Somehow I find myself looking at tomorrow being Dec 1st. Already! It feels like this year has just sped past. It's been a wild year, and, prompted by the Spotify Wrapped... I find myself reflecting on the year that's been, and looking forward at the year to come.
I've achieved a lot this year, no doubt about it. It feels sometimes like I have too many projects going at once - like I'm constantly juggling a dozen hot pans on a 4 burner stove. But, honestly, that's not uncommon for me and I'm sure many of you can relate. We're all busy, and we all have too much we want to accomplish and too little time to really dive into it all the way that we want to.
On the HIVE front:
I've done really well. I didn't hit every goal that I had made for myself last year, but I've come really close!
I began last year with around 7,273 HP and 584 HBD in savings (I didn't actually start logging this until Feb, so these numbers don't actually reflect January 2022). Since then, I've grown my account to about 8,846 HP and 1,056 HBD in savings. Hitting 1k in savings was a big goal for me for my Hive account growth, and while I didn't quite achieve the 10K HP we're doing really well. I've been able to support some folks with a modest, but still noticeable, vote weight which feels really good.
I didn't post as many Worldbuilding Wednesdays as I had hoped, but I have managed to create and post a whopping 453 (and counting) Worldbuilding Prompts since I began them in April of 2021. This has had an honestly much better reception than I thought the project would. We have a small but dedicated core of people that use the Worldbuilding Prompts on a regular basis, and more folks pop up now and then expressing interest in them. I truly appreciate everyone who's interacted with them - were it not for your kind comments and super cool creations, I'd have probably given the prompts up by now. Instead, we're heading into another year of story prompts and I have about 2 months worth jotted down already!
I had hoped to do more commenting this year than I have actually managed - it's been honestly hard sometimes to just keep up with reading my favourite authors here, so hopefully next year I'm able to actually devote a bit more time to writing comments as I know full well how important and encouraging engagement is. There are times when the first chance I get to read is at 11pm after a full day of working, making supper, and playing with/getting the kids into bed and by then I'm so braindead that it's hard to make words happen.
Which, actually, is partly why I haven't done more posts this year too. I've managed 77 posts so far this year (excluding this one, and any future ones that will come out between now and the 31st). It's not a bad number, but it's definitely not the amount I would have liked, and I didn't interact with nearly the number of communities I would have hoped for. I keep meaning to do a lot more freewrite, scholar & scribe, tabletop/dnd, and Hive book club posts but just haven't found the time and energy to engage as much as I had hoped. Where I have shined this year is in the Worldbuilding and Hive Gaming communities, which are communities I think I've done the majority of my posts in.
So, all in all, on the HIVE front it's been a pretty successful year, but there is room for improvement of course. There always is. I'm hoping next year to be able to achieve more meaningful comments and engagement on folks' works and to make more posts myself. I'd like to revive and maybe complete the Worldbuilding Wednesday topic (as I think there is a happy ending point for it), and I'd like to get into doing more fiction writing as well as more programming-related posts, while still maintaining the Worldbuilding Prompts and the various gaming-related series/content that I have going on.
I keep meaning to sit down and tackle a Choose Your Own Adventure style blog inspired by the super cool work that Enjar did with Forbidden Lockbox but so far I haven't had the time needed to plot out a story, create the artwork I'd like to include and all the associated actual writing that would entail. It's definitely something I want to tackle in 2023 though - I think HIVE can work really well for interactive fiction.
In my offline life:
This year was our first full year in our new house, and my wife returned to the office in January after being out on Maternity Leave for 2021 so there were a lot of changes and adjustments that we had to kind of muddle our way through.
Covid caught us not once but twice this year, and it sucked both times. Kids being in daycare plus a complete reversal of all pandemic restrictions made for more general sickness too, as the poor little buggers don't have much of an immune system right now given that everyone basically masked up and kept to themselves for two years. So, we've had our fair share of illnesses, but thankfully nothing that actually was worrisome.
I've done less artwork/cartography this year than I had hoped, but what I have done has been pretty good and I even managed to see a map I made used by a group that streams on Twitch - which is still just so cool to think about! I want to do more cartography and dungeon-drawing in my spare time, which thankfully has been increasing.
Within the last month, my cousin finally has reliable internet too. We haven't had as much time to chat and work on projects together as I had hoped, so the ability for semi-stable internet up where he is, is going to make a huge improvement in that I'm sure. We already have plans for some combined gaming content and some writing content which will be a lot of fun.
This year has also seen a big transition from QA work into actual Dev/Programming work for me in my professional life, which is great as that's where I'd like to be. I love making things and solving the mental puzzles that programming inherently comes with, so it's been a lot of fun to focus further into that role.
I've only read 5 or so books this year, but the majority of those were pretty dense 700-page or more novels, so I'm counting that as a pretty great number. Currently, I'm reading Caliban's War, which is the second of The Expanse books, as well as Hell Divers, which is the first of a series that I may or may not read more of.
Also this year, I finally caught up with and/or completed a ton of podcasts I'd been meaning to actually finish. Things like The Magnus Archives, TANIS, and Welcome To Night Vale. I'm just starting The White Vault, which is I think a fitting aesthetic given that it's cold and snowy as all hell up here.
It was this year that I really fell in love with Solo Tabletop RPGs, and I've devoured a ton of solo RPG content. I'm planning to play a lot more (some of which will be featured in blogs) as well as I want to create a few handy apps or tools for my favourite games.
Lastly, this year I actually dusted off the ancient YouTube account I had created, got over my self-consciousness about talking in videos, and created a bunch of video & blog content. It's been a lot of fun to pick up again; a number of years back I had done a stint streaming on Twitch, and I just didn't love it enough to grind my way to success... but creating videos for YouTube has been a lot of fun. I'm learning new tools like DaVinci Resolve and figuring out cool ways to make engaging content that has been really enjoyable.
So, yeah... quite the year so far. And, as I've mentioned throughout, a lot of plans for next year. It'll be fun to revisit this late in 2023 and see how much things have changed, what I have achieved, and what I bounced off of.
I encourage everyone to reflect on their year. It's been a lot of ups and downs (crypto has 'died' like, what, four times this year? LOL) and I think it's really fun to both reflect on how things have been and to later come back to writings like these and use them as a benchmark down the road.