2024: The Year of Cringe

2024 was a year. That's really the least complicated way I can put it!

It was frustrating. It was exhausting. It was fun. It was depressing. It was interesting. I don't know if life in general can possibly be smooth enough to ever be able to generalize 365 individual days into the labels of a Good Year or a Bad Year. 2024 was an okay year. I'm gonna talk about it a bit cuz that's what people do.

At the end of 2023, I decided 2024 needed a theme. It was gonna be the year of cringe. I was gonna try to allow myself to be weirder and sometimes try to engage with terrible media. I think it was a fun excuse to go out of my comfort zone and try new things and do stuff I previously felt embarrassed to do.

2024 began with me being off of HRT after only being on it for 3 months because I freaked out a little when I started noticing the first signs of breast growth. Having boobs is something I still don't know how I feel about but I'm not gonna get into that other than to say it took me 2 years to even consider trying HRT despite thinking about it so often because of the whole Boob Thing. I'm still on HRT now, though I haven't technically hit the 1 year mark due to other stuff I'll talk about later.

I also decided early on in the year I was going to keep track of the notable media I engaged with throughout the year and write down my thoughts about it. This was a lot of fun, and it's gonna be something I do going forwards in the future. 

Then at the end of January I took "Year of Cringe" to it's furthest point and suddenly made a fursona and I guess became a furry??? I went to Vancoufur in March, which I talked about here, but to summarize it was a lot of fun and I went through a lot of personal growth getting past some anxiety in a very short period of time. I started feeling a lot more free to express myself and really forge whatever fucking identity I felt like.

In April I did all sorts of weird fun stuff like going to a Hatsune Miku concert and seeing The People's Joker at a theatre. I finally made good friends in Vancouver thanks to a smaller furry meetup, friends I was very excited to hang out with more. And I really would have hung out with them a lot more if May didn't happen.

May. Fuck May. God. I lost my housing fast. I'm not going to go into details of the situation cuz I don't wanna get too personal here (especially when it involves other people) but I made some foolish mistakes with the paperwork and those mistakes were taken advantage of, resulting in me being told I didn't have a place to live by the end of the week. I don't know if you've ever tried looking for housing but less than one week is not enough time to find something. I probably could have done more and maybe found a place to stay, but I was stressed as hell and didn't have time to figure out a plan, because if I couldn't find somewhere by the end of the week I'd be homeless. The most secure plan was my parents helping me move back in to their place.

So, here I am right now no longer in Vancouver, after spending years trying to get out of this dump of a town that was slowly eating away at my soul. You know that part in I Saw The TV Glow where Maddy says she feels like staying in that town is going to kill her if she doesn't leave? Yeah.

So being back here has really sucked. But it's been a good way to save money as Frogsong sales dwindle, I suppose.

But... a lot of really good things have happened since then?

I gave streaming a shot for a few months. I demoed my new game at the Vancouver Game Garden (first time showing off a demo at an in-person event!), which turned out to be a lot busier than I anticipated and a lot of people played my game and left very good feedback. I went through some very surprising stages of personal growth (again, don't want to get too personal). I made some really good and close friends. I went to a friend's wedding. I played a lot of new games. I made by far some of the coolest work I've probably ever done. Like, I'm making a little horror game where you play as a rover on a fucked up alien planet, how cool is that?? I went to Midwest Furfest (which was cool but also probably too big and don't know if I'll be back). I finally announced the new big game I've been working on with my team over the past and the response has been really positive. Based on Steam wishlists alone I have a really good feeling that this game is going to do far better than Frogsong did, which is a huge weight off my shoulders - I might actually be able to keep making games work, especially with the small games I'm releasing between the big ones. I've made a lot of progress with the development of that game. 

The place I'm in still sucks. All the good stuff doesn't really change that. But it was a lot of really good stuff?

At the end of each year I also write a list of goals for the next year. It feels different from the idea of News Years resolutions to me in a way I'm not really sure how to articulate, but it's nice. I accomplished all of my goals for 2024, including a couple I wrote at the end of the list as a joke in a "yeah like THAT will ever happen" kind of way? 

I dunno. This isn't the most cohesive writing I've done but I don't usually go out of my way to make this stuff more cohesive. 2024 was a year that started off strong, quickly turned to absolute shit, and then started to get really strong again in the last few months. I'm really feeling good about this moment. I'm feeling really hopeful about 2025 in general, actually. I like the momentum that's been building.

I think my theme for 2025 is gonna be Year of Cool Shit. I'm gonna make and release a bunch of cool shit. I'm gonna do a bunch of cool shit. I'm gonna watch a bunch of cool movies and play a bunch of cool games. I have a feeling it's gonna be a pretty okay year.