Despite the fact its already February, I am going to do another of these annual end of the year reflections. They’re likely to be of little interest to anyone else, but I find the practice useful. I’ve previously done these for 2020, 2021 and 2022.
What follows is a mix of personal reflections on the year, as well as a brief lists of the things I’ve enjoyed watching, reading and playing.
Working
Last year I largely stopped my freelance work and instead moved to working on Energy Sparks full time.
There was enough work and short-term budget for me to do five days a week and I wanted to remove the pressure of finding additional freelance work whilst focusing on the milestones we had to meet.
The largest of these was completely redeveloping all of the energy analysis pages to improve them based on finding from our user research, my desk research, and as the last piece of our Welsh translation project.
We hit that and all of our other deadlines last year, which made me feel pretty proud.
However it’s been a difficult time from a long-term sustainability point of view. We ended up managing to secure some additional funding and more some of our schools, local authorities and multi-academy trusts onto a paid version of the product. This was a good step forward in terms of longer-term sustainability but we’ve still got a long way to go.
Uncertainty around funding is something I’m used to. But I found it really hard this time to focus on delivering important milestones whilst knowing that everything could evaporate.
Onward, as they say.
Freelancing
Despite focusing on Energy Sparks, I still did some freelance work in 2023. I’m part of a team doing a five-year evaluation for a grant funding some data infrastructure, so have continued to participate in that.
I delivered a short piece of work to review an open standard. I find it hard to say no to interesting projects, especially if I can fit them in around other work! The client wanted some feedback on how their documentation and tooling. The work involved doing a close reading of the specification, reviewing sample data, testing out tools and then producing a report with some feedback on potential improvements and areas needing clarification.
I don’t know yet what my balance of freelancing will be in 2024 so if you have a potential project I could help with, then let me know. This is the type of stuff I’ve done in the past.
Coding
Because I’m spending so much time doing development work during the day, I don’t often feel like coding in the evenings or weekends.
I have been working on two different Mastodon bots though. One of which posts maps of Doom levels. Another one of those projects where I quickly got engrossed in implementing an idea but then failed to do the final 10% and actually release the thing. Soon.
Walking
As planned we go outdoors for some great local walks in 2023.
I find it really uplifting to tramp through the countryside. Although as with 2022, the number walks ended up dropping off in the summer because of the heat.
We also did a family trip to Bannau Brycheiniog and walked up Pen-y-Fan which was both knackering and amazing.
Cooking
The usual Saturday night “try a new recipe, make some cocktails” also continued.
I didn’t really keep a detailed record of what I cooked in 2023. I felt weird about sharing on Mastodon but I’ve got over that now. So will be logging more in 2024.
As usual I’ve bookmarked recipes are here. But I’ve picked up a number of new cookbooks including:
- John Torode’s Sydney to Seoul
- Emily Dobbs’ Weligama: Recipes from Sri Lanka
- Thomasina Miers’ Meat free Mexican, and
- Gurdeep Loyal’s Mother Tongue.
We’ve become mostly vegetarian now. Generally only eating meat at the weekends. I’m not really missing meat.
This year’s favourite ingredient is the collection of dried chillies that a friend brought me back from a Mexico trip. They’re generally either hard to get or ridiculously expensive if bought online. I’ve been making and freezing a variety of chilli sauces.
I am addicted to this Jalapeno Hummus.
Gardening
An absolutely disaster last year. I’ve not written a separate gardening retro as I have done in previous years, as there isn’t much to say.
The mixture of heat and wet weather in April/May meant that a lot of my seedlings and vegetable plants ended up dying. I think I went through maybe a dozen cucumber plants and none survived.
I planted more potatoes this year. They all died off. Even the courgettes, usually to be relied upon to overcrop, didn’t produce.
We did get a decent crop of chillies and tomatoes but these were in pots on the patio rather than the vegetable beds.
I think the cause was partly the weather, but also I think the soil is just too depleted. I’ve cycled things through the beds and use my homemade compost, but it’s not enough. I think I need to properly refresh the soil and the raised beds need to be rebuilt. So I might be taking a year off growing in them this year and just focus on some pots.
The other cause of a general lack of success in the garden is that I hurt my shoulder (whilst gardening!). This ended up with me having a frozen shoulder and unable to really lift or move my arm freely. So I wasn’t able to do really anything significant in the garden in the second half of the year. Frustrating!
We had a second swarm of bees in the garden this year. I spent a happy afternoon chatting to the beekeepers who came to collect them.
Listening
I’ve also kept up my habit of creating a playlist of “tracks that I loved on first listen, which were released this year“. Here’s my 2023 Tracked playlist. It contains 104 tracks, totalling 6 hours 45 minutes and 53 seconds of music. The tracks are in order of when I heard them.
That’s about half of the previous year. I’ve just been listening to 6 Music more this year and spending less time ferreting out interesting new tracks.
My My Most Listened 2023 includes Last Dinner Party, Panic Shack, Gorillaz, Obey Robots, SPRINTS, Hot Chip and Hania Rani.
It also features an album by Midori Hano called Invisible Island which is a great ambient album. But if I’m honest it’s mostly there as a soundtrack to my Sunday afternoon naps. Know your data.
Reading
I log all my comic and book reading in Story Graph. They produce an annual wrap-up. Here’s mine for 2023.
There’s a lot of comics — collected volumes or graphic novels, not single issues — which increases the count. So 118 books in total but of those 34 are novels and 2 non-fiction books.
Fiction
My favourites this year were:
- Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
- Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka
- Juno Loves Legs by Karl Geary
- Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
- Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman
Non-Fiction
Just the two books finished this year, although I’ve been dipping in an out of a few others
Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World by Brett Christophers is an essential read that will, unfortunately, make you cross.
Comics
I read a lot of Judge Dredd. I still have a lot of comics I’ve picked up in digital bundles, so have been working through a lot of these. But my favourites have been:
- Volumes 3 & 4 of Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye
- Volumes 1 & 2 of Kelly Thompson’s Hawkeye: Kate Bishop
- Brink Books 4 & 5 by Dan Abnett
- Books 4 & 5 of Immortal Hulk
Gaming
I’m ldodds on both Steam and PSN if you want to add me there.
- After several years we finished up our Masks campaign, which was great. There’s so many things I’d do differently now if I were to run that again, but given this was my first time DM’ing for years I think it went pretty well
- We finished up our Brindlewood Bay campaign which escalated pretty quickly towards the end. I don’t think I quite nailed the final scenes, but we had some excellent comedic and chilling moments and I loved playing it.
I am still buying too many new TTRPGs. Next up, I’ll be running Agon.
I’m thinking of starting a second regular game, as there are so many games I want to play. I would love to find an in-person group to play with.
Videogame wise I’ve not played a great deal. I’m really enjoying, but have not yet finished Armored Core VI. The difficulty spikes are amongst the hardest I’ve encountered in a FromSoftware game, but still give me that endorphin hint when I’m successful.
For a more relaxed time I’ve been working my way through Horizon Forbidden West. Collecting all the things, exploring all the views. Enjoyable.
Watching
Films
I’m continued to log every film I watch in Letterboxd. I watched 100 films in 2023, 27 of those I’d watched before.
My favourites new films (released in 2023) were:
These weren’t my absolute favourites of the year though. Those would go to:
- The Pollinators, yes a documentary about bees
- The Red Turtle, which blindsided me, leaving me in tears
- CODA
- Rye Lane
TV
Signed up to Apple TV so this list is skewed towards stuff we’ve been watching there:
- Silo. Please don’t let this turn out as badly as Lost
- For All Mankind. I love an alt-history
- Beef. Outstanding
- American Born Chinese. Just a lot of fun
- Traitors. I thought I’d give it a try and ended up being totally sucked into this. Not my usual watch
Masterchef remains one of my favourite programmes ever and I’m now a Bake-Off regular.
Writing
I wrote 13 blog posts in 2023, totalling 7,964 words.
I wrote nothing before July and nothing after September after publishing a flurry of ten blog posts. One per day for ten days. This is the least I’ve written in years.
The first few months in the year were just so busy I didn’t have the head space. And then I found that I didn’t really have the motivation to write anything. I’m not sure why.
I get caught up in feeling like I have to work through a backlog of things I have planned to write about. But then if I don’t tackle though, then I get stuck. Those ten posts in September were rattled out in a few days. I’d been carrying them around in my head for months.
I’ve also been doing less research or freelance work so I felt like I had less to write-up. My blog often acts as a public note book.
I’d like to change this for 2024 and just write more.
Everything Else
I finally caught COVID. Knocked me for six for a week or so, but I worked through a lot of it.
I’m still plugging away learning Welsh on DuoLingo.
I’m enjoying being on Mastodon.
The kids are both at university now. My daughter moving away this year was a difficult and emotional time as you’d expect. Our eldest is studying locally so they continue to live at home. My wife went back to work in 2023. She’s got a fantastic job which she loves.
But this also means that often there’s just me in the house. I’ve worked remotely for years. But it’s not until this year that I’ve felt quite so isolated. We don’t have an office so I rarely have a need to be elsewhere. This, combined with the uncertainty around funding at work and the shoulder injury has left me pretty down at times. Some days have been a real struggle.
Some stuff has happened in the first few weeks of 2024 which hasn’t made any of that easier. It would be nice if the life lessons around resilience didn’t always revolve around family health issues.
For 2024 I need to find more ways to get outside, be with more people and not so wrapped up in my own thoughts.
Lost Boy 