This was me, 2023

 I entered the year with one single thought screaming though my brain like a man on fire: "I HOPE TO ALL THE GODS THAT THIS'LL BE THE YEAR WHEN THINGS DON'T GO TO SHIT. PLEASE AND THANK YOU."

...well. I'm not dead. So I'll say that's a win at least.
Whatever. Lets get down to business.

   We mourn the loss of the incredible Sinéad O'Connor, Tom Wilkinson, Andre Braugher, Tina Turner, Ryan Siew, and Barry Humphries. Thank you, you'll be missed and you'll be remembered.

   As for the rest of this Year Review I'm going to keep it short and sweet because this year has been somewhat of a mental car crash with some glitter sprinkled on top to make it look appetising.

Two gingers in a mirror

   During the best annual bookworm event, Bokrea (book sale), a total of six new friends joined the ranks of the home library. However, because of how the economy seems set to starve us of everything beyond the bare basics of surviving, these literary friends are very nearly the only books I've managed to aquire this year. However, since I haven't had time to read as much as during the 'Rona Years this might actually be a good thing - it forces me to read what I've already accumulated.
   This doesn't at all mean I haven't treated myself to experiences that'll take my mind off of how terrible the world is.

   Henry Rollins was punk rock personafied when I saw him perform his spoken word show, but sadly, Dylan Moran lived up to the Drunk Irishman prejudice.

   2023 was the year of me experiencing a wide array of my favourite bands; Faun, Raised Fist, Electric Cowboy, Mimikry, Ice Nine Kills, LOK, Perkele, Fit For An Autopsy and Whitechapel were all guests of my wonderfully ugly home town of Göteborg. For the first time since 2019 I was finally feeling physically safe enough to travel which meant that I not only went abroad but also went to my first ever music festival - GRASPOP. It was huge. And amazing. And fantastic.

   For Midsummer my best friend threw a Hobbit Party, and what a party it was! We ate ourselves rotund, played games and laughed all the while enjoying each others nerdy costumes. As for all other national holidays, and my birthday, they were nothing out of the ordinary. Still hate Krimmus.

   This year I've ended unsatisfactory relationships and made way on other, hopefully more felicitous ones. I've discovered more about myself in relation to others and taken a hit or two to the heart along the way. Honest communication and expressing my needs have been both supressed and forcefully unearthed themes that'll have to live with me and seriously develop further in the next coming year.

 
Best of 2023 experiences:

Movies: I haven't been to the cimena even once this year but I've paid through the nose for several streaming services and so I hereby give you my favourite discoveries - Bullet Train, and The Gentlemen.
Shows: "Last of Us" has had me gasping all year. Pedro Pascal is a treasure.

Books: I read 53 books during 2023 and managed my goal of reading more litarature by non-male authors than the other way around. I was gifted "Legends & Lattes" by Travis Baldree for Krimmus last year and the story was so sweet and tender and just lovely. "The Girl With All the Gifts" by M.R. Carey had me reading at all hours of the day in anticipation for what was going to happen next. I continued the Between Earth and Sky series by Rebecca Roanhorse with "Fevered Star" and I loved it. I was absolutely in awe of Brian McClellans "Sins of Empire". The continuation of Wayfarers; "A Closed and Common Orbit" by Becky Chambers was fantastic and by the end a real tear-jerker.

Events: I've drastically upped my amount of social interactions; parties, concerts, dates, several beer festivals, Graspop, the Midsummer Hobbit Party, a book expo, all the while also managing to consistently work out. I bettered my personal best time running a 5k and feel stronger than I've felt since I was in my early twenties.

My hopes for 2024 are legion,

but I would like it if things just worked out.

This fucker right here

   This past DecemberI was looking around for conserts to attend during 2023 because like so many others I wanted to make up for the Covid years when we couldn't attend... anything. In particular, I was looking to see Amity Affliction or I Prevail and LO AND BEHOLD - I stumbled over Graspop where both bands were planning on making a performance.

   Seeing as I've never been to a music festival I found it ludicrous that I would even consider going to an event not only abroad but also attended by over 200 000 other metal heads. Going through the rest of the line-up I realised that I actively listen to nearly 20 of the performing bands.

   Did I want to go? Yes. Did I hesitate? Yes. Did I finally buy myself a ticket? Also yes, with a whole lot of encouragement from my friends.

   Did I go? Hell yes.

Did I enjoy myself? HELL YES.

Do I want to go again? Also yes, but with a few but important corrections to my luggage and food plans. Lunch and dinner was never a problem at Graspop, but pickings were slim when it came to breakfast for us vegans...

   Favourites included Architects (basically a religious experience), Hollywood Undead, Motionless in White, Fever 333 and Amity Affliction. My camp gets a bonus gold star simply because it was nowhere near as nasty as I thought it would be. Four day festivals are brutal though and, as expected, hella expensive... 

   ...I wanna go again.

Hindsight is 20/20...(?)

   We hear it all the time; that "Hindsight is 20/20" and it might be. It is only once we've stepped out of the past that we can look back and clearly see what we've left behind.
   So what are we leaving behind this year?

   First of all; we lost Christopher Tolkien, so the year started off quite poorly. Then there was Mike Resnick. And then Terry Jones. And Max von Sydow. Albert Uderzo. Then came the news of Sir Ian Holm's passing and every Ringer on the planet must have shed a tear or two. The musical genius Ennio Morricone passed on. Chadwick Boseman was ripped away from us way too young. Diana Rigg. Terry Goodkind. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. David Prowse. Jeremy Bulloch. Thank you for everything.

   As for me, I've had a... year. I know I called 2019 an "extra bitch" but holy hell... 2020 didn't have to go so hard. Was it revenge for having had a too good a time? Did I do too well in late 2019? Was I too happy? Was that the issue? Did I jinx it? All I know is that some stuff and things happened:

Some raised fists for Raised Fist at Pustervik


• I went to some really fancy parties in January and February - oodles of glamour, debauchery and rose-tinted glasses.

• Watching Dropkick Murphy's was a wild experience after which I had happy bruises.
• Imminence and Raised Fist was insanely good, I shit you not I think I had a religious experience.

• Enter: Covid-fucking-19. What a shitshow.

What's there to say? 

   Everything was cancelled or postponed. Life was put on hold. Feelings were held back only to explode uselessly into empty air.

    I would have gone to see Russell Howard, but that was pushed to 2021. I would have gone to experience Amaranthe, but that's now been pushed to the spring of 2022. The plan was to party all night long all through The Medieval Week, but as the crisis worsened in April I gave up on that... and then came the physical festival's cancellation announcement just shortly after; instead launching "the Medieval Week: Plague Edition" - an entirely digital festival I didn't spend more than perhaps ten conscious minutes on.

I was isolated. I was heart-broken. I sunbathed.

   The Faun concert I was going to use as a mental band-aid after not going to The Medieval Week was pushed forward a year. My second Imminence concert for the year was cancelled. 

• My skinny ginger flat mate turned 8 years old. He is officially middle-aged, and seem to be getting more and more snuggly with age.
• I turned 32, and as good as it feels to survive another year, them years are fucking getting to me.
• I started going to parties again in September. Meeting people, having fun...

   ...as it turns out so did everyone else, but on a much larger and intimate scale than I, so covid-19 really started to pick up speed and numbers again. Back into social isolation we went. Or at least some of us did. On top of all of this, the rotten cherry on the poop sundae that was 2020; smashing through the door came the X-Mas madness like the unwanted bastard it is. Instead of thinking too hard on what I couldn't do I finally started making good use of my time and so December was the start of a string of monthly tattoo sessions starting with a sperm whale and petunias.

Best of 2020:
   Movies: Jojo Rabbit, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, aaaaaand then there was covid-19 that shut down any and all cinema-going from March and onwards.

   Shows: FEMINIST FREQUENCY RADIO - GO LISTEN WITH YOUR PREFERRED PODCATCHER. The Witcher. I mean, COME ON ❤. I Am Not OK With This was kinda awesome. Killing Eve's third season left me quite disappointed to be honest, but the second season of What We Do In the Shadows made up for that. The Great was fuckin' hilarious. The Umbrella Academy season 2 was mindblowing. Every other episode of Lovecraft Country sent my mind spiralling. His Dark Materials.
   Books: I read 90 books during 2020, and this time around 40 of them were not written by cis men - a vast improvement from last year (but I can do better). Dmitry Glukhovsky's 'Metro 2034' was almost as good as the first book of the series (which is very). 'Chrysalids' by John Wyndham is a "Best of Scifi classics" I can get behind. Stina Wollter's 'Kring Denna Kropp' was frikkin fantastic. 'The Truth' and 'Night Watch' by Terry Pratchett were both hilarious and thought-worthy. 'Way Station' by Clifford D. Simak was good. 2020 marked my third reread of 'Lighthousekeeping' by Jeanette Winterson (still awesome). Continuing the 'Newsflesh' series by Mira Grant with 'Blackout' and it's still going strong. 'Moon Over Soho' and 'Whispers Underground' by Ben Aaronovitch, 'Creatures of Will & Temper' by Molly Tanzer, 'Horns' by Joe Hill were all great reads. Brent Week's 'The Black Prism' was a solid 5-star all the way through. If you, like me, loooove Aliens you should read 'Bug Hunt'  - an anthology edited by Jonathan Maberry. A worthy finish to a good book year was 'Women's War' by Jenna Glass.

   Comics: Spells on Wheels by Kate Leth, Saga vol 4, Skottie Young's Deadpool series, Matt Fraction's Hawkeye, SF SX (Safe Sex) by Tina Horn.
   Events: RAISED FIST. Yes. I'm adding that. When the rest of the year was misery, my early spring was fantastic enough, and that Raised Fist concert will for ever be my best thing about 2020. It's also pretty awesome how archaeological digs through Sweden in the last couple of years will force us to rewrite our history books concerning basically everything we're taught in school about those pesky little years between round about 700 to 1300 AD (hint: the east coast and Birka wasn't nearly as important as the historians of Stockholm would have us believe...). As for the rest of the world's good news; efforts to regrow parts of the Great Barrier Reef has seen great successes. The bees living on the roof of Notre-Dame de Paris survived the fire of last year and has thrived through the pandemic, just like a lot of other species of animal around the globe enjoyed the greatly decreased tourism flow. New European legislation will make it easier to have household appliance products repaired in an effort to make appliances longer-lasting and thereby saving on energy costs. With the dismantling of more coal-based power production, carbon emissions continue to decline in Europe. Human ingenuity created a bunch of different vaccines to combat this latest pandemic in record time.

So that's good I guess.

Is hindsight 20/20? Nope. We've learned fuck all as a species in 2020, which is about as much as we've learned every other time a pandemic has threatened to wipe out great masses of people. The sick, the poor and the marginalised will always take the brunt of the blow.
   People are truly stupid.

   2020 was a shit year.

   For next year I just want no more of 2020, and fewer things to bite me in the ass, please and thank you. But this newfound willingness to reach out to strangers can stay. Even if it started in pure desperation it might prove to be useful in 2021.

   So lets bring it. Lets survive. Lets get fuckin' vaccinated and rid of this thing.

Shivers

I have a new fancy obsession.
I think you should share in my obsession and listen to this:

Participating with the TRHPS gang

I don't remember exactly when it was that I first experienced the madness of The Rocky Horror Picture Show but I know very well how much I loved it, because it stuck with me and never failed to bring a smile to my face at any point of recollection. It was about ten years ago that I discovered this audience participation business going on with cult musicals as I saw a Swedish film critic go to a The Sound of Music Audience Participation dressed up as a nun. The dude in question is over six feet tall, is a total metal head with the long hair and HUGE sideburns but he looked as if he had a blast and a half singing along with "The Hills are Alive".

   It was inspiring.

   Also funny as fuck.

   And I wanted to do it too.

   Never were a huge fan of The Sound of Music though.

   Which brings us back to that cult hit Rocky Horror.

   Last week I did my first (but I hope not the last) The Rocky Horror Picture Show Audience Participation. Dressed in a fancy vest and jacket, extravagant bow tie, silver shoes, and flamboyant (and extremely cheap) pink feather boa I nervously entered the theatre with a friend on my arm and was welcomed by what I can only describe as our 'Fellow Transylvanians'. A whole horde of them. Now it was our turn to have a blast and a half through the film and then disperse to our separate homes. That whole thrilling experience only to be left staring off into space in longing for the next time we can meet up and do the Time Warp together.

   Just wow. Highly recommended.

Skillet on a Wednesday

   It was a dark November Wednesday evening and I went to see Skillet and Red Sun Rising. I drank mediocre generic type beer and enjoyed some good music from where I stood at the back of the room. While Red Sun Rising were playing on stage I found myself surrounded by a group of young men I found eerily familiar. I suspiciously eyed them through the whole show. They turned out to be the members of Avatar.

So that happened.

   Then Skillet came on. Don't get me wrong, each to their own, but I've always found myself ridiculously uncomfortable around openly religious people. So when lead vocalist John Cooper started talking about his "hero, Jesus Christ" I clutched my beer glass tightly and made an effort not to roll my eyes too hard or groan too loudly. Luckily for my awkward ass, Jesus was never included again.

It was a good night.

Peter Hollens' voice

Peter Hollens is one of those freakishly talented men that shows up a little now and then on my feed on Tumblr and/or Facebook whenever he's made a new song. Thus was the case when he did some of his a capella magic based on Skyrim (x & x), Game of Thrones and The Hobbit but I think my favourite so far is his original song Sleepwalking. Enjoy.



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Ok. I give in. This one is awesome too.

Riding the bus like a baws

Riding the bus is never as awesome as when I've got this baby booming in my headphones. Actually, to tell the truth, everything is way more awesome when this shuffles past.

♥ Tom Waits

I've listened my way through Tom Waits' new album Bad As Me several times now and immediately fell like the Berlin wall for one of the songs. It's the greatest anti-war song I've listened to lately. It's so angry you can feel it. Awesome.
Enjoy.