January 2023 Bullets

It’s a new year, whoopie. Nothing particularly noteworthy to report.

• I’ve seen more than a few people online saying how glad they are that 2022 is over because it was such a terrible year, which seems like a fairly common end-of-year sentiment since about 2016. I, living my hermit lifestyle apart from the concerns of most of society, can’t relate. Typically, only what happens inside my house and the video calls for work during the week affect me. As such it was a fairly average year, continuing the trend of good fortune I received on starting a quite good job in 2021. The two biggest changes in my life were the loss of my dog and the addition of a semi-domisticated feral cat to the house census.
• The big Christmas Storm of 2022, which the media delightedly called a “bomb cyclone,” luckily didn’t affect me very much. It only would have if I’d lost my power, which I didn’t. No pipes froze, which was my biggest concern. The worst thing I can complain about is that the “emergency heat” was on a lot, and the house was moderately more chilly than usual, which doesn’t seem like something that’s worth complaining about. I didn’t have to leave the house at any point during the crisis. (The coldest it got overnight was 10F, which it turns out it wasn’t anywhere near the record December low of 1F for my area. In fact, I actually remember going out for Christmas services in 1983 with the family in temperatures near 1F.)
• In the continuing adventures of watching all old UK panel shows that were ever made, I moved from Taskmaster to Would I Lie To You? Then I found an entertaining BBC “travelogue” series on Amazon Prime called The World’s Most Dangerous Roads, which led me to finally start into the catalog of Michael Palin travel documentaries, beginning with Around the World in Eighty Days with Michael Palin, which is perfect because I just finished the Jules Verne book of the same name.
• I wish I was the sort of person who could travel without a constant dread and terror about being away from my safe and familiar home, because it would be fun to make travel diaries like Palin’s. There’s a total solar eclipse coming to the U.S. again in 2024, which, having had a taste of the experience in 2017, I’d like to go see*, since it’s probably the last one in the U.S. in my lifetime, but it would require me to travel a few states away to get into the path of totality. Alas, it seems impossibly daunting, especially by myself.
• I had made a daily schedule for myself to do various hobbies every day of the week, but I’ve successfully avoided doing that while staring passively at UK television in a stupor, waiting for the accursed winter to end so normal life can return. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed this but it’s far easier in life to vapidly consume others’ stuff than to create your own stuff, especially in the depths of a winter of constant exhaustion from moderate seasonal affective disorder.
• 2022 was a fairly bad year for gaming. There were very few good new game releases. My Steam Reply 2022 is fairly dull and not at all surprising. Except it doesn’t include:
• In an unexpected burst of gaming enthusiasm, in the last week of the year I finally finished my game of Lords of the Fallen, a game from 2014 which I started in 2016 and restarted in 2019.
• I’m trying to figure out what to do with my YouTube channel in 2023. I feel like Elden Ring was the pinnacle of what I can possibly achieve with a game video series and it’s a good time to retire, but I also feel like the process of continually improving game videos has beneficial side effects. The ability to make a decent video with decent sound quality is an increasingly useful skillset in an increasingly remote, media-focused world. But I’d like to try something different. Just not sure what.
• Notable music listened to recently is the lengthy Nier: Automata soundtrack, which is one of the best game music soundtracks I’m aware of. (And it’s pretty good even apart from the world of game music.)

*

I recorded a video during the eclipse to remind my future self to go to the path of totality in 2024 :)

— Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) August 23, 2017