Personal

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2021: Year in Review

Last year I wrote a semi-brief retrospective on the previous year where I went over my annual statistics and the hobbies I pursued. I think this is a worthwhile pursuit. The unexamined life, etc.

2021 was a tough year. There was a coup attempt in the U.S.1 Coronavirus exploded (again and again). More personally, I started going to therapy. I stopped writing (so this blog languished, although I have many drafts I’m working on!) and started reading. I spent a lot of time outside.

Hobby Shuffling

I’m sort of a collector of hobbies. In 2020, I spent a lot of time with my cameras, trying to improve as a photographer and as a photo editor. In 2021 I don’t think I picked up my cameras once. Instead, my outdoor activity was disc golf. Indoors, I fell away from writing and instead I worked on some game development projects. I also read quite a bit.

There are certain categories of hobbies that I try to fill: at least one restful activity (reading, watching movies, etc.), one mindful activity (writing, programming, etc.), and one outdoor activity (disc golf, photography, anything moderately active). This keeps things varied and interesting and prevents me from falling too deep into any one rabbit hole, since I tend to fixate on a thing sometimes and need something else to pull me away.

Notice how, for the “indoor” activities, I differentiate between mindful and restful — not mindful and mindless. Mindless consumption in any form is, at best, a waste of time. It’s important to critically examine the media we consume. The most basic reason for this is at least to determine what it is we actually like about something, so that when we search out new media it’s easier to find something to either challenge or comfort ourselves. The other reason is to gain a better understanding and appreciation for the art in our everyday lives, and to learn what the things we enjoy tell us about ourselves. If an unexamined life is not worth living, then an unexamined movie, book, TV show are not worth consuming.

Writing

I did write some this year: a whopping 18,000 words, all in two months.

My primary project was a near-future science fiction project. It took place around the year 2100, under the effects of climate change, radically increased in pace. After being uprooted by collateral damage wrought by bands of eco-terrorists and the fascist state police trying to stop them by any means possible, a found-family started to splinter, competing allegiances chipping away at their unity.

I really liked this premise, and I might retool it to work in a different setting. Working on this project, looking into projections for what things might be like ~80 years from now, looking at various projections and climate models, I started to get kind of sad. It’s one thing to write a dystopian sci-fi, but the closer it hews to Real Life Possibilities, the harder it gets to think about. Eventually I grew too discouraged and started working on short stories until I started programming, which took up all my writing energy.

Game Development

At some point late in 2020, I got the old game development bug. I made a mini-game in 30 days then blogged about it. Then I threw it away and started over. This time I wrote pages and pages of notes, drew up a decently terse GDD — just long enough to answer some important, broad questions; just short enough to easily change — and dived right in. I bought Aseprite and started learning how to make pixel art and then decided I was not good enough and paid for assets that I could use. More importantly, I made a lot of mistakes, which means I learned a lot!

In my demo project I worked on a “vertical slice” of gameplay: like a demo level for a game. Here, I spent a lot of time working on mechanics and behaviors individually, and I put off things like level design and puzzles and narrative for later. I put the player in an empty room with various enemies spawning around so I could playtest all of the player abilities and enemy abilities in a sort of vacuum. This was a ton of fun and I think could make its own arena-style mini-game.

Effort kind of waned around July or August. This is when my sabbatical from work ended, and I started programming “for a living” again. It was also around the time I started going to therapy and reading more, which also took a lot of energy.

I learned so much from working on this game, and I’m so eager to pick it back up and start working on it again. I genuinely think it could be a good game. A worthy entry in the genre. I have a lot of stuff written up on it: a heft devlog, many screenshots, etc., that I will start to sort through and probably blog about.

In the meantime, here’s a couple of incredibly short videos showing very tiny bits of the game.

(The art in these is a mixture of open source art, my own art, purchased assets, and assets from ROMs. Basically, all placeholders.)

Disc Golf

According to UDisc, I tracked 87 rounds of disc golf with a total of 1,453 holes. My best score was -3 (3 under par) and my average was +3.89. I threw one ace2 and 123 birdies3.

I picked up UDisc about a month or two after picking the sport back up, after going through a number of subpar (heh) apps to track my scores. Although I no longer care to track my scores in as much depth, UDisc’s course finder and score card tool are killer features that keep me coming back.

Disc golf is a wonderful sport. I walked more this past year than in the past two years combined, and I don’t think that’s too much of an exaggeration. I started waking up earlier so I could get out to farther courses earlier, and then to beat the heat. I met people and made new friends. The people who play this sport tend to be very friendly and easygoing, and if you’re not the type to learn things from YouTube or by reading then there’s usually someone out there who will show you how to do things on the course.

Even in California, though, we had to take a break for the winter. I recently started getting out again and I believe this is definitely something I’m going to continue to do, to strive to improve at, and most importantly, to enjoy.

Movies

I watched 177 movies in 2021. This year, instead of doing Hooptober, I watched a scary movie every day in September. I saw a lot of truly great films this past year. Not much else to reflect on here – I keep my movie notes elsewhere.

Beyond the Numbers

Keeping track of all these metrics can be fun. I like to see trends take shape. Like watching my average score gradually fall in disc golf. That’s a definite measure of improvement.

There’s not much real insight, though, to be gained just by looking at numbers. I wrote X,XXX words. I saw YYY movies. This doesn’t describe my year any more than counting up all my steps would. I’m not learning anything here, I don’t gain anything by looking at these.

2021 was a busy year for me, and there might be a number of ways to characterize the year. If I were to choose a single theme or defining trait, however, it would be self-discovery. In between the movies, the disc golf, and the programming, I went to therapy (individual and marriage). I read twenty or so books, many of them in that much-derided genre of self-help. I expended a great deal of energy and spent an incredible amount of time trying to learn about myself, how I work, and how I don’t.

When the year started I didn’t know where I was going, or even how to learn to figure out what I wanted out of life. I was so out of touch with myself that discovering what I wanted, even in the most basic sense, was incredibly difficult. What’s more, the prospect of admitting this — or sharing any sort of vulnerability at all — was completely foreign to me. It took quite a bit of introspection and an equal amount of guidance to learn all of these things. Then it took even more to deprogram those behaviors. Then the hardest part of all: real, actual change, in assuming new and healthier behaviors and habits. This is an ongoing process and may never end, but like the Bojack saying goes, it gets easier. The hard part is you have to keep doing it.

Now I still don’t know where I’m going. If you ask me what my Ultimate Goal is out of life, I will thousand-yard stare past you. But I’m a hell of a lot closer to being able to figure out the answers to those questions. Or, at least, to making a decision about them. None of us know where we’re going, but we all choose a path. I’m just working on finding the right path for myself.

2020: Year in Review

I don’t generally agree with the way some services do their year-end reviews, like Spotify who does theirs at the beginning of December. The year’s not over yet – there’s still a whole month left to go! Typically I’d wait until January to really start thinking about the last year, but since it’s 2020 and I’ve been on vacation for a few weeks I’ve had some extra time to stew.

This year I went through several periods of idleness, though not inactivity, punctuated by a few bursts of productivity. I didn’t write nearly as much as a normal year, but I did take back up photography. I programmed some, but not as much as I’d have liked. And I watched a ton of movies.

Writing

Tracking my Progress

I keep a spreadsheet where each tab represents a year in writing. Over the years I’ve added or removed columns but it’s remained fairly consistent in its use. Although Scrivener does keep track of your progress over time, this is just on a per-project basis, and I like to have a broader view of things.

work tracker

I’ve started and restarted projects to turn this into a little app, similar to the NaNoWriMo tracker: goal tracking, project management, progress reports. Sometimes it has some social features, sometimes it’s desktop app, sometimes it’s just a command line interface. I’ve done this so often now that it’s basically become how I evaluate new programming languages or frameworks.

But no matter how I dress it up, or how refined I build my user interface, I still just come back to the spreadsheet. Apps introduce complexity. A spreadsheet is as simple and dumb as you can get. Very little is as useful as a plain spreadsheet.

This Year’s Word Count

word count progess

I think it’s obvious what happened here, at least in that first long horizontal line. But I’ll explain a little.

In the beginning of the year we moved to the city. Late last year I started a job that was 100% remote, and living in the suburbs was not cutting it for me. A little too much ennui, there. The hope was that living smack dab in the middle of the city would alleviate some of the problems working from home introduces.

And for the first month things were great! City life was awesome! Then the lockdowns came. That was okay, because at least outside my window wasn’t a lawn and another lawn and another lawn and endless quiet. Even under the lockdowns, there was still life outside my window.

But, it became difficult to keep up with things like writing or programming in my free time or doing very much at all, really. Being productive during a pandemic just wasn’t a priority. I had to reassess what it meant to me to be productive, or if I needed to be productive at all in order to feel satisfied with how I spent my time. The short answer was, I didn’t need to be productive; I just needed to be.

I’ve always written for myself more than anything else. I rarely share what I write, although I do sometimes talk about it. While I do think it would be nice to someday be published traditionally, that’s not the only goal and it’s not why I write. The problem here is that I didn’t really think much about the exact reasons why I write. It’s a compulsion, more than anything. Stories or premises appear in my head and I have to write them down.

Because of all this I think it was inevitable that I grew unhappy with my writing in general. The lockdowns and the stresses of the pandemic, of the protests that marched by my apartment, of everything else that happened, these all were handy excuses for taking a long break and really evaluating my reasons for doing what I do. The joy in writing had been evaporating, and it took all this for me to think about it deeply.

So these long horizontal lines are my time doing a little soul-searching, doing workshop exercises, trying to re-find and refine my reasons for writing as well as my craft.

Once I started back up, I think I made good pace! Even an emergency appendectomy didn’t stop my progress once I started. Minus the two days in the hospital.

Programming

All in all, I wrote nearly as many lines of code as I did words this year. Generally LOC are not a good metric for progress, but I thought this was an interesting metric, anyway. Maybe this is another reason I felt a little burnt out sometimes: 40,000 words written, and over 30,000 lines of code in a year! I guess I have been busy.

Photography

Earlier this year I bought a used Nikon D3 and have tried to revive and maintain my interest in photography.

I’ve learned, and re-learned, a few important things with this camera:

One, photography as a skill is not like riding a bike, and you really need to keep up at it to keep your eye. Otherwise you end up starting over, redeveloping skills you used to have and rebuilding muscle memory. This is frustrating and discouraging and the worst part of picking up any hobby after a long absence.

Two, post-processing continues to be the maker and breaker of photos. Few photos are perfect straight out of the camera. With a little extra care, many photos that at first seem unspectacular can really grow into something special.

Three, it’s just as important to look at photos as it is to take photos. This helps you figure out the things you like and gives you goals for styles to develop on your own.

Four, don’t pay attention to Instagram. It’s a toxic black hole of chasing likes, thumbs-up emojis, and pointless trends. Social media continues to be cancer to creative endeavors. I spent about a month maintaining an active photography account before I got tired of that rat race and moved on.

Movies

I watched over 150 movies this year! It doesn’t take much active engagement to just watch movies, though. I did semi-participate in Hooptober, where I watched a horror movie every day through October. This gave me the opportunity to fill in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of the horror canon. I love horror movies, but it’s taken me until now, my 29th year of life, to finally watch the Night of the Living Dead, which may have been made in the 1960s but feels as modern as anything released in the past year.

In Review

It’s easy to review the past year in terms of numbers when you’re a little metrics-obsessed. I track everything from the words I write to the music I listen to to the movies I watch.

Even so, there were long stretches of the year where I “did” nothing at all: nothing got tracked. This kind of unplugging, for me, really helped me keep my head on straight as it felt like things were getting more and more out of hand in the world around me. As spooky news became a pandemic, and protests turned to riots and businesses shuttered and never took down the plywood over their windows, as the election ramped up and petered out, as long as focused on my own little corner of the world and doing what good I could with what I had, I managed to stay okay.