Closing out the year 2023. An overview on some things I did, played and watched this year.

Things I did for 2023

  • Proposed to my girlfriend.
  • Moved from a 2 bedroom apartment to 4 bedroom house.
  • Coding ** Started the year by working with expressing digital logic circuits in Python. ** Explored using Harfbuzz from Python ** Explored the RTMP protocol - verdict was the idea was not worth perusing as using Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) to record and stream a window seems to be way better option for my cases. ** Finally revisited converting Open Street Map data to raster tiles. ** Worked on some world-building ideas for a game I had. Hopefully in the new year I can get to writing up about various parts of that. I don’t expect to complete the game itself let alone get a beta out for it.
  • Went boulding a couple of times this year except the closest gym is closing in January 2024 which is a shame as I was thinking of getting a membership.

Games

Towards the end of the year I stopped my Xbox Live Gold subscription after about 8 years, as at least for the past 2 maybe 3 I wasn’t making good use of it and the Games with Gold were not worth it.

  • Xbox Games Pass
    • Payday 3 - This was the game that triggered my purchase of the Games Pass as friends wanted to play it.
    • Headbangers: Rhythm Royale - My playtime and enjoyment of this easily justified a month of Games Pass.
    • Gotham Knights - I would never have purchased this myself but it is payable. The strange thing was the almost Division-like controls rather than traditional first or third person (i.e. like Spyro or Crash). I need to find some time to play it a bit more, the advantage is there is kind of a day-night cycle where you go out on missions and when you return that becomes the next day so possible to use that as a guide of one play session is one “return to the tower (not Bat cave).
    • Persona 5 Tactica - A work college raves about playing the Persona series so I figured I give it a shot. Overall, I like the turn based aspect and it filled the desire to have played Advantage Wars despite never having a Gameboy Advance.
    • Super Lucky Tale - This mostly made me regret not sitting down and completing the third Spyro game first.
  • Call of Duty
    • Modern Warfare 3. Played the free weekend, unless it was just the free player part it seems like they removed the online stats which is a shame. Overall, the levels looked the same as the first one but better graphics and the best new feature was showing how many people contributed to your deaths. I would really need the time to play it would only get it if it was $40 but might consider $50.
  • Spyro
    • I’m about half way through the third game.
  • Magic the Gathering
    • Played paper magic in the Magic of Summer Event in December.
    • Only played a few games of Brawl on Arena (the computer game version). The motivating factor was the mastery tree had a Gishath Avatar which is my commander in game and on paper.
  • Diablo Immortals
    • I still played way too much of this game.
    • They did sucker me in as they regularly releasing new content.
    • I haven’t played the new top-down tower defence mode, which really seemed like it originated because some NetEase developers were tasked with writing a new game and decided to build it inside Diablo Immortals to prototype and then someone decided “hey, that is fun, we can theme it and ship it”.
  • lichess
    • Played 571 games
    • Started year with a rating of 969 and ended on 1054.
    • Longest winning streak was 10 games between 2023-09-07 to 2023-09-09.
    • Longest streak (of playtime): 1 hour 21 minutes on 2023-03-11.
    • Reached highest raiting in blitz of 1110.

Television

  • In 2022, I was introduced to the world of K-Dramas, starting off with with Business Proposal and then “What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim” while waiting for new episodes to drop.
  • Disney+ shows
    • Secret Invasion - Season 1
    • The Mandalorian - Season 32
    • Doctor Who Specials
    • Artful Dodger
    • Loki - Season 2
  • Netflix
    • ONE PIECE (Live Action) - Season 1
    • Shadow and Bone - Season 2
    • Rick and Morty - Season 7
    • You - Season 4
    • FUBAR - Season 1
    • Oblierated - Season 1
    • Lupin - Season 2
    • Disenchantment - Season 3 - Series Finale
    • Gotham Knights - Season 1
    • Kink the Land - Season 1
    • Touch Your Heart - Season 1
    • Unstable - Season 1
    • Love to Hate You - Season 1

Music

Artists

  • British India
  • Say Hi
  • She & Him
  • San Cisco
  • BUMP OF CHICKEN (Theme song for Spy vs Family)

Top Tracks

  • Lollipop (Candyman) - Aqua
  • Doctor Jones - Aqua
  • I Can Make You Love Me - British India
  • Wrong Direction - British India
  • Better Off Alone - Alice Deejay

For Lollipop, the catalyst for listening to that was a clip of Magnus Carlsen playing chess while hanging out with the Botez sisters (Chess streamers) with the song in the background.

For British India, I don’t really remember listening to the songs themselves it must have more been Spotify got stuck on a playlist. Likewise for Better Off Alone but that might have been it was a feature on a playlist that also included several Ace of Base songs.

Things for 2024

I only did two of the items on last years TODO list for 2023 which were the two blog posts.

Upcoming blog posts

  • Post about name generation (and/or date of birth).
  • Post about location generation.
  • Add comments to the blog.

Upcoming site ideas

  • Separate music pages for artist vs song broken down by month
  • Create Television/Movies pages similar to the music.