End of Year Media Roundup Review Thing
Port Waikato beach, New Zealand. The rainclouds weren't looming over us the whole time, thankfully.
It's the last day of the summer break for me, and I've been actually doing appropriately New Zealand-ish summer stuff! (a.k.a. going to the beach and drinking alcohol). This has somewhat impinged on my blogging time, so this is why the blog post is a little later this week. If you want to see when my next post will be you can check my about page.
I don't have much else to write about so here's a belated end-of-year roundup of stuff I've enjoyed.
Books
I read the classic travel book The Great Railway Bazaar over the holiday. I enjoy travel writing, at least the sort that doesn't go too far into being a thinly disguised advertisement or a collection of gripes about the places the writer visits. This book definitely tends in the 'collection of gripes' direction, but it's worth going through that to get an impression of a now rather distant seeming time.
I've also been brushing up on my written Japanese by reading Haruki Murakami's 女のいない男たち (Men Without Women in English), which is slow going but I'm able to grasp pretty well. I'm getting back into my Anki routine as well.
Before then, off the top of my head I recall that I read Godel, Escher, Bach (and blogged about it), some of Jan Morris' travel writing, and a whole lot of blog posts.
Music
Last year I've been slacking somewhat on finding new music, mostly digging through the archives of bands like Okkervil River and The Mountain Goats. Both bands have excellent songwriters, which seems to be what unites the music which sticks with me the most.
I'm also getting to the point where I'd rather have most of my music in physical form, or at least as DRM-free files on my local storage, rather than sitting on a megacorp's server somewhere overseas. Definitely this should be in a way that gets money to the actual human artists involved in its creation. I am unfortunately quite good at finding rationalisations for being cheap and avoiding spending (at least for digital things, I already have bought quite a few CDs I've picked up from proper record stores), so I may need to start a routine for it. It's a strange thing, making purchasing entertainment into a ritualised thing. But maybe you need that to avoid falling down the slope of doing the Easiest Thing.
Games
Not much here... Nubby's Number Factory is a lot of fun.