HELLO! I WRI... I... I MAKE...

BYE BYE


I'm not too sure how to feel about 2022, now that it's almost over.

To be honest, I was in a pretty bad place in 2021, and this honestly carried over for a chunk of this year as well. I wasn't socializing, I wasn't particularly successful at my day job, and while I was starting to lay down the groundwork for Mirama there really wasn't much momentum either. I was burnt out, on top of other worries that I won't get into on a public forum. And while I'm better now, it's hard to fully disconnect from the feeling of having wasted an all-important year of my life.

But enough about 2021. I'm supposed to talk about this year, right?


I said at the start that I'm not sure how I feel about it. Truth be told, it's been a step in the right direction, it's felt like my life has been moving again. I've now been a team lead at my day job for a year. Management is... not where I expected to end up (nor is it necessarily where my skills lie, I'm an introvert through and through), but it's been a change of pace that helped get me out of a rut at least.

On a quick tangent regarding work, the tech industry is really not in a good place, is it? That's the source of some of my frustrations -- it's disheartening to see so much of my field of work abandoning acting in the interest of people. Social media has been bad for a while now, but the rise of blockchain nonsense and AI abuse has not been fun to see either. And even if my day job doesn't rely on the blockchain, its influence is inescapable. It's the topic of coffee chat conversations, it's mentioned during company conferences, and I often see people trying to use hackathons to integrate them in some fashion. It's disheartening.

But I digress, back to the positives. I've met wonderful people this year. Inspiring people, kind people, ones that I legitimately look up to. I'm truly thankful for that.

I got to make some good progress on Mirama too! Not as much as I thought I'd be able to this summer, but isn't that just game development? Now I'm only one room away from having a chapter 1 that's playable from start to finish, so I'm pretty proud of what I've done! As my mood improved, it's gotten me to add more humor into the game too. Funny how these things work!

Inspecting the fridge in Mirama's Hub. The dialogue says "There's a grocery list on here. Let's see... 'Corn dogs, Ketchup, Toothpaste, corn dogs, peanut butter, corn dogs, wine, corn dogs, corn dogs'. The fridge is, unsurprisingly, full of corn dogs."

I got much better at Touhou! Only started playing this series last year, and I got my first clear of an extra mode in May with Unconnected Marketeers. The boss' music is an absolute banger, by the way. Worth a listen.

Clearing the Unconnected Marketeers extra stage! I also pulled it off with Reimu afterward, but that one had an extra three lives from Mokou's card so it was less impressive.

Wait. Somehow we ended up talking about games again. My bad.

While this year's provincial elections were, uh, frankly depressing, there was a silver lining to these ones. To motivate friends and family to vote for the progressive party this time around, I made an edit of an incredibly photogenic moment of mine for every day of the campaign on my Facebook. I even got a photo with one of the co-leaders of the party in a moment that felt pretty magical! While the center-right party ended up with a sadly comfortable majority I'm happy to have at least one reason to look fondly at this point in time, in the end.

A photo of me and Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the latter holding a very photogenic moment from my trip to Japan

Where does the year leave me? Still not in an ideal place, as I mentioned at the start. I can't find it in me to focus as I could pre-pandemic. I'm still, uh, not always in the best headspace. But things are getting better. If I can keep at it, maybe learn to draw a little and spend less time idling on YouTube... I don't see why next year couldn't be a good one!

And that's all I got, I guess! Hope you all have a great 2023! :host-joy:


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