I can't has cheezburger

I take a pause at the end of each year to reflect. It’s a casual habit that got more deeply entrenched when I was in college and winter break was a rare occasion when the stresses of student life were truly lifted from me and I really had no responsibilities for a brief period.

During my college years the end of year was just a chance to decompress, but the years have passed, I have grown into a boring adult that likes to use the end of the year as a chance to reflect.

I would like to pay some lip service to the year in terms of world events. We’ve been in a long period where current events weigh on me. Zooming out a little bit, I try to keep perspective and remember that I grew up during a period where the world enjoyed relative peace and human rights expanded a lot, and it’s seeming more and more like we’re in a period where we’re regressing a lot in this regard. It’s pointless for me to try to enumerate the issues that have me worrying because I’ll just leave out important ones, but I do my best to get by in this environment, and I have to lean heavily into the fact that I have some level of control over things very close to me, and I have some sphere of influence to shape the world around me the way I want it to be. I choose which people I surround myself with. I choose how my home is designed. I choose which city I live in (and I have some confidence that my local governments are headed in the right direction). I continue to feel for the people who don’t have that level of control right now.

Thinking back to the end of 2023, I was thankful that I started feeling things turning around in the fall and I was grateful for the people that were there helping make the bad days not be worse. Thanks to that, I was able to build on that joy in 2024.

Thursday nights have faithfully remained retro game nights, but this year Scott and I played some larger games. We played Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX, Zelda: A Link To the Past, and Super Metroid. Each of those games took us several sessions to play through completely. There were several other great games in the mix. We played some more modern stuff like Firewatch (and at 8 years old it’s starting to meet the definition of retro) and we made a visit to Next Level Pinball Museum in Hillsboro in January (it was a delight). I also fell in love with Katamari Damacy, and we closed out the year by playing We Love Katamari on our final retro game night.

I met Matthew in fall ’23 and we quickly fell for one another. In March he moved in with me full time (prior to that he spent almost every one of his work weekends with me). The best way to characterize our relationship is that with him I get to know how Morticia Addams feels being married to Gomez (except that instead of having a model train set, he has a Lego city in the basement). We’ve steadily become a familiar presence in each other’s lives and we’ve gotten past learning the basic things about one another and have moved onto filling in all the tiny little details you spend a lifetime learning about the one you love.

I had termination sessions with both my psychiatrist and my therapist. I had been in therapy for about two and a half years by the time we had our termination session. That experience is another thing that needs its own post, but participating therapy was important to helping me get through a really difficult time in my life and it helped me produce sustained incremental improvements in my life, and I feel better equipped to take on challenges in the future.

I spent more time enjoying being outdoors in 2024. I biked a little over 350 miles total this year and deeply enjoyed it. I’ve learned the key to getting more biking miles in is not to take more 15–20 mile longer trips, but to take a lot more 1 mile trips to places. I love hitting up places on Foster, and I got a library card at the library nearest me that just opened up after getting rebuilt. I kind of maintained my garden this year, but I plan to get better at that in ’25.

I’ve gotten more physically flexible this year. I started visiting a place called Stretchlab where a professional flexologist stretches various muscles on my body. I need to post about this separately because it’s been kind of transformative for me. I’ve been living with a lot of inflexibility for years and with the assistance of some pros, I feel less pain in my day to day and I can move more easily, and I have an easier time doing more at the gym. That’s a win, and if you spend a lot of your day sitting this is a quality of life improvement I bet you didn’t realize was even an option.

I started talking to a great interior designer this year about finally remodeling my kitchen and I’m excited for that work to start in early 2025. I bought my house in 2019. The kitchen is decades old and it’s starting to fall apart. My designer is focused on making the kitchen visually stunning, and I’ve been putting a lot of focus into making sure this new kitchen makes it easier for me to make more great meals and less mess. I plan to write up an extensive post about that when the project is done next year; stay tuned.

At the end of last year I got a 3D printer because I wanted to learn something totally new to me, and I’ve been having a blast doing it. I since then started a side hustle selling 3D printed items with the hope of subsidizing my 3D printing habit.

Looking back at 2024 there are a lot of beginnings of things planted in there. When I was in the thick of some difficult times in 2023 I remember this thought that stuck with me that I had untapped potential that wasn’t getting out. There were things I wanted to accomplish that hadn’t been able to happen because I needed to heal, and one thing that kept me going was the thought that those things were yet to happen and I looked forward to reaching that point.

In 2024 I started feeling that happening again, and it’s left me with one goal for next year:

I’m going to make more in 2025.

And I do mean “make more” in all the senses of that phrase. I didn’t say I want to earn more in 2025 or that I want to create more things in 2025; my goals encompass both.

But specifically I have several things I want to make happen in ’25:

• There is a specific game from the 90s that I want to rebuild for modern macOS, probably using SpriteKit.
• Now that 3Delights has soft launched, I want to press on the gas. I’m not one to pursue endless growth at all costs, but I want to grow the business to a size where it feels comfortable. I’ll be adding a few new products to my store in early ’25, including some in-house designs.
• I say it every year, but more writing! Icanthascheezburger will continue to be where I do my personal blogging but I think I’ll also spin up a new blog for 3Delights itself, talking about some of the behind the scenes aspects of the business.
• There’s a work related initiative I’ve been trying to make happen for years now that I think is finally going to happen in ’25. It’s not a headlining feature or anything but it’s something that’s widely requested and involves a lot of work to make possible. When it ships I’ll be excited to write about it and hopefully share on GitHub’s blog.
• I’m excited to use the newly built kitchen to make amazing meals for friends and loved ones. I might also experiment with making short form videos!
• I want to give the garden a little more care than I did in 2024. That’s not a difficult goal, but I’m hoping to start incrementally improving year-over-year until several years from now the change is dramatic. I love sustained, incremental improvement.

And of course I’ll be aiming to keep up with many of my current initiatives. There will still be lots of biking (hopefully at least 375 miles this year), plenty of retro gaming, and plenty of enjoyable moments with friends.

This sounds like I’m taking on a lot, but I won’t be burning the candle at both ends; it’s going to be a year of reaching into untapped potential I know is there.

I was depressed by the US election results this year, but initially I was just kind of surprised at the results. Harris ran a solid (if a little conventional) campaign against whatever Trump’s campaign was, and she underperformed Biden’s 2020 results by millions of votes. Trump picked up votes this year over 2020 (also deeply surprising), but overwhelmingly the issue is that voters didn’t show up for Harris, and that lost her the election.

And it looks to me like the reason is pretty simple.

Americans care about economic issues that affect them directly, like inflation, the costs of goods and healthcare, job availability, and access to opportunity.

That’s what motivates them to vote.

And Democrats have offered voters close to nothing on this front.

If Americans say “we’re not doing well economically,” you can’t respond with “we did a great job with economic recovery” and then rattle off statistics about the stock market, unemployment rates, and GDP per capita. If your grocery bill is up 60% and your paycheck is only up 5–10%, you don’t give a shit if the S&P 500 is up 10,000%; you’re not doing well.

Americans are largely indifferent to other issues when it comes to picking a president.

And when you look at election results current and past specifically through this lens, so many things start to make sense.

Obama won in a landslide in ’08 maybe in part because he represented change and that mobilized young voters, but much more importantly, after eight years of Republican economic policy, our economy was tanking in a huge way and Americans felt it.

Americans didn’t pick Trump this year because they loved his bizarre campaign speeches about Hannibal; they picked him despite of that, because they believed that this would lead to better economic outcomes for Americans (I don’t think they’re correct here, but that’s what they did).

Biden presided over years of inflation levels we haven’t seen in years and high interest rates, and even though the inflation cooled back down, the prices are still as elevated as ever, and paychecks aren’t. Americans voted against that. It didn’t help that Democrats have been patting themselves on the back on the economy, and Harris’s campaign didn’t really suggest she was going to deviate massively from the status quo of what Biden was doing.

And although Democrats did do impressive work to stabilize the economy and address inflation, Americans don’t feel like they’re taking home record paychecks the way the stock market is closing at record highs.

That’s it. That’s the issue.

Sure, if you talked to enough Americans you’d see a nuanced and complex narrative form, but nothing you’d be able to build a cohesive campaign message around. Nuance doesn’t work in political campaigns.

But that doesn’t seem to be the thing the national Democratic party seems to think they got wrong. As one DNC member from Florida puts it:

I don’t want to be the freak show party, like they have branded us. You know, when you’re a mom with three kids, and you live in middle America and you’re just not really into politics, and you see these ads that scare the bejesus out of you, you’re like, ‘I know Trump’s weird or whatever, but I would rather his weirdness that doesn’t affect my kids.’

Translation: “we lost because of woke. If we hate on trans people more, we’ll finally win over those centrist voters!”

Are you fucking kidding me? Democrats do jack shit for marginalized groups. They just expect to get their votes, and Democrats will alienate the marginalized in some stupid misguided effort to win over hateful voters who already weren’t going to vote for a Democrat anyway because when it comes to being hateful, the Republicans are actually committed. When Republicans try being racist and lose, they double down on the racism. It’s called having principles. The principles suck, but Republicans have them and they stick to them.

I firmly believe you could go into a red state and open a cartoonishly exaggerated caricature like The Onion’s depiction of an $8 billion abortionplex and if you promised hundreds of high-paying permanent jobs people would be generally happy with its existence. If you take good care of Americans economically they’ll look past the stuff they don’t like about you.

Evangelical Christian voters looked past Trump’s… not family friendly nature. Free-market conservatives looked past Trump wanting to enact tariffs. Americans writ large looked past Trump’s Nazi-leaning tendencies. Americans just don’t care.

I’m disappointed we weren’t more principled here. I hate that as a country we’re so indifferent to social injustices, climate change, and threats to democracy that we’ll let those things slide because we think the fascist who literally tried to overthrow the election last time he lost will make groceries cheaper (which he won’t).

In the long term I believe America’s biggest strength is its capacity for growth and progress.

But in the more immediate future, progressives who want to get elected have to recognize that you campaign to the electorate you have, not the electorate you imagine you have, and the optimist in me sees a straightforward path to winning:

• Push broadly popular, mostly economic-focused policies whose benefit to everyday Americans is obvious and would be immediate if passed
• Absolutely shit on everyone who tries to push back on these policies, including fellow Democrats.

Campaign on slashing prescription drug costs. It would be a wildly popular among Democrats and Republicans alike, even if it included coverage for prescriptions for gender affirming care for trans people.

Hell, campaign on significant health care reform! If not full-blown universal healthcare, then at least bring out a public health insurance option that’s less of an administrative burden on your doctor and spends close to 100% of every dollar on paying for healthcare (under Obamacare insurers only need to pay out 80% of premiums collected on healthcare). Someone literally shot a private health insurance company CEO last week in broad daylight and liberal and conservative voters alike shrugged and largely saw it as an inevitability. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Americans this aligned on something.

Bring back the idea of the Green New Deal. History looks favorably at the New Deal because it created good jobs to solve an urgent world problem. Americans don’t love oil jobs because they specifically love increasing carbon emissions; they love oil jobs because they’re good-paying jobs, and they love good-paying jobs building and installing solar panels.

Roll out universal parental leave, giving new parents months of job-protected paid leave. Roll out universal daycare so that when those parents return to work they can rest assured their children are getting excellent care and that all of America’s youngest are on equal footing. Sell it to individuals, and sell it to small businesses who don’t have the budgets to foot the bill for these on their own.

Make paid sick leave universal, a thing I can’t believe we didn’t do when COVID was widespread, but it’s better late than never.

Americans want this kind of stuff, and we need to quit pretending this shit’s politically impossible. These things are only politically impossible because Democrats are helping make that be the case.

And I’m not suggesting that Democrats roll over on improving the lives of the marginalized! I promise these policies will be popular with marginalized groups too, and if you are enacting policies to make Americans feel materially better off, you can also quietly help address issues of inequality and Americans will dismiss the weirdos screaming about it as the weirdos they are.

I usually roll my eyes when I hear people lament that Democrats and Republicans are basically the same, but when it comes to the needs of Americans who work for a living, elite Democrats and Republicans alike aren’t lifting a god damn finger. Members of Congress in both parties tend to get really wealthy after elected considering their salaries, and they enjoy stock portfolios that perform suspiciously well. While Clarence Thomas is sporting his lavish gifts from donors, the Supreme Court voted 9–0 that they don’t think they should be subject to more stringent independent ethics scrutiny. Nine to zero.

A better life and a better world

If Democrats support policies like this and manage to get a live one to run for president, we could see a sea change in US politics.

But it takes a lot.

So please donate $50 to the Harris Fight Fund right now!