That was the year that was, and this is the year that might be.

It's been a year, hasn't it?

This year's theme was Generally Unfucking Shit - and it's fair to say that while we unfucked some things, there's still a lot to do that falls under our sphere of influence. But that's fine - we've made progress, and we always carry the previous year's theme forward in some way.

  • 2022's theme was Overcoming Social Anxiety - and I feel like we've been a more active participant in calls and streams this year, as one example, and made more of an effort to reach out 1:1 even if some level of "speak when you're spoken to" persists.
  • 2023's theme was Creativity - and we significantly reduced the amount of time it takes for us to retexture an avatar base for VRChat, allowing for some surprises in just how quickly things could go to "good enough"

The entire year has seen a lot of ups and downs, with Confuzzled in May being a particular low point and a wake-up call that for as much as we try to be an anchor for people and critters that need it, sometimes we really, really do need to ask for help.

We've also ended up fairly drained after work due to the fairly rapidly changing requirements of our role - but at the same, that has been kind of invigorating in its own way.

And for some reason, a lot of plans and mental health kind of cratered in November.

But enough dwelling.

moving forward

In June, we had a dream about the exploration of new worlds with friends, with the phrase "to new adventures" resonating shortly before we woke up.

And that idea stuck; we mentioned it in our last quarterly review as well - and so yeah, next year will be the Year of New Adventures.

In many ways, this is the flipside to this year's theme; 2024 was about improving the old, 2025 will be about embracing the new.

travel plans

The focus point of at least Q1 is our trip to Vancoufur. It will be the first time we've been geographically outside of Europe ever. While we're overpreparing a little (particularly given how much of a problem Confuzzled was)... there's going to be something we don't realize we need, that's inevitable.
And that's fine. Whatever we're missing will be available over there.

That trip to Llandudno was a reminder that there's still lots of places closer to home we haven't been to (or not in a long time, at least), and I want part of this year to be about changing that, to not spend weekends the same way.

internal narratives

One of those narratives we've had about ourselves for years is that we're a picky eater, and so the best option is always what we're most familiar with to avoid an issue.

But we've already been trying to change that. For the past few months, we've either tried to go to restaurants and fast food places we don't normally go to, and order things we've not tried before [1]

And if that narrative can change, others can too.

expression, again

Re-reading last year's article, while we have acquired more outfits that say more about who we are... well, we've been worried to wear some of them. We live in a (lowercase) conservative household in a conservative area. That probably isn't changing any time soon, we have family nearby, and we help out so many critters that I would not want to upset our financial stability until the situation truly became unbearable.

But we met up with Dad a couple of months ago. And she's thriving. [2]

And different situation and all, but there's definitely more we can do safely. The goal last year of tossing out the plain t-shirts for walking the dog is slightly misguided, as it turns out it is pretty nice having ones to schlub about in and for the dog to poke holes in with excitedly jumping up if we've been away. Still, if the ones with the most holes in got replaced with equivalents in femme cuts, who would notice?

dead media

We've long been proponents of keeping a vast local media collection. A single sale on Bandcamp matters infinitely more than hundreds of streams on Spotify, and there is no way for CDs to be updated with a worse mix because it needs to support spatial audio now, or for films on DVD/Blu-Ray to be patched or removed.

However, what is also true is that for CDs in particular, the disc almost becomes vestigial very quickly for us - we rip the CD to our computer once, and the jewel case then just sits on the shelf.
I don't want to get rid of them in case something happens to our digital collection - but they also don't need to be within immediate reach. The same is true of movies that we've already ripped, and of PC games where we've already redeemed the license key.

So to make space for new projects that we might want quick access to, one of the things we want to do is go through the CD collection, and if it's at least decently ripped [3], move it off the shelves in our room - either to the loft or to a CD cabinet somewhere.

digital declutter

Another part of the out with the old idea is being more intentional about digital detritus - to automate cleaning up our Desktop and Downloads, but also to tame our filesystem a bit by implementing something like Johnny Decimal. We use it at work for notes due to the lack of Obsidian, but have yet to implement it for any filesystem and that sometimes leads to inconsistencies.

For example, the git repository for this site is in ~/OneDrive/git on our local filesystem. There are other git repos in ~/Projects. On Windows devices where we're the only user, sometimes stuff ends up in C:\Temp\git.

Similarly, while folders are less important in our personal Obsidian than tags and the other ways notes can be linked... well, we didn't know that at the start, and that's lead to some structure that's redundant, confusing, and not cleaned up - for example, we've ended up with two primary folders where games could go, originally intended as "games we need detailed notes for" vs. "games that are connective tissue for other notes" [4] Within the detailed notes games folder, there are also Too Many subfolders (e.g. /Specific Games 👾/Pokémon/Go 👣/Events 📆/Go Fest London/).

This could be significantly simpler, but we've let that build up.

technology stacks

Work is currently undergoing some of the cloud transformation work that a lot of companies went through, and that means a lot of reskilling.

And that means there's a lot of learning, and a lot of thoughts about how we could do things differently personally as well.

We'd like to move to a continuous integration/deployment model for this site and ❤️'s site, for example, making it a lot easier to work with them from any machine. It'd be nice to do something with Nix so that when we do inevitably buy new hardware, at least setting it up will be easy.

(The redesign of ❤️'s site, still in progress, also counts - we're doing a lot of things we haven't done before, including heavy use of CSS custom properties in interesting ways)

The other part of this is figuring out new solutions to problems; looking to replace our current battery powered security cameras which have their problems, setting up a better home DVR solution, sorting out some of the problems discussed in the hardware audit.

scheduled maintenance

We have our exercise routine of roughly about 75 mins on the exercise bike three times a week, along with daily dog walks. However, it would be nice to sometimes have more upper body focus, because the truth is we can't always do what we'd like with our legs. [5] This might mean purchasing some additional equipment and alternating between leg day and arm day - or simply making more use of the dumbbell we already have and other things around the house that can be used for strength exercises.

closing thoughts

Chances are we are probably going to not complete all of these this year. The to-do list is never done, and our spoons have been very low the past few months.

But the joy of a yearly theme is that it keeps providing a direction to move in. Slow incremental progress still matters, even if it might be more noticeable to other than ourselves. We feel like we don't blog enough, but some friends have been shocked by the amount of output.

further resources

footnotes

  1. (...albeit still currently avoiding some textures that have previously invoked the gag reflex). ↩︎

  2. She still signs texts as Dad, so that's what we're going with. ↩︎

  3. Our digital music collection dates back a long time; some albums in the library are rips of only one or two tracks in garbage quality WMA format. ↩︎

  4. Bubsy 3D is a game that we've had a lot of thoughts about over the years, but it is not one where we need detailed notes on specific mechanics. ↩︎

  5. We got hit by a car in 2018; our left leg is still substantially weaker. ↩︎