JC Cawley

Reflecting on 2018

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by

J.C. Cawley
in

Another year-long chunk of my life has changed. It’s not “over” and it hasn’t gone anywhere. It simply moved from my future to my past. It’ll stay there for a while, where I’ll still make use of it from time to time. Anyway, 2018 was the first year that I actually made goals, so it’s time for some reflection.

Fitness

My first goal was to start taking more deliberate care of my aging human body. It’s a frail and complicated machine. Celsius Game Studios made this great observation on Twitter:

I wasn’t in awful shape to begin with, and I don’t like reactive “diets” so I resolved to make small, easy adjustments and stick with them for the whole year to see where they would lead me.

I cut out alcohol entirely. I was never a big drinker—I would have a beer with friends every once in a while—so it was easy to ditch it. I’m sure this had a minimal effect, but like most health-related changes, my primary aim was to effect psychological momentum.

It would have been harder to quit drinking sugary soda beverages cold turkey, so I switched from my usual full-sugar mainstays to gross-tasting diet alternatives. (Common artificial sweeteners like aspartame aren’t any worse for you than normal sugar, despite what fearmongering natural health quacks would have you believe.) The point of this shift was to enjoy the habit less and less over time, making it easier to quit eventually… unless someone manages to find me a case of the Soda-Pop Holy Grail:

I cut back on sugar and snacks in general. I still eat chips and fries from time to time. Hell, I’m drinking chocolate milk right now. It’s winter holiday! But I don’t eat a whole cake at work every Thursday morning.

Finally, I set a realistic training plan and stuck with it all year. This doesn’t mean I beat myself up if I didn’t do deadlifts every single Thursday. I had a lot of flexibility. The key was to stay active and try to stick to a consistent pattern in an effort to start entrenching good habits. (I had help from knowledgeable friends. Thanks Rob.)

I know weight and body fat are unreliable metrics, and they’re not the be-all and end-all of physical health. I chose to track them as a way to develop body awareness, build confidence in progress, and create accountability. Everybody’s bodies and goals are different. So how did I do? On 1 January, 2018, I weighed 189 pounds with an approximate body fat percentage of 22%, on the higher end of average. Right now, I’m 165 pounds and slightly under 17% body fat.

Homework

In the spring, I embarked on the Journey of a Deck (click here to see the gallery). Most of my back deck blew down in the Great Christmas Hurricane of 2017, so I improved the design and my parents visited to help me build it.

In the summer, I engaged in a War on Dandelions. I don’t actually dislike dandelions, and I’m not invested in keeping up with unrealistic standards of neighbourly beauty or anything competitive like that, so this was an excuse to spend time being productive outdoors. Landscaping.

I beefed up Twilight Cinemas by building and painting wall-to-wall shelves up to my ceiling. I took a week of vacation to do this, but it finally allowed me to unpack all my books, movies, and games. I also mounted my TV on the wall and installed some LED strips, clearing out space at the front of the room and creating a more cinematic experience. When’s the next movie night?

Consumption

I like to keep track of the media I consume. It gives me an excuse to make detailed spreadsheets, which is one of my life’s burning passions. It also helps me avoid accidentally watching Expendables 2 a second time without realizing it.

Video Games

I played a lot of video games in 2018, but here are the ones I finished:

  • Universal Paperclips (PC, 2017)
  • Picross e8 (3DS, 2018)
  • Batman: The Telltale Series Season 1 (PS4, 2016)
  • Celeste Classic (PICO-8, 2016)
  • Monster Hunter: World (PS4, 2018)
  • Minit (PS4, 2018)
  • God of War (PS4, 2018)
  • WarioWare Gold (3DS, 2018)
  • Holedown (Mobile, 2018)
  • Donut County (PS4, 2018)
  • Bloodborne (PS4, 2015)
  • Picross S2 (Switch, 2018)
  • Mega Man 4 (NES, 1992)
  • Pizza Titan Ultra (PS4, 2018)
  • Diablo III: Reaper of Souls (PS4, 2014)
  • Hexologic (Mobile, 2018)
  • Into the Breach (Switch, 2018)

That’s mostly new games, which is unusual for me. I finally got around to playing Bloodborne (and getting the platinum trophy)—about time, for a Dark Souls fanatic. I also made Monster Hunter: World my “hangout with friends” game for a while, although it failed to fill the hole left by Bungie burning Destiny to the ground.

Screen & Stage

I don’t want to list everything I watched because that would be just wild. How about this instead?

  • 24 stand-up comedy specials
  • 17 Netflix movies
  • 16 movies in cinema
  • 15 movies on home media
  • 9 Netflix TV series
  • 7 seasons of TV on home media

That’s a lot of tube hours. I filled a “classic” gap by watching Lawrence of Arabia (1962) for the first time. My favourite movie this year was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which will win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

Books

I didn’t get through as many books as I planned (or as many as I read in 2017), partly because the last few months of the year were completely consumed by four career development courses.

  • Gai-Jin (James Clavell, 1993)
  • Selected Poems (Alden Nowlan, 1996)
  • Ablutions (Patrick deWitt, 2009)
  • The Subtle Knife (Philip Pullman, 1997)
  • Dune (Frank Herbert, 1965)
  • A Hero Born: Volume I of the Condor Heroes (Jin Yong, 2018 translation)
  • The Fifth Season (N. K. Jemisin, 2015)
  • The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (Ursula Le Guin, 1974)
  • The Wealth of Virtual Nations: Videogame Currencies (Adam Crowley, 2017)
  • The Rez Sisters (Tomson Highway, 1986)
  • A Game of Thrones (George R. R. Martin, 1996)
  • Spelunky (Derek Yu, 2016)
  • The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu, 2008)

The oldest book was Dune, which I finally conquered after putting up with it glaring at me from my shelf for years. The newest book I read was my UNB classmate Adam Crowley’s The Wealth of Virtual Nations. Great work, Adam!

Production

I’ve never really set concrete goals around my creative output. I just do stuff sometimes.

This year I wanted to commit to publishing at least twelve articles on This Old Neon (which is no small feat for a community endeavour driven by volunteers navigating their own busy schedules). I’m happy to say I was able to reach that goal, and I’m ridiculously proud of my team of editors and contributors.

As a little side-benefit to operating This Old Neon, I had the privilege to be invited to participate in the Independent Games Festival as a judge. I played and rated a number of interesting games that I wouldn’t have normally had the opportunity to enjoy, so that was a lot of fun, and I look forward to seeing the results in March 2019.

In October, I started compiling a list of my sixty favourite video game tunes as a silly structured content experiment for Twitter using the hashtag #KongsTdayTunes. I post a new song each Tuesday and Thursday (I also include a brief discussion on this very site) in a little project that will reach its conclusion in April 2019.

Finally, launching and sustaining Plot Threads, a podcast I co-host with Tony Lantz, has been another of 2018’s high points. It’s a nice way to give shape and structure to casual conversations between friends, which can be surprisingly difficult after you become an old man. We churned out thirteen shows this year, which is a solid episode-per-month pace plus some additional Academy Awards coverage.

Looking at 2019

The next year is a thing that’s going to happen (for most of us), so I’ll have some new goals to discuss here soon. This reflection has helped me realize just how busy and productive I’ve been. Even the goals I didn’t quite manage to meet helped me organize and enjoy my time, and they give a good picture of how my energy and priorities were directed throughout the year. I’m looking forward to keeping my momentum going and seeing what else I can accomplish.

If you want to talk about any of the things I did this year—the books I read, games I played, junk I wrote, or stuff I built—I’d love to hear from you.