Music Hall of Fame finally finished, Haruhi novel read:

I've been trying to wrap everything I started in 2024 up before 2025 and I've finally reached the finish line.  Of course new projects will begin in 2025, but it's nice finishing something.  Completing something.

Basically I had to do music maintenance due to moving the files from one drive to another, but this somehow spiraled into having to flip dozens of ratings, identify and eliminate remixes, delete the bad middle portions of otherwise good songs, fix my '100 Waifus' music playlist, find lots of all new good songs to plug holes that kept opening up, listen to those new good songs 100 times as required before their entry to my hall of fame -- ::shakes head::  So much work!  How did it come to this?  But at least at the end of this tunnel I have a magical music collection for the rest of my life.  From 2025 forward it won't be music maintenance, it will be music enjoyment time.

From the very beginning of the year I was adjusting my music hall of fame to the very end.  This project was just as big as editing '100 Waifus', and just as important.  Due to some computer glitch dozens of my precious songs were overwritten and had to be rediscovered by searching through labyrinthine backups.  I think I managed to retrieve all but a couple from that unfair void.  Meanwhile I had to make room for the soundtracks to Unicorn Overlord, Granblue Fantasy Re:link, Heaven Burns Red and various anime themes while still sticking to exactly 5,500 songs broken up into 5 tiers of worst to best, 1,100 per tier.  I've been adding and subtracting, promoting and demoting my music for many years now, but this year was the most challenging ever.  So challenging, in fact, that I've openly given up on ever doing it again.  Starting in 2025 my music hall of fame will lose its symmetry and songs will just be rated whatever, and the number of songs will be whatever, because I can't put in this much effort again.

While I was listening to the last of my 5,500 songs I read the latest Haruhi Suzumiya novel, the theater of Haruhi Suzumiya.  The book wasn't very good.  Basically the characters were thrown into a variety of different genres, like gangster, western, sci-fi, fantasy, greek myth, pirates, etc., and the question was what was going on and how could they get back to the real world.  Eventually the author deus ex machina'd the situation by saying Yuki Nagato did something or other and everything was fixed.  So through no decisions of the characters involved did they get into the predicament, and through no decisions of the characters involved did they get out of the predicament.  I consider a story to be about decisions and their consequences, and this book had none.  What this book did have, though, is a ton of illustrations of our leading ladies in various costumes suited to each new genre they entered.  It felt like there was a new drawing every five pages, a real visual feast.  I could look at Haruhi and crew in different dresses all day and never grow bored.  They're that beautiful.  So actually I would say, in the end, this was a good book.  The plot was an excuse for the art so, okay, fine by me.

With my two big projects complete, I can officially declare the year over and present my thoughts on the year as a whole.  I love reflecting on all that I accomplished over the course of a year, but I fear 2025 onwards I won't have any accomplishments because I finished everything this year.  ^^;.  Well, that's for my 2025 in review writing self to worry about.