Happy New Years! I can’t believe it is already 2014, 2013 seemed go by in lightning time. It was a big year for me with a ton of changes. Hopefully most of the change in my life will settle down for 2014, but not too much. Here’s my yearly review of goals as well as proposing new goals on the year.
Online Life
Honestly, I feel like for the most part 2013 saw my blog get regular updates and I was proud of that. I decided at some point to mostly just work on making weekly updates rather than having updates twice a week. Though I do eventually want to increase it again, I think one time a week is attainable for me so I am hoping to at least continue that. I am strongly considering moving my host for my blog to a free service in 2014 as a way to save some money and to increase traffic. I must say that my blog saw the most traffic while I was still located at wordpress and have been playing around with blogspot and will likely review that sometime in the next couple of months. We’ll see if this happens in the future.
Asheron’s Call 2 ended a few months after it started. This largely occurred because too many people in the group I was playing with stopped playing, and the few who remained wouldn’t sit and help me level so that I could actually play with them. The problems of MMO life. I haven’t picked up any MMO at all since then really and I don’t plan to or want to. It was fun to play that for a few months, I had a good time. But right now I don’t have the desire.
RPGComplex died as I anticipated it was going to. Too bad. For a time the person I was going to do that blog with was going to do a podcast with me about RPGs but that too died out I think. The second blog I was going to start was BucketGeek.com. This blog is still around though I haven’t posted on it. One goal for 2014 needs to be to get back at work for this blog. BucketGeek is a much more high maintenance blog due to needing to actually do stuff from my bucket list so I don’t expect weekly updates on it, but I do need to update it periodically. Right now I am playing with moving it to Blogspot before I do any major posts to it.
Last online life goal that I have is to start a Let’s Play series on Youtube. This will begin with revisiting all my MMOs of years past, but I might include a series on Minecraft as well. I had been planning on already starting on this, and even have some episodes recorded, but my current computer is too loud and the series has been put on hiatus until my computer can get fully upgraded.
Gaming Life
I did not play the RPGs I was intending to last year due to the fall of RPGComplex, and I also did not buy an arcade cabinet. The cabinet idea is nice and is a long term goal of mine, but I don’t think that this will happen in 2014. I will pen this to an idea in 2015. For this year, I do want to make my goal to not only play games for the let’s play but broaden my game playing a little. I admit that I tend to stick with 3 or 4 games and that’s it, I want to play more of the games I own. I already have started this with a lot of Rogue Legacy play early in the year.
I also need to fully update my computer. This has been an unwritten goal for some time, but I want to complete this goal this year and I think there is a good chance of that. I want it to be a better gaming rig and the current setup is near 5 years old so I need updating. This should be a shoe-in to get done.
Work Life
My goal for 2013 was to find a new position, preferably within the company and I am happy to say that this goal was in fact achieved back in September. I was moved to the Systems team and am now a Business Analyst and testing our system for a big upgrade in 2014. My main goal for work at this point for 2014 is to maintain my position and not get let go when the project is completed in 2014. And even to get a raise if possible.
I hate my writing habits to be honest. Again last year I failed at my writing, I did get in the hang of it for about 6 weeks and again got side tracked. I really need to see this as my long term job because I don’t think working at HP will suit me forever. So even if it is once a week i need to get in the habit of writing my book and get that out in 2015. I figure if i can get $5,000 a book a year long term, and get 1 book out a year… by 45 I will make $50,000 a year which might be suitable to not work anymore. Obviously more money is nice, but I think $5,000 per year per book is an attainable goal.
Personal Life
I did lose about 10 pounds permanently, meaning it is staying off. But this is not sufficient to what I want to do. I need to lose another 20 pounds in 2014 and keep it off. For this, I not only want to maintain and improve upon my diet. I need to get back into regularly exercising. For awhile I was doing DDR in the morning and that was helping, I may start that up again but don’t want to promise myself that. I might start doing Wii Fit U daily once I get that, but again who knows. I do want to set a goal for myself that if I don’t do the above two, that I at least do crunches twice a day, squats once a day, and small free weights once a day as a work out. In addition, once spring rolls out I want to get back in the habit of walking for a half hour a day.
I want to continue working at maintaining friendships outside of work. Working in a new position forces this somewhat and I am going to try to maintain a movie night with the old gang at least every 3 months. Also every 3 months, I want to dedicate myself to going to a friend’s house for a game night. Lastly, I need to maintain my RPG group or a similar RPG group. It was good this year, we added a new person into the group and I think every new person in my life is a positive.
Japanese is always something I’d like to do but who has the time. I need to come up with an idea to do this while doing other things.