Welcome to the final issue of The Voice Magazine for 2024.  It’s been an interesting year so far, and looks like it’ll be ending that way as well, as yesterday I had to take one of our kitties in for a massive surgery—all the mammary glands on both sides removed due to a malignant tumor.  They basically cut a great big circle out of the upper layers of flesh on her chest and belly, pulled the remaining skin together, and sewed it up.

This meant I ended up missing the Council Meeting last night, as well as most of my sleep as the post-care instructions, especially in a house with another cat and a dog that’s super high energy, have been a constant challenge to keep up with.  That said, Smartie does seem to be recovering well at this point, so, though tired, I’m pleased.

Another interesting point to end the year is that Dr. Matthew Prineas has left the position as provost, returning to a position at AU as part of the regular faculty.  No specific reasons were given, and at first I was hopefully thinking perhaps he got annoyed at the demands government was placing on AU, and hence students, to deal with funding levels that are consistently decreasing on a per-student and inflationary basis. Was he taking a principled stand as a way to try to tell this government how displeased he was with their actions?  I mean it would be an exercise in futility if it was, but an admirable one nonetheless.  But then I came across a letter by the AUFA detailing why they “strongly opposed” his reappointment back in 2023.  So perhaps there are other reasons.  Still, it’s the holiday season, so, for this moment, let’s be charitable in our assumptions.  I can get back to cynicism next year.

And speaking of next year, there’s still a lot of room to be swayed if you can think of an article you think deserves to be featured in the “Best of the Voice” issue, which will be out on January 3, 2024. So let me know at karl@voicemagazine.org so I can take your opinion into consideration.

But what do we have for this final issue? A fair number of things. Our resident music reviewer Jessica Wilson takes a look at this year’s Spotify Wrapped, which was interesting to me simply because I’d never heard of such a thing before.  People actively sharing their meta-data about their listening habits?  Such a thing seems terribly odd to me, not because of any privacy concerns, but because of the “Who the heck cares?” factor.  It would never occur to me to share something some third party decided to cobble together from whatever information they gleaned about me from my activities, because I’d never think that such a thing would interest anybody else.

But I guess we live in an age where data supersedes connection.  I mean, it’s certainly more efficient to be able to look up what genres and songs someone favored than having to ask them and getting the self-filtered answers where people will try to provide you with the things they like that they think you’d like or approve of.

Getting back to the magazine, we still also have a music review, as a brand new writer provides us with her review and conversation with artist Matangi and her new album Nexus, part three of our look of street foods in Japan, Alek Golijanin digging into the topic of human trafficking and those who’ve lost their legal status to be in Canada, the latest Love Goddesses comic, events, scholarships and much more!

So enjoy the read, and the season, and we’ll pick this up again next year!