scrubjayspeaks

As mentioned previously, I don’t use streaming music services. So I do a DIY end-of-year wrap-up for my music listening. Obviously, I listened to music I already owned as well, but this is the highlight reel of the year’s new purchases.

I had a lot more instrumental/ambient type music this year. I didn’t have as many “backfilling from my misspent youth” albums, though I did have some “I’ve known this artist’s work for years but never had an actual album” purchases.

New albums* heard: 74--down slightly, I think last year I did a few multi-album weeks
*(discretely purchased music items, includes singles, EPs, and other short forms along with “full” albums)

Contributing artists: 54--up slightly

Oldest album: technically, A Charlie Brown Christmas (Vince Guaraldi Trio, 1965), though the songs on The Kingston Trio collection date back to 1957 (the collection itself was released in 1990)

Newest album: Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild (Merce Lemon, September 27, 2024), though the 2024 track added to Louie Zong’s Ghost Songs might have been later

Top artists by albums: Louie Zong had six full albums, though S. J. Tucker had eight if including singles (yay for robust back catalogs!)

Most repeated albums: No Place in Heaven (MIKA), Goodnight Dreamer (Dreamer Isioma), Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (Chappell Roan)

Tracks of note: Good Guys (MIKA), GOOD MORNING SUNSHINE (Narcissist Cookbook), Dance ‘Til You Stop (Ninja Sex Party), The Village (Wrabel & Trans Chorus of Los Angeles), Pivot to Evil (Baby Got Back Talk), Wonders (S. J. Tucker)

I started buying music more frequently last year, and quickly realized this provided a massive improvement to my quality of life relative to cost. So for the past year, I have listened to at least one new album each week. Thursdays are New Album Day. (And Boy Juice Day, because Thursday is best day.)

I am a weirdo who doesn’t do streaming music but actually buys albums, organizes mp3s, and listens across multiple devices including some rather retro ones. So I do not have a tidy end-of-year, Spotify Wrapped-esque, service-generated data set to show off. I shall have to DIY that shit.

New albums* heard: 77
*(discretely purchased music items, includes singles, EPs, and other short forms along with “full” albums)

Contributing artists: 50

Oldest Album: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (David Bowie, 1972)

Newest Album: It's Black Friday, Charlie Brown (Louie Zong, November 24, 2023)

Top artists by albums: Left At London and The Midnight, four albums apiece

Most repeated albums: DECIDE (Djo), 6666 (Four Fists), PORTALS (Melanie Martinez), Monsters (The Midnight), Bronco (Orville Peck), Fake News (Pinguini Tattic Nucleari)

Tracks of note: For Judas (Adeem the Artist), The Grand Experiment (Doomtree), THIS IS A PROTEST FOR YOUR HEART!!! (Left At London), Unjinxed (Four Fists), Maker (Anjimile), Live Another Day (Skyhill)

A better, if somewhat confusing week. Work was very up and down. I have done something terrible to my back that doesn't seem to be going away. :/

The 80s synth-pop is, in fact, making me feel better, as is the small mountain of other music I have given myself. New music, it turns out, gives me way more happiness bang-for-my-buck than new books.

I am bingeing on Stranger Things season 4 fic. Have I seen the season? No, fool, I haven't even watched season 3 yet! Have I joined the movement that says that ending never happen, shut your pie hole? Yes, obviously, because everyone lives happily ever after, shut up, shut up, shut up! Am I trash for Eddie Munson? Friends, they gave me a theatrically weird, trailer trash nerd who is pretty visibly neurodivergent and unsubtly coded as queer--I was fucking doomed from the start.

And finally, I have been invited to play D&D with a couple of coworkers. Who are going above and beyond to make me feel welcome and not overwhelmed by the whole socializing thing, which is genuinely touching and baffling. Have I made friends? Holy shit??? *cue preemptive panic*

Lewisia: 3 new regular pieces written, 9 new ephemera pieces, and all of December queued up--finally caught up again

Day job: 42.75 hours, which swung wildly between abject boredom and frantic busyness

Crafting: got 3 out of 6 new patches sewn onto the battle jacket

Gardening: pandemic garden club post

Listening: Cruel Liars by Mightmare (freaking phenomenal, grungy and thumpy), Haunted House single by SNAKE POOL (delightful, fatally catchy), Skablam by Louie Zong (a favorite I finally got around to buying, instead of just listening on Youtube), The Age of Consent by Bronski Beat (hat tip to palmviolet's Stranger Things fic, sub-culture, for turning me onto this wonderful and very gay 80s synth-pop), Please by Pet Shop Boys (because I am just down an 80s rabbit hole now and might as well wallow happily)

Other: dental appointment #1 (more to follow)

Challenge #3: In your own space, put some favorite characters into an AU, fuse some favorite canons together, talk about your favorite AU/fusion tropes, or tell us why AU/fusions aren’t your cup of tea.

Oh, biscuits--see, that's what all my recs were going to be about this year. No, no, I'm not dropping them right now. It's hard enough for me to scrape together recs. We shall speak in general terms instead!

I love me an AU. There's always something nice about the idea that so much of the world can change, but these people will still find each other. Since I'm a sucker for teamwork and found family, anything that reinforces the inevitability of these characters coming together will get me right in the tender heart bits. For reference, when I think AU, I'm not usually thinking of fix-it fic (glorious on its own merits), but more sweeping changes to the known universe.

I don't generally go for mundane AUs--the coffee shops and colleges and whatnot. (With the exception, perhaps, of essieincinci's No Finer Mess To Be Found series, aka the Chubby Punk universe, which features tattoo artist Steve and the aforementioned chubby punk Bucky. There: a rec after all.) I'd be lying if there haven't been a few to win me over. But if anything, I want to inject even more weirdness into my fictional worlds, not subtract what canon already gave me.

Also, I worked in food service myself--why would I do that to fictional characters I like? Can't I just torture them lightly and toss them into the arms of their loved ones instead? Wouldn't that be kinder?

Since I'm mainly in superhero-based fandoms, I've got a pretty thrilling range of weirdness at my disposal already. So to add more, I quite like adding magic that is a bit more high fantasy--witches and curses and kingdoms at war. Psychic powers (not originally attributed to the character in question) are always fun as well. Soul bonds, as one of the AUs du jour lately, are a solid option as well.

Despite being otherwise indifferent to zombie stories, a fandom-based zombie apocalypse has a good chance of doing it for me. Apocalyptic settings in general, when handled by fandom people, are a lot of fun. I can generally trust them to give me happy endings and only the sorts of suffering I like to read about, which is not something I can safely say about the publishing genre.

I also enjoy a good alternate timeline AU. The gang's all here, they just met up at a different stage of their life or at a different point in the storyline. See owlpostagain's Stilinski's Home for Wayward Wolves and, in a more general canon divergence, KouriArashi's Adult Wolf. (Where did all these recs come from???)

Of course, you can also just turn the whole cast of characters into, idk, stray dogs or something. Cracktastic AUs are an extremely valid life choice.

Now then: the semi-exception to my no-mundane-AUs preference. Hockey. All I can say is, damn all you weirdos* for making me not only know things about a sportsball for the sake of seeing more superheroes kiss, but for making me actually. care. about. a sportsball. Do you realize, I have started watching hockey games on tv when one of my meager selection of channels carries one? I have seriously considered paying actual monies for ESPN+ to be able to see all the games said meager channels DON'T carry? All because certain people had the bald-faced audacity to take a whole assortment of Marvel characters and put them on ice skates and make them punch and/or kiss each other in deeply compelling ways. Unbelievable. Who let you in here?

*It's thepartyresponsible. They're the weirdo. More on that later.

I haven't quite finished the last few pages of Field Guide to the Haunted Forest, but oh my gaaaaaaawd, I love it so much. Every so often, the universe sees fit to remind me that I genuinely love poetry. And this is loose, pleasantly odd poetry, deeply rooted in nature and seasonality. It is the flip side to traditional haiku, with its rigid structure, but it puts my head in the same sort of place.

This is--I think I mentioned previously--by the creator of the podcast, The CryptoNaturalist. It doesn't have any particularly cryptozoological tendencies, so if that's not your bag, fear not. It's more of a...traditional (???) sort of nature poetry, though there's certainly an air of the weird at times. Mostly, though, it focuses on the ideas that nature is fundamentally wonderful--full of wonder--and that you as a human are part of nature and the world is better for having you and everything else in it. They are poems of small, overlooked things and cosmic truths glimpsed in mundane places.

I gather from comments here and there that Jarod has had mental health struggles. It absolutely reads like the work of someone who has fought to get to a point where they believe in their place in the world, believe the world would, after all, be smaller and poorer were they not in it. It reads like letters of encouragement to a former self: you deserve to be here, just as you are. You are part of the world, a radical notion when one is deep in the isolating misery of depression.

Also, Jarod tweeted out this description of the intersection of genres at which the podcast sits, which will tell you exactly why I love it so much:

The CryptoNaturalist is a podcast about Van Helsing situations from a Steve Irwin perspective. It has also been described as "if Tom Bombadil had a podcast" and The X-Files as told by Bob Ross. I'm pretty pleased with all of these descriptions.

— The CryptoNaturalist (@CryptoNature) April 24, 2021

I am absolutely insane with envy at the prospect of having my own body of work described thus. Hnnnnnnnggggg...

Challenge #8: Rec at least three fanworks that you didn’t create.

Well, three recs just isn't going to happen, but one is better than none.

I encountered Lisosa's Pokemon fanart on tumblr whilst awaiting the arrival of my copies of Sword and Shield. They did a series of water Pokemon interpreted as mermaids, and there are a bunch of other Pokemon-as-human designs. (These are apparently called gijinka.) I just find their stuff really charming. They have little blurbs about how the characters are connected to one another, too.

Just look at the pretty!

Day 2

Rec at least three fanworks that you didn’t create. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I had originally planned to do a nostalgia rec set, but that rather came apart on me. So here: have an assortment of things I have liked with commentary.

Apocalyptic, by Grable424 & djcprod (fanvid, multifandom): the apocalypse should probably not make me feel so pumped up, but this one does it. By the time it gets to the line of "we go forward," I feel like I have rediscovered a reason to live. (Even "Live. Breathe. Suffer." feels like a motivational moto.) I have a deep, badly scarred-up place in my heart for anything that can be described as "teeth-gritted determination." I hum the song to myself at work sometimes, thinking of this, when the bullshit level is particularly elevated and I need to keep my head above it.

Lights for the Emperor, by tend (fic, Yu Yu Hakusho, Kurama/Hiei): I need to reread this, but I'm sort of saving it for some misty spring day. That feels like the right sort of time to get cozy with this story again. (I mention all this to excuse my inability to give any kind of detailed synopsis.) I found this when doing an "I wonder if anything interesting is happening in my ur-fandom" search. And it was particularly lovely, with its nuance and its quiet and its difficulties, as a reintroduction as an adult to something I loved as a teen. Also, the world building aspect of Kurama performing traditions intended to cast out evil spirits--traditions that actually activate against him--was brilliant.

The last bit does have two fic recs, but it's actually a...concept that I'm recommending. The stories OK Computer by Speranza and Transfigurations by Resonant both have a DVD commentary version, here and here respectively. These are both solid nostalgia stories for me, this time more from the college years, I think. They both do fascinating things with world building, and story arcs, and identity, and the passage of time. I love even more the commentary versions, which is something I don't seem to see done anymore?

For OK Computer, the commentary is some great literary analysis, including some really interesting commentary on queerness in media. For Transfigurations, you have an author and a beta in conversation about the writing process, which--you have no idea how endlessly fascinating that is to me. When I reread either story, I prefer to read the commentary version. What one loses in immersion is, I find, made up for in complexity of engagement.

As I said, I don't really see this happening any more (the lj challenge community for it has long since died), but maybe I'm in the wrong fandoms for it these days? If anyone knows of individual fic or fandoms where this is being done, I would totally be willing to leap into a new fandom for this. Hell, even rec me old stuff with commentary versions that you find particularly satisfying--I won't turn my nose up at it.