Taken from an old blog, post-by-post from the Very Old Blog from what I’ve then called Weekly Reviews, with the intent to make the list somewhat more publishable without re-opening all my prior ramblings. Please note that this means all of this is presented written-as-is by the 2012-version of the author, and cut short in some places.
January
Van Canto with In Legend and Orden Ogan. A great show with a great band and very good support acts. If you don’t know Van Canto: they make a-capella-covers of metalsongs. By now they have some selfmade songs, but mostly they sing covers.1
DJing at the medieval fantasy rocknight, playlist here. Good crowd, good party, great fun. In retrospect I would have done some things differently, but now it’s done. As it is a once-a-year-party I didn’t want to experiment too much, as long as the dancefloor is crowded. And the seemingly absurd combination of a medieval-party and a Depeche Mode-party (last year there was a pagan/viking/folk-metal-party) turned out to have a good side: No one complains when there is more than a few metal songs…
On saturday we visited the show Parodissimo by our friend Oliver. Great show, great fun. Parodies on singers (and some actors) together with some “serious” performances, anecdotes…2
Finished reading “The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research” by Petre&Rugg. Although obviously written for PhD-writers, many things could be useful for all other shapes of academic writing and discourse.
Finished the Clan Novel Toreador by Stewart Wieck and The Art of Nonfiction by Ayn Rand.
Watched the PhD-Movie and the movie-adaption of Pratchett’s Going Postal. Two incredibly funny movies, go watch them when you have the chance.
February
Finished The Game Games Bowl by Tim Buckley.
Finally got through the fourth season of The Big Bang Theory.
Thursday, the Real McKenzies. Great show.
Finally finished Gail Carriger’s Soulless. And there are four more books of the Parasol Protectorate-series, which I really should not order as long as I still have about a meter of unread books…3
Finished Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, which is hereby the new #1 of books read this year.4
Finished Arthur Martine’s “Martine’s hand-book of etiquette & guide to true politeness”. Although in some parts heavily dated, it still contains some valid points…
Finished “The Royal Navy Officer’s Pocket-Book”, a compilation of WWII-time supplements from Brian Lavery. It consists of documents from the Royal Navy for commanding officers who got their post in a accelerated progcess due to wartime needs. Pretty intersting stuff, if one is interested in such things.
Finally got to watch Your Highness. Which is hereby officially declared a Fucking Great Movie, and no, not only because of the Natalie-Portman-Bathing-in-a-steel-thong-szene.
Finished Father Ted. Epic.
Yesterday evening, Hellsongs played at the Universum.
If you have the chance, go and visited them. It’s amazing. Great. Beautiful.5
Finished “Last Chance To See” by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. Highly recommended work.
March
Finished Testing Treatments. Good book, important topic. And available as free pdf. Go download (or buy) and read it.
Omnia have been great.6
I just finished Mass Effect 3. And I’m highly disappointed.7
Totally forgot this last week: I went to watch Hugo Cabret. Great Movie.8
Finished “Das Mitternachtskleid” by Terry Pratchett. Great book. Way to close on reality on some aspects. Go and read it. In terms of ranking, it’s my new #2.
April
Finished “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” by Seth Grahame-Smith. Easy read, but well-written. Recommended if you’re looking for something light. It moves behind the Game Games Bowl and comes to rest as #5.
Watched “The Pirates! Bunch of Misfits”. It was a good movie, but somehow I expected more.
Watched “The Hunger Games”. Path-E-Tech Pictures could have been a little less involved in this movie, but it really made me want to read the books…
After watching The Hunger Games, I started reading the novel by Suzanne Collins. If I hadn’t seen the movie, I probably wouldn’t have been able to put it away until I finished it. Great book. Read it. [And yes, it is essentially a western version of Battle Royal, but who cares? It’s still a great book.]
Finished the Hunger Games-Trilogie with Catching Fire and Mockingjay. Read it.
On Saturday Joe from the McMontos and Sebastian from Green Highland and Heiter bis Folkig at the Murphys Law in Esslingen. Great evening.
On Sunday Faun Acoustic at the Wagenhallen. The new line up is just great. So was the show.
Finished the VtM-Clan Novel Tzimisce by Eric Griffin.
Better than the first book, Toreador, but it probably wont get an all-to-high place in the ratings…
Watched Iron Sky. To quote a friend: “This is it. This movie is the answer to all questions. No other movie needs ever to be made.”
If you have the chance go and see it. Totally worth it.
May
The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross. Lovecraftian Horror meets Inverse Spy Thriller. For fans of Lovecraft and bureaucratic hells a must read, recommended for everybody else.9
Weiter Weg by Martin Spieß. A collection of short stories.
American Gods by Neil Gaiman. An extremly well researched book about what happens to gods in a foreign land, a land in which gods are created in the blink of an eye. And about what happens when the old gods and the new go to war…
Die Farbe der Freiheit, the DrachenFest Blue Camp pre-event-con that year.
I finished “Mr Tompkins in paperback” by George Gamow. Highly recommended for everyone who’s looking for some tangible picture of how quantum mechanics works.10
June
This week I finished Heinrich Bölls “Irisches Tagebuch”. Maybe I’ll still find some of the ireland Böll found in 1957…11
Zeit der Legenden. We, the NPC, won.12
Last week, I finished reading Myke Cole’s Shadow Ops: Control Point. It was recommendated by Howard Tayler, the guy behind Schlock Mercenary. Interesting piece of work of military fantasy, kind of “Tom Clancy meets magic”. And yet another series to keep up with…
Finally saw Rapalje again after about a year.
July
An Age of Tales happened.
I finished The Science of Discworld by Prachett/Stewart/Cohen. Recommended.13
Also a DrachenFest happened.14
August
I finished Märchen und Fabeln by Hans Christian Anderson. All the storys are either hardcore christian propaganda, depressing, or both.
I watched Ice Age 4. For the fourth part of the series, it is pretty great.
I also watched The Lorax. Recommended.15
Watched Brave. Great movie. Could be even greater, but then it would be a “tiny” bit longer and no longer a kids’ movie.
I finished Peter Tysons Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress, with is highly recommended if you’ve just started playing it (which you should do).
I also finished the RPG-rulebooks for Misspent Youth and Killing Puppies for Satan. Interesting ideas, and I’d love to play both of them.
September
Festival Mediaval V16
I finished The Science of Discworld II – The Globe by Prachett/Stewart/Cohen.
October
Pete McCarthy – McCarthy’s Bar
To quote myself: “just one thing: get McCarthy’s Bar. Don’t ask, just do it.”
Don’t just get it, but read it. It’s great. And, as a totally unrelated fact, it is a travelogue about Ireland, and there are bars involved. Did I mention that it is great?
Terry Prachett/Stephen Baxter – The Long Earth
Hm. It’s definitely not one of the best works of Prachett. It’s a good book, based on a good idea, but I had the feeling that it didn’t actually go anywhere. Some things happend, some evil-or-not-so-evil being was stopped-or-not, and in the end there was a nuke. It is written that there will be more Long Earth-books, and I will most likely get and read them. There’s potential there.17
Howard Mittelmark/Sandra Newman – How not to Write a Novel
The title is basically self-explaining. A collection of lovingly illustrated things you totally should do of you want to write a not-that-good (or worse) novel.
The RPG-rulebooks for Dogs in the Vineyard und Fiasco, two more systems on my todo-list.
And the City of Golden Shadow by Tad Williams. A good book that stood on my list for about ten years now. I nearly got a heart attack about 60 pages before the end, when suddenly a bunch of new character fell from the sky and a rather pathetic speech was held. But everything went better than expected. And there are three more books in the series, so stay tuned – one day I might tell you something about them.
I finished The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.
A good story, mostly well written. There were some vulgarisms [is this even a word?] which were totally uncalled for.18
And the story took some fifty pages to build up momentum and managed to avoid three (THREE!) apocalyptic endings without dei ex machinae. I personally would have preferred the final decay of mankind, but you cannot win everytime.
I also finished Pump Six and other Storys, same author. A short story collection with some interesting transhuman and biopunk-ideas – The Windup Girl bases on some of them.
I’ve read Clive Barkers The Hellbound Heart, which I could have skipped without losing anything.
And I’ve finally managed to read Momo by Michael Ende. This book is a surprisingly accurate portrait of modern times. There should be no need to say more.
[Another Con, Libertas Mentis, happened around here, but I don’t think there’s a writeup.]
Harry Harrison – Make Room! Make Room!
A dystiopian vision, paced 12 years ago. We should all be glad that it hadn’t come this way. Yet.
Bernhard Cornwell – Sharpe’s Tiger
First book of the Sharpe series. Which I will definitely continue to read.19
November
Marc-Uwe Kling – Die Känguru-Chroniken & Das Känguru-Manifest. Witzig. Lesen.20
Serena Gray – Handbuch für Außerirdische
A travel guide for aliens visiting earth. It’s been written 20 years ago and holds some incredibly funny anachromisms. Who can remember the “car phone”?
It was a good book, and someone should write one for the current situation…
The acoustic tour from Fiddler’s Green was great, so was the show from Joe und Andrew.21
The books: Frank Herbert’s Dune, Robert Asprin’s “Another Fine Myth”22 and Ephraim Kishon’s “Abraham kann nichts dafür” & “Die Waschmaschine ist auch nur ein Mensch”.
Two more by Robert Asprin, Myth Conceptions and Myth Directions. Every fan of high-fantasy-light fare should start reading it.
Er ist wieder da by Timur Vermes. Following the maxim “Satire darf alles und muss alles dürfen”, Vermes lets Hitler (yes, THE Hitler) wake up in Berlin in Fall 2011. Things go downhill from there. Personally, I guess it’s more realistic than I’m cofortable to admit. Read it.23
December
Horst Evers – Für Eile fehlt mir die Zeit.
If you like Kishon, give it a try.
Grandma’s 90th birthday last weekend. I finally met all parts of the family again. And good food.24
Kishon – Der seekranke Walfisch oder Ein Israeli auf Reisen
Isaac Asimov – Foundation
Read this. Great book. I actually regret to never have read it before..
…and a happy new year [by FutureSjut]
PastSjut
2012.. 61 books, a bunch of movies, some great shows and cons. Let’s see what the new year will bring.
That was the official count, I have not verified that (but might do in the future, as part of the plan is to also spreadsheet the whole stuff to complete the spreadsheet collection). That was apparently also the only full year the Very Old Blog saw, so unless I have things reported on other places where I can find them there’ll likely be a gap in things.
I was remembered that the New Years Eve 2012 > 2013 was a Major Clusterfuck, and looking back at it… yea, but also I both survived and I don’t hold any particular sharp feelings about it anymore. Clusterfucks are like pebbles, they grow smoother with enough time. I’ll shut up now.
Footnotes
- The sentence-du-jour apparently was “totally worth it”, and I’ll cut content for sanity. ↩︎
- I am aware that the link now goes to Oli’s homepage rather than the program. ↩︎
- Dear Reader: if course I have bought the books. The boxed set, even. I have since not touched any of the other books. ↩︎
- At this point in time I have decided to rank my readings. The full list, if it’s even published, will be at the end of the blog. I did ditch this habit. ↩︎
- This still stands. At the time of making this collection (March of 2026) they are touring again. ↩︎
- GOD this has not aged well. Or maybe it aged perfectly. While they always have been “a bit wacky”, since then they’ve just completely lost it. Or maybe “don’t even try to hide anymore how much they’ve lost it”. Sigh. ↩︎
- I am still salty about the decline of the franchise. Here is the rant I have written back then.. ↩︎
- Another thing I just have no idea about anymore. ↩︎
- I have started reading Charlie’s books FOURTEEN YEARS AGO!? ↩︎
- I retain ZERO memories about this one. ↩︎
- I ended up not writing the thesis in Ireland, and I also wonder what I was thinking, given how much brutal poverty this book describes. ↩︎
- Still very high up in the list of my larping experiences. ↩︎
- Back then even more than now I seem to never read anything I wouldn’t recommend. Up until today there’s very few works where I’d explicitly say “stay away from that. ↩︎
- This was the first time both me and the Flying Scotsman showed up there, and sadly the post I’ve started about it only contains the headline. ↩︎
- …I watched the Lorax? ↩︎
- Was that my last one? I’d need to look my numbers, at some point I stopped going. ↩︎
- Since the second book came out it stands untouched on the shelf of opportunity. ↩︎
- I am a sweary person, but I seem to be kinda sensitive to certain word choices in this book. Maybe I need to revisit. ↩︎
- I dare you, I double dare you: how many Sharpe-novels have I read since? Exactly, two or three. ↩︎
- Viel schönes dabei. ↩︎
- Johannes Single (McMontos, Hoodie Crows), und Andrew Gordon. ↩︎
- RIGHT at some point I’ve been reading the Myth-series. ↩︎
- This still sometimes pops back up in my mind. It is disturbingly
goodwell executed. ↩︎ - That truly feels like a lifetime ago. Grandma did not see another Big Round Number and went into a rather steep decline before her death, sadly. ↩︎