I’m sure you’ve read Reflecting on 2018 by now. One of the lessons I learned is that making goals and looking back at what I accomplished helped me appreciate how busy my year was. To keep the stakes high and the momentum going, here are 19 goals of varying shapes and sizes for 2019:

Fitness

• I want to get my body fat down to 15% by the end of 2019. I dropped it from 22% to 17% in 2018, so this will be hard work, but it should be within reach.
• I’d like to cut back on gross-tasting diet soda beverages dramatically—maybe even eliminate them from my diet entirely. Switching from delicious, full-sugar pop in 2018 will hopefully have made this easier.
• I’d also like to cut back on eating mammals. Sorry chickens, I’m still coming for y’all.
• I plan to track additional body metrics more consistently this year. The number on the scale was far less informative than the waistband of my pants, so I’ll take a cue from that and start wrapping a tape measure around myself every once in a while.
• I’ll go to the beach of a hot day and swim in the ocean.

Homework

• I intend to sell or donate a bunch of my stuff (clothing, games, movies, books, furniture, electronics). I’m neither a hoarder nor a minimalist, but I’ve got to keep a good flow going
• I plan to finish cleaning up the last of the basement boxes and use the extra space to set up my miniature gym.
• I’m going to get a comfy new couch! When’s movie night?

Consumption

• Earn 5 platinum trophies in PlayStation games. Which ones? Not sure yet. Monster Hunter: World will probably be one of them. I’d be happy if Spider-Man were one of them as well.
• Beat 3 Nintendo Switch games. Which ones? Not sure yet. Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will probably be two of them.
• Watch Ran and The Godfather Part II. Which ones? Ran and The Godfather Part II. I literally just said that.
• Find a brand new 2019 album that I really like. Polygondwanaland by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and is this the life we really want? by Roger Waters were my two favourite albums of 2017 by a long shot, but I didn’t manage to find something released in 2018 that grabbed me in the same way. I have to make a concerted effort to prevent that from happening in 2019.
• Finish watching Deadwood OR The Wire OR Black Sails OR Band of Brothers. If I watch more than one, that’s great, but I’m only committing to at least one of them.
• Read 18 books. Which ones? Not sure yet, but Patrick deWitt’s French Exit, Peter Watts’s Blindsight, Stephen King’s 11/22/63, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists, Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, N. K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate, and John Patrick Leary’s Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism are all high on the list. Other than that, I’ll be guided by my unpredictable whims!

Production

• Spend less time editing Plot Threads, holy fuck. Maybe the 2019 season is going to be a bit looser and noisier.
• Publish 12 more articles on This Old Neon. If you’re a developer and you’d like us to review your stuff, drop me a line.
• Do an art. Any art. Maybe I’ll draw Baby Savvy again. Maybe I’ll take some photographs again.
• Finish #KongsTdayTunes and replace it with another fun list. Hey, speaking of fun lists…
• Launch the 2019 “BEST GAME EVER!!!” Project at This Old Neon, with new features, user-submitted side-events, and public voting. The “BGE!!!” Project is a gigantic community-driven event where users nominate games they think are the “best” by various metrics (cultural impact, overall quality, personal favourites) and then everyone votes in tournament-style elimination brackets until one game has been crowned as the “BEST GAME EVER!!!” The current reigning champion from the 2015-16 event is Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES, 1988).

These aren’t grand, sweeping “resolutions.” For the most part they’re small, achievable goals that will make me happy throughout the year. Some are ridiculously easy. Some are intentionally vague. I probably won’t complete them all, but that’s alright.

Do you have any big plans for 2019? Little ones? If you have a resolution you don’t want to commit to in public, but you’d like some support to stay accountable, feel free to contact me!

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:

If you frame it correctly you are currently piloting a very small mech made out of flesh.

— Celsius Game Studios (@celsiusgs) December 2, 2018

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.

• Destiny 2: Room to Improve All Over Again (JC Cawley)
• Super Meat Boy (JC Cawley & Clay Anderson)
• 8bitdo SN30 & SF30 Pro (JC Cawley & Erik Krueger)
• Night in the Woods (Jörn Oehlerking & Wendel Shoemaker)
• Designer Diary: War Chest (Trevor Benjamin & David Thompson)
• Robots Don’t Rest (Brian Johnson)
• Donut County (JC Cawley & Ryan McLaren)
• The Messenger (Wendel Shoemaker & Spore)
• Pizza Titan Ultra (JC Cawley & Ryan McLaren)
• Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age (Jörn Oehlerking & Rob Dunphy)
• Neon Notables: Surviving Mars (Ryan McLaren)
• Neon Notables: Return of the Obra Dinn (Jörn Oehlerking)
• Neon Notables: Hexologic (JC Cawley; coming tomorrow)

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.

To help plan my acquisition and direct my reading, I set more goals. First, I hoped to read at least a few books recommended by friends. Second, I wanted women to be well-represented in my list. Third, I planned to dip my toes into some of the popular mid-1990s fantasy revival series (e.g. Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, A Song of Ice and Fire).

This latter goal evolved into a feverish marathon consumption of the entirety of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and Stephen King’s Dark Tower series (thirteen novels in total) between 26 June and 28 October. I alternated after each book to keep my interest sharp and to make the beginning of each new book feel like a return to a comfortable nook. Neither Rowling nor King were at risk of overstaying their welcome, but my strategy prevented Harry Potter’s formulaic structure from feeling repetitive and helped mitigate King’s prolificness.

Outside of that era of single-minded focus, I did manage to read some recommendations. These included The Outsider by Albert Camus (thanks Brian), The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis (thanks Sandra), Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (thanks Tony), and The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (thanks Rob).

Stats

In 2017, I acquired 38 books and read 25. The total regular price of those books would have been $711.13, but I spent $330.27 (savings of 53.6%) thanks in large part to a firesale on paperbacks that saw King’s entire series delivered to my door in one box. I spent an average of $27.52 per month, or $8.69 per book.

The oldest book I read was published in 1942 (The Outsider), and the most recent was published in 2017 (J. R. R. Tolkien’s Beren and Lúthien). If you don’t count repurposed Tolkien manuscripts, the most recent would be Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, published in 2016.

I read eleven books by authors from the UK (most of them Rowling), nine by authors from the USA (most of them King), three from Canada, and one each from France and Ghana. Eight male authors wrote fifteen of the books I read, while four female authors contributed the other ten.

I didn’t keep track of how many pages I read, but I will in 2018.

I’ve moved the other books I acquired but didn’t have time to finish to the “backlog” section of my 2018 reading list. I’m just about to finish one such holdover (James Clavell’s Gai-Jin).

The List

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