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.

Passions and Priorities

There’s still a month before I do my official goals update at the mid-year mark, but I can’t get this idea out my head this week, so here’s a brief post that will act as a precursor to that update. I’ve been doing this focus tracker thing for five months now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it isn’t helping in any meaningful way. I’ve also come to the conclusion that it’s wrong to say that I have a focus problem to begin with, it’s really a problem of passions and priorities. Let me try to explain.

First, let’s talk about the problems I’ve been having with the focus tracker I started. Like many other things I’ve tried to do, it was really useful and enlightening for the first couple months. But by March it became obvious that it wasn’t really providing any useful insights into what I was actually doing, aside from seeing if I was reading every day. So I tried to switch it up to assign different projects to different days of the week. That lasted for another couple months until May when I discovered that also wasn’t helping, so I switched it up again to try to do more daily, consistent tasks.

Of course that hasn’t really worked either. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself over the last decade or so is that I’m not programmed for consistent practice of anything. I keep flipping back and forth between consistent practice (shorter periods of time every day) and batch practice (longer periods of time once a week or so), but I can’t do either one well. Yet I continue to try because every single person who’s ever been successful at anything will tell you that you have to do either one to succeed. And I want to be a successful person as much as anyone else, so I keep pushing myself into failure because neither method seems to work.

That’s why I come up with things like the focus tracker. I convince myself that if I track everything and see trends, it will give me more information on what works and the motivation to keep doing it. But it’s an inherently flawed system because it was never a problem with focusing on things in the first place. I am actually very good at focusing on tasks, and can pound away at something for many hours at a time.

The real problem is that focus only comes from passion. And I’m not passionate about very many things. And those passions very rarely match up with my priorities. Therefore, trying to force myself to focus on priorities that are not passions is doomed to fail.

A couple months ago I wrote a post about my perpetual games, those games that I play for years and keep coming back to whenever I can. Those are perfect examples of activities that I am super passionate about, but are super low priorities. For example, I probably put in 20 or so hours into Heroes of the Storm this week, both in playing it and watching videos about it. I think about that game all the time and I want to play it all the time. But I know in my logical mind that spending all my time on that game doesn’t improve me, as a person, in any meaningful way, it just feels good. The same goes with the thousands of hours I put into playing drums in Rock Band or guitar in Rocksmith. Learning to play music is a worthwhile endeavor, but in the grand scheme of things, the time put in hasn’t really justified the outcome.

The thing that really gets me about this is that I should be okay with it. It’s my free time and I should be happy with whatever I do during that time. And while I’m doing those activities, I am happy. It’s only later, when I see how much of the day has gone by, that I get down on myself for not doing other things that have a more tangible reward. Most days I get to the end of the night and the line from Hamilton plays in my head, “He will never be satisfied.” The big difference between me and Mr. Hamilton is that he had the passion to fulfill his ego, I just have the stupid ego.

So after five months, I have to concede that the focus tracker idea was never going to be the tool that gets me motivated to complete more things. It ended up being yet another tool for me to look at and realize how bad I am at doing things I’m not super passionate about. It was definitely the right tool for determining what my priorities should be, but that doesn’t mean much when missing those priorities has no consequence.

The quest to find the right tool for getting those priorities taken care of continues. What I really need is to get those priorities at the same motivation level as these weekly posts. Outside of using my existing tools to remind myself that it needs to be done, I haven’t had any trouble being motivated to write, as long as I have something to write about. But doing other things like reading, playing non-perpetual games, watching new TV shows or movies, cooking, exercising, each one feels like a hassle. And I like doing all those things, I just don’t love them.

The motivation for writing these posts largely comes from the public nature of them. There are enough people reading them that I feel bad when I miss a week. I also get more motivated to clean the house or cook when people are coming over. But I don’t know if I can rely on that same external pressure to read or play games. I guess I could set myself a review schedule so that I had to finish things in order to write about them, but then it becomes like an actual job. Is that what I really want? Of course not. Is there any other way to motivate myself? Probably not.

Ultimately I don’t want to treat leisure time like homework, but my completionist self tends to make it necessary to be satisfied, if only temporarily. It sucks, but that’s just who I am.

Year in Review: 2018

This review is going to be fully, internally focused because it needs to be. On a personal level, this year was incredibly disappointing. I am more frustrated with myself than I have been in a long time. Granted, it was a tumultuous year with a lot of unexpected events, but that is true of every year. No, what has truly frustrated me is that, as I write this, I am looking back on last year’s review and literally nothing I wanted to improve on has gotten better. In fact, they all just got worse.

2018 in Summary

There’s going to be a lot of negative in this review, so let’s start with some of the more positive things and just go through all the things that happened.

The biggest change for me this year was in my career as I left Amazon after almost 5 years working there. There were multiple reasons for this, but the main one is that the team I was on a year ago was dissolved, everyone scattered to other teams within the organization. That was really de-motivating given that the organization as a whole is barely-contained chaos and our team was a tiny beacon of sanity and good practices. By the time this happened I was also getting frustrated with other bureaucracy in the company that was hurting my ability to advance my career the way I wanted to. So, as everyone else on that team moved on to other opportunities, I decided to as well.

This change was followed by a month or so of enjoying the freedom of funemployment, then three months of job seeking. The end result is that I do have a new job lined up for 2019, and it’s in New York City. So I can already say that this new year is going to be a game-changer as my wife and I move across the country for new opportunities and experiences. I’m also going to be getting into a completely new industry for me, finance, so that will be exciting.

As an aside, I specifically pointed out in my review last year that I loved visiting NYC and could see myself living there for a few years, but doubted that it would happen. Way to show myself!

On the home front, we managed to stay in the same place for another year without moving, but that is obviously going to change very soon. If I’m honest, I’m not going to miss much about our current home aside from the space, and even then I could do with a little less of it so I don’t have so much to clean.

As far as trips went, there were a ton of them, but most of them were small, so no big vacation trips like we’ve done. The year started off strong with another fun trip to San Antonio for PAX South, can’t wait to go down again in a couple weeks. Shortly after that was an unexpected trip to Mexico City for a recruiting event that was a lot of fun despite the long days, and my wife took the opportunity to go to Vegas while I was gone.

From there, a short trip down to California for a family visit in March, then April came with another couple work trips so that our team could transition our work off before we split up. I got to visit Austin for the first time (liked it a lot, would enjoy visiting again) and Vancouver, BC for the first time in over a decade. It made me sad that it took so long to visit Vancouver again after so long because I barely remembered my first trip, and turns out it’s a fun city to visit. April rounded off with another yearly tradition, the spring wine barrel opening in Zillah. Always one of my favorite weekends of the year enjoying good wine and many of my closest friends. This is going to be one of the things I miss most about moving away, unless we find a way to make it work.

There were no other trips until August, where I went to Minnesota for the first time with a few friends to visit their family. Not normally something I would do, but I had just left Amazon and wanted to take a trip somewhere where my wife wouldn’t be upset if I went without her, so this fit the bill. It was a good trip overall, got kinda bored after a few days, but that’s just me having difficulty backing away from the need to be productive. After that, once the job seeking process got underway I was traveling around quite a bit. In the span of two weeks in November I: went down to Santa Barbara for an interview (didn’t get nor want that job); went to Disneyland two days later for a long weekend with my wife (this was planned before the interviews); went to New York City for some interviews (didn’t get those jobs either); and finished off with another trip to Vancouver, BC with my wife (also planned before, she was jealous of my trip earlier in the year so I had to take her). Other than that, the typical holiday trips to visit nearby family. Overall a lot of new places to see, and they were all great in their own ways.

Before we move away from the positives, there is one more event worth mentioning that is the highlight of my year. After 7 years of writing and false starts, my band finally got into the studio to record our second album. It was a night and day difference from our first recording. We knew better what to expect going in, having learned our lessons the first time around. We had a recording engineer with decades of experience with many well-known bands who helped in so many ways we didn’t anticipate. And with the time we put into making the songs, we executed better on every level, and we had the time to decide which songs we truly loved. The second album sounds amazing, I’ve listened to it dozens of times since we got the mixes and I expect to continue having it on heavy rotation. The mastering is happening next week from when I’m writing this, so the final product will hopefully be out this month. It is hard to express how proud I am of what we did together. It’s not the perfection you get from a professional band, but it embodies who we are, and I cannot think of a better way for the band to say goodbye (we knew going in that we were breaking up, so my moving had nothing to do with it).

Looking at the great things I just listed, the list of negatives from this year is short in comparison, but it’s really the pervasiveness that made it insidious. Trips are a lot of fun for me and recording an album is one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. But those are just blips when compared to the whole of the year.

On the work side of things, the only time I was really satisfied was in the first quarter when our team was still together. The transition was frustrating and the work the new team was doing just wasn’t fulfilling in the same way. And then I wasn’t even working for almost half of the year. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this year it’s that I legitimately hate being away from work that long. I tried to get myself motivated to do some stuff on my own, but that didn’t work very well. I’ve come to accept the fact that I am 95% eternally motivated to do non-recreational activities.

On the health side of things, I feel like crap all the time these days. My exercise sputtered the whole year and it’s effectively dropped to zero by now. My diet has also gone to hell as sugar addiction got to me and my overall dissatisfaction led to making bad choices more often than not. It’s one of those things where the scale doesn’t show that much had changed, but I can feel it. Constant inflammation and fatigue plague me, and being unemployed has only exasperated it. I feel that I shouldn’t complain about it since my wife was diagnosed with arthritis this year, so she’s in a worse situation than me. But at least in my case, I know what causing it and I know how to fix it. I just don’t.

On the free time side of things, I again failed to improve in any way based on the goals I had. They were pretty simple goals: reduce distractions (my social media and Youtube use went up this year, not down) and focus fire (I’ve played a dozen or so different games in the last month, only finished one). I think the most telling statistic here is that this year I read less than one-third of the books I did last year (15 books this year, 47 in 2017) and less than half of any other year in the past 6 years (since I’ve been keeping track). That’s just plain awful and points to how much of my time is being stolen away by useless crap and how bad I’ve been at prioritizing.

After all that, I’m not sure if disappointment in myself is enough of a motivating factor to really make things change. If that were the case, I’d be on the rebound by now. I really hope that a new city and a new job will help me refocus, but I need to have a plan and make conscious effort to follow through. Some changes to my environment and a few key habits should help, and I’ll go into those a bit later in the goals area. Overall, I am getting to a point where I’m starting to worry about myself, so something definitely needs to change.

Favorite Games

(Incidentally, this is the only area where I actually did better this year than any year previous, so that’s good, but improvement here shouldn’t come at the cost of everything else)

God of War - Best game I played this year, no real surprise here. It deserves every accolade and award it’s gotten this year. I feel like I have to play the game again before I can put it in my all-time favorites, but I have never been more impressed by a game. It is stunning to look at, the combat is a blast, it has just the right amount of difficulty throughout the whole thing, and I haven’t enjoyed exploring a world and doing the side stuff this much in years (probably not since Assassin’s Creed 2).

Cuphead - I don’t have an Xbox One so I missed this game when it first came out and didn’t think about it for a while until I saw the speedrun of it at AGDQ this year, and I knew I had to give it a shot. I’m really glad I did because I enjoyed the hell out of it. I never found the difficulty to be that bad, but there are definitely some bosses I struggled to get through. Still managed to get the full 200% completion on it though. I eagerly await the DLC coming this year and will jump back in when that happens.

Diablo 3 - Late to the party much? I’ve had this game for years but only this year did I finally decide to give it a spin (driven largely by an upsurge in my Heroes of the Storm playing). I never played the first two, so I didn’t really know what to expect going in, especially on console. But I had a blast right from the start. I’m pretty sure that’s largely because I picked the right class (demon hunter) first, if I’d chosen a different one I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much. I’ve largely fallen off after going through it with a couple characters, but I still jump in from time to time to do the adventure mode stuff while I catch up on podcasts.

Marvel’s Spider-Man - I’m honestly a little surprised that this made my favorites of the year. I had heard plenty of good buzz about the game, but I’ve never really been a fan of Spider-Man, so I didn’t feel the need to rush to it. Eventually the buzz got to me and I decided to try it out. Oh man I got hooked quick, probably more so than any other game on this list. I think I got to 100% completion in about a week. I’ve also been jumping on each DLC pack and completing them in one sitting. It’s not the best game I’ve played this year, I have some big quibbles with some of the side missions and the controls, but when it clicks, it clicks. The swinging mechanics in particular, I never got tired of flying through the streets of NYC. Incidentally, this game was a big motivator for me to look for jobs there. It just reminded me of how much I enjoyed being there, so if a game can capture that feeling, it’s doing something right.

Favorite Movies/TV Shows

Thor: Ragnarok / Captain America: Winter Soldier / Captain America: Civil War - About half of the movies I saw this year was my wife and I catching up on everything in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that we had missed over the years so that we could go into Avengers: Infinity War with full understanding. Of all those movies, these three stood out on top, particularly Thor: Ragnarok. It is just a fun time from beginning to end. I think of all the MCU movies, Winter Soldier and Civil War stand out as the best in both narrative and action. While I don’t think I would go out of my way to watch them again like I would Ragnarok or the Guardians movies, I would never say no if the option came up.

Mission Impossible: Fallout - I’ve never been a M:I fan, I’ve only seen half of them and I can only recall what happens in one of those, Rogue Nation. I can’t fully put my finger on what it is about Fallout that appeals to me so much, but I had a blast watching it the first time and enjoyed it just as much on the second viewing. While it no longer had the element of surprise the second time, I was able to appreciate the craft of it a lot more, and it’s an impressive movie in so many ways.

Favorite Books

To be honest, I didn’t enjoy any books I read this year. That is probably a big factor for why I didn’t read much, I couldn’t find anything to get sucked into. Of course I am a completionist by nature, so putting down a book unfinished is extremely difficult for me to do. This meant that several books sat on the table for weeks or months while I pursued more engaging activities. I should probably try to be a little more selective in the coming months so that I get back into the habit of daily reading with books I know I should like to some degree.

Goals

Alright, finally to the part that I’ve spent several days thinking about. Looking back at last year’s review, I mentioned that it’s difficult to have a goal stick when you don’t make it specific. The goal for 2016 was simply “consume less, produce more”. That didn’t work. The goals for 2017 were basically the same idea but a few more specifics. That also didn’t work because they still weren’t specific enough.

So this year I’m getting a lot more specific, and I’m also going to lay out some actions I’m going to do to make positive habits around them. I did this to some degree last year with my goals of getting below 200 pounds, reducing distractions, and focus firing, but after a while I stopped caring about how often I missed my targets because I didn’t set up any habits around it (I especially stopped caring once I was sitting at home all day).

For the most part each of these goals is a response to something that I feel is bad or lacking in my life, so I will frame each goal as such.

Run a Half-Marathon in Under 2 Hours

Hi, 2015 called and it wants its goal back! Yes, this is dipping back into that well again. I was doing really well at running a few years ago when I was exercising more regularly, and doing races really helped motivate me to stick with it. This goal is a direct response to how awful my health has gotten in the last couple years. The reason I stopped running was because of injury, but I have long since healed up. During the last couple years I have tried to get back into running shorter distances on a regular basis, but it just hasn’t stuck because of that lack of an external motivator.

I figure, if I’m going to set a goal like this, let’s really push the envelope. My previous goal was simply to finish a full marathon. Based on that experience and where I’m at age-wise, I don’t feel that doing a full marathon is ever going to be a good idea. It’s a cool feat, but not one I’m interested in doing any more due to the stress it puts on your body. I have done three half-marathons, so I know how it goes, and I think it’s a lot more reasonable. And where this pushes me is that my current record is 2:13:30, so I not only need to get back into shape where I can run it, I need to do it a lot better too.

So how do I get there?

• Get the diet back under control. Easier said than done, but if there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that I’m a lazy cook. So it’s going to be back to basics and get used to boring food. The hardest part is that I’m effectively going to have to go my own way here since I doubt my wife will want to share. Another thing I’m going to do that I’ve toyed with but haven’t committed to yet is cut out meat more often, have more vegetarian meals. Good for the environment and good for me. The trick here is that vegetarian often means more carbs to replace the protein, but I think that with a big a place as NYC is, I can find the right places.

• More tea, more wine. These are specifically to try to curb some of my bad cravings. When I say tea, I mean herbal tea because I don’t like black tea at all and I don’t need the caffeine. The tea is just a way to have something other than water so that I don’t get sugar cravings in my mouth. The wine, similarly, is a better alternative to beer and mixed drinks. Granted I’ve already cut back on those quite a bit this year, so this is just more in the right direction.

• Get back to accountable workouts. The main reason why Orange Theory worked so well for me was that there was some sense of accountability. We were already paying for the gym, but we had to pay a penalty if we missed a workout. With the CrossFit gym I joined, there was none of that, it was very loose. Despite the high monthly cost, it was just too easy to never go because there was no schedule to follow. So once I get to NYC, I’m going to need to find that accountability again.

• Monthly races. This worked really well before, so let’s go ahead and do it again. I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunities in a city as big as NYC. If nothing else, doing a lap of Central Park once in a while will pay big dividends.

As far as finishing the goal itself, it could come through the form of a defined race near the end of the year. Another option I think would be cool (and there may be a race that does this), is simply do a run from one end of Manhattan to the other. It just so happens that the distance from Inwood Hill Park at the northern tip to Battery Park at the southern tip is about 13 miles. Not sure how feasible it is because running on streets means having to stop often, so I will need to do some research on possible routes. Even if I can’t use it for the goal purposes, I think it would still be cool to do.

Publish a Post Every Week

This is something I’ve also toyed with in the past, I have had several years where a goal was to write more. But again, “write more” is not specific, so those years inevitably led to little, if any, actual work. There was a period of time in 2014 where I was making a post each week (which you can still find on this site), but I ran out of steam because I ran out of ideas around the theme I was going with. There was another period of time in 2016/17 where I was doing mini-reviews and posting them once I had a few saved up. I took those off the site because they didn’t provide the kind of value I wanted them to.

So what is going to be different this time around? Not a lot on the surface. I already know that I can do it, as I’ve done it before. The average time to write a post is 3 hours, which is perfectly doable in any given week. The only real difference is that I’m not going to stick to one theme or topic (like the lessons series I did or the FF Challenge I failed a couple years ago), I will let each post come from whatever I happen to be able to speak on that week. I suspect that most of the content will come as reviews of things I’ve been playing or reading, but I will try to branch out into more lessons, observations, or other creative work. The only area I will not do is politics, not because I don’t have opinions, but because it’s just a lot of work to do research and stuff. I will leave that to the experts.

So how do I get there?

• Schedule out blocks of time. This is pretty obvious, so I won’t dwell on it. Not knowing what my new job schedule and commute is going to look like, I can’t say when the blocks will work. Most likely it will be blocking out one night a week to write up the post, then do a quick proofread the next morning before work and then putting it up. The key here is going to be making the time and not letting other things get in the way.

• Plan things out in advance. Also obvious, ideally I should have a month’s worth of ideas at any given time.

• Have more to write about. This comes back around to the focus fire idea from last year. The goal below will go more into this, but suffice to say that having more experiences will allow for more things to write about.

This will be an easy enough goal to measure. Come back in a year and see if I made 52 posts or not (this counts as number 1).

Listen to 200 New Albums

This goal may seem a little odd compared to the other ones, but it has a very specific purpose. The biggest problem I had during my last year at Amazon was self-imposed distractions, mostly in the form of streaming video and podcasts. Listening to podcasts at work isn’t new to me, I’ve been doing it my entire career, but I know from that experience that while it seems like good multi-tasking, it really wasn’t. The mind can only focus on one thing at a time, so it either distracted from work or become background noise and I’d miss things. Once I started streaming videos at work, the problem worsened exponentially as video is much better at distracting me than pretty much anything else. I have to be really disinterested in a video in the background for me to ignore it.

So the real goal of this is to remove my biggest distractions at work. It seems to me that simply saying no to those things will be tough, since, again, if it was easy I wouldn’t have had the problem in the first place. In order to keep podcasts and videos out of my head, I need to replace them with something else, like music. And in order to keep music at the top of my priority list of things to listen to, I need to make a goal such that I want to keep it there.

Thus, set a goal of listening to a bunch of new stuff. My natural inclination was to just say 100 new albums, but given there are 365 days in a year, around 250 of which involve going to work, I think 200 is stretching without getting too crazy. And realistically, I’m going to want to listen to a lot of music I already love. I also really like this goal because there are a ton of albums from artists I like that I haven’t gotten around to for one reason or another, so this gives me a chance to finally get to them.

So how do I get there?

• Remove the options to consume the bad stuff. Not knowing what my work environment is going to be, I can’t say what that will look like. But ideally I can set it up such that I cannot access things like Youtube or Twitch from my work computer. Similarly, I am going to remove all video apps from my phone and block non-music apps from being accessible during work hours. The latest version of iOS has most of this capability, though it’s a little clunky, so I might find another solution for that. But the general idea is that the only thing I can access during work hours is Spotify/iTunes.

• Make a list of music to listen to. This is another obvious thing, but not something I have done for music in the past. I do this all the time for games, movies, TV, and books, so adding music should be an easy enough thing. The list will also be easy to seed with all those albums from artists I like that I’ve missed, including the ones I already have in my library (soundtracks and such).

The nice thing about doing this goal is that next year’s review I’ll be able to talk about which ones I liked the most.

Make a Focusing/Quitting Habit

The previous goal is very much this year’s version of focus fire/reduce distractions for the workplace.This goal is the same thing but at home. I really want this goal to be more specific than “create a habit” but it really is more of a process change than accomplishing any one thing. I can say things like, “write one completed story” or “read 30 books” and those would be fine, but there’s something deeper that makes those things easier. The ability to focus is key to getting more done, so this goal is around making it into a driving habit rather than an occasional thing I can do when needed.

So why is quitting also mentioned? I’ve noticed it for years, but it was especially prominent this year. My inability to quit things that I don’t enjoy doing is a key factor in my inability to keep focused on one thing at a time. Since reviewing and analyzing media isn’t my job, I don’t have any real incentive to actually finish things I don’t like other than the completionist side of me needing it to be done. At some point I need to break that side’s stranglehold over my habits so that I can get my time back, so why not this year?

What does this mean in practice? The focusing aspect isn’t any different from what I talked about last year. It involves removing distractions in order to block out time, removing decision paralysis via (selective) randomization, and having one thing in each category to focus on. Where the quitting aspect comes in is that if I find that I don’t want to focus on what I’ve already chosen, then maybe it’s just not for me, and it’s okay to abandon it and choose something new. For the things I loved this year, it was never a struggle to devote my time to them, so if it ever is a struggle, I need to do the right thing and just move on.

So how do I get there?

• Remove the options to consume non-focus stuff. Just like with the goal above, I need to remove the temptations of other things so that I’m necessarily funneled into the right thing. With my computer at home I can easily block distracting content, and my phone is going to be pretty barren in terms of things it can distract me with. And even with the things I intend to keep around, like Twitter, setting time limits will keep me from overdoing it.

• Keep a daily tracker of my progress. I already do this to some degree through a productivity app I use, but it’s really just a binary thing of “yes, I focused on one thing” or “no, I didn’t focus on it”. Having a tracker will give me a better idea on a weekly and monthly basis of how well I’m doing. Being able to see that I focused on my one thing 25 days this month is a better metric than what I do now. Keeping track of the number of things I’ve abandoned will also be interesting to see at the end of the year.

• Make the habit rewarding. One way I’m doing this, and I’ve already gotten it set up, is using more granular checklists. Completing checklists is super satisfying for me, and up until now my backlog lists have been just big buckets that never really finish. By breaking these up into lists that can be completed, I think that will drive me to finish more. Having a more tangible reward, especially for successfully quitting something, would be great too, so I will give that more thought and see what I can come up with.

• Check in on satisfaction often. In terms of determining when I should quit something, I think a good rule of thumb will be to do a gut check around 5 hours in. For any activity that’s about 3 days. It’s early enough that I should be able to avoid the completionist itch, but enough time that I should also get a feel for how the rest of it is going to go. If I am still interested after 5 hours, then regular checks every 10 hours will work too. It would be nice if I could find a way to automate this so that I can’t avoid answering the gut check, but I don’t know how to do that with the tools I have right now. I will probably just have to do it during my weekly upkeep.

As I pointed out at the start, this will be harder to assess because it’s a habit rather than a specific number or event. I think a reasonable goal, assuming I’m good at keeping a daily tracker, is to have 75% of days this year where I am able to focus on whatever my one thing is (this will likely be two things because I’ve always kept reading as exempt from this, it’s really one book to be reading every day and one other thing to focus on).

Here’s to 2019

Not that anyone else is counting, but this review is almost twice as long as any other I’ve written for this site, but I think it’s for good reason. I haven’t been this low on myself at the beginning of a year in longer than I can remember, so I have a lot to work on. I’ve laid out what I think needs to happen, so now it’s a matter of doing the work.

With a new city and new job ahead of me, this year has no choice but to be transformational. I want to be able to capitalize on that and finally kick some of my bad habits for good. Only once I do that can I really pursue my heart’s desires.

Here’s to 2019 and 51 more posts!