Tis that time of year again where I review what happened to me in the previous year and think about what needs to occur in the coming year. It was an off year for me and many of my goals from last year fell by the wayside unfortunately. This happened I think largely due to a depression that leaked into my life an ultimately one of the larger goals I have going forward is getting out.
Online Life
I feel like my blog has been pretty regular over the past year. It has had ups and downs but overall I think I have been averaging 3-4 articles a month which is about where I want to be. I definitely want to get the number more regular for 2015 and closer to 4-6 a month. It’s funny looking back at previous years and seeing that I had updated around 12-15 a month at one time, but a lot of that was due to having extra time from being in school. Still, there are definitely moments in work that are dead that I could use the time to write blogs and I should use it as such more often.
I picked up playing Ingress this year which I consider to be an online game. It is both online and offline, a weird hybrid. This has gotten me involved in several real life get togethers and it has been a lot fun meeting new people in the area and region. I have been waning on my interest of the game of late but am sure I will continue to have small spurts of play.
BucketGeek had a small surge in postings. However, the postings have largely died. If anyone actually followed the blog, I still do the bucket list items but overall I think I set myself up for failure on the blog. It takes almost as much time to blog about the items as it is to just check the items off my list. That puts it into a problem spot. Be that as it may, I do want to get that site back up with regular updates.
I am happy to say that I did in fact start putting out Let’s Play videos on Christmas Day this year and so far have kept it up for the last week. This project I admit is bound to fail from time to time as it is an incredible amount of work getting the videos together and uploaded. Still, I have been enjoying it so far and hope that the game aspect of it keeps me involved. I foresee the biggest problem with keeping up with Minecraft, and already have lowered production of my series to be from Monday, Wednesday and Friday to just Monday and Friday. The problem is it really does take way more time to produce than other videos. I also do The Witcher and Zeus+Poseidon and for both those games I can sit down and record and in an hour I will have two episodes, then another hour and both of those episodes are fully edited. For Minecraft, if I put in an hour I am lucky to have a single episode and it’d likely take an hour to edit that episode. I wager that it actually is 3 to 4 times the effort to do Minecraft than it is to do the other series. But I kind of see Minecraft as the longterm glue for the channel… the thing that will always be there as other games come and go.
Gaming Life
I feel my gaming life has picked up largely due to the let’s plays. I currently have 4 current games that I am playing for recording and have a couple other games I put a few moments to here and there that I don’t record. I definitely feel like the number of games I play has risen which is nice and bad all at once.
My game collection is also coming along. In 2014, I got a Dreamcast, a Genesis, and an X-Box 360, as well as several games for each. I also purchased a RetroN 5 and have purchased a couple dozen Super Famicom games imported from Japan. Most of the games that I have been collecting thus far have been centered around the RPGs and older games that I always wanted to own but couldn’t. In 2015, I’d like to expand my games even more and get a PS3 and Maybe a Sega Saturn.
My update of my computer did get completed last year. I even got a new keyboard and mouse which weren’t planned, but nice additions. I even got a second monitor, though it was gifted from my company and so isn’t particularly great. Thinking ahead to 2015… my computer related goals includes getting at least 2TB of HD space on my computer added in. I already have 7TB but almost my entire movie collection was digitized so I need more.
Work Life
I don’t have a ton to say. Work is good. I got a raise at the end of the year. I got moved to a project I love and have hopes of going to another project in 2015 that is related to my current one that I think I will enjoy. My only real complaint with my current job is that towards the second half of the year, a lot of the people I conversed with on a regular basis became part of a project in which I never see them so work life has gotten a lot more stale. Not much I can do about that. Can’t have everything, at least I enjoy the job.
Personal Life
Well drama occurred with the former work group that I was trying to get together on a regular basis for movie night and so that idea died early unfortunately. I may give it another go but I don’t have hopes at this point. That group is pretty well fractured at this point.
The RPG podcast and the game night have also not happened, I think to a lesser degree because of the above drama. I kind of have hopes of putting together a game day with another friend, we’ve had 2 thus far but it has been infrequent so far.
Unfortunately, at the end of 2014 my long standing Pen & Paper RPG group broke up. Not entirely sure what happened, we ended a Pathfinder campaign and when prompted to do something past that, one guy said he was out and others showed no interest at all. Towards the end of the campaign I had started having some issues with one of the guys and I wonder if that in combination with my general lack of roleplaying (it was a roleplay heavy group) led them to just kind of drop me off at this point. Or if people’s schedules just became too much to have the game as well. Not sure, there were a couple of people who were consistently showing up later and later, or not able to show up at all which was causing problems. So it might have just been a natural end to the group. Is too bad, but I needed a break from it anyway so I think it is good. Timing wise it gives me an extra night to get stuff done and I wasn’t a huge fan of Thursday nights as it made preparing for weekends with my daughter more difficult.
I did go through a few spurts of learning Japanese and found a new way to learn it which I think was working quite well. Unfortunately that dropped off a bit and I need to get back into doing that.