lady_ragnell (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lady_ragnell) wrote2026-01-01 11:01 am
lady_ragnell) wrote2026-01-01 11:01 am
Entry tags:
2025 Media Catchall Post, Fourth Quarter
Here we are again with the end of the year! As ever, don't really do any year-long trends with these, and the writing and crafting wrapup for the year will be in its own post, probably sometime later today.
Music
As ever, my October and November music was dominated by the score for the show I was music directing. In between that, it's possible that I listened to Chappell Roan's "The Subway" on repeat for what felt like weeks solid. It's just so Cranberries! Recently have been into "I'm Scared" by Rosie Darling, because I love a Sad Girl Song. Also attended a Celtic Christmas concert with my sister, nice to have some live music in there, I don't attend a lot of concerts but I should do more.
Movies
Someday I need to figure out the coding for the little "details" cut specifically so people who don't care about terrible Christmas romcoms do not have to wade through all those titles. To start, though, I did watch two entire films that weren't Christmas-themed! Wicked: For Good was less bloated than its predecessor, and while the two new songs didn't mesh in SUPER well with the old ones, they were at least slightly more justified than award-bait songs added to movie versions of musicals tend to be. The Elphaba/Fiyero chemistry sure was low, which is actively difficult in what may be one of the sexier songs in the musical theater canon, but maybe that's not shocking when the movie was actively focused on the Extremely Straight And Platonic Elphaba/Glinda of it all. And then Wake Up Dead Man was a worthy outing in the Benoit Blanc series, and I hope not the last one, I had a lot of fun with it.
Let's at least give the holiday movies their own paragraph. The best of the new ones (I of course did my usual watches of Muppet Christmas Carol, Love Actually, and A Princess for Christmas) was The Merry Gentlemen, a sort of PG-rated Christmas-themed Full Monty. The others were offbrand Hallmark (it's the Great American Family Channel, maybe? Something like that?), just because it's what Netflix had: The Christmas Contract (fine), A Very VIntage Christmas (terrible vintage-seller ethics, they were straight-up inventing provenance), Christmas on the Alpaca Farm (understood a tiny bit about fiber), Christmas at the Chalet (Bad), and A Royal Date for Christmas (contains perhaps the least convincing British accent I've seen on screen, and I've heard some bad ones).
TV Shows
Not a ton of these this time, largely because I've been deep in an Elementary rewatch! Most of the way through s5 now. Watched the first parts of the seasons of 9-1-1 and 9-1-1: Nashville, both of which are returning this month, the former is struggling with pacing and the latter is very much still finding its feet (and is less relevant to my interests in general), but I'm continuing to find the show format comforting in These Times. Watched season two of Man on the Inside, where Ted Danson is having a marvelous time and that's really all I need (but I appreciated the depth of characterization for the women around him this season). Oh, and the latest season of Only Murders in the Building! Another one where they're having fun and that's what makes me have fun. And as of the last week or two, I've finally started watching Farscape, which is going slow so far, but sometimes you just need some sci fi in your life!
Other
Watched Crowd Control, the new show on Dropout, which I'm mostly enjoying, though the last part of the show, where they add another game onto the main one, doesn't work as well for me. Watching the new season of Make Some Noise in bursts, I think I'm like three behind right now, whoops. On YouTube, finally watched I'm What the Culture Feeling about a year late (three hours of documentary is a big ask for me), and watched a feature-length review of a game called Void Stranger on a friend's rec. Oh, and also watched a truly terrible pilot for an indie company's Scooby-Doo-does-Riverdale concept, Mystery Incorporated.
And just the other night, I watched the PBS Great Performances recent Twelfth Night, with Lupita Nyong'o and a very star-studded cast! It was a really fun production, overall. The Orsino wasn't my favorite type of Orsino but they went hard on the choice so I didn't mind it, the Feste had Pipes, and Peter Dinklage's Malvolio was treated with just the right balance of sympathy and dislike by the production (some shows make him a villain who deserves it, some shows sympathize with him way too much, I've found a healthy balance is important to a good Twelfth Night). However, I am going to make SUCH a complaint about PBS. The production makes really cool use of Swahili with Lupita and Jupiter Nyong'o, and the subtitles consistently just say "speaking Swahili" instead of transcribing it. And I'd be annoyed but not surprised by that if it weren't for the fact that the subtitles transcribed the one sentence of French that was in the show just fine. I'm not asking for translation, that wouldn't be in the spirit of the show, but you should be transcribing so bilingual viewers with hearing problems can get the same experience as bilingual viewers without them! I'm mad enough about this that I may submit a complaint to PBS, much as I hate to do it when they're struggling so much.
D&D
The players are still interspersing exploration of the Nine Hells (completely reconstructed) with other things! In one hell, they saved a compound of druids that had a disaster while testing out a new anaesthetic potion and nearly caused an environmental catastrophe as a result and then discovered that an ancient undead sorceress was making lampposts disappear for complicated magical reasons. In another, they befriended the world's saddest awakened bird and then captured the unethical scientist who awakened her in the first place (and discovered that she might be connected to a guy who's definitely not the big bad, don't worry about it). Also they talked to a journalist. They've also started a thread about personhood and political power for some beings in the hells who aren't really thought of as people! They're very busy, really, and also juggling courtship and work parties and a thousand other things.
Things I'm Looking Forward To
Mostly just seasons of the usual things these days! The return of the firefighter shows after hiatus, season two of The Pitt, watching more on Dropout. I'm excited to continue with Farscape, I could use something like that in my life, I think. No upcomig movies I'm really excited about that I can think of, but that's often the case, as you might have seen I don't do a ton of movies except during Romcom Season. I'm really excited to keep on with D&D, though, there's a lot of fun plots coming up!
Music
As ever, my October and November music was dominated by the score for the show I was music directing. In between that, it's possible that I listened to Chappell Roan's "The Subway" on repeat for what felt like weeks solid. It's just so Cranberries! Recently have been into "I'm Scared" by Rosie Darling, because I love a Sad Girl Song. Also attended a Celtic Christmas concert with my sister, nice to have some live music in there, I don't attend a lot of concerts but I should do more.
Movies
Someday I need to figure out the coding for the little "details" cut specifically so people who don't care about terrible Christmas romcoms do not have to wade through all those titles. To start, though, I did watch two entire films that weren't Christmas-themed! Wicked: For Good was less bloated than its predecessor, and while the two new songs didn't mesh in SUPER well with the old ones, they were at least slightly more justified than award-bait songs added to movie versions of musicals tend to be. The Elphaba/Fiyero chemistry sure was low, which is actively difficult in what may be one of the sexier songs in the musical theater canon, but maybe that's not shocking when the movie was actively focused on the Extremely Straight And Platonic Elphaba/Glinda of it all. And then Wake Up Dead Man was a worthy outing in the Benoit Blanc series, and I hope not the last one, I had a lot of fun with it.
Let's at least give the holiday movies their own paragraph. The best of the new ones (I of course did my usual watches of Muppet Christmas Carol, Love Actually, and A Princess for Christmas) was The Merry Gentlemen, a sort of PG-rated Christmas-themed Full Monty. The others were offbrand Hallmark (it's the Great American Family Channel, maybe? Something like that?), just because it's what Netflix had: The Christmas Contract (fine), A Very VIntage Christmas (terrible vintage-seller ethics, they were straight-up inventing provenance), Christmas on the Alpaca Farm (understood a tiny bit about fiber), Christmas at the Chalet (Bad), and A Royal Date for Christmas (contains perhaps the least convincing British accent I've seen on screen, and I've heard some bad ones).
TV Shows
Not a ton of these this time, largely because I've been deep in an Elementary rewatch! Most of the way through s5 now. Watched the first parts of the seasons of 9-1-1 and 9-1-1: Nashville, both of which are returning this month, the former is struggling with pacing and the latter is very much still finding its feet (and is less relevant to my interests in general), but I'm continuing to find the show format comforting in These Times. Watched season two of Man on the Inside, where Ted Danson is having a marvelous time and that's really all I need (but I appreciated the depth of characterization for the women around him this season). Oh, and the latest season of Only Murders in the Building! Another one where they're having fun and that's what makes me have fun. And as of the last week or two, I've finally started watching Farscape, which is going slow so far, but sometimes you just need some sci fi in your life!
Other
Watched Crowd Control, the new show on Dropout, which I'm mostly enjoying, though the last part of the show, where they add another game onto the main one, doesn't work as well for me. Watching the new season of Make Some Noise in bursts, I think I'm like three behind right now, whoops. On YouTube, finally watched I'm What the Culture Feeling about a year late (three hours of documentary is a big ask for me), and watched a feature-length review of a game called Void Stranger on a friend's rec. Oh, and also watched a truly terrible pilot for an indie company's Scooby-Doo-does-Riverdale concept, Mystery Incorporated.
And just the other night, I watched the PBS Great Performances recent Twelfth Night, with Lupita Nyong'o and a very star-studded cast! It was a really fun production, overall. The Orsino wasn't my favorite type of Orsino but they went hard on the choice so I didn't mind it, the Feste had Pipes, and Peter Dinklage's Malvolio was treated with just the right balance of sympathy and dislike by the production (some shows make him a villain who deserves it, some shows sympathize with him way too much, I've found a healthy balance is important to a good Twelfth Night). However, I am going to make SUCH a complaint about PBS. The production makes really cool use of Swahili with Lupita and Jupiter Nyong'o, and the subtitles consistently just say "speaking Swahili" instead of transcribing it. And I'd be annoyed but not surprised by that if it weren't for the fact that the subtitles transcribed the one sentence of French that was in the show just fine. I'm not asking for translation, that wouldn't be in the spirit of the show, but you should be transcribing so bilingual viewers with hearing problems can get the same experience as bilingual viewers without them! I'm mad enough about this that I may submit a complaint to PBS, much as I hate to do it when they're struggling so much.
D&D
The players are still interspersing exploration of the Nine Hells (completely reconstructed) with other things! In one hell, they saved a compound of druids that had a disaster while testing out a new anaesthetic potion and nearly caused an environmental catastrophe as a result and then discovered that an ancient undead sorceress was making lampposts disappear for complicated magical reasons. In another, they befriended the world's saddest awakened bird and then captured the unethical scientist who awakened her in the first place (and discovered that she might be connected to a guy who's definitely not the big bad, don't worry about it). Also they talked to a journalist. They've also started a thread about personhood and political power for some beings in the hells who aren't really thought of as people! They're very busy, really, and also juggling courtship and work parties and a thousand other things.
Things I'm Looking Forward To
Mostly just seasons of the usual things these days! The return of the firefighter shows after hiatus, season two of The Pitt, watching more on Dropout. I'm excited to continue with Farscape, I could use something like that in my life, I think. No upcomig movies I'm really excited about that I can think of, but that's often the case, as you might have seen I don't do a ton of movies except during Romcom Season. I'm really excited to keep on with D&D, though, there's a lot of fun plots coming up!
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