting older (the youngest of them, my own mother, will be turning 70 this year). At least we got to catch up with the two schoolfriends I’m still in semi-regular contact with and their respective husbands, so we weren’t surrounded by the old and infirm 100% of the time.

Like the past couple of years, I’m not feeling particularly inclined towards celebrating the passing of the old year/the coming of the new by presenting detailed statistics about every insignificant thing I did in a given category during 2024, so instead, here are some men I enjoyed last year, and here are some things that seemed relevant in December:

Fic writing
  • I finished off a few FFX WIPs for which I had initially had more ambitious plans:
  • Also I succeeded in writing something for /yuletide … I signed up offering a load of visual novels that I hadn’t played with the intent of using the exchange as an excuse to play one of them, which worked well. Ended up being assigned Nightshade, which I enjoyed (probably more than I would enjoy most otome games??). I wrote a little thing about unexpected dining arrangements  U   ☉  1k+. No doubt there was some kind of entertaining wank this year about something, but I’ve stopped looking at anon comms.
  • Continuing work on A Shot At Life, which in December mostly involved finalising the metadata and some aspects of presentation. I’ll be posting the first chapter on Saturday along with unnecessarily detailed commentary … probably about 90% of what I say and do in 2025 will relate to this fic, just a warning.
  • I posted 15 fics in 2024 for a total of 14,268 words (all the stats are here), which was quite a significant drop from previous years, but (gestures at the 375k fic I’m about to start posting).
Films
  • Conclave (2024): this was really good. I had a sort of memey tongue-in-cheek obsession with Robert Harris when I was 17 or so for convoluted reasons, so it was appropriate to watch this.
  • Mufasa (2024): sadly, it was also appropriate for me to watch this, because I was hugely into The Lion King when I was seven and even wrote fic at the time about my OC “Kovu 2” … mpreg was involved. I say “sadly” because this film was shite, especially the songs, which were all terrible and have actually put me off the idea of seeing Hamilton ever. There were some potentially interesting plot points (such as Mufasa gaining some kind of vague sixth sense because he’s raised by women), none of which went anywhere. At least this take on Mufasa and Scar’s backstory provides an explanation for Scar’s British accent, I guess.
  • I watched 8 films in total in 2024, which is probably a pretty average amount for me.
Gaming
  • Completed all the routes in Nightshade, which I’ve been quiet about in previous posts given that it was my /yuletide assignment. As I said above, I found it quite enjoyable, and shoutout to best boy Hanzo, who endeared himself to me by being the strongest and most revered shinobi in the world while also being unfathomably, ludicrously loyal to his posh, eccentric master. (I took a screenshot of the moment where he says “I’m sorry I was late. Are you all right, my lord?” because I was like, oh … it’s that dynamic …)
  • Bought a couple of games in the PSN sale, although I can’t play them atm because the slow death of our TV appears to have finally reached its climax. In related news, 4K TVs seem quite affordable now?
  • I beat 5 games in 2024, which could have been more if FF7 Rebirth hadn’t gone on for so many interminable hours.
Home
  • A couple of things in our garden broke during the early December storm; we’ve applied temporary fixes because the One Trusted Joiner said he may not be available until June.
  • I cleared out the bathroom cupboard yesterday and got rid of a load of mouldy soap. This was a very satisfying exercise, the perfect new year’s eve activity imo.
Music
  • Orchestra Christmas concert number 2, i.e. the one that was actually in December, seemed to go better than the first one (mostly because we played Sleigh ride at a decent tempo).
  • Found a few of the CDs my mum owns in a secondhand CD shop and bought them in an ongoing attempt to reconstruct my childhood music library.
  • In “obscure music that has significance to nobody but me” news, I discovered a new-to-me Graham Sandercock song to enjoy.
Reading
  • The in-common-laws got me a couple of books about Japan for Christmas; I’m not sure when they discovered I’m a weeb, but they seem quite enthusiastic about it.
  • My mum got me Trelawny’s Cornwall and I spent most of Christmas day reading it while everyone else made a huge fuss about the turkey … highly recommended.
  • Finished L’assommoir at last! Despite Zola’s propensity for using extremely specific vocabulary that I don’t understand, which I remember is what prevented me from making much progress when I tried Germinal, I enjoyed it. It’s extremely tragic, did u kno I love suffering.
  • Started reading Too like the lightning, having been hugely intrigued by ~silveredeye’s post about the series. I’ve only just started and I have no idea what’s going on, but I think that’s the intended effect at this point (hopefully).
  • I read 39 books in total in 2024, almost certainly more than in any other recent year because I had some time for work-related reading at work last semester. I’d like to keep up a decent amount of reading this year, which may be possible now that I’ve deleted various social media accounts.
Recs
Techbro
  • I deleted my facebook account, actually a huge deal because back in 2009, it was the first website I started using regularly where not everyone else was a weird nerd like me and I quickly had to learn how to interact in a sufficiently normal way. My account had been mostly empty since 2012 when I had one of my periodic help-I’m-being-perceived phases, but I was still using it to passively catch up with a certain community that I’m geographically removed from, until I decided I could just join the community association formally instead and read their actual newsletter instead of contributing to hypercapitalist parasocial shite.
  • Added a page showing my record collection to my website, which is built by yet another static site generator of my own devising that scrapes directly from Discogs using their API.
Work
  • Got to where I planned to be by the end of my semester of leave, I think … now I have to go back tomorrow and actually communicate with people again, and even teach students in a couple of weeks. Not sure I currently remember how to do either of these things tbh.
Upcoming
  • Really nothing more than what I have said already (starting to post the fic, yikes! Starting to interact with students again, yikes!) … if I have any kind of new year’s resolution it’s to touch grass or something, I guess.
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