2024 Retrospective
It's been a big year, this one. And with the start of 2025, we've reached 3 years of "publication" on this blog. So, I thought I'd blab a bit about what's happened in the last year. Not really about important things, but just things I'd like to note.
School, as always. This year class difficulty started to pick up, with the discrete algebra class in the spring cooking me a little. But somehow, by the skin of my teeth, I'll still be starting the new spring semester this year with a 4.0.
The internship over the summer was a big first for me, not only in getting work experience but also in living alone. Having to figure everything about my every day out was certainly new and a bit more work than I expected, to be honest. From planning my commute, to even just figuring out where to eat every day or what to buy, I had to make a lot more decisions in a day than ever before. Adulting smh. Also learned about the importance of living close to public transit stations. Not something I will forget. While on the internship I also tried out a few different things, one of them making a vlog style youtube video. I already yapped about it in the corresponding exploratory endeavors post, but it opened my eyes to how much work even a fairly simple video like that was.
One "notable" change - started watching/reading anime/manga/LNs, for better or for worse. For the first two, probably for the worse. It all started when people at the VR club were watching bits of The Demon Girl Next Door to show off their home server's streaming capabilities. At some point I found myself watching it on my own, and then would you look at that I'm watching all sorts of anime and reading all sorts of manga. According to anilist, in the half year that I've been watching/reading, I've watched 5 days worth of anime and read about a 1000 chapters of manga. But as for LNs, I'm glad I have a source of entertainment that is just reading again. I used to be an avid reader in middle school, and according to the book tracking we did back then I read hundreds of actual books in a school year. I used to always have a book (or two) in my backpack and all times. But as I got into high school, well, there was a lot more work and a lot less free time, but I also had my phone, so any tidbits of time tended to get lost there instead. So, all throughout high school and up through the spring semester last year, I basically only read books that were required for class - so only like 3 or 4 books a year. But just in the past half year, I've read 17 volumes of novels, so that's like 3400 pages? Not bad.
It was also quite a packed year for my programming projects. Around this time last year, I started the neuro sama recreation project, and it's been much more successful than I could have imagined. Obviously, the project works and has expanded in terms of functionality, but it's also been noticed by a lot of people on the internet! My first project to do so. It's sitting at over 350 stars on GitHub as I write this! I hope other people have had as much fun as I had making it. Apparently, it also got high enough on the google rankings so that the real Neuro sama found it and talked about it while on stream! Just a few days ago on the day after Christmas on the subathon she said my name out loud unprompted. How amazing. I've also made a streamdeck plugin for th-ch/youtube-music, which was fun. I'm also working on a toy scale cloud computing project, which is proving to be a great way to learn Go. And of course, I've also been a part of making Nebula, a small little twitter clone with some friends of mine. A lot happend and a lot of code got written!
Last topic is drawing I guess. Learning to draw has kind of been on the back burner for the past few years, kinda sitting there, but this year I wanted to get back into it a little more. My biggest issue is the workload from school. Juuust can't really get around it. My creative juices and motivation is at its highest when it's nice and sunny outside and bright in my room, but when I'm done with classes and work it's always pretty dark outside and tired inside. But, with the purchase of some artbooks while I was in Seattle, I've been able to get a lot of inspiration and absorb a lot of art looking through it and drawing from it. Hopefully, I'll be able to figure something out to get some more meaningful practice sessions in this year. We'll see.
So. It's time to start a brand new year, and say hello to the second half of the 2020's. Here's to hoping it's better than the first half.