2024

Phew, made it to the end of the year! Just gotta do keep doing that. I went through my previous posts from the year. Completely forgotten what I’ve written about, but catching up was (un)fortunately easy because I posted way less than I thought. I didn’t quite do super well on the “writing” portion of my “paint, read, write more” goal. But I do feel I am still progressing.

Walks

S and I moved north of Tokyo. Our usual hiking spot in west Tokyo is now outside of the spontaneous weekend hike travel distance, though we’re thinking we might plan for such a weekend in the future. When the weather was in the sweet spot we did a few hikes around the neighboring areas. We went even more north to visit friends in Karuizawa and have gone on a few walks with them as well. It turns out I might be getting older . For exercise I would do morning runs around the park. But the summer was pretty rough even in the early morning, I was not having a good time with the heat. When we moved it was a perfect time to reset my routine. Started at a cheap gym. Making the morning exercises at least partially air conditioned. They have a leg press machine that I am hoping by doing that regularly will help the occasional hike not kill my knees. We tend to shoot for 10km hikes, but the verticality of the hikes are pretty ambiguous until after we attempt them.

Books

I feel like I did a bit of reading this year. Though as always very slowly. Read through Piranesi, Things Become Other Things, The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, Moonbound, Lord Of The Rings (whole thing!), Yellowface, Going Postal, Beautiful Days. And now I am going through another Le Guin book: The Dispossessed. Lots of good books. I feel like I am learning more about what books I actually enjoy or not. Getting more comfortable with just tossing books that I am struggling to get through. Too many good books to get stuck on ones that are not working for me. Let me know if you have any recommendations, I want to dive into more Terry Pratchett.

Writing

I feel like I slumped a bit in writing this year. I don’t know if it was work draining me, or if it’s because I just didn’t keep a good routine around it. Similarly for blogging. I didn’t do 750 words quite so much this year. I intentally was focused on hand written for a while. Thats a bit different style of writing and output. I kinda miss doing more blogs. Doing 750 words in the past was almost a trick for me to be able to generate blog posts for myself. It gets me writing a lot and then find one segment that’s interesting and maybe expand it. I’ll see about doing something different next year.

I talk about 750 words a lot, I recommend the practice even if you don’t use the website. The creator, Buster, recently quit his job at Medium and is working to make 750 words something he can do full time. I got grandfathered into a free lifetime account on the website, but if you’re interested in supporting a small business I recommend checking it out.

Painting

I feel like painting is one area I did the least. I need to figure out a better routine for painting specifically, but I have been drawing lately. Pencil sketching. Occasionally, I get a decent portrait out of it. I do feel like I have a hard time of using sketching/painting as a thing to relax with oddly. I want to make something nice. I heard someone talk about how this is one of the reasons that learning art as an adult can be tough. When you’re a child you don’t have many points of comparison to be dissatisfied. As a child, your gap of skill and taste is not so large. You don’t have a developed taste. Your skill is barely above holding a pencil, but it doesn’t matter. It’s fun. That gap is much larger as an adult. You’re more likely to have a have developed a taste of “I like pictures that look like this” and your skill is barely above holding a pencil. Finding that childlike wonder to just be happy with a crappy drawing is a bit tough some days.

Someone online mentioned drawing is like gatcha vending machines. And I definitely feel that in my bones. I am continuing to practice and sometimes it works out. Gatcha are those are the little machines that have the various toys in them. In the US, those machines and prizes are usually pretty simple. Gumballs or bouncyballs (don’t want to mistake those), or a tiny toy. In Japan gatcha is it’s own little world. The quality of the items can be kind of crazy. It’s such a huge thing here. Interestingly, don’t think I’ve seen candy out of those here.

Coding

I wanted to do not as much coding this year, but I still found some weekends where I mentally got sucked into it. The current project is a small side scroller game. Originally, I wanted to do a Megaman, but slowly reducing it to very basics. I am more leaning towards Kirby, Doki Doki Mario. I am still exploring. But I decided that I want to do the game largely from scratch. Meaning no game engine to do this. There’s something about the hand crafting that I find enjoyable. I probably would have made a lot more progress if I had used a game engine. But I am learning a lot. Zig is a fascinating programming language that challenges how I think about writing programs. My current goal is a single stage and a single boss. Then see how I feel about either continuing or trying another project. Too many project ideas.

Hope you have a lovely end of your year. Now I am off to a spa day with my beautiful wife.

–