2013

Work

It's been hard to get going each day waking up at five in the morning, constantly feeling terrible and not getting quality sleep, as well as working over 40 hours per week (typically 50 hours, 7 AM to 5 PM each weekday), and coming in a few weekends here and there this year. I never recover as much over the weekends and I've gone stretches where I'm just out of my element emotionally.

Despite getting some assistance from hiring an intern and transitioning some of my workload to another employee, the work never ceases to slow down at all. I have noticed that my group of project managers are winning and working on more projects at once this year, which has caused me to feel constantly behind on maintaining what I need to do for them. It also doesn't help that the work isn't as mind-engaging as it once was, which is making it tougher for me to get through my constant workload.

Bombardment from All Sides: Co-Workers, Supervisors, Vendors, Clients

Family

I'm constantly concerned with my parent's business and future. Their business hasn't recovered since the big economic depression from 2008. I've been constantly giving my parents money in their most pressing times to help them pay their vendors for business to continue running, but the business continues to run in the red. It's distressing to hear my dad constantly saying that business is extremely slow and bugging me for money here and there. I'm not sure if they have much going if they decide to retire from the business, with the only thing that have stored is social security. (Unless they have some other retirement fund somewhere that they haven't told me, but I worry that's still not enough to support them.)

My brother's been acting weird since he was laid off from work two months ago. He's starting to creep me out a bit with her odd behavior. Before then, he seemed to be pretty happy and I was grateful for him in dragging me out to various events this year, especially to Otakon. He did have a job interview a few days ago and I hope he's going in hard on his job search, though he is also contemplating of going back to school.

Personal

It hasn't been TERRIBLE, but I've been feeling pretty rough this year. Mostly feeling depressed in a spurt of days from the stress of work and other things. I will look to recover as much as possible over my Christmas/New Years break. (I had accumulated over 250 hours of vacation time... >_<)

It's been hard for me to stay even-keel, to keep telling myself that whatever negative thoughts I conjure up is stupid and I need to keep going not only for others, but for myself.

I was doing okay with eating and exercise over the spring and summer, but fell off pretty hard once fall came around. Ugh.

Gaming

Despite working a ton and not exactly in the best of emotions, I managed to complete 27 games at this point. Especially the 3DS JRPGs. I mostly played on the 3DS and PS3 this year, rarely played on the 360. I recently purchased a Wii U and Vita.

I plan to publish my GOTY 2013 list on 30 December, as I hope to finish a few more games.

Games I hope to complete and evaluate before year end: The Last of Us; Super Mario 3D World; Tearaway.

Games that I feel are locks in my Top 10: Etrian Odyssey IV; Fire Emblem: Awakening; Puppeteer; Rayman Legends; Shin Megami Tensei IV.

Music

I created a Youtube music playlist that represents my constant feelings of frustration this year. Feel free to listen to it on the link.

Personal Favorite 2013 Albums

• Baths - Obsidian
• Blood Ceremony - The Eldritch Dark
• Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest
• Chelsea Wolfe - Pain is Beauty
• David Lang - Death Speaks
• Deafheaven - Sunbather
• Eluvium - Nightmare Ending
• Friendzone - DX
• Fuck Buttons - Slow Focus
• Grant Hart - The Argument
• Julia Brown - To Be Close to You
• Julia Holter - Loud City Song
• Julianna Barwick - Nepenthe
• Majical Cloudz - Impersonator
• My Bloody Valentine - mbv
• Oneothtrix Point Never - R Plus Seven
• Parquet Courts - Light Up Gold
• Polvo - Siberia
• Queens of the Stone Age - ...Like Clockwork
• Run the Jewels - Run the Jewels
• Savages - Silence Yourself
• Sigur Ros - Kveikur
• Smith Westerns - Soft Will
• Yo La Tengo - Fade

2014

Personal

I'll have to hammer in my head to do more job searching. I appreciate what my current employer is doing and I have been awarded with good reviews, salary raises, and bonus checks, but the item that the workload isn't as engaging as it once was along with the firm's aggressive pace is not doing it for me anymore.

I'll also have to get back into getting better shape, more walking and less eating. Maybe buy some small weights?

The biggest goal is to not get frustrated easily, especially over items that do not seem it's worth getting so worked up over, which includes gaming. Of course, easier said than done.

Gaming

The biggest item that I want to accomplish in 2014 is to really enjoy my time playing games. I made the same resolution last year and at times, playing games was really refreshing and enjoyable. However, at other times, I was just pushing through just for the sake of it. If the game has some serious flaws that prevent the game from being truly enjoyable, then folks have the right to be less than thrilled about it. There are numerous times where I realize that the game I'm playing is very good, but I'm not in the right state of mind to really enjoy the game I'm playing.

The genre that kind of screws my mindset a lot are fighting games. I know deep down that I'm not going to be a godlike player like the pro fighting game players, and my time at work and my passion for other games limits my time from "hitting the lab" in these games where I can hone in on my skills, but I still get salty over for not being able to pose much of a challenge against whoever I'm fighting against. I wish I had the big enthusiasm the folks in both chat rooms I hang out in with whatever fighting games they're interested in. I just want to have the same mindset for all games, I'm playing this for fun. Just give me a few (like two) combo strings, a few line items on what I should do with my main character, brawl, and smile after getting beaten and bruised all over.

There isn't too many games early in 2014 that I'm interested in, so I'll do my best to use Q1 2014 to knock out some of my insane gaming backlog. After that, it's whatever.

I wouldn't be surprised if I got myself a PS4 in 2014.

Other Items

I'm debating on opening a WordPress (or something similar) to post random stuff, as I do have a lot of thoughts flow through my head and this would be a nice avenue to spill them out to. I used to do a lot of free-writing in high school and in college as a nice hobby and had the itch to return to that recently.

Drawing too.

Though I'm awful in fighting games, I'm still interested in competing in a fighting game tournament, preferably a local one since I feel like I'll get too nervous and overwhelmed in a major. We'll see.

I wouldn't mind going to Otakon again.

And to reiterate again... to not get so worked up and enjoy things more.

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Thanks for reading.