Another year, another look at my music trends for the year. It was another year of music acquisition (supporting the artists, ftw! - I knew Spotify wasn’t paying artists well, but Corey Doctorow’s book, Chokepoint Capitalism really brought home how much they’re screwing over artists), although I think things may slow down in 2023. Here are the albums I purchased in 2023:

• The Protomen - Presents: A Night of Queen
• Encantó soundtrack
• Moderator - The World Within
• Kognitif - Soul Food
• MxPx - Horns, Plans within Plans, Let’s Rock, Left Coast Punk EP, The Rennaisance EP
• Packy Lundholm - Track Sabbath Vol 1
• Lana Del Rey - Blue Banisters
• Catbite - Nice One
• Macroblank - entire discography - 14 albums
• Vicente Garcia - Lomas de Cayenas
• Girl Ultra - Nuevos Aires
• The Shape of Ska Punk to Come
• Me Like Bees - Songs from The Realm
• Kill Lincoln - Can’t Complain
• Jokabi - Chilltendo Deluxe
• Turning Red Soundtrack
• We Are the Union - Ordinary Life
• Chillhop Music - Essentials Spring 2022, Essentials Summer 2022, Essentials Fall 2022
• Anberlin - Silverline

New Music I got as a gift:

Python

This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm.  I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains suite because of the work I’ve done for my open source project: Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since development has slowed a bit on there, I may not be able to renew the subscription. If that’s the case, there’s a big chance that I’ll start saving up some money for a Pycharm Professional license. The only real exception to using Pycharm for programming was when I was editing code on a server. There I would use vim or nvim (more on that later).

In short succession 2 podcasts I listen to covered the movie adaptation of The Pelican Brief. If you watched it back in the 1990s you probably didn’t realize how bananas the plot of this movie was. It sounds OK in short summary - some evil corporations kill 2 US Supreme Court judges to prevent a certain ruling. But once the podcasts go into the details of the movie - it makes next to 0 sense.

On Dec 10 2022 I participated in my second swim meet of this year and also my second swim meet as an adult. It was the same day in which I did the Bigfoot Endurance Trail run and rolled my ankle during the run. It wasn’t causing me any issues during my swim or walking to the blocks. But it does mean I wasn’t at full strength for the meet.

The last concert I attended was Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm back in June of 2021. At the time we thought perhaps we were out of the woods with COVID. Instead, variant after variant has COVID a never ending fact life. For a while I was thinking that perhaps we’d eventually vaccinate our way out of this situation, but the vaccines haven’t proven to quite work that way. So, after passing up on a bunch of concerts this year, I decided to go see I Fight Dragons with MC Lars and Schaffer the Dark Lord. I just decided to wear a mask to keep myself from getting sick (especially since I’ve still got a few races and meets left this year).

Since I didn’t cover running last year, I’m going to cover both years in this post.

2021

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I caught the running bug during the Red Hat Summit in 2019. My original goal was to do an official race that would allow me to qualify for a good spot at a Run Disney race. Then COVID-19 hit and killed in-person racing.

Because of various issues I wrote about before (mostly stemming from the issue with my right sesamoids), I ended up canceling my summer and fall races. The last one I was really looking forward to was the Ted Corbitt 15k, honoring Mr. Corbitt who has a long list of achievements, including being the first African-American to run the Olympic Marathon event and being a founding president of the New York Road Runners. This was to be my final competitive road race of 2022.

The Blackcollar by Timothy Zahn

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ll start off with a reminder that I use the tooltips for Goodreads ratings and 2 stars is “it was ok”. It may possibly have hurt that this was my first Zahn novel and I’ve heard so much about him because of the Thrawn Star Wars novels. But I think it’s really more that the novel reads like it was written in the 1980s (which it was). It’s full of that “karate stuff is cool " feeling from the 80s that culminated in films like The Karate Kid. I tend to do alright with Golden Age SF because I like the philosophical aspect behind most of the characters’ dialogue. But the 1980s seems to just fall into an uncanny valley - it’s almost like the modern SF I read, but just full of enough older tropes to feel a bit clunky. This story also seemed to revolve a bit too much on the one character in the know always having a bunch of gambits going on at once and refusing to reveal anything to the main character. So sometimes the wins felt a bit cheap. I also think the idea of training super karate soldiers to fight aliens just doesn’t make sense in the context of an interspecies war.

Nightmare magazine 122: November 2022 by John Joseph Adams

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I really was not feeling it with this issue. The editor mentions that these are all stories in Weird Horror. I’m not a big fan of Weird Science Fiction either, so I’m not surprised these stories all bounced off of me.

Devil Take Me - The main character is a kid in an abusive household. Things got a little too metaphorical and weird and I couldn’t really understand the source of the horror or what was going on.

The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, Sanderson has completed Era 2 of the Mistborn series. Originally intended to just be a bridge novella, Sanderson expanded it to 4 books. (Not surprising since he wrote 4 books during COVID out of boredom)

If you’ve been reading the books from Mistborn Era 2, you know that Sanderson has used it to bring the series more into the cosmic war between gods that appears to be the full Cosmere story. Previous entries were mostly confined to easter eggs and the mention of a rival god known as Trell. This book takes things up to 11 and, if you haven’t read other parts of the Cosmere before this, you will be partly lost and partly truly missing out on the consequences of what’s going on as part of the mystery Wax and friends are solving.