Change

There is also a spoken version of this available here or here.

Hello from the last day of 2016! I've been doing this blog thing for three whole years now. In terms of blog, this year was fairly standard. I am now at 106 posts (not including this one). I actually stuck to writing a blog post about once a month. It's a good way of making note of how time passes. Keeping some sort of record of what's stayed the same and what's changed. I made another mix, the kid who eats poptarts made another appearance, my mom still asks me if I have a girlfriend, I actually ended up on the core organizing team for HackBeanpot, and I'm still just as confused as ever.

I think I'm going to remember this year. This year kicked me on my ass early on and then kept kicking till its mom said dinner was ready. But after the kicking stopped, I got up, brushed myself off, and somehow found the motivation to keep going. In some sort of fucked up way I'm a little thankful for all the experiences I had this year. I think I've changed for the better. I hope I've changed for the better.

And this year wasn't all bad of course. I have a job for when I graduate which is super cool. After a bunch of talk about moving to the west coast and California I'm moving to Seattle which I'm pretty excited about. I found that I enjoy rock climbing. I'm not very good at it and I haven't been in a few months but I will definitely get back into it when I can. I also did a lot of small projects, I contributed to Visual Studio Code with extensions and pull requests, and I finally built a LED light box.

I also met someone, I was getting tired of my relationship with League of Legends so I started a thing with Overwatch. I've noticed that I switch games every couple of years. I was super into Minecraft in high school. Then I had a brief stint with Super Monday Night Combat. I still miss that game. Then I met League. League was fun for years and then it just lost it's spark, as well as solo queue, so I made the switch to Overwatch this year. I'm sure we'll have plenty of good times together till I find another game. I also found a new favorite game of mine, Hyper Light Drifter. As soon as I started playing it I fell in love, the art is amazing, the controls are tight, it's challenging but rewarding. It's now in my top 4 games along with Mirror's Edge (the original, Catalyst also came out this year but it never really charmed me as much as the original), Cave Story, and Portal 1.

But like, I'm a computer science game design major and I still like playing games but I didn't get a job at a games studio. I'm not planning on working in games for at least a few years, if I ever do. It's one of the many things I learned this year. Some things just don't work out and if they do it usually isn't as you expected. From my co-op (it was super stressful), to my relationships (what relationships), to the election (fuck Donald Trump), to my new job (I didn't expect to accept a job at Amazon), to the box (it broke less than 24 hours after I finished it), to even Poptart Kid. I'm sorry but he isn't coming back next year.

From numerous celebrity deaths to the most memorable US presidential election in recent history (because it's the most recent 😛) the popular narrative is that this year sucked and I'm in camp it did but that doesn't mean next year is going to get any better. All of your childhood heroes are going to die. Trump will fuck up, multiple times. We're all fucked.

Or maybe we aren't. Change happens, it's inevitable. But it's important to make the best of it. The new year marks a new beginning. Even though it's just another day, it's also a new day, a new year, a new chance. I'm just going to try to remember to keep moving forward.

Happy New Year.