Hindsight is 20/23 – On this past year, and my goals and resolutions for 2024

So, this year passed by rather quickly. Jeez, it’s nearly 2024. Currently, at the time of writing, it’s 3:22 PM and I’m waiting for my parents to finish getting ready. We’re spending New Year’s at my uncle’s place, so I’m really excited to spend some good quality time with everyone.

2023 is over. A lot has happened and I’m honestly quite unsure where to begin… but also, people tend to not read these posts as much, so I’ll try to be a bit more brief this year.

This year…

• I’ve managed to write 112 posts (including this one),
• I’ve managed to write a total of 143.349 words,
• we managed to hit nearly 122k all-time views,
• we just barely reached 100k page visitors,
• …and my MrBeast post got by far the most views with around 11k views (which is incredible and a little sad).

Aside from those blogging milestones, I also ended up…

• improving (in my opinion) my writing style,
• cutting down on my gaming time,
• quitting nicotine for nearly five months,
• getting into better sleep and food habits,
• moving,
• getting closer to my bachelor’s degree.

So, life was turbulent. I was pretty busy. I had a great time going to Kosovo for the first time in five years, I moved apartments, I made some great progress in my studies, I quit nicotine for the longest time in five years, and overall, I think I’ve had a much healthier year.

Hence, I wanna try and continue this. I wanna cut down on the time I spent in front of screens, I wanna read more, do more stuff creatively, and keep up good sleep and food habits. I also want to reduce the amount I smoke per day, and quit (hopefully for good) when I’m in a better place.

If everything goes well with this semester’s exams and if I manage to get into all of my classes next semester and if I finish up those exams, too, I should be able to tackle my bachelor’s thesis in late summer or early Winter… and then do my three or so months abroad afterwards… but that’s a lot of “ifs” in a sentence, and hence, I’ll keep expectations low for now and just do my best.

At the moment, I found my pace and while I do want to finish asap, I also don’t want to kill myself over it.

Hence, my resolutions are to make more progress, get done hopefully, and prioritize university over other stuff. I want to be healthier, both physically and mentally. I want to call my relatives even more often… and I want to still do the whole blogging and streaming thing but I wanna severely cut down on it to make some time for reading books again. It’s been a while since I finished a new one, after all.

Aside from that, I’ve had this big plan of a year-long project of talking about toxicity in the gaming community but I only managed to write a post or two on that topic which is a bit of a shame but with the move and everything, understandable, I think. Hence, I’ll take that project into the next year and do my best, then!

For a while now, I’ve also been getting back into this dream of mine to develop a game. I’ve spent some time now learning GMS Code and I’m thinking about possibly switching over to GDScript… but I’m also being held accountable by my community on my Discord server, so that’s pretty great. At the moment, I’m still deciding on the perspective and stuff, and I’m still figuring out how to do basic actions like moving and whatnot.

Hence, look forward to dev updates from time to time? Also more reviews and interviews and the like?

Oh, and last but not least, I haven’t been able to read blog posts in ages, so a super important goal of mine will be to do exactly that: Read other folks’ posts more frequently!

I’m optimistic about this upcoming year. I frankly can’t wait for 2024 to hit me with all the crap that the past few years have typically hit me with!