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?