• personal

Year in Review - 2024

Published on December 29th, 2024, 1880 words, 7 minutes to read

This year passed quickly; I blinked a few times, and a few months passed. But regardless of that feeling, a lot of things actually happened this year!

My website

First and foremost, I remade my website — the one you are reading this article on right now! After about five years of attempts that I got discouraged from quite quickly for different reasons (my design idea didn't stick with me, tooling was bad, etc. pp.), I finally managed to release something I refined over the year.

I'm really thankful to Xe Iaso for recommending me Lume. It's been an absolute blast working with it. It really made building a static site fun again. Since starting my site, I have built plugins and recommended it to most of my friends for their site-building endeavors.

I could talk about Lume for days on end, but I'll do it in a separate blog post!

With a working site, I also got back into blogging! I have always enjoyed writing about anything, whether technical or not, which has led to quite a sound output this year. I have written 13 posts this year, including this blog post. Looking a bit at the numbers, my most popular blog post of the year seems to be "Make your own Personal Hub".

I attended a lot of (TYPO3) events

I've been on the road quite a bit this year, too! I've been at all four TYPO3 Community Sprints in Düsseldorf this year, bringing the project forward with fun and productive meetings. Also, two of them had the probably worst train experiences I had this year, with the first sprint featuring the return trip being canceled due to strikes and the second one being the train ride that had longer delays than the ride initially should have taken.

Aside from the sprints, I've also been to the TYPO3 DevDays and the TYPO3camp Munich. Both are must-have events of the year that I always look forward to, enjoying the talks of people and meeting new and old friends again!

At the TYPO3 DevDays, I also gave a talk, "Migrating from jQuery—Core Journey to Vanilla JS", about the journey the TYPO3 Core took to migrate jQuery away to vanilla JavaScript.

This year's biggest TYPO3 event for me was the TYPO3 Surfcamp! I'm so glad I got offered the opportunity to participate in it. Building these projects with people and getting to know and befriend newcomers to the community has been an excellent experience. Meeting everyone at the TYPO3 DevDays also felt like a class reunion, even if we met for the first time a few months prior.

Gaming

Looking at my Steam Replay for this year, I played many games. I'll talk about my favorite games this year now.

Rabbit and Steel

I'm generally not a fan of games that are hard, and by the first look of it and, are based on MMO raid mechanics, I thought that was awaiting me with Rabbit and Steel. I still decided to get it, and I was pleasantly surprised. While challenging, it has a nice learning curve, and especially in co-op, it's been a blast, coordinating the battles and sometimes dying in fun coincidences. Combined with the cute art style and banger soundtrack, this has been one of my favorite games of the year.

Deadlock

After Overwatch (and before that), I never really picked up online shooters too much, but being invited into the closed alpha test (thanks to Steffo), I felt a bit intrigued...and Valve delivered. I'm not a MOBA person (I loathe League of Legends, or rather... its players), but Deadlock has been a lot of fun; I played with a group of friends. We still tended to avoid other (human) players, mainly playing in bot lobbies, but I'm all for that as long as we're having fun.

Satisfactory

I played this way back when Early Access came out on Epic Games Store, but I returned to it after 1.0 was released, together with two friends. I've been enjoying my time with this and managed to build some wild (and sometimes highly inefficient) assembly lines. The game is fun, and the first person elevates the factory-building experience. I also absolutely adore the wacky things like the carts and hypertubes...with which we basically spent hours after unlocking just building cannons to shoot us out of the map boundaries. Also, the ADA dialogues are ridiculous and round up the entire experience.

As some runner-ups, I also enjoyed vivid/stasis, No Man's Sky and Dwarf Fortress this year. They all haven't been released this year, but I returned to them, or they had some new content.

Music

I didn't listen to as much music as I used to. My switch from Spotify to Apple Music was a huge factor in that. Once I reach "a full year" of using Apple Music in February, I'll also write a blog post about that. As a short spoiler, I'm enjoying my experience.

My top artist of the year has been aran. Apple Music even told me I've been in the Top 100 listeners (to be fair, last year's Spotify top %0.05 percent must have been close to that as well).

Anime

I also watched a lot of anime this year. I have a weekly anime hangout with two friends for several hours, which gets me to watch many series I usually wouldn't watch. One of these, solely for its length, is Hunter x Hunter, my favorite this year. I really wanted to watch that one, especially after my friend Meriucchi has swooned over it for quite a while.

Another one of my favorites has been Assassination Classroom. I'm also quite late with that one, as it always has been quite a looker with the weird yellow-headed alien thing front and center. I watched both seasons, and I was absolutely endeared by that story, and it got very close to me.

Artworks

Every year, I commission many artists to draw artwork for my characters. This year, it's (as usual) mainly been my OC Poly. I discovered the artist Simpelplant this year, and I've ended up commissioning them several times; of the above image, the second large image, as well as the stickers at the bottom, have been drawn by them. The third image was also by them, but not a commission...so, fan art?

For next year, I need to commission more artwork for different characters, mainly to build their OC pages.

Here are all the artists:

• yomyompi
• Simpelplant
• soyatu

The Retrospring Shutdown

Another big thing I did this year was announce the shutdown of Retrospring in August. The site will shut down in March 2025, and there will be another six months (until September) to download data exports before everything is gone. The linked blog post includes all the details, so I'm not rehashing those here.

What I will discuss, however, is the fact that after we announced our shutdown, suddenly, all other large players shut down as well. Well, not all of them; Tellonym remains, but ask.fm and CuriousCat have since shut down. I know both platforms were troubled before, so we were not the sole reason, but the timing is just comical.

I have a lot to say about the whole situation, but that's a topic for a blog post next year, probably as some post-mortem once the entire thing is over.

Cortex Implant x Pixel

Ever since my "core" friend group fell apart in 2020, I've struggled quite a bit with social interactions on the internet. I don't want to sulk too much here, but approaching new groups always felt tedious since most other friend groups already felt "done" without more space for new people. At some point, Revengeday (also part of said old friend group) invited me to join a group call in their community, and as that became quite big, it turned into a weekly occurrence that I now enjoy joining. And as I'm not part of the Cortex Implant community (which mostly comes from their fediverse instances), it became a "Cortex Implant x Pixel" thing. Looks like I will also attend a community meeting of CI in 2025 👀

My New Years Resolutions

Yeah, I'm actually doing that. I generally don't like doing these, but I have some things I want to get done next year.

• I want to (and need to) lose some weight. I'm not too overweight, but before it gets any worse, I should reverse what I gained over the past year. Getting into some routine in terms of sports should help with that. I looked into getting my VR setup up again to use Beat Saber to move some more. I may need to employ some habit-tracking here again, though.

• I need to attend more events next year. As you read above, I mainly participated in TYPO3-related events. Due to planning difficulties and not feeling up to it, I skipped out on many events I usually attend. Next year, I want to attend all of those again, like FOSDEM, Revision, Evoke, etc.

So, I think that's been everything. I'm sure I missed something of importance as well, but whatever. I want to thank all my friends who stuck it out with me this year, giving me a great time through gaming, talking, or just being there for me. You know who you are.

To everyone, have a successful start to the new year! Thanks for reading my blog post ramblings. I also enjoy and appreciate all your opinions that I receive on various platforms.