Year in Review: 2021

Apologies for being late to getting this out there this year. This is probably the latest I’ve ever published a year in review since I started back in 2015, and I don’t have any good excuses as to why that is. I have simply gotten very good at procrastinating during these last two years as things continue to have little meaning for me, but I’ve also spent more time thinking about the coming year than I usually do, which we’ll get to in due time.

I spent some time re-reading what I wrote a year ago, and I hate how much nothing has changed since then. Not just in the fact that the pandemic continues to make time stand still for us all, but also in the complete lack of progress in anything I’ve wanted to fix. Despite that, I am feeling more hopeful than I have in a while, at least on a personal level.

As we go into this, note that the tone may shift weirdly at times, but that’s just because this was written over a few days and I ended on a much more positive note than when I started it.

2021 in Summary

Events

Literally two events of note happened this year for me. One, I finally got fed up with the toxicity of my old company and jumped back over to Amazon after a 3 year hiatus. It wasn’t something I had really planned, it just ended up being a situation of “right place, right time” as I became open to making a change in the middle of the year. And when I left Amazon the first time around, I had no issues with the company itself, just the position I was in at the time. It ended up being a crazy time to get hired with my new team because we were rushing to get a big product out in time for re:Invent in December, but overall I am super happy with the change.

The other event is that my wife and I took the risk of visiting our families for the holidays, and it turned out pretty well. It sucked being on edge with the omicron variant gaining strength day by day, but we were careful and stuck to our normal restrictions, so nothing happened in that regard. Hopefully we can visit again this year without the concerns, but who the hell knows. I will just continue to hope that COVID will become endemic as quickly as possible because I have no faith in people to do the right thing anymore.

It absolutely sucks that we have spent more than half the time we’ve lived in NYC in quarantine at this point. While we have managed to see friends a few times this year once we all got vaccinated, I would still like to be able to, you know, enjoy where I live for once.

Work

I already kind of covered this, so won’t reiterate on it. I think the only issue I still have with where I’m at right now is that working from home is still very hard for me mentally. I just cannot get the same amount of focus here as I do in an office, and collaboration is difficult for me without that face-to-face interaction. I know that a lot of my generation are totally okay with never going into an office again, but I guess I’m just old-fashioned in that way.

Home

I continue to be happy with the choice of apartment I made when we moved here as we continue to never leave, save for getting supplies. The only real problem we’re having is that the isolation has led us to get more and more lazy with cleaning, it’s just too easy to push things off because no one visits and you get used to it over time.

It hasn’t happened fully yet, but we did recently decide that we wanted to do a bit of a furniture refresh. We have been here for 3 years now and we are still living with a lot of the temporary measures we put in place because we had to. But over the next couple months we are going to get some new stuff and rearrange things for the next few years (hopefully). Things like getting an actual bed frame (after 10 years of not having one), new couch that fits us better, bigger TV (already have this and it’s so nice to be able to see text from across the room now), maybe new shelving depending on how things shake out. At the very least, doing all of this work will force us to clean in those areas we’ve neglected for months/years.

Health

Right now this has become one of my top concerns again. If you remember the saga from last year’s review, I was in the ER a couple of times a few months into the pandemic and I worked with a couple doctors to make sure I didn’t have any heart issues. The result of all that was a diagnosis of hypertension, but not to the point where I’ve received any medication for it. The instructions were basically to get my ass back in shape and eat better.

Well… you can probably guess how well that went. Honestly for most of the year I felt pretty okay though so I didn’t give it that much thought. It was also really easy to continue to neglect it between the stress of my old job and the ridiculous hours of the new job. Things didn’t start really getting bad again until near the end of the year, but according to my doctors nothing internally has really changed, my numbers are mostly the same as they were before. So I’m not really sure what caused the increased issues during the holidays, but I feel a lot better now that I’ve been able to get back on track to some degree. I also feel much better overall than I did when I wrote my last year in review, and there’s a very specific reason for that.

One of the things I was doing a year ago was using a CPAP machine because during my first ER visit the doctors noticed that my oxygen levels dropped a lot when I fell asleep (and snored), so I got it looked at. Well sort of, I didn’t get diagnosed with sleep apnea, but the doctor I was talking to figured I might as well try a CPAP and see what happened. Turns out, that was what was causing me to feel so terrible all the time. I can’t say exactly why, but I suspect my brain was actually being more oxygen-starved by the machine than just normal breathing, it basically completely failed to do its job and suffocated me instead. What I do know is that a week after quitting it entirely, my constant headaches and nausea just went away. Now instead of that I use a device in my mouth to keep my jaw from falling back while I sleep, and that has worked very well at giving me better sleep and keeping my snoring to a minimum (which the wife likes).

In any case, I know that I need to put my health higher, and I have a plan in place to make it happen. So hopefully a year from now I will have better things to say.

Favorite Games

Resident Evil Village - I suppose this doesn’t end up being too big a surprise, being a Resident Evil fan from way back. I still haven’t played RE7 which comes right before this one and features the same main character, but I played a lot of the RE2 and RE3 remakes last year, so I was really excited to get into this one which promised to be more action-heavy than RE7 was. And it did not disappoint, I had a blast playing through this game multiple times to try to get all of the unlocks and bonus stuff. It reminded me a lot of what I loved about playing RE4, but with all the modern stuff I loved about the RE2 and RE3 remakes. Do I think it’s a great game? No, I generally reserve that for games where I can’t stop thinking about them, and while I was hot on it for a couple weeks, that was pretty much it. But it is fun as heck to play and I look forward to revisiting it in the future.

Metroid Dread - What was fun about this was that it came at the end of a full Metroid marathon that I did leading up to it. See, while I have touched a few of the Metroid games in the past, I had never really played them, certainly not to completion. So with Dread coming out I decided to sit down and finally get the full experience of this series. Just the main 2D games though, I didn’t have time to do the Prime games, but I hope to get to those in the future. Of the older games, it’s no surprise that Super Metroid ended up being my favorite as it is everyone’s favorite, but for my money I think Dread comes really close to toppling it. I have several nits with it, mainly I didn’t think the map design was that great, but it is a fantastic game to play. It has been a very long time since I’ve played something that controlled as well as this game does, running and gunning around is ridiculously satisfying and snappy. Unlike most of the other games in the series, the difficulty never felt unfair because I had so much control over what I was able to do in every situation. The only weird part about it is that I haven’t felt any need to play it again after finishing it, which also keeps it from being a great game in my eyes. Maybe sometime this year I will feel the itch since I do want to do it on hard difficulty and try to unlock all the pictures and stuff, but we’ll see.

Destiny 2 - Normally I only put games that are new to me during the year on these lists, but I’m going to make an exception for Destiny 2 here. Technically I played this game back in 2018 since it was free for a small period of time and I figured why not. I got through most of the campaign at the time, but ended up dropping it for other things since it just didn’t really grab me. Well the main game is free forever now, and I was led back to it through an online community I got into this past year. And this time, it definitely stuck. I did have to start over with a new account since the last one was on Battle.net and those all disappeared since I didn’t migrate it, and the tutorial experience was very different. But I was having a blast from day 1 and I ended up playing through all of the expansions, grinding out daily stuff multiple times a week. It was basically all I played for several months. I did drop off the game again with the amount of work hours I had to put in during the second half of the year, but I’m planning to pick it back up again soon.

1828/1862 - Just like last year, I'm going to put a couple board games on here. Sadly, since there weren’t any PAXs this year (that I was willing to go to anyway), the number of new board games this year was very small, and almost all of them were new 18xx games (7 in fact). Of these, my favorites ended up being 1828 and 1862. I’m not going to get into exactly why they are my favorites because that’s super into the weeds for people who don’t know these games, but I will say that for whatever reason I’m really good at 1862. I have more wins in that one than all of the other 18xx games I’ve played combined. I’m not sure if our group has kind of burned out on train games since we haven’t played one in a few months now, but I know that even if we are done with these games, I will forever associate them with this period of time as a highlight of my daily activities.

Favorite Movies/TV Shows

Much like the previous year, I spent way, way too much time consuming Youtube and Twitch so I didn’t get around to many movies or TV shows. In fact, I saw more movies during the week we were with our parents than I had in the previous two years combined. So that’s pretty sad. And like last year I don’t think anything I saw was good enough for me to count as something I would consider a favorite. I think I had the most fun with John Wick 3 and Shang-chi, but they are just solid action films that I enjoy at the time, then I move on and only watch them again if they happen to be on.

Favorite Books

Sadly I also don’t have anything to put here. Of all of my normal hobbies, reading has probably taken the hardest hit. Just to give perspective, in 2019 I read 17 books, in 2020 I read 11 books, and this year in 2021, I read 2. Just two. And neither one was worth talking about really. I have just been in a really big rut in terms of enjoying books as of late. I mean, I am technically doing a decent amount of reading, but it’s all web stuff, no actual novels or self-contained stories. A big problem is that the book I’m trying to finish right now just doesn’t interest me that much, and I’m not a person to quit on a book, no matter how bad it is (I don’t think I’ve ever not finished a book in my life), but I just can’t get myself to read it. I know I’m going to have to force it at some point in order to get on with my life.

Goals

Before we get into the goals I set for the last year, let it be known upfront that I pretty much immediately forgot about what they were and let myself slip back into survival mode, so it will not come as a surprise that I didn’t accomplish anything towards any of them. I kind of had a realization in the last couple weeks about why that is, and I’ll get into that in the next section for this coming year.

Be More Responsible - While I think I could argue that I was able to do better in this goal when it comes to my work, the focus of what I wrote last year was in regards to personal and home maintenance. And when it comes to that, I struggled a lot. We are not exactly living in ruin or squalor, but it has been the bare minimum for a long time. At the very end of the year we decided to do something about it with a furniture refresh, but that doesn’t mean the same as having a habit to clean on a regular basis.

Get to 200 - Heh, no, not even close. At the time I wrote this goal I only had to lose about 20 pounds to get to 200, but now it’s 40 pounds. Between the lack of going anywhere and constant work stress, I have truly become the proverbial couch potato. Don’t think I didn’t have this on my mind the whole year, but it was just really hard to care.

More Active Media - I also failed really hard at this one. Even when I tried to use various tools to block access to Twitch and Youtube, I would just work around them until they became irrelevant. And I tried to do this multiple times. It has really become as close to an addiction as I’ve ever gotten. It was too easy to tell myself that it was okay because “soon I will be commuting again and that will force me to stop thinking about it all the time,” but that never happened. As evidenced by my lack of favorite things this year, I spent far, far too much time watching my computer monitors, wishing I was enjoying what I was watching.

—-

Yeah, it was a bad year. This might be the most disappointed in myself I’ve ever been. And it’s not the same kind of disappointment I’ve had in the past where I set a bunch of lofty goals and projects and don’t complete them because I’m unrealistic in what I can actually do. It hurts especially bad this time around because my goals were literally just “get out of the rut you’re in”, and I couldn’t even do that much.

But, despite that, I’m actually pretty positive right now. I think I’ve realized why it has been so hard for me to get my mental state out of the hole it’s in. And when I say my reasoning, this is just how I function and is not a reflection on how other people handle the overwhelming stress we all feel right now. I’ve been struggling for two years because I have let other people convince me that just getting through each day is enough. That not pushing yourself to be better is okay. Again, for a lot of people this way of thinking totally works for them and helps them get through tough times. But I’m realizing that it really doesn’t work for me. In a way, not pushing myself to be a better person puts me into a depressive state of mind because nothing seems to matter. I have to have something to look forward to in order to maintain myself.

Right now I’m not entirely sure what that actually looks like in practice, but I know that it’s the reframing I need to make if I want to have any hope of getting better. Maybe I’m just finally coming out of the stages of grief where I’ve been telling myself for months that I will be able to improve things once the world starts recovering, but realize that I just can’t wait anymore. I’m honestly not sure, but the shift in my thinking has already been happening for a couple weeks. It’s part of why it’s taken me this long to get around to writing this, it’s because I had to get some other mental ducks in a row before I could have the focus to do this. My goal right now, at this moment, is to try to look forward to all the things I need and want to do. Even if it all comes down to me faking excitement to do things, if it works then so be it.

So with all that said, my plan for this year is to stretch back into the past to try something I haven’t done for several years, which is to focus on building habits instead of completing goals. One of the things I’ve known for a long time, but this pandemic has really solidified for me, is that personal goals are often at the mercy of things that are outside of your control. Setting a weekly goal is one thing when you can have a pretty good idea of what your schedule is and what your environment is going to be like, like setting a goal to walk 10 miles during the week and knowing which days will have better weather to do it. But to try to plan out what you can do in a year, I should give up on ever trying to do that again. Trying to run my life too much like a business. So, yes, let’s focus on building habits instead that can accumulate into the goals I wanted to accomplish all along.

Schedule Maintenance

Right now I am attempting to schedule pretty much everything in my life going forward (as there is little expectation of random events disrupting it in the near future), but especially for what I’m going to categorize as maintenance. When I think about things that happen outside of work, they all fall under three umbrellas: hobbies, social activities, and obligations. Maintenance is a subset of obligations that occur on a recurring basis. In my case I’m specifically going to focus on exercise, cooking, and chores. Honestly I’m not too sure on what other maintenance things there are besides those, but I’m sure other people in different situations (like those who have children or do physical labor) will have more. The point is that each maintenance task gets an allotted time that I’m going to do my best to stick to.

This is definitely going to be the hardest stuff to “look forward to” because all of those things suck while doing them. Others will disagree on the cooking because lots of people love doing that, but I don’t. The trick is going to be focusing on the end result and getting my brain to want that. It feels great to feel strong after a workout, or to have a clean kitchen, or to enjoy one of your favorite meals, so that’s the mental muscle I really need to build back up again.

Stream Regularly

This may come as a bit of a surprise given how much I’ve talked about how watching Twitch and Youtube has become a big problem for me, but I want to look at it as a hack to get around that addiction. See, you can’t have a problem with watching streams if you’re the one streaming. I mean, I guess you could stream yourself watching other streams but that would be super weird. And it’s not like it would be new to me since I’ve streamed a lot in the last year and a half now, ever since I started doing the ALTTP randomizers I mentioned in last year’s review, but it has never been with any real consistency. It’s the same story of doing it a few times a week for a few weeks then dropping it as soon as something gets in the way and throws me off schedule.

What I like about having this as a habit is that it makes me actively think about what I want to do with it as a product. I have no expectations that anyone will actually watch anything I do (but I have had a surprising number of people roll into my programming streams), but that’s not the point of it. The point is that having the stream forces me to focus on the task at hand, and since it’s all fun things, I have lots to look forward to in doing that. I have many ideas about what I want to do with those stream blocks, so I’m legit excited to get them started (still have some prep I need to do ahead of time, but it’ll be soon).

Look Forward to Tomorrow

Sort of a running theme here about looking forward to things as a way to get me moving forward in getting out of my rut. This is one of those things you can’t really quantify, but it’s something that I’m trying to do right now and hopefully I will remember to carry it through the year as best as I can. While I was doing better at this during the first year of the quarantine, as it became clear that it wasn’t going to end anytime soon, I definitely fell into the mindset of trying to avoid the day ending because I wasn’t satisfied with what I had done. This resulted in me staying up way too late almost every night and struggling to get out of bed every morning because I just didn’t care. I would still show up for work but many days it would be the least amount of effort possible. That’s not who I want to be since I know I am capable of much better than that.

In order to reverse that mentality, I have to switch it to just looking forward to the next day and try to do as much as I can. It’s definitely not going to be easy, especially with moving my body clock back a couple hours when it naturally wants to do otherwise (what can I say, I’m a night owl by nature and always have been). But I’ve been trying to put this into my head for a few days already and it’s been promising so far. As I already said before, it’s kind of like me telling my brain and my body that you’ve had your time to mourn and wallow about the time you’ve lost, now it’s time to accept what has happened and get back to being a person again.

The Tunnels

A year ago I was somewhat hopeful that 2020 would remain the worst year we would ever have and that 2021 would be better, but I really don’t think it was. In some ways yes, but in other ways no. While 2020 was a year of fear of not knowing how to deal with the virus, 2021 was a year of frustration as we came to know the virus and how to deal with it, but large segments of humanity decided that we didn’t need to fight it at all despite the millions of people dying of it around the world. But I don’t need to expound on that, we all know it. What we originally thought was the light at the end of the tunnel was actually just the start of a big mountain pass with many more tunnels to navigate.

So I’m not going to hope for a better 2022, the course of the pandemic is completely out of my control anyway, I can only do what is best for me now. I think with a little bit of improvement and progress every day, I can still be satisfied with what I’m doing. And I will be overjoyed if we end the pandemic by the end of the year, but I won’t be counting any chickens this time around.

At this point I am also not going to make any assumptions about any other new content coming to this website in the coming year, so see you all in 2023 ya?

Year in Review: 2020

Let’s just start this year in review off by saying that I haven’t really written anything of substance since last January 1, so I apologize in advance if the quality is lower than usual. I also apologize up front because this is going to be less eloquent than usual as well. I know it’s going to because that is just where my mind is at right now. I always intend these posts to be written as if I’m giving an unprepared speech so I never rewrite after the post is done, I simply edit for grammar.

In all honesty, I don’t want to spend the time to write this to the level that I normally do. Like almost everything else this year, my heart just isn’t in it. But I will do my best.

2020 in Summary

Events

COVID happened. That’s it. That’s the year.

Yes, technically we were able to do PAX South and East before all this happened, and I am super grateful for that, but the entire rest of the year has been so dominated by the fact that we can’t do anything fun anymore that those things might as well have been in 2019. Time has gotten so warped for me that my brain is almost convinced they didn’t even happen.

I find nothing to be happy about this year. I have been stuck in the same 2 square miles of land for over nine months. I have not stepped inside of a subway car for over nine months. I have not visited a single restaurant for over nine months. Aside from my wife I have seen, with my eyes, exactly five people I personally know, for less than a minute each, over the last nine months.

It fucking sucks. And I hate it. And I hate that there are so many people who don’t care.

I know that I will look back on all this and be happy that I did literally everything I could to not spread this disease and try to support those who don’t have the luxury of being able to work from home. But right now, when we are losing thousands of people every single day, it feels very thankless to isolate ourselves so much.

By the time this is all over, my wife and I will have spent over half of the time we’ve lived here in quarantine, and I don’t really have words to express how depressing that is.

Work

My opinion of my place of work has not gotten any better since last year. The culture was toxic then and it’s possibly even worse now. Aside from the constant finger-pointing of why nothing seems to get done correctly, now we are also dealing with lots of people quitting (due to the toxicity) during quarantine with no replacements, yet we are still expected to deliver at the same pace as if the world wasn’t on fire. I also firmly believe that our executive team is convinced that people should be happy to work more hours because it’s not like we have anything better to do.

Again, I have no concerns about where I stand in the company, but I’ve long been at that point where I honestly don’t care about what happens. The only reason I haven’t followed the smart people out of the door is that we need the benefits, and I don’t really know where else I would go right now. I generally only make job changes when I’m looking to grow, and right now I’m just surviving.

Home

It’s where we are 24/7 now. This year has made me so happy with the choice I made last year in where we live because it has made the surviving part as easy as it could be. It would’ve been easy to trade space and comfort at home for a better location or cheaper rent that would allow more time to be spent outside the house. I remember it being a distinct selling point of “you’re gonna live in NYC now, you won’t spend that much time at home anyway,” and I’m glad I didn’t listen to that.

That being said, I never fully appreciated just how important having a commute was to me. Certainly I get just as annoyed when the train or bus is late, or full, or just doesn’t show up at all, and you always have to be wary of certain people. But I miss it so much, and not having it has taken a direct toll on my physical and mental well being. Going for walks just isn’t the same because the destination is always the same. Home doesn’t feel like home anymore when that’s all there is. I need that change in scenery.

And what really sucks about having this extra time at home is that I didn’t use that extra time for much. Similar to last year, the stress of work and not being able to go anywhere compounded into giving me no motivation to do anything, even the things I enjoy.

Health

The last few sections all culminate into this one, which has really been my struggle this year. Looking back on last year’s review I was already on a bad trend and I noted that if things didn’t improve I would likely burnout or worse.

Well, despite not getting COVID, I ended up in the ER twice this year due to panic attacks. Now I didn’t know at the time that that’s what they were, having never experienced them. I just knew that my heart was going crazy and my body was shutting down, and with my family’s history of heart-related diseases I knew I had to get it looked at. But after those visits and working with a cardiologist, I now know that all I actually have is high blood pressure and a lot of stress.

And it’s like, okay, what can I do about it then? As I already mentioned, I’m stuck inside all day and I have a stressful job. And that’s just the way it has to be right now because not being careful is not an option and not having a job would be even more stressful. The one thing I was able to figure out is that a lot of my fatigue and headaches were actually caused by dehydration, so upping my water intake has helped a lot. Being sedentary and stressed still counts for all my other problems though.

So, I’m just doing what I can for now. Taking advantage of the days where I’m feeling decent and just accepting that some days I’m going to feel like crap and just get through it. Try to get some amount of walking or biking in each day. I know that I need to limit my screen time as well but, again, super hard to do when there’s nothing else to do.

At this point, I’ll just be happy if I can avoid the hospital again for a year. Any other improvements would just be icing.

Favorite Games

Final Fantasy VII Remake - I feel like I was destined to love this game since I’m a FF fanboy and I have a lot of nostalgia in particular for the original FF7, but even I was a little surprised at why I ended up loving this remake. First, the battle system is a blast, so much more satisfying than FFXV that I played last year and has jumped up to my favorite battle system in any FF game to date. It reminds me of everything I love about FFXIII’s system but with direct control and better customization. Second, I appreciated the fleshing out of the Midgar world and the characters you meet in the early game. The other members of Avalanche are actually worth caring about and the aftermath of the pillar sequence feels so much more impactful. I also like the way the story has been modified to keep the spirit of the original but allow for a different path through the two upcoming games. I wasn’t expecting to like this game as much as I did and I very much look forward to the next one, whenever that ends up being.

Hades - This is another example of a game where I expected to like it, but I became obsessed with it for several weeks, and it ended up as my favorite game of the year. Technically I’m not done with it yet, as I consider it full complete on getting every item and I’m still one companion short of that, but I’ve full-cleared the story and epilogue so it’s close enough. So many things have been said about it but for me it comes down to fun gameplay and a sublime soundtrack. I’ve been a fan of Darren Korb’s stuff since Bastion, and the Transistor OST is in my top 3 soundtracks ever, and the Hades soundtrack has quickly become a favorite as well. Combine those things with some great art, enjoyable characters, and a bunch of collectibles and you get a game I’ve sunk 100 hours into and plan to continue for a while yet.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Randomizer - This is a little bit of a cop out since it is obviously a very old game that I’ve played many times throughout my life, but this year I got really into the randomizer and the community around it. I think in terms of pure hours, this outranked every other game I played this year. Lots of casual playing, some co-op play with a couple friends, and eventually I got into competitive playing where I’m racing other players and actively trying to get better at the game. It’s been a great way of giving new life to my all-time favorite game.

1846/1817 - I’ve never put board games in the yearly review before, mostly because I never kept track of what I played, but I started doing it this year so I want to include these. Both 1846 and 1817 are among dozens of games that constitute the 18xx series of train board games. These are games that I’ve heard of for a long time but never dipped into until this year thanks to the 18xx.games website coming into existence, coupled with not being able to play games in person with friends. We’ve played dozens of games this way and of the ones I’ve played so far 1846 and 1817 stand out as my favorite ones. I have yet to actually win a game because the friends I play with have a lot more experience and these are the kinds of games where just one mistake can ruin your chance of winning, but I’m constantly learning and getting better. I think in any other year (with 3-4 PAXs) some other board games would be here instead, but these have defined my entire board gaming this year so I had to mention them.

Favorite Movies/TV Shows

I don’t have anything to list here because I’ve only seen 7 movies or TV shows that I hadn’t seen before, and none of them are strong enough to be listed as a favorite of mine. This just wasn’t a good year for new media for me, it was a year of going back to old comforts, and the vast, vast majority of my time was watching Youtube or Twitch because they’re mindless and provided a lot of much-needed social interaction for me. There are a couple things we are currently working through that might’ve made the list but we haven’t completed them so they don’t count.

Favorite Books

Sandman - Much like with TV, I didn’t get a lot of books done this year because reading just wasn’t something I wanted to do most days. I also kept picking disappointing books in the early part of the year, so I eventually tried to make a shift by going with a known classic, finally reading the entire Sandman omnibus, and I was definitely not disappointed. It still probably wasn’t the story I needed at the time, the darkness of the pandemic made a lot of it difficult to enjoy, but it still holds up very well for something that’s 30 years old now, and there are a lot of sections that I will likely remember and reference for a long time to come. Which is really the best thing you can say about great art.

Goals

I’m not going to spend that much time on reviewing last year’s goals because no one could have predicted what was going to happen, so I think it is unreasonable to hold myself accountable for things outside my control. Much more important to look forward at this point.

Health Comes First - To be fair, I was doing a good job of this until quarantine started. I adjusted really poorly to being home-bound so I not only lost all the progress I had made but, as mentioned above, things got even worse. Having those medical scares did force me to pay more attention to it though so I’m doing better now than I was mid-year, but there is plenty more work to be done.

Less Isolation - Heh. Yeah, nothing I could do about this one. “Let’s spend less time in my office” turns into “well guess I’m spending at least 9-10 hours in my office every day now.” And not being able to see friends also makes it impossible to get away. So yeah, I had absolutely no control over this one, and as such I’m not going to be hard on myself for not putting more effort into it.

Schedule Weekly Blocks - Didn’t do this at all. Don’t really care either in all honesty. Again, hard to care about working on projects when you’re constantly in survival mode.

Accept and Push Forward - Still not good at this either. If anything I dwelled on things even more this year than I normally do because I was too miserable physically most of the year to do anything else. The point of this was to stop hesitating and just do things more often and I overall did less this year than any year I can remember, despite being at home all the time. I really was just in bad shape too often, but I know it’s something I still need to work on.

In terms of what I plan to do this coming year, I already know that quarantine is going to continue for a long while, so the goals are going to be simple and focused on making isolation easier rather than productive. If I can manage to get myself into a place where I am more productive, great, but let’s just focus on getting through this year without anything else bad happening.

Be More Responsible

Also known as, more adulting. Without the need to go out and be presentable or host people, we have been very bad at basic maintenance of the apartment and ourselves. So I want to make it a goal to just be better at doing things we need to do before leisure time. I know it has been particularly difficult on weekdays after work when I’m drained from stress, but it’s not going to get easier for a while. So I just need to do it.

I think the side benefit of this is that by just getting the things done, I will feel less guilty about my leisure time. As it is I hesitate on what I should do on a daily basis because I know there are things I need to do but would rather do something fun, so I end up doing neither (basically the Accept and Push Forward problem). If I just get the things I need to do done, then no more guilt.

Get to 200

Another year, another weight loss goal. I’m not going to dwell on this one at all since it has been a consistent thing for several years at this point, but I’m going to go ahead and put the specific number because it might help as a motivating factor. And where I’m at right now this is only 20 pounds to lose, which should be very doable in 12 months. Plus it’s part of my medical treatment for high blood pressure, so there’s additional incentive to do it this year.

More Active Media

It’s kind of funny to have a goal around actually consuming more media rather than trying to be productive, but looking at what I did this year compared to previous years, I just spent way too much time on passive media (namely Twitch and Youtube). So when I say active media, I mean that I should be spending my free time actually watching new TV and movies, playing more board games, and reading more books. Things that actually provide some kind of value. Not to say that all TV and books are valuable, but watching Twitch is like watching the news everyday, it doesn’t matter much a few days later. Media that requires active attention and is designed to be remembered and talked about is what I should be doing in my free time. I think there is still a time and place for the more ephemeral content of Twitch and Youtube, but I don’t need it to be my main form of media.

Hopefully Not More of the Same?

That’s the best I can hope for with 2021. I would like to think that 2020 will end up being the worst year most of us ever see in our adult lives, and that 2021 can only be better, but we will honestly have to see if that comes true. Lots of people are fighting to make it better but there are just as many people determined to make it worse. I know I’m going to keep working to make it better in the ways that I can, and I hope that I can come out of this pandemic with even more patience and empathy than I started with.

Let’s have a better review in a year, yeah?

Year in Review: 2019

Here we are at the start of a new year! But… if you read the review from last year, the review for this year is going to be depressingly familiar. I don’t think I feel as frustrated with myself as I did a year ago, but I certainly feel just as disappointed, if not more so. I was hopeful that moving to a new city would force some good changes, and there were some, but they came with just as many bad changes. Of course, as always, I will expound on these at length below.

2019 in Summary

The only tweak to the previous format will be in this section. I normally cover a bunch of things in a random order here, so just to make it more clear where things are, I’m going to split these up into some broad categories: events, which includes big life changes and trips; work, which includes career stuff as well as personal projects; home, which includes social life and entertainment; and health, which is pretty self explanatory.

Events

To get the big one out of the way, I got a new job and we moved to New York City, specifically Queens. I wrote several posts during the first half of the year talking about my experiences and thoughts about our new home, but in summary I still love the overall decision. I do miss the familiarity of Seattle at times, mostly not getting to see our best friends and family all the time, but everything else about living here has been better for both of us. The only thing we haven’t been great about is exploring, so that’s going to be a goal for the coming year.

Another big event that happened shortly after we moved is that the album I recorded last year got released. I could not be more proud of what we made. I love it with my whole heart and have listened to it regularly the entire year. I even use Kindness as my wake up alarm because it’s a nice, upbeat way to get going in the morning. Like most albums, it was most popular during the first month after release, but it has been consistently played (streamed) since then. Not a lot compared to most artists I’m sure, but it’s enough that I’m convinced it’s not just us band members listening to it.

In terms of trips we went on, almost all of them were related to PAX. Went to San Antonio in January like we have the last few years. Went to Boston for the first time, though didn’t get to see much of the city due to the convention. Went back to Seattle for a long Labor Day weekend. And finished off the year a few weeks ago with a return to Philadelphia. That last one ended up being pretty terrible though because we were both sick the whole time and went home early.

The only non-PAX, non-holiday trip was the week we spent in Ireland courtesy of my family. A couple of days were spent in Dublin, which my wife and I both love dearly, and the rest were spent on the northern coast. We stayed in a little house in what can only be called a village, so it was about as different from our new home as you can get without being farmland. It was a good time though, getting to see a culture in that way, with plenty of beautiful scenery to see.

Work

My job this year has been… difficult. It is by no means the worst job I’ve had, in fact I would say that it ranks second behind Amazon (when taken as a whole). However, it has given me a lot more stress than it deserves. The work itself is all fine and good, plenty of consistent challenge with reasonable rewards. The culture, though, is quite toxic, and it has worn on me all year. It makes it hard to be motivated to want to do the good work that I’ve become known for. The big plus is that, since I do such good work, I have no concerns about where I stand in the company. But it would be nice if everyone else could just get along better, then I wouldn’t be vented at all the time, bringing my attitude down.

As far as personal projects went, well, there weren’t any really. All of my free, creative time went towards the weekly posts I did for most of the year. But even after I stopped doing that, I didn’t end up shifting towards using that time for other pursuits. I did get more ideas for things I want to do during that time, but ideas don’t equal results. So, we’ll see if that gets better in the coming year or not.

Home

At this point, I really have to thank myself for creating a good group of east coast friends before we moved, since I think we would be struggling a lot more if we didn’t have that. Outside of them, we basically only knew one person in NYC before moving, so we would’ve had to put in a lot more effort to create a new friend group, which is not easy for us. So with a good group already there, our social life has been pretty good. The great thing about it is that we all live in Queens, so getting together is very easy and can happen on any day we want to. It feels like seven years ago, at the height of our Capitol Hill friend group. I know we can still do better here since a lot of the time this year we missed out on things due to stress and illness.

As far as enjoying my free time, I think it was better than the previous year, but I still spent far too much time on unrewarding things. Again, a lot of this was stress related, but I was able to make some adjustments later in the year that helped me focus more, so if I take that into the next year, I’m sure my time will be better spent.

Health

In short, my overall health continues to decline, and I feel worse than I ever have (at least as far as memory serves). My status a year ago is basically the same as it is now. Diet has not improved, it’s actually gotten worse now that we live in the world of food delivery. I have exercised maybe 20 times the whole year, which isn’t enough progress to get anything going. I’m still tired all the time, and I get headaches from it on a nearly daily basis. So yeah, things aren’t great.

I’m going to put at least some of the blame for this on my job. As I’ve already mentioned, the stress feeds into the cycle of being tired all the time so bad decisions get made in the evenings when I should be exercising and cooking dinners. In addition to that, I went many years where I had the flexibility to get to work fairly late in the morning. As long as I put the time in, it didn’t really matter when I was there. Now I’m in a job that forces the 9-5, and my body is just not built for getting up that early. You would think I would’ve adjusted after a year, but no, the amount of time sleeping doesn’t matter at all. It’s only the time I wake up that matters, and my body hates getting up at 7:00 and earlier. Maybe at some point I will be able to convince my superiors that I’m more valuable getting into the office later so that I can get the rest I need, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

This really needs to be the highest priority for me in the coming year, or I’m going to eventually end up in a situation that I can’t recover from.

Favorite Games

Final Fantasy XV - I really didn’t expect to like this game as much as I did. I love the series as a whole, but when it came out I wasn’t hearing much from others that got me particularly interested. Most people were positive on it, but I couldn’t understand why based on what they actually said about it. I totally get it now. Yes, it definitely has a lot of flaws and the moment to moment isn’t as fun as other entries in the series. But I legitimately didn’t want the game to end because I had gotten so attached to the main characters, which has never really happened before in those games. Even now I consider going through it again, but I know that there is so much more to play that I shouldn’t. A full review for this will be coming eventually.

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening - This is a little bit of a cop out since it’s just a remake of a game I already loved when I was a kid, but it’s a fantastic remake and worth every minute I put into it. It has a lot of quality-of-life improvements allowed by the console, the graphics are beautiful, and it’s a short enough game that I would have no problem just playing through it again when I have a free weekend.

Stardew Valley - Typically I only put games on here that I’ve finished during the year, so this wouldn’t normally count since I haven’t finished it. But it’s a game that has no actual end goal, so I’m going to let it slide this time. Again, I didn’t expect to like this game as much as I do. I’ve never played any games in this genre, like Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon, so I can’t compare it to those, but I really dig this game. It really comes down to a couple things. One, lots of collections to complete, which appeals greatly to my completionist nature. Two, it’s fundamentally a game about experimenting and maximizing efficiency, which appeals to my engineering side as well. It’s relaxing and easy to play while listening to other things, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it for the last month. So, it definitely fits under favorites.

As a short addendum, I do want to call out Borderlands 3 and Untitled Goose Game as being two great experiences I had with my wife this year. I personally don’t find myself wanting to go back to those games much right now, so they aren’t favorites, but playing them with her made them better than they would’ve been alone.

Favorite Movies/TV Shows

Bad Times at the El Royale - First watched this on one of the many flights at the beginning of the year during the move, and it was so good that I made my wife watch it as well. Basically the same thing that happened with Mission Impossible: Fallout last year. It’s just a fun romp of a movie with tons of twists and dynamic characters. Would gladly watch again and again.

Annihilation - Another flight movie, getting to catch up on something I’ve wanted to see for a while. Overall, I didn’t find anything particularly novel about the film, it was actually kinda boring in retrospect. But the visuals really stuck with me for a long time, so I’m going to give it a nod just for that alone.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse - I feel like I don’t really need to add anything more onto this that hasn’t been said already. While I don’t think I love it as much as most people did, I have to recognize it for the artistic achievement it is, as it visually blew me away. I might’ve seen it differently if my expectations hadn’t gotten so high with all the praise it got, but still absolutely one of the best movies I saw this year.

Knives Out - This is my favorite movie of the year, by quite a big margin. Like Bad Times, it is a ridiculously fun romp, and it comes out ahead of that one by also being very smart in the story it tells and the way it tells it. Great mystery, lots of humor, polarizing characters, fantastic performances across the board. It also came as the biggest surprise since I didn’t really know anything about it until reviews started coming out, and those convinced me it was worth seeking out. And I’m super glad I did.

Favorite Books

Alexander Hamilton - It was sadly another year of not enjoying many books I read, but this did stand out as the only audiobook I listened to this year that I wanted to keep going with. I’ve probably mentioned before that I’m a big fan of the musical inspired by this book, and it is definitely an interesting book. Probably the most interesting aspect isn’t so much about the man himself, but about how little things have seemed to change when it comes to politics. I considered writing a post about it this year, but I couldn’t quite find the right frame to do it with, so decided not to. In any case, a good read.

Hyperspace - I guess if I had to choose a book I actually read with my eyes, this one was the most interesting to me. I did write a post about Cosmos as well, and I liked that well enough, but this book had a lot more stuff that was new to me, so that brought it up to the front. I do wish the book had more actual science in it, most of the concepts are explained and we are told that there are proofs and stuff, but those are never shown or explained. Yes, it is written for a wider audience, but I didn’t like how hand-wavey it was about how they know they’re correct. It was still enough to keep me engaged though, so that’s something.

Goals

As usual, I will have a lot to say here, but before I get into this coming year, a quick recap of last year’s goals. I made them pretty specific with subgoals to flesh out my exact plan for each, so it’ll be easy to assess exactly where I got. Though, if you’ve read my posts across the year, you already know how they went.

Run a Half-Marathon in Under 2 Hours - Super ambitious, super failure. As I already mentioned, my health has only gotten worse this year, so there was no way this was going to happen in light of that. Even with the adjustment I made mid-year, I’m just not exercising at all. More on that later.

Publish a Post Every Week - I got a lot further with this than I expected. Sadly I decided to give up in August, so I can’t say I succeeded here, but I did better than I ever have with similar attempts. I definitely have a lot of respect for those who can maintain that kind of pace (though to be fair, most people who do write for a living). The main reason I quit was due to lack of topics, but I also wanted to use that time for other things. Overall a good attempt, but not enough reward for the work I put in.

Listen to 200 New Albums - I honestly have no idea how far I got with this, but probably somewhere in the 60 range. Fundamentally, the idea didn’t align with how I tend to take in new music. I have a giant list of albums that I want to listen to, but I never want to do it because that’s not how I approach music. It tends to be more natural where I hear a song somewhere else, and if it triggers my brain then I will seek it out. But if I just go into an album cold, I’m not likely to get into it much. Sometimes I do find gems in this more artificial way, but it’s rare. The side effect of removing distractions while working didn’t really work either, so that contributed as well to not setting aside time to listen to new things.

Make a Focusing/Quitting Habit - This is the first goal I abandoned, for the sole reason that it just didn’t work at all the way I thought it would. I thought recording stuff and making things more granular would help, but it ended up just adding more busywork that took time away from doing the actual things. So I stopped. An unexpected side effect of this failure is that I’m not even using Jira to track things anymore after six years of constant use. I finally realized that it was taking 10 steps in Jira to do the same thing I can do in 2 steps using Evernote, so I’m phasing it out until I have a real need for it (like a project).

As I think back on all the different approaches I’ve tried to be more productive and all that, it’s difficult to really know what has worked better than others. There are so many approaches you can have. You can try to schedule everything you do. You can try to make very specific goals. You can try to use deadlines. You can try to build habits instead of specific goals. You can try to offload the whole burden onto external systems to keep you in line.

I have tried all of these in one way or another, but they all blend together at some point so I can’t point to one way as better than others. Scheduling works pretty well until you have to deviate from it, and it requires a lot of upkeep. Specific goals works pretty well until life makes it such that you can’t do them, or you stop wanting to do them (see this year). Habits works pretty well until you realize there are no heuristics on if you’re doing well or not. I do know that deadlines really don’t work for me, at least in my personal life. They attach too much stress for things that are supposed to be fun, so I will leave deadlines for my paid work.

The specific goals attempt this past year did actually work for quite a while, so it’s definitely not a bad approach. The thing is, I don’t know if it’s a good fit for what I really want to do, which is to have time for bigger projects that can take a year or more to do. With things like that, I find that it has been more effective to just devote time to them and eventually something pops out. So the obvious answer there is to take a more scheduling approach.

Aside from missing the goals I set this year, the other bad trend I noticed is that I’ve been isolating myself too much. This wasn’t so bad in our old place because my computer was in the main room where my wife was also, but in our new place my computer is in a separate room. It’s a good thing when I want to have time to myself to focus and such, but I’ve been taking it too far and kind of locking myself away. In the coming year, I want to be more intentional with the time I spend on the computer, and default to being more social.

Now, with all of that said, I have a few things I want to work on this year, so I’m going to mark them as goals, though I’m not going to go as specific as I did last year. That means no hard criteria. The real goal with these is to restructure my life/schedule to accommodate them.

Health Comes First

I’ve started and stalled on getting my health back in order multiple times this year as I slowly got worse and worse. It’s not like it’s a mystery, I can feel it in small ways every single day. Yet as with most things, it is simply easier to push it off and say I’ll do better tomorrow.

The steps to do this are basically the same as what I said last year. As far as diet goes, the main thing is to get back to cooking again and stop ordering in all the time. Doing that alone will go a long way, in addition to cutting back on the carbs. Exercising 3-4 times a week is also a must. I feel so much better when I get even two workouts in during a week. Being less sedentary will also help with feeling better. More standing desk, more going outside on days when I’m not commuting, more breaks when I am sitting for long periods of time.

I was pretty clear last year about how bad I felt all the time, and I’ve gained 15 pounds since then, none of it muscle. So yeah, I’m not feeling any better. This has to be my main focus for the year. Working and having fun are great, but both become a lot harder to do when your body is constantly crashing.

Less Isolation

I just mentioned this as being something I think needs to happen. When I say less isolation, I’m specifically talking about my backroom time, mostly using the computer. It is effectively the great distraction machine. Of course I do still use it for good things, like writing this post, but it is just too easy to use it to waste away entire days where nothing gets done.

Staying out of the backroom will result in multiple good things. One, more chores will get done since procrastination will be harder. Two, more quality time with my wife. Three, with my options more limited, I will be forced to spend my time on more rewarding things. Less Youtube nonsense, more movies and TV (you could argue those are also not rewarding, but I personally think real art is better than Youtube junk). Less social media, more reading books. Less playing perpetual games, more playing new games.

Of course I will still use the backroom for times when I do need it, but it should be with a time limit or some other plan in place. So far I’ve been using the time in the morning before work pretty effectively in this regard, I just need to apply the same tactics to evenings and weekends.

Schedule Weekly Blocks

The purpose of this goal is to ensure some time each week is set aside to work on those longer projects I mentioned. I’ve tried scheduling my whole week in the past, but that tends to fall apart very quickly as unexpected things get thrown into the mix, or things end up taking longer than I expect. It also results in never having enough time to split appropriately between all the different things I want to do.

So the approach here is going to be a little different. The idea is to make sure I have enough hours somewhere in a given week to do X. It can all be in one block or split up among different days depending on what’s going on that week. I already know that a good chunk of my free time has to be spent on exercising, cooking, cleaning, etc. So if I want to write a post like this one, I know I need around 3 hours of time to do that. I can do it all in one go on a Saturday morning, or I can find an hour here and there on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

Of course the difficulty is always going to be deciding what to do with those hours I carve out, so priorities are still important. Ideally most of this time will be spent on creative endeavors, which includes post writing, but I should be able to also find time for tackling things I’ve been putting off for a long time that are not creative.

Accept and Push Forward

There are a lot of ways to express this, but none of them fully fit, so I’m going with accept and push forward. Essentially, this is telling myself to stop dwelling on things so much and just keep moving. Obviously some amount of self-reflection is necessary to know where I stand on things, but I get locked up far too often and I stall for hours or days on things that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

I suppose it comes from having an analytical mind. You turn things over in your head a lot because you want to come up with the best solution, but often times you just need to pick something and go. This comes up a lot when I beat myself up over not finishing something I wanted to, or when I can’t think of what to do next after completing something. It pains me even now to think of just how much time I’ve wasted doing nothing because of the constant indecision and regret over the indecision.

Yes, I think it is absolutely important to have those times when you can do nothing and be okay with that. But like anything else, it should be intentional and not the default state. I feel a lot better on a daily basis if I feel I’m using my full time, even if it’s not used as effectively as possible. I always have to remind myself that any progress is still progress. Stop thinking about it and just pick something!

Here’s to 2020

Hard to believe that another decade is here now. There are certainly a lot of things I’m proud of that I’ve been able to do in the last decade, but I can’t help but feel like my peak was a while ago. So, I want to get back to feeling like I’m really living my best life. Things can never be perfect, but I can at least make sure that the positives outweigh the negatives, and I’m not there right now. Haven’t been for a few years.

So here’s to 2020 and a new decade. It’s up to me to make it the best it can be.

Deck-building vs Deck-building

It’s been a hot minute since my last post, wherein I explained why I wouldn’t be doing weekly posts anymore, breaking one of the goals I set out with this year. But I promised to not just stop posts entirely, so here’s one that I had intended to do a while ago. It came to mind again after a fun weekend of playing games at PAX West, where one tends to have conversations about different games. This post is going to be a short explanation on how I feel about different deck-building games.

I’m approaching this topic in a similar way to how I talked about puzzle games a while ago. When it comes to puzzle games, I am always interested in cool mechanics and feeling smart when I figure something out, but I tend to gravitate towards puzzle games that are more meditative rather than difficult. Now that I have played a number of “deck-building” games, I find that I also gravitate towards certain kinds versus others.

I’m going to preface this by saying that I’m not going to be using deck-building in the strictest sense of the term. In this context I’m using it to mean any game that involves playing with a deck of cards that are built using a subset of the full range of available cards, either during or before a game. So I am talking about games like Dominion, which is a pure deck-building game, and games like Magic: The Gathering, which falls under collectible card game. Why include both of these genres? Well, as you might have already guessed, I like one and not the other.

And when I say I don’t like one side of these games, it has very little to do with the game itself. If I sit down to play a game with a deck of cards that all do different things, I’m going to have a good time with it. From this you can probably also now guess that it’s the stuff outside of the game that I don’t like. Believe me, I really want to love games like Magic and Hearthstone because they really are fun to play. But I just can’t get into spending the time it takes to build decks outside the game. I find it tedious and stressful.

What I love so much about Dominion is that, even though there are hundreds of different cards you can have in a game, you don’t have to worry about all of them when you sit down to play. You get a subset and that’s all that matters for the game at hand. So forming a strategy around what cards to get happens during the early part of the game and it doesn’t take a large amount of effort because of the limited pool. At any given time Magic and Hearthstone also have hundreds of cards, but you have to look at the whole thing and figure out what to get before you even sit down to play. Sure you could get around this by just looking up successful decks, but that’s removing a big part of the game’s appeal. Some people love it, but it’s not for me.

This was not much of a surprise to me since I’ve known it for years. I haven’t tried to pick up Magic at all because I knew in high school that it wasn’t for me. Hearthstone I’ve dipped into a couple times, but each time I remember why I bounced off before. It’s really more FOMO than anything else that keeps me wanting to get into it, so I need to get better at simply ignoring that impulse. Especially when I have other deck-building games that I do actually like.

The real reason the topic came to mind a few months ago was because I had been starting to dabble in more games that have deck-building mechanics as part of a larger game. And the distinction between the ones I really got into and the ones I didn’t is basically the same.

The first one that piqued my interest was Slay the Spire, back when it had just gotten into early access. Not because I was excited for it, but because everyone I knew was raving about it. And I can see why. Though I haven’t put as much time into it as I would like, it definitely scratches that itch. Rogue-likes are another genre of games that tend to be hit or miss for me, so I was pleasantly surprised that it turns out to work very well with building a deck to fight sets of monsters. Like other good deck-building games, it starts out with standard stuff and you get choices as you go along about what to do so you don’t have to think too much about it. After enough plays you know the cards enough to know when to skip taking new stuff since you don’t want an overfilled deck. There is also some sense of persistence between plays, though I prefer more in my rogue-likes. But on the whole I really like it, and I would play it more if the runs were shorter.

A while after that another game that used a deck of cards to do combat in a single-player game came out, Steamworld Quest. It wasn’t as widely talked about as Slay the Spire, but what I heard from people who did play it was that it was like Slay the Spire with a real RPG wrapped around it. I figured, I like both of those things, so I gave it a shot. For the first five hours or so I was enjoying it, though I quickly realized it wasn’t quite the Slay the Spire I heard about. Then after another five hours, I realized it was actually Hearthstone with an RPG wrapped around it. Yes, the combat is fun enough to keep me interested, but the actual deck-building part is not fun for the same reason I don’t like making decks in Magic. Too many characters with too many cards, and the deck you build is way too small to have any real fun with the cards you get. Maybe that changes later in the game and you get to have more cards or abilities that let you do more, but I don’t know if I want to play enough to find out.

In a similar vein, another game I got right around the same time was the digital copy of Pathfinder: Adventures. Definitely not the kind of game I would buy the physical copy of, but as a digital game it works well enough. Since it’s a board game rather than a video game, it’s closer in my mind to a game like Gloomhaven than Steamworld Quest, but when you play it digitally where you control all the characters, it does get closer to the latter. What makes Adventures a little more compelling for me is that it does a better job of keeping the options limited, so I’m not building decks outside the game as much. Each character is limited to a small set of cards they can take into battle like Steamworld Quest, but you figure out what cards to put into it after each scenario, so you’re really upgrading your deck as you go along rather than picking a subset from a large pool. I really like that aspect, as well as the choices you have to make when you upgrade your characters. Where Adventures falls short for me is in the actual game part. After you play a few scenarios, you basically know how the game goes and it doesn’t seem to change much from there. That part is probably more fun as a physical game, though maybe not since the game isn’t that highly regarded. Gloomhaven so far scratches the same itch in a better way.

Speaking of Gloomhaven, I considered whether that counts as a deck-building game enough to include it as a comparison point, but I don’t think so. You don’t change your character’s deck of cards enough to consider it deck-building, plus a big component of that mechanic is adding more cards to it as you play. You will do that playing Pathfinder: Adventures, but not Gloomhaven. I do still like Gloomhaven a lot though, and will probably write a post about it sometime in the future.

In conclusion, Dominion style games are fun for me, Magic style games are not. I don’t know if I need more deck-building games like Dominion and Slay the Spire, as they both do their thing quite well and I don’t need a bunch of clones. But I do want more games that use card decks as a main mechanic to be closer to those than the Hearthstones of the world.

Honestly, if I had more time, that’d be a fun thing to design myself.

Knowing When...

It’s ironic how just a month ago I was pretty confident that I was going to be able to finish out my goal of writing a post every week. I am not so confident now. In fact, I am confident that I will not finish it out. That’s because I am intentionally breaking it off this week. I am just going to call it quits on this goal and move on.

Yeah, I know, I suck. As I noted in my mid-year goal update, I am relearning a lot of things that I’ve already learned over the years. As a whole, goals have never been very effective at getting me to actually do anything, and this year I am likely going to go 0 for 4. At this point the only one I haven’t given up on or moved the goalposts on is the album goal, but I can never seem to find the time to do it so I’m never catching up on that one either.

But as disappointed as I am in how this year has gone in regards to the goals, I also think it is important to know when it’s time to stop sinking time into something that’s not rewarding and find something else that is. For me personally, I think that constant frustration is a good indicator that something is not going well and maybe it’s better to leave it alone. And to be fair, one of my goals this year was to get better at letting go of things I’m not enjoying.

The act of writing itself has never been much of a problem. Finding time and focus can be tricky, but if there’s something to write on, it’s very doable. As I’ve said from the start of this year, it’s finding the thing to write on that’s hard. And I’ve gotten fed up with falling farther and farther behind because I just can’t think of new things to write about.

And let’s face it, none of this is my job. It’s a hobby. And hobbies are first and foremost supposed to be enjoyable, or at least developing a skill that can lead to something more rewarding. Writing is more enjoyable for me when I don’t feel pressured into doing it, and I have no delusions of thinking that getting better at writing is going to lead to a career in it. I honestly don’t even want that, I’d much rather keep my software career and leave writing as a hobby. Sure I want my writing works to be enjoyed by others (yay stupid ego), but I do not want to have to depend on it in any way.

There’s another reason why I want to shift away from writing these posts. It completely pulls me away from working on anything else creative. Not in terms of time, I have the time to work on both posts and stories, it’s just a matter of prioritization. No, it pulls away my mental capacity. I worry and fret about the posts that I’m not writing, and that makes it way more difficult to justify spending time on other projects. It’s the same nagging that you get when you procrastinate on chores you know you need to do but don’t want to do. I get enough grief from that, I don’t need to add onto it with worrying about arbitrary deadlines that no one is holding me to.

However, this does not mean that I won’t continue writing posts. I know there are at least a few people who read these regularly and I know they would be sad to see them go away entirely. Yes, there may be long stretches of time between posts from now on, but as long as I continue to set aside time to write, some of it will be spent on topics I think are working talking about. At the very least, every once in a while I will read/watch/play something that is worth giving a review on. Ultimately where I want to end up is posting excerpts from the stories I’m working on, or maybe even micro stories that can stand alone and don’t take too long to read.

I don’t want to phrase it as a goal because we know how those seem to go for me, but if I imagine an ideal situation for me with my writing, I see myself getting up every Saturday and Sunday, a little later than usual but still early morning, sitting down at my computer with some coffee or tea, and slamming out 3-6 hours of writing while grooving on some good mood music. By then my wife will be up and we can do some brunch and look forward to the rest of the day. Over time the work adds up to things I can release, probably a few times a year.

Obviously I can’t do this every weekend, there will be travel and other events that will get in the way, but it’s a nice place to be. I’ve tried the daily routine and it just doesn’t work for me, especially with how unpredictable evenings are. It’s a lot easier to do bigger chunks on days when nothing else is planned, especially during the mornings when I won’t get interrupted by others.

Honestly, I already feel a lot better after writing this all out. I did think I had a good chance of writing a post a week if it was limited to just one year, and I’m happy I was able to go as long as I did. But stepping away from the weekly deadline will take away a lot of unnecessary stress I feel, and I will feel even better when I’m able to put the time into actual stories instead.

Here’s to knowing when it’s time to move forward.