This is a blatant rip-off of the post John Scalzi did over at Whatever.
If you're gonna steal, steal from people who you know do good work.
Right?
Anyway, I've never done one of these "year-in-review" sorts of posts before. Mostly because I've been looking forward rather than back; work-life tends to make you do that. You're pushing to stay ahead of the bill-collectors and corporate reviews and colonoscopies (okay, well, maybe not colonoscopies; those, like the occasional sudden sneeze, just sort of catch you) and all the other trouble in the world.
But this last year was different.
For one thing, I finally stopped being a wage-slave and having to strain to look forward.
Being a geologist-for-hire was a huge part of who I am - who I was - for thirty years. I did science for a living and put in a lot of long, hard days outside doing it. Shit, if you go to this website my front-page bio even says that: "...analytical by training and doggedly hard-working by necessity..." That was me.
Now?
Well...I'm still who I was then. Still analytical, still liberal, still...well, actually more judgemental, but that may have to do with the appalling tidal wave of reactionary shitheels that you can't swing a cat without smacking or so it seems.
But I've already gone into that. This is supposed to be about things I LIKED in 2022.
So.
Retirement.
I've liked being retired. At least so far.
I liked the lab work, soils testing, the sort of bench-chemistry-index-testing science we learn in school.
I liked the analysis, the puzzle-solving, the looking at the ground and the soil and the landforms and trying to figure out what was going on.
But because the bulk of my work was dirt-nanny stuff? Nagging asshole contractors to do what they low-bid and are trying to slime out of? That's the daily bread of most of earthwork engineers, and sweet baby Jesus how it sucks. Sucks the fun right out of all the other stuff.
So. NOT having to do that? I like that. And it makes up some for no longer having the disasters and lab and analysis to do.
So retirement? I liked that.
The Portland Japanese Garden
As you can probably tell from the photo essays, I love the Garden; the peaceful order, the quietly tended "nature". The colors, the light, the shape and the weight of it.
Membership in the Garden lets me get in early, when the City around it is still and the pathways are empty. I get to stroll and think, watch and reflect, and I like that a lot.
And speaking of Japan...
Anime and Manga
For some reason this past year I've been sinking deeper into the world of Japanese graphic art, whether in written form as manga - 漫画 - or animeアニメ .
The Girl shares my enjoyment of the animated form; over the last year together we've enjoyed the big-screen versions of a couple of Studio Ghibli classics - The Cat Returns and Howl's Moving Castle - along with perhaps the most visually gorgeous film I've ever seen, Belle.
The story? Oh, just the old "beauty and the beast" chestnut. Fun enough, and the story of Suzu, the "belle" of the title, her friends and family, is genuinely sweet and moving. But that's not the main reason to watch.
It's the graphics.
Amazing.
My taste in the dead-tree forms runs all over the place, from dystopian futurism like Ghost In The Shell to sweetly adorable yuri romances. I think I've mentioned my fondness for the goofy adventure/military/fantasy Gate: Where The JSDF Fought.
Rory Mercury?
Yow.
My favorite from 2022, though?
Sweat and Soap.
It's a weird, weird, deeply weird premise; the female lead, Asako, has "hyperhidrosis" - meaning she sweats more than she thinks is "normal" - while the male lead, Koutarou, has an incredible sense of smell which he normally uses in his job as soap designer but which leads him to Asako...who smells delicious! At least to him.
I picked it up purely out of curiosity; the storyline seemed odd but the artist (Yamada Kintetsu) has a nice clean style and I'm a sucker for that.
But that didn't catch me.
What caught me was how it turns out to be a true, sweet, and moving love story.
True in the sense that these fictional people are deeply flawed, as are we all, and that they meet and become a couple in a very weird way...but one that finds goodness and joy even in their own and each others' flaws.
It's just gentle and kind and very, very romantic.
And speaking of romance...
I follow a shockingly large number of comics at the "Webtoon" site, but this was far and away the most delightful; a goofy, funny, exciting, bizarre little story about an ordinary Korean girl who wakes up inside the romance novel she's reading but not (as is the usual form of these "isekai" (異世界) stories) as the heroine or the villainess.
She's just "Ripley", a minor character at the party scene where Zeronis - the titular Duke and a classic manga "dark and dangerous" hero - is supposed to meet the heroine and fall for her.
Instead Ripley gets plowed and ends up in bed with the Duke, who becomes obsessed with her instead of the woman he's supposed to fall for.
Oh, it's waaaayyyy more complex than that. There's fake deaths, and mad suitors and actual love and it was just big crazy fun. I'm sorry it's over, and I'm hoping that maybe the author will release an English language version, because I'd love to re-read it; it was my Top Romance Story of 2022.
And speaking of even more romance...
Everything Everywhere All At Once
I've been a Michelle Yeoh fanboi ever since her Hong Kong action days. But she, and this wildly inventive film, were perhaps the best thing I've seen at the movies not just in 2022 but for many years.
She's, well, everything all at once; mom, wife, diva, artist, businesswoman, savior of the world...while all the time being the same struggling everyday person just trying to get through one more day that we all are.
It's action and adventure and comedy but y'know what?
It's really a love story.
Yeoh is a woman who is tired. She's tired of herself, her husband, her daughter, her dumpy little laundromat that is her whole life. She's tired of struggling through every day just to find another just like it. And she is terrified to find that there's worse; the actual no-shit end of the world - worlds! - that only she - tired and beat up and struggling - can save.
And she does. Because deep down, she loves herself, her husband, her daughter...she loves the whole world enough to fight to save them all.
It's an epic performance in a terrific flick.
It won't win Best Picture and she won't win Best Actress.
It's too weird, and she's not diva enough.
But they should.
The Portland Thorns
God but this was a fun season. Winning the title was pretty awesome; I liked that, duh. But getting to write and think about the team and the league and the game was a hell of a lot of fun, too.
And we might just be getting a new owner and a new front office, after a pretty rugged couple of years from the old regime, and I'm liking that.
Oh, and I love this photo; it's from the post-match celebration. The player in the circle is Olivia Moultrie, who's still in high school and 1) can't drink, and 2) is clearly embarrassed at the grownups. Yeah, Livvy, grups can be pretty cringe-y.
One of the most fun things I've read - as a no-pictures-just-words book - this year has been the three volumes of the "Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennett" series, beginning with the first Pride and Prejudice-based story of the middle Bennett sister finding work as a spy for the Regency government and continuing with the next two.
The fun part about these is that the author doesn't try to heroine-up her protagonist by making her more witty or clever or smart or attractive. Yes, she's the "heroine"...but she's also the same socially awkward, pedantic, prosy middle Bennett sister we meet in Jane Austin's novel.
Cowley makes that plausible; being drab, plodding, and detail-oriented might make you a crashing bore at an afternoon tea but a damn good undercover agent.
Mary is more than just that, though. Crowley shows us how her exposure to the bigger world outside of Longbourne helps Mary grow. She learns that she has actual skills, that she doesn't have to push herself forward to show them to others. Indeed, as a confidential agent she has to learn to conceal what she knows and does!
By the third book - where she has to "learn" to kiss to sweeten up a possible source or beguile an enemy agent - she's become genuinely thoughtful and even a bit wise. Does she still manage to find a way to work a moralizing quote into a romantic moment?
She's Mary Bennett! Of course she does!
But this Mary can have a romantic moment, and even enjoy it fully and intelligently.
There's supposed to be two more of these coming; I can't wait.
What else?
I still like this furry butthead. He's a good cat. Or, as my Bride describes him, he's "good at being a cat".
And I still love my family, my home, and my hometown.
So all in all, it was a pretty decent year. There were a lot of things I liked.
Tomorrow I want to talk about the next year, though.
Wait, wait..!
I can't go on without recommending...
Rachel Smythe's post-modern take on the ancient Hades-Persephone tale.
It's funny, clever, sexy, all with the wonderful graphics that pulled me in the first time.
Plus it's an absolutely heartwarming love story.
(Can you tell I'm a sucker for a love story?)
Anyway...go, read it. It's tons of fun.
6 comments:
I discovered anime in the mid 80s when I briefly lived in Hong Kong and it blew my mind. Throughout the 90s when it began bubbling up in the west (in the form of university clubs sharing bootleg amateur subs) I was hard into it. I remember going to the backroom of a teashop that sold bootleg VHS tapes with 1st or 2nd gen copies of stuff we'd never even heard of (and of course all non-sub) and having to guess out the plots.
Then I kind of fell out of it. I think I discovered that it wasn't as groundbreaking as I thought - there were plenty of shit anime just as there were shit TV shows, we just didn't get exposed to the shitty ones and only saw the good ones in the west. Also the conventions began to grate on me, just as much as the tired tropes in western media did.
That said there's a few series I have an interest in. Ghost in the Shell being one of them. If you haven't, I highly recommend the two series in the 'Stand Alone Complex' world which have great stories. Never watched the 3rd one (that seemed to turn the major into a young teen) so no comment. But highly recommend the first two series.
Happy new year chief.
The Cartoon Network "Adult Swim" showed the original GITS as well as the first two Stand Alone Complex series and I watched and enjoyed all three. I'm already ridiculously over-subscribed to various online publications and streaming services so I haven't got a Crunchyroll account to watch the third SAC; I'll have to hope it turns up here eventually.
Oh, no question - probably, I dunno, 60%? 80%? of anime and the manga they're developed from are crap. I think the rule of thumb is that 60% of ALL creative product is crap - that's just people. And sometimes it's hard to tell the crap from the rest without digging around through it...I just abandoned a scifi novel about halfway through. It was good enough that I REALLY wanted to like it, but it was flawed enough that the stuff that bugged me kept being more and more irritating until I finally had to put it down. Someone else would have liked it, surely - there was a lot of good ideas and well-written piece within - but it just was not for me.
And the other thing that makes this complicated is that not every creator is always on top of their game. I picked up Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan military scifi series decades ago and enjoyed the hell out of her work over the years...until recently, when she seems to have started self-indulgently milking the series for cashgrabs. Meanwhile she's still doing good work in a separate heroic-fantasy-world involving a couple of side characters from another set of worldbuilding that she seems to have abandoned otherwise...
And don't even get me started on G.R.R. Martin..!
Hey Chief,
My wife is a huge Jane Austin fan, especially Pride and Prejudice. I like it a lot too - especially the BBC miniseries with Colin Firth.
So I mentioned the trilogy from your post to her, and she read the first book yesterday (as in the whole thing in a day). So thanks for that!
I'm an Austinite and have been ever since picking up Emma in college. But I'm not a purist and enjoy a lot of the riffs on her works, including the BBC production (and there was a PBS thing called Death Comes To Pemberley about ten years ago that I sat through while rehabbing my knees that's big fun, in part because it gives Lydia (played by Jenna Coleman) to grow quite a bit and, in at least one moment, become genuinely humane and even wise (for a moment - like the Mary series, Lydia is still Austin's Lydia...).
But the Mary books are big fun because, as I mentioned, the author keeps the essential core of Austin's Bennett sister intact...but helps us see how that could make her a good agent. There's supposed to be two more, and I'm looking forward to them quite a bit.
Nice to see some love for "Everything Everywhere All At Once". Or better yet nice to see a short description helping me make sense of the movie or what I thought of it when I was watching it!
I remember watching it and going from "is this depressing family drama? why are we watching this on a pleasant evening" and "when I watch a Michelle Yeoh movie (yay for HK action movies!) I expect a$$ being kicked and this is just drama", to "wait, what is happening here?", to "this is weird", to "this is interesting... crazy, but interesting!". And after finishing the movie going from "this was a good movie", to "would I recommend it to someone? Yes I would", to "wait, how would I describe it when I recommend it?".
I don't even know how the guys who made the movie pitched it to the studios or even the actors. But kudos for being bold and original and it was indeed a good movie and most definitely not one of the many flavourless mass produced one. And yay for James Hong too!
And kudos Chief for giving a good description and reminding me / helping me understand a bit more / giving me a way to actually describe it to someone. And if I had to pick a theme, something that I remember / took away from the movie it would be (perhaps having now read your description) something about soul-crashing everyday life but upstaged by love, particularly between mother and daughter or parent and child in general?
Happy New Year!
It's...well, everything all at once...but I think calling it a love story fits it best. It's about a woman who, like the God of the scripture, "so loved the world" that she gives all of herself to save it.
It's about love; the love for her husband - in all his avatars - for her daughter, lost child and evil destroyer of the universes - of her life and her world and even Jaime Lee Curtis as her nemesis the tax assessor.
Wonderful flick.
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