foxinthestars

Games: Travel and vacation schedules meant no board game gathering this week.

Miscellaneous: A couple of longform articles:

A Ghost Estate and an Empty Grave

We Still Live in Fast Food Nation

Music: First house session of the new year; with only four of us there, a lot of opportunities to call sets, which consisted of a good mix of familiar and new tunes. One of the guys is, unfortunately, a noodler, playing into any and every silence, which makes it very hard to start sets. I will just have to be assertive about playing over him if he's there next week.

Roleplaying: Newest D&D Homebrew campaign had our "Beach Episode" holiday one shot this past weekend. As ever, it was an absolute blast. I sound like a broken record, but our DM is phenomenal: she gets such a good mix of role play, exploration, and combat into every session, and you'd never know she is--by her own admission--winging things half the time.

I played a kobold bard and loved it. As with my goblin rogue, I chose this critter because I wasn't convinced it would be fun to play, and as with my goblin rogue, she has become one of my favorite characters. Turns out, I really enjoy playing characters that don't quite get larger humanoids. And bards are just so versatile. It's been...five years since I last played this class, and man it was fun throwing all those spells and buffs into the mix and watching what happens. We'll be back to our main characters in the next session, but since this one shot took place in the same universe I hope we'll have a chance to revisit these ones as well.

Television: We finished Max Headroom S1. The final episode, Blanks, is my favorite of the season, and I'm always surprised by how long the show takes to introduce them compared to the movie. Having blanked myself from as much 21st century Big Tech as I can, I feel a special affinity with those guys. (And again, damn, this show was prescient: social media-elected leaders, the attention economy, doomscrolling, ransomware--it envisioned them all.) We'll probably get started on S2 tonight.

I also watched the first three episodes of Heated Rivalry. This is a very horny show. (Which, no complaints there. XD) But I had been anticipating something more along the lines of Our Flag Means Death, where the romantic relationships are one element of a larger general narrative, and not the primary focus of the show. (I was surprised and honestly a bit bummed that the hockey is just window dressing. I'd been expecting an ice hockey story with a romance subplot versus a romance story on an ice hockey stage set.) That said, the production values are good and the actors have excellent chemistry that they--blessedly--maintain even in the show's most explicit scenes...which unfortunately has not always been the case with other such offerings (I'm looking at you, Our Flag Means Death).

I don't feel particularly participatory about this show (yet?), but I am very much enjoying it and will probably wrap up the final three episodes this week.

Video Games: Finished my first game of the year, Botanicula, which is a perennial favorite. It's just such a visually beautiful game, with a great soundtrack and really clever puzzles. As ever, I have to space out my playthroughs so I don't just immediately remember how to solve everything the next time I play it. I'm trying to decide if I want to dive straight into Samorost 2 or opt for something a little more serious (e.g., Darklands or Pentiment).

これで以上です。

Your main fandom last year?
Irish traditional music, which decidedly does not have a presence on Dreamwidth and which by far occupied the majority of my time (to the exclusion even of reading). I made a ton of progress on flute during the months when humidity levels made playing possible and started regularly playing in two sessions (one pub, one house). As of year's end I had 59 tunes I can play in my sleep, 119 I can play at standard (but not session warp) speed, and 75 that I am working on getting solidly under my fingers.

Your favorite movie watched last year?
I watched only ten movies in 2025, one of which (Hundreds of Beavers) I watched twice, and only five of which (Bolt, Evangelion 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone, Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance, Hundreds of Beavers, and Thunderbolts*) I hadn't seen before. Of those, Hundreds of Beavers and Thunderbolts* were the clear favorites. Thunderbolts* was the only movie I saw in a theater.

Your favorite book read last year?
In fiction, Disha Bose's I Will Blossom Anyway, and in nonfiction, Ronald Hutton's Pagan Britain. My full 2025 Reading Roundup is here.

Your favorite TV show of the year?
Dragon Prince: Book 7 - Dark was my favorite fictional show, and The American Revolution my favorite nonfiction show.

Your favorite video game of the year?
Turns out 2025 was not a banner video game year for me, due to a combination of microsoft nuking my computer (and with it my progress on half a dozen games), work craziness that left me too tired for gaming, and the GC having primacy on the consoles. That said, I replayed Thank Goodness Your Here!, a game that just gets better with each run through.

Your favorite song, album, or artist to listen to this year?
Song: RTÉ's live recording of Cran playing Na Ceannabháin Bhána
Album: Hand of Kalliach's Corryvreckan. This is a metal album.
Artist: Cran, who are pretty much what I want Irish traditional music to sound like.

Favorite podcast of the year?
While not exactly a podcast, I watched the heck out of Ronald Hutton's Gresham College lectures on Youtube.

Your best new fandom discovery of the year?
Learning that what I thought was my copy of Cran's debut CD, The Crooked Stair, was actually an unauthorized compilation album released by an unscrupulous label that replaced multiple tracks from Crooked Stair with tunes by a completely different group. I then managed to finally get a copy of the actual Crooked Stair, finally listened to the whole, real, album, and discovered that the missing tunes from the compilation include banger versions of several of my favorites--among them The Hills of Coore, Fiollaigean, and Lexy McAskill. It's been on heavy rotation ever since.

Your biggest fandom disappointment?
I'm so bummed Azhanharad didn't have more page time in Katherine Addison's Tomb of Dragons. I just love this character, and he was criminally underused.

Your TV book boyfriend of the year?
Sturmhond from Leigh Bardugo's Shadow and Bone series is a delight.

Your TV girlfriend of the year?
Harley Cameron's Mercedes Monae ventriloquist puppet promos on AEW were fire.

Your biggest squee moment of the year?
Having an email exchange with one of the ITM players I absolutely idiolize, who improbably seemed as excited to be talking to me as I was to him.

Fandom resolutions for 2026?
To write and post some fic. I lost several hundred thousand words of in-progress fanfic when microsoft nuked my computer last year, which pretty much destroyed my motivation to write over the following 12 months.

Your biggest fannish anticipations for the new year?
I...don't really have any this year. Let's see what the next 12 months bring!

My complete(ish) 2025 Multimedia List is here.

これで以上です。