I'm giving myself a couple of Taskmaster-free weeks, even though I do have some TM NZ s6 I could catch up on, because Champion of Champions 4 is coming on Dec 22 -- so excite! The poster gives a full look at the costumes, answering the question of whether Mathew was going to wear EVEN SHORTER shorts, and the people on Reddit provided the extra context that John's Freddie's Harlequin outfit is associated with "We Are the Champions", and that Andy is wearing the cricket uniform associated with the one-day cricket as opposed to test match -- and I love the added meanings from these two nerds. (If there's a deep explanation or Maisie's nun or Sam's bellhop, that has yet to be shared. So far the hypotheses seem to be that Sam's is a reference to TM Hotel and Maisie's is going for something that will keep her knickers covered this time, or possibly another classic musical reference, Grease --> The Sound of Music.)

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In the spirit of catching up on things, I went and got myself up to date on Rivers of London (especially as I'm requesting it in Yuletide and fandomtrees. This is the first year I've had to catch up on it -- I've had a copy of the novel since early July, on preorder, and kind of forgot that Stray Cat Blues had been out for almost a year when I ordered it in October, and then proceeded to not touch for the next two months. But, well, I'm enjoying this patch of story less than previous ones, I guess, so there's less of an impetus to stay current even though I do still love the characters and the world.

5. Ben Aaronovitch, Stone and Sky -- This one was an odd experience... I've been keeping up with the novellas and GNs, but it's been 3.5 years since I read the last novel, and this one seems to be continuing the trend where it's taking me longer to read each book than the preceding one, in the post-Faceless Man arc of the series: False Value I didn't like that much (relative to the series preceding it), but read in 1-2 days; Amongst Our Weapons I liked more but took several days to finish; and this one I read over the course of weeks, setting it aside and going back to it, and I'm not sure how it compares to the other recent ones for me because it just didn't feel like a Peter book, it felt like something else, and that something else didn't work for me as well as the Peter books, but also it was trying for a different thing. ( More, with marked spoilers )

6. Stray Cat Blues (RoL GN #12) -- it does go well with Abigail's heavier and more independent presence in Stone and Sky. ( But it was mostly meh as a stand-alone story (spoilers). ) Abigail was also the only one whose art I liked in this outing. I mean, I don't read these for the art, but this was more meh/downright ugly than most of these.

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More year-end meme: ( movies, television, books this year )

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And, the year-end meme was a good impetus to dust off the fannish goals I'd put together in early January and have not checked in on since end of May, LOL.

( Fannish goals check-in )