Time to write a retrospective post of 2023! It was a loooooooooooooong year but a great one, best year of my life since 2019 and it was even better than that. Anyway, here is some data on me for that bot in Singapore to mine:
Overview/Timeline:
January - had a lovely birthday thanks to Royce drinks and later A.
February - worst month due to stress of two courses, made ATU part-time.
March - lots of GTI and ATU assignments to keep me busy.
April - exams for GTI, easy. Best month thanks to M and H. Legoland with Theo!
May - exams for GTI, hard because Maths. E. Went to Malaga at the end of month.
June - end of Erasmus+ in Malaga, Spain. GTI over, passed with Distinction overall.
July - lots of Java OOP coding but fine. Met M for the last time. Goodbye (?) x
August - watched AEW All In in London. Goodbye to H. Handed in the OOP project.
September - went to the USA and got to meet my friend Meg in California.
October - tough month, lots of assignments and shit. Bridge/K/M incident.
November - tough month as well, lots of coding. But better.
December - two big assignments to do, too busy to go out or do much, ah well.
Music
I listened to 84000+ minutes of (mostly) music on YouTube Premium last year - this year?
38527 minutes! What happened? I suspect that as I was not walking into work for six months listening to 45 minutes of music that may have had an effect (so maybe 8000 minutes give or take, assuming I worked most days, minus the weekends but plus all the times I walked both ways). Also I listened to way more podcasts (JCE) and increasingly more funny videos and whatnot that may have bitten into it a bit. That or they got better at tracking the exact amount of minutes of music listened to; 2022 was the first year they did it so may have included EVERYTHING including podcasts and whatnot.
So anyway my top 5 tracks were:
Living Color - Cult of Personality. I blame Pepsi Phil.
Harry Styles - Adore You - I blame the S.S. Situation Ship. Also, it’s just good.
Downstait - Kingdom - Cody’s song is great but may not be this high in 2024(?)
Gerry Raferty - Baker Street - fabulous and eternal. Summertime I listened.
Rihanna - Only Girl - I blame a particular red-headed lady for this, again.
It, that is, YouTube Music, also grouped my top bands listened to - overall Fleetwood Mac returned with a bang this year after a couple of years of not listening to them as much. Congratulations!
Oh and a by month look at 2023:
January - Tasmin Archer: Sleeping Satellite. So good.
February - Downstait: Kingdom. Cody’s fault.
March - Boyzone: Picture of You. Classic.
April - Killswitch Engage: This Fire Burns. The best month this year.
May - Lykke Li: I Follow Rivers. My favourite song in 2013 returns.
June - Living Color: Cult of Personality. Let’s fucking go.
July - Bill Conti: Gonna Fly Now. Rocky 2! He wins. Had a great month.
August - Gerry Rafferty: Baker Street. Another great month.
September - Rihanna: Only Girl. The USA was A-OK.
October - various Fleetwood Mac songs. Starting to get dark here.
November - T’Pau: China in Your Hand! One song I’d heard on the radio a few times and would listen to bits of it but finally looked it up based on one line and boom, the whole thing.
December - various, at time of writing (December 22nd). Nice replay of everything.
Movies/TV
I managed to watch 30 movies this year, mostly new for once and only a couple I saw twice.
My favourite movie I saw this year is Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind which I watched with a friend in the States (no, not that one). Shout out to Lauren Larue! I cried like a baby at the end of it. Fabulous movie.
Serious contenders were few but there was a pack of good movies - I enjoyed Tár, Puss in Boots, Barbie (did the Barbenheimer sort of, over two days). Napoleon was good and the one I wanted to see the most but fell short. Just too much stuff to cover. The Hunger Games prequel surprised me, I really liked it.
Re-watched a bunch of movies, Smokin’ Aces, watched the D&D movie twice, Puss and Boots twice in the cinema… watched a bunch of stuff again on the flight to and from America, that was a handy feature.
Worst movie was probably FNAF. Mainly due to just being an empty shell of a thing. Theo liked it so that was all that mattered. Marmaduke and that Pokémon Lucario movie were down there too.
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I’m shite at watching TV series but there is just so much good stuff out there. Proud to say I watched Season 2 of True Detective (Again) for a lark and then carried into True Detective Season 3 which I had never watched before - absolutely brilliant. Mahershala Ali was brilliant in it.
I watched Generation Kill again but I also watched Impeachment for the first time, something I would be interested in to an extent. Sarah Paulson was great as a heel and Beanie Feldstein as the babyface. Also props to Clive Owen and his prop nose.
The final combo of rewatch and new was Fleabag season 1 (new) and the Kennedys (rewatch). Fleabag, I loved the cast. Looking forward to cracking into the famous season 2 sometime in the New Year. As for the Kennedys, it’s been a few years since I watched it (I think I legitimately watched it in Finland not long after it was released in 2011) and it holds up.
Games by month 2023
January - consulting my diary, there was not much video-gaming done in January! But did play some Civ4 at some point in a shocker.
February - Resident Evil 1 easy - I managed to beat Resident Evil 1 on easy mode. I really like this game, I periodically return to it and try to get various achievements. Later on after Halloween I managed to beat the game in less than 3 hours and without saving, which was cool too.
March - GOLDEN SUN, also Resi 2. I played through Golden Sun 1 in a couple of days, after having set it down for a while. On an emulator, of course. There is a blog post about it, which I would link if this was a blog of import but it’s mainly to tickle myself so no link for you!
I also started Resident Evil 2 Remastered and got as far as leaving the police station but, eh.
April - I played LOADS of Halo around here. I had played Halo 1 with Royce at his old house in Maunsells Road on the 360 and was so hyped I picked up the MCC on the PC again and unlocked several hundred achievements, I’m now at about 350/700 achievements or something. This was Halo 1, Halo 2, Halo 3 and ODST. I played all of them again in various ways. Have yet to play Reach muh (even though I loved it on 360) and of course Halo 4. I also played Cod Blops 2 to completion (again).
May - a lot of Civ 4. I am enjoying Tectonics maps, Global Highlands and the occasional Random Script. I have made it to Emperor difficulty, I briefly promoted myself to Immortal (the second-highest rank) but demoted myself again. Pretty much assume that every month I play at least a minute of Civ 4, the greatest game of all time(?).
July - Holdfast and Stanley Parable. I played a ton of Holdfast (see my July 2023 blog post) and it was fun and got me sort of back into playing against humans. I hate and fear humans, especially the online gaming type, but hot damn was it fun to play a soldier in my fave era of military stuff (muskets and rifles and shit, my fave era of history is 1492-1918, or more accurately 1618-1918). I also cleared the Stanley Parable 100% just because, a nice little aperitif.
August - DayZ. Again with the human players. Fuck the infected AI, human players are the real scary thing in DayZ. Loved, loved, loved it. See the blog post. I also played FF9 twice - once really fast to get Excalibur, very easy to do with the boosters on. Second time to clear the achievements to 100%. I will await the Remastered game that will no doubt come out one day…? It’s my 5th fave FF after all, after FF7, FF8, FF10 and FF12. I have yet to play FF7 remastered actually… so many games I own, so little time. Or energy.
September - Pathfinder: Kingmaker. I did not love this as much but I liked it a lot. Jesus it took a long time to clear. But it was good enough. I bought the DLC there recently and will give it another spin… eventually. See the blog post!
October - Heavy Rain - I hate saying this but as a parent this got me hook line and sinker. Was also just a good game, good story and I finally got to play it as it was meant to be played - on a PC in October 2023. I left a handful of achievements aside (1 or 2 are ridiculously hard) so I can replay it later. How about that? I was also a bit depresso in October so maybe this didn’t help but fuck it, good game.
November - Star Ocean 2 R - one of the first games I bought on release date in years. Decades, perhaps. Like there were a handful of 360 and Wii games in the 2000’s I may have got on time. Majora’s Mask as well prior to that. Uh, Final Fantasy 13 in 2011 and it was so bad I stopped buying games on release day. Until 2023! When I got this. One of my most beloved childhood JRPGS, huge influence on me and Necut and everything, got to play again in amazing graphics and on a very stable, powerful PC. I wrote an extremely long, rambling blog post on it replete with a hundred screenshots, taken from the almost 3000 I took. Phew.
After I beat Star Ocean 2 R I played a load of Civ5 and only have 7 achievements left to get! 279 out of 286. Some are the absolute hardest ones, but I cleared a bunch in November like Mongolia and Wonders of the Ancient World.
December - mainly Civ 4 again. Comfort gaming. Too many assignments.
Reading
I finally started reading again properly in 2023! I had been reading consistently for years prior to 2020, then I started the night shift and it killed my desire to read before bed. Never really recovered that but read a handful of books in 2021 and 2022 but it was a struggle. In 2023 I only read 5 books but 2 of them were massive slogs so don’t blame me.
Daniel Bryan’s biography - nice book, easy to read. I have yet to read a rasslin’ book I did not enjoy.
Colossus by Niall Ferguson - NF is a bit too edgy for me nowadays but this exploration of ‘is the USA collapsing’ from 2005 was a bit dated, I had an old copy. Sloggy.
Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham - a slog but super fucking interesting. I am aware of the Congress of Berlin 1878 and all that entailed from a European politics point of view but had no idea what had happened ‘down there’. Really, really interesting account that took in everything from the Mahdists in Sudan, the explorers in various parts, the French in Tunisia and such, the Boers and their wars and everything in between. Brilliant but took me forever, mainly as I had few points of reference. Hand me a European history book that’s 700 pages? I'll gloss over loads of stuff as second hand news. This 700+ page book took me a while to process. Very good.
In Retrospect - Robert S. McNamara’s book. I had a copy that had a typo every paragraph, I am not joking. At one point the book spelled aircraft with a 4. As in, ‘aircr4aft’. I am not joking. Every single page had a typo. It was a decent book that I’d been meaning to read for years but I will throw away this copy fast.
Boer War by Martin Bossenbroek- finished there, was fascinating. We found out one of my great-grandfathers fought in the Second Boer War, they found his medals in the garden of the house in Roscommon there a few years back! Anyway, it was an excellent read. Boers are fascinating but fantastically racist, like the Nords in Skyrim, I thought to myself. Not even a huge Skyrim nut but that seemed an appropriate comparison.
Exercise
It was a good year overall for exercise!
Not strolling around as much but still manage to do a bit, usually on a Wednesday night or nights here and there. Or the occasional power walk in and/or out of town.
I cycled at least 138 times this year(ATOW), with a total of 1234 km done. Short, fast cycles as far as Menlo and back were the order of the day. To get more distance I simply repeated certain loops around the Dyke Road, and such. 16 km was the longest I would cycle for. All that and I only got my back wheel replaced in November after it finally blew up. I bought this bike in 2018 I think for 200 euro. Cycling was good but it only got me so far, but it did keep me active.
Running returned in September or so - I tried September 2022 and failed, but went back again this year and largely succeeded. Due to NUIG being privatising bastards, I am reduced to running on concrete finally after avoiding it for years but it’s actually grand. I am currently up to about 5.6km before I took my break. I run about twice a week. I find Monday and Thursday the least painful days to go out running. I ran about 32 times between mid-September and mid-December, doing 111km altogether, averaging 3.4km per run. Highest was 5.6, lowest was 2km.
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Still largely doing the chest and triceps one day, back and biceps next day, rest pattern. Twice a week. Not really noticing any definition but I do sit down almost every day now for 14 hours at a time.
I was trying to bulk up for much of 2023 but it’s just impossible, so switched gears to being leaner instead. I can do that, at least. Also lightened a lot of my weights and focussed more on form than weight. This shift occurred after August 2023.
600-700 planks were done. A rough calculation has me at 670 done this year or something. I was doing them twice a week, and the number of the month was the amount, and 1 minute per plank. So in April I would do 4 of them, twice a week. May, 5 of them, twice a week. I upgraded in November (11 a week, twice a week) to doing them four times a week, so by December I was doing 12 one-minute planks, 4 times a week. I stopped all exercise in mid-December but am looking forward to resuming in January already. I will start at 12 planks a day, four times a week, in January and go from there.
I did a bit of yoga on the mat I bought but have fallen out of it again. Must go back to it.
Travel
I travelled to 4 different countries this year, 2 of them were new:
Denmark - April - went to Legoland in Billund with Theodore. Was very fun. I had been to Copenhagen before but it was in the middle of my first and last ever connecting flight back in 2011. Theo had been to Legoland in the UK before but still enjoyed it, naturally. As a huge Lego fan when I was a child, I liked it.
Spain - May>June - I had been to Barcelona for 48 hours in December 2022 but returned for 3 weeks in June 2023, Malaga this time. I never wrote about it anywhere online, oh wait, here. The last bit is me!
UK - August - I went to Londinium with my cousin to watch AEW All In. Was super cool to be there. Don’t really remember many British things which are good but the American wrestling was fabulous. Best match was either Punk versus Joe or MJF v Adam Cole BAYBAY. Will probably give the nod to the latter. Most of the tag matches were clusters, sorry. Cool to see these guys in the flesh, though.
USA - August>September - I decided between interrailing across Europe for a couple of weeks and went to visit a friend in California. Big mistake, in retrospect. Nice to see my friend and San Francisco was nice too but Fresno, where they live, sucks. And she’ll say that too as a proud Long Islander. Also, the USA was surprisingly expensive. I don’t know what I expected but yeah, I was down over 2000 euro by the end of it all included. Should have gone interrailing! That would have cost the same but I would have seen a dozen countries, some old, some new. Oh well, it was nice to see Meg in person after being friends for 3 years. She is always welcome to come over here and visit.
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That's it for travel in 2023 - won’t get to do much next year as funds are depleting but hoping to return to Finland-Estonia-Sweden again, possibly with company, and maybe finally see Scotland if my other American friend visits there.
Work/College
No work, lots of college though:
I was still in the middle of GTI Software Development when I started ATU Software Development in January 2024. The actual ATU modules didn’t really start until late January but by February I was super stressed - not only had I had to re-learn Maths after a 13 year hiatus for GTI exams but I had 5 modules of ATU stuff coming at me as well in addition to everything else.
GTI was completed by June 2023. It was a nice course and a great introduction to IT/programming etc. I had to leave work to accommodate it but no regrets. It gave me a good foundation and as a bonus I got to go to Spain for three weeks at the end, (most) expenses paid. The hardest part was re-learning Maths; there was a Maths exam in May which had all sorts of general Maths questions in it. I didn’t have great marks from the continuous assessment and the assignment so the exam was make or break. Got a Merit anyway so it’s all good!
I made the decision to go part-time in ATU, so instead of doing the full course in 2023 I now had 3 modules in Semester 1 and 2 modules in Semester 2, just finished. I’ll do the balance of the modules in 2024 - 2 modules in the first half of 2024 and 3 modules at the end of 2024 then I’m done. Much easier.
OOP, HTML and Computer Architecture were grand. I had some experience of HTML already, a semester worth of Java OOP from GTI and general knowledge of computers so all was well. The latter two modules finished by May 2023 but OOP had a project which was to be handed in by August 2023; I had it mostly done by July and I took plenty of breaks over the summer but it added to the sensation of never-ending coursework.
In Semester 2 of ATU, I had Mobile Applications and Networking Technology only. Both were grand but not quite what I thought they would be. Lots of Angular/Ionic/Typescript in the former and Wireshark in the latter. All stuff I can do but I don’t know, something didn’t click for me. I just finished the Mobile App Project there before Christmas and am now working on the Networking project. Can’t wait to have 2 weeks off in January, feels like I’ve been doing coursework non-stop since September 2022.
Writing
For the first time ever I finished NaNoWriMo properly, as in, written entirely within the confines of the month of November.
This is what my daily word counts looked like. White days were just normal, try to type as much as possible. Green days were ‘sprint’ days as I called them where I would take regular breaks but would otherwise try to get as much done as possible in 3-5+ different attempts daily. Red days were ‘burst’ days where I would overindulge in coffee or whatever and try to go overboard. Didn’t always work but hey, we made it.
As with most NaNo attempts it’s garbage but we all gotta start somewhere.
Earlier in the year I had attempted something similar and dropped it so glad I got something done in the end.
I feel better writing something every day, even if it’s just my Google Docs Diary, but writing fiction is even better. I will try to do more in 2024!
Wrestling
A good and bad year for wrestling! Good for the business, bad for my general interest. Took a bit of a plunge over the course of the first 9 months and now I’m not too invested, which is kind of a relief, I was glued to all the news in 2022 so it’s nice to just chill out and catch up at my leisure.
Anyway, the biggest thing was going to see London’s AEW All In with my cousin. As I said above I really enjoyed the singles matches and didn’t really care for the multi-man matches. It was a cool experience and we are going back again in 2024.
Not much else to say - I always watch the Royal Rumble(s) so I was entertained by that. The story continues. I watched an episode of Raw and an episode of Smackdown on TV as they happened in the USA while I was there which was cool. I watched a bunch of Christian Cage matches, namely the one where he won and the 2 out of 3 falls match with Darby, ouch. Finally, the last match I watched was Survivor Series 2023 and the return of Pepsi Phil.
D&D/board-gaming.
My campaign wrapped up in November 2022. I ran a couple of GURPS games using a sheet I designed that would calculate the skill points somewhat correctly. I also ran some Frostgrave over Roll20 which was cool but just not the same as the real deal.
Britannia was great - finally managed to run it (three times) this year. I came second as the Yellows the first game, third as the Greens the next game and last place as the Blues in the final game. I can never get the Blues right. I want to run a ‘winners game’ in 2024, between myself and the 3 first place finishers of those previous games. I deliberately avoided giving myself the Reds but will play them in this fourth game where I hope to win. I’ll do the write-up on Britannia when this game happens.
At one point I played a game of Betrayal of House on the hill and a bit of Dead of Winter. Seriously need to have another proper go at the latter.
Plans for 2024
Possibly return to Finland-Estonia, it’s been 5 years, but money is tight. No other major travel plans, happy to give it all a miss for a bit anyway. If I do go to Scandinavia again it’ll be in the middle of the year.
Will be running the Enemy Within campaign adapted for 5e. Stay tuned.
Triple-convention in February 2024 should be good.
King of Kings Britannia Game. Has to happen.
AEW ALL IN so I will be actually in the UK again 2024.
Do NaNoWriMo again, but not too pushed. Would prefer just to tap away at something all year.
Finish the ATU course by December or so 2024.
And so on…
