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.
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