The Old Year and The New
I'm quite late to the retrospective party, but the end of 2024 was a bit rough for me - not in any serious way, I was just very preoccupied and low energy. This is just a little retrospective on last year, what I'm planning for 2025, and if the mood strikes I'll talk more about either in future posts.
On 2024
2024 was a fairly downward year for me in many ways. My health hasn't been fantastic, my mood has been commensurately challenging, and many of my bettering-myself goals have ended up in the bin. The only thing I've really managed to stick with is quitting social media, but the main upshot of that is that the exception I made - YouTube - consumes more of my time than it used to. Still nothing on my old Twitter habit, and I've blocked shorts and the like, but it's more than I'd like.
The loss of Cohost was a big shift in how I view my time, myself, and the relationship between the two. I wrote a lot about it at the time, and probably will again, but all I have for now is that it was the only good social media, and that I miss it and wish it could have survived.
A recurring issue has been migraines and the sorts of things that come with migraines, and it kind of took over my christmas, but I'm vaguely optimistic that it getting bad enough to need a hospital visit will actually lead to getting proper treatment - there's still no indication that this is anything grim or serious, but it sucks to lose dozens of days in a year to a single unclear cause, so I'm choosing hesitant positivity here that I'm turning a corner.
A big thing I've been doing this year is starting to learn Chinese using a daily-practice app called HelloChinese. I've definitely got a bit into the habit of gaming it to not lose my streak, but I'm starting to be able to chat very slowly and methodically with my partner, asking for drinks or calling her dumb names. I've purposely held off on moving past HSK1 until I have the mental energy to do some hanzi learning, because while it's not required until HSK3, I want to take this seriously.
My personal life has been mostly good - my partner and I have been together 15 years now and she's still my best friend, the only person I don't tire of. It's been a hard year for her career-wise though, and it's hard not to take on some of that burden on her behalf. Financially we're fine, but we moved back to Scotland in the hope of thriving, and a few years on it just hasn't come yet so she's feeling a need to pivot into an unfriendly economy. That's her story though, not mine.
My own professional life is in something of a holding pattern - I work in games, and after layoffs in 2023 the mood in the office has been low, and the stuff we've been able to release hasn't really brightened it. My own position within that has been very static, doing the bare minimum to not cause problems, but without any motivation to excel or show myself in a better light. The migraines have been a big part of that, but to be honest I'm not sure which way the blame goes here.
In entertainment it was kind of a flat year? I had some high hopes for big RPGs, and there were certainly some bangers, but honestly my heart wasn't really in it for big stories. I rediscovered some love for Rocket League though, cranking out about 350 hours in what's probably my biggest year since I was unemployed in 2018. Not a bad year by any standard, but not one I'm going to look back on with any awe. If I make a separate post about anything, it'll be games.
Other entertainment was a total bust though. This was probably a Me problem. For one, my NAS died and needed resurrected without my existing library, and a big part of that being a problem was the 6 months it took me to care. I've fallen behind on anime in a big way, and movies have been something of a non-factor for me this year. I've been getting into C-Dramas a bit, picking up some memes, dramatically calling my partner fūren and the like. Normal shit. It is a shockingly time-consuming hobby to have alongside games though, so it's not an easy one to maintain.
Overall, 2024 is one of the most also-ran years I've ever experienced.
On 2025
I've not got a lot planned for this year. While 2024 is an also-ran year by accident, 2025 is sort of planned as one?
My partner and I have some pretty big travel plans for 2026, but with how things are now it'll require a lot of careful saving and financial management, in a way we typically haven't bothered with. I'm even going so far as to restructure debt (not in a scary way, in a "I've been super fucking lax about this" way) to give us a better chance at paying for our whole own trip, rather than continuing to rely on parents for help in our 30s.
I'm also trying to more actively pursue non-computer hobbies, or less computer-obsessed ones. I've got a very dusty shed ready for woodwork, a brand-new half-frame film camera, and a bunch of thoughts that may culminate in a 3d-printer. I'm also enjoying cooking lately, and want to try to get back into that habit.
A small aside on cooking - there's a YouTube channel called SortedFood, and they've been diversifying their revenue streams away from just ads and sponsors over recent years. A big thing they do is an app called Sidekick, and I cannot recommend it enough. The premise is to bundle a trio of recipes with ingredients in common, and reduce the odds that you're left with a half-bag of spinach you have to through out at the end of the week. Not every recipe is a winner, some are clearly just bunging 3x as much coriander as they need to finish the packet, but overall I've had so much fun making these recipes, and it's mature enough now that there are literal hundreds of packs with various goals or gimmicks around speed, simplicity, or ingredients. I know this reads like it's sponsored but it's not, honestly I cannot help proselytising when it comes to Sidekick, it's really fucking good.
Anyway, games? Some good looking ones on the way. I'm sure I'll post about them when I play them. I don't have a lot of hype in me right now for new games, but I'm usually open to trying them so I'm ready to be surprised.
The big "resolutions" for the year are around how I structure my time for self-betterment stuff. I got very into the idea of returning to my roots as a physics student late last year, and decided to structure it a bit. I still have my (oh god) 15 year old intro uni physics textbook, and have decided to basically just put it in my brain. The goal for the year is to just spend time learning it. For 3 hours a week I go chapter by chapter, see if I can answer the test questions, and if not go back and learn it and try again. As I see it, however long this takes, I'll eventually have myself a pretty solid grasp of the topic again (thanks to Angela Collier for that one), and I'll know if I want to get into the the really dirty stuff (QED) that knocked me out of grad school and killed my love for academia.
I also want to commit more time and conscious effort to Mandarin, so alongside my 10-minutes a day app I'm committing 2 hours to actual study - be that vocab, hanzi, speaking or listening, just 2 hours of staying in the context a week.
You'll notice that's 5 hours total per week, and that's kind of the juice here - I've learned that I don't self-motivate well to do stuff at the weekend, so the plan is to keep them pretty sacred. This is intended as an hour of study per workday, between finishing work and dinner. Hopefully this can also break up my day a little, rather than just switching my monitor from showing the bad computer to showing the good computer, my usual routine.
I got a new Kindle this Christmas, and getting back into reading was a big goal of mine. I used to be a moderate reader, usually spending about an hour a day on my commute in London blasting through some scifi novel or other. But since I've gone remote I barely read anything that's not considered a Post in some way. I miss it, and having started back at it a week ago, I've gotten bad at reading. I never knew it was possible to get bad at something like that, but I really struggle to focus on the text in front of me. All that changes this year - I have no particular goal for book count or reading time this year, I just want to make my bedtime routine less about immediately putting a video on and more about actually turning my brain down.
I had a lot of ambition to run last year, but it fell apart somewhat because of a short illness and my inability to develop habits. I haven't fully figured out what I want to do this year, but I think I'll focus more on walking - I can walk to my parents' house in around 90 minutes. This is long enough that I can't just up and do it from my incredibly unfit state, but it's a simple target, and I can change the difficulty by just pacing up or down. My brother already does a 30 minute version of this every Saturday morning, so I might line it up with his.
Overall, I want to spend less time at the computer or TV vegetating this year. I don't mean time playing games or calling friends - that's fun and entertaining. I'm talking about scrolling YouTube for the vaguest sustenance. I don't miss that time when I do something else, but I lack the impetus to tear myself away most days. I'm hoping an externalised routine will help.
As I said, 2025 is sort of an intentional non-year. The goal is less to do big things, and more to enable myself to do big things in the future.
On This Website, and Others
I know I haven't been a particularly effective poster on here - I have ideas, but often I write half of it and leave it drafted as a "bad post", and leave it there. This is probably a bad habit, but I tend to get wordy (ignore the scrollbar, keep your eyes over here) and if I don't find a post breezily readable or intensely informative, I usually don't consider it worth posting. I can tell when I'm rambling, or lack a point.
But this isn't a marked essay, it's just a place to post shit. I didn't filter myself this much on Cohost, and this site is meant to reflect the spirit of my presence in that place. Something about having to access an Admin panel to post just makes it feel like it should be more.
So an additional resolution is to come up some kind of format for shorter posts I can just rattle out. I don't want to go full micro-blog, I don't value those chosts of mine particularly, but I had some good couple-hundred-word ones that I really liked. I want to be able to differentiate them, but I don't need a whole new area for it. Might dick around with tag filtering.
More than anything, I want to extend a thanks to everyone who's been posting in the last few months. I've been doing my best to keep up with the blogs, though I do have a small backlog since New Year - I mentioned my reading ability has tanked in recent years, and a large number of genuinely interesting posts has proven really hard for me to get through. I don't want to just mark them as read, I want to enjoy them. Because I've been enjoying them a ton since October, both people I interacted with regularly on Cohost and those I had missed in the network. It's not really about the who though, it's about the fact that you're posting.
The biggest motivation I have to break these posting droughts and put something out there is seeing other people doing the same. I notice when someone hasn't posted in a few weeks, and get a little buzz when they get round to it again. Beyond just being an outlet for my brain words, the only real goal I have for this site is that it does that for someone else. That they open their RSS in the morning, see I've posted, and think "oh hey, he's back".
I think that's what always-online social media has lacked compared to blogging. It's like being a bunch of infrequent pub-goers occasionally seeing each other and having a chat, or overhearing each others conversations. It's a comfy space that we come into in our own time, when we want to be in a shared space. There's no expectation or judgement if we don't want to be there for a while, for whatever reason. No need to always contribute to every conversation at the bar - but if you have something to say, you can pipe up and join in, even just for a couple of minutes.
Ah shit this is the start of my inevitable descent into proper old-man behaviour, isn't it?