New year :D

Happy (slightly late) new year everyone! Hopefully 2025 will be a good one for all of us (despite and in spite of all that's happening on the geopolitical scale..)! A lot has happened since I last wrote a blogpost here (even if I originally intended to update more frequently, woops <3), so allow me to share in the following paragraphs :)

2024 seemed like a loooong year, but I'm satisfied with how it turned out in the end. I don't actually mind that it felt long either to be honest, because I think it's a sign that I did and experienced a lot of new things this year! I'm grateful for that, for the last thing I want is for my one shot at life to pass me by before I can live it, and I believe it's gonna get harder and harder to experience new things as I get older... but yea. Sentimentality aside: I enjoyed 2024 :)

I was an unemployed for most of the year (after dropping out of my master's degree in January) (why did I even enroll in the first place??), which I'd generally rate as an unpleasant experience (smiles). But it did lead me to a short internship as a web developer for an anime shop in July, which was really fun and I learned a lot! And the shop owners were very kind and so pleased with my work that they gifted me several anime figurines :D

About a month later I happened upon a listing for a job-aimed course for neurodivergent people who want to work in IT, offered by a sort of recruitment company... normally I'm a little hesitant about things aimed specifically at neurodivergent people, as they usually make me feel othered from """normal people""", buuut the months of unemployment had gotten me quite desperate so ignoring my hesitation would be worth it if it could land me a job. And it turned out to be the right move!!! My fellow course-takers were a bunch of sweet guys (and it was just guys... but that was to be expected...!) and I got a lot of practical experience in programming and working with IT :) It also made me realize many ways in which I could've written this website better lol (but I can comeback and improve it later anyway!)

Around the end of November/start of December was when this course truly paid off. One of the teamcoaches pulled me aside and informed me that they had found a company who were interested in my profile! Like for a JOB!!! I skipped my way down to the busstop on my commute home that day :D Fast forward to now, and I'm officially working my first job as an IT consultant doing frontend development!!! I still can't believe my luck :')

(Well. My luck has also been playing tricks on me this year! Both my internship and my job fell into my lap only mere DAYS before my unemployment-benefits-imposed deadlines!) (Lady Luck if you happen to be reading this I'm really grateful and I thank you for your blessings 🙏 Please don't be mad 🙏)

In between all of my job turmoil I got to spend a lot of time on my hobbies and goals for the year! For a little roundup on those:

• I managed to read all the Junji Itou works I could find in English (which there were 21 of!!)
• I read 7 "proper" books NOT including Wizard of Earthsea, which was the only book I included in my goals by name (smiles)
• I watched 14 of the 15 anime movies I had picked out, so I believe I have now seen all major works by Satoshi Kon, Makoto Shinkai and Mamoru Hosoda :) Only movie I didn't get to was Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door, because, as it turns out, it actually takes more time to watch a movie if you also want to rewatch the series it belongs to with your long-distance partner first. Ho well <3

And I was blessed enough to visit and be visited by my sweet girlfriend 5 times(!!!), including having them over for Christmas and New Year's with my family for the first time! I won't get too sappy now, but... I am really thankful for all the time we got to spend together in the last year <3 I hope there'll be lots more in 2025!

This blogpost is already way longer than I thought it'd be, SO to finish out I'll share the goals I've set for myself this year >:) I have tried to keep them slightly more chill this year, since I expect that a lot of my energy and time will go to this fulltime job I have now (smiles)! Emphasis on tried though... I struggled coming up with these and kept tweaking them in the days after New Year's, but I fear they might still be a bit too ambitious... but a year is a long time, so maybe...? No matter what, heres the shareable ones I got:

• Another reading project: I've got a couple of books on my bookshelf I haven't read yet (Wizard of Earthsea...), so I'll see if I can read all of them before the year is out!
• A chiller movie project: My sister and I, since we both love horror movies, discovered last October that if we watched 1 unseen movie from the Friday The 13th franchise each month then we could make it through the whole series in a year! Later we found out the list we were looking at included some documentaries(?) or something, so we were actually only missing 8 movies :) but hey that just means we have some wriggleroom to complete this goal!
• More video games: Last year was a little light on video games if you don't count me playing through the DMC games again so this year I wanna play just a liiil more :) Starting with finishing my poor abandoned Bayonetta 3, and then perhaps I can play the rest of the Metal Gear Solids..! But we shall see. Oh yea and I wanna 100% complete Devil May Cry 5 (this is probably gonna be the hardest goal of the bunch!)
• And the EXCITING one: Bird quest!! This one came from the beautiful mind of my sweetie. I love birds! It'd be cool to see a lot of them! The rules are simple: a bird observed (seen/heard) in person goes on the list if I can confidently identify it. I'll try to get as many as possible, with a guiding goal of having at least 50 birds on my list by the end of the year >:3

It ended up being a considerable selection of goals this time (slightly intimidated)! However, if you're like me, who likes doing these New Year's resolutions because they give direction, then it's important to not get too stressed about potentially failing. It's literally just a game for fun after all :)

Okay wowie that was a lot of blogpost (been writing for 2 hours), I'll shut up now before I write a whole biography :D Thank you for reading and have a lovely day!