Oh geez, another year went by, didn’t it? Time keeps picking up steam, and I can’t stop thinking about dying. Is 30 too early for a mid-life crisis?

I can’t shake this fear that it’s too late for me to become who I want to be. I worry that comfort and age are unstoppable, erosive forces like wind and glaciers, only instead of carving canyons they just steadily sand me down into the least interesting person on earth. When I’m awake in bed after 11:30pm, I get this feeling like I’m going translucent, like every hour that I spend watching TV is siphoning a little bit more of my soul into outer space until one day all that’ll be left walking around down here is a husk with a day job whose main thing is that he has a dog.

But do I know who I’d rather be? Of course not. Could I describe my ideal self with words more specific than cool or accomplished or feels good? Nah. There’s nothing to this that’s concrete except that I feel this way. These fears are just fears, and if I were pushed, I don’t think I’d lend them much credence. But I hope there’s value in airing them out a bit, in looking at them in the daylight and seeing what I can learn from them.

When I set this site up, I wrote that I wanted it to be a way of removing pressure from myself. I wanted it to be my own little imperfect corner of the internet. Already, in less than a year, the site’s gathering dust while I’m spending way too long on this post and worrying about whether it’s going to come together just right or not. Oops! It’s starting to seem like it might take more than a single decision at a single point in time to change my whole life.

An idea I’m increasingly confronted with is self-acceptance, and more specifically my own lack of the same. In the coming year I’d like to try and find a therapist, and also to keep working on letting myself live. I still feel like I need to re-learn how to enjoy things without self-consciousness getting in the way, without watching myself from the outside and stressing about how I look. In this spirit, I’d like to take a look at how I spent the last year and do my best to be honest but not judgmental.

A success

I baked 24 loaves of bread in 2023! Most of them turned out pretty well, and some of them were even delicious. A few bakes were disasters, and in fact the most recent loaf turned out utterly weird for reasons I can’t explain. It’s hard to say how much I’ve learned from the experience—I may need to bake something like 100 loaves before I gain any real fluency in the variables that contribute to the final outcome—but I can honestly say I’m no longer intimidated by the idea of making bread.

And here’s the best part: I don’t care that I still don’t know what I’m doing! I enjoy the process, I (usually) enjoy the results, and that’s all that matters for now.

A failure

I did not make 12 games in 2023—I only made something like 4. It turns out that making a game is very difficult. Here’s an interesting way that games and bread differ: you have to make several versions of a game before it’s finished, but a loaf only gets baked once. It’s incredibly hard to figure out the right level of effort to invest in each stage of a game’s development. Too much and you’re wasting time on the wrong idea; too little and you’re not actually learning anything from your effort. Being good at this process takes a willingness to throw yourself at the same thing multiple times, to toss out a bunch of hard work, and to share something you might be deeply embarrassed by.

Not only am I inexperienced in this design process, but I’m also a bad artist, musically incompetent, and overly concerned about whether I’m implementing something in the best possible way. I don’t know how to start a game without getting overwhelmed with new things that I feel like I have to learn in order to take a first step. The simplicity of a platform like Pico-8 can help keep this under control to some extent, but even Pico-8 has an inbuilt synthesizer that terrifies me and tons of forum threads about complex optimizations that distract me.

I think this is a goal that I should have scoped down even more, to make it remotely approachable. For example, maybe I shouldn’t be making video games until I’m experienced designing tabletop games or social games. Or maybe I should try collaborating with someone on my next game (though that comes with its own set of fears and challenges).

Some art I liked

Killers of the Flower Moon really got under my skin in a way few other movies did this year. It’s cold and heartbreaking, and looks deep inside the lies we tell ourselves and each other to point out the awareness we all lack about who we actually are. It also has, and this is maybe the best part, an absolutely surgical deployment of Jesse Plemons in its final act.

Tears of the Kingdom also got under my skin, but I’m less convinced that’s a good thing. It’s undoubtedly my game of the year, even if only by hours played, and it contains such an abundance of surprising content and creative gameplay that I’m just astounded it exists. To me, its best moments are a testament to the value of human care and craftsmanship. At the same time, though, the game is also a reminder that more isn’t always better. I think it has just a bit too many systems, too many resource-gathering loops, and too much fluff to get unqualified praise from me. I adored playing this game, but I also resent it for not respecting my time.

Some more shout-outs: Bottoms gives me hope for the future of 90 minute comedies; The Handmaiden floored me with its structure and performances; Reservations Dogs and Derry Girls both made me cry multiple times; the final episode of Midnight Gospel is nothing short of stunning; Foundation was fun and interesting in a way I needed it to be, especially in a year without Dune: Part 2; Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze is exceptionally fun, with a soundtrack guaranteed to make you boogie; Windosill is a brilliantly wordless toy, a pure little work of art endemic to the touchscreen age; Dark Souls somehow outflanks its own reputation; The Ministry for the Future gave me hope and also a little bit of depression; The Sellout made me laugh and wince and miss LA and hate LA; Manifest is one of the the stupidest things I’ve ever watched, and it’s perfect.

Some new interests

This year I began to really embrace and enjoy the craft of programming. Not just engineering, which I do for my job, but the more hands-on act of planning, writing, and organizing computer code. I began to pay closer attention to the tools I use every day, adopting vim keybindings in my editor at the start of the year and recently adopting Neovim for more day-to-day editing. I’m spending more time in my terminal (kitty, because it’s responsive), understanding my git commands a little better, and taking more of an interest in how software really works.

I spent some time outside of work writing C (just a few Advent of Code problems), Rust (a little graphics programming), and recently Zig (just the basics). For now at least, I’m enjoying getting a little closer to the CPU and reminding myself how capable computers really are if you’re thoughtful about the instructions you give them. I’d like to be someone who can solve real computing problems, not just build apps that entice VCs, and I think investing in these skills will help. I’m tempted to try and write something like a database or a game engine or even a programming language from scratch, just for the sake of learning how little I still understand.

Oh, yeah, and I moved to Seattle a month ago. Time to find out if LA was really the reason I couldn’t make any new friends…

What’s ahead

Beats me! I’m not ready to set any specific goals yet. I’ll definitely keep programming and baking. I’d like to practice being creative. I want to become increasingly comfortable being bad at things and learning by doing. I hope to write some more prose (maybe even some fiction?), and ideally it won’t all be totally dominated by first-person pronouns like this has been. I’ll probably try to host some more software on my home network. I might even get on a skateboard and see what happens.