2023-2024 Eeveeyear Goals

I'm gonna level with you guys. This year? Did not go well. That was for reasons, and we will be discussing those reasons, but I need to start by expressing in no uncertain terms that I. Failed. I reached less than 50% on most of my goals, I failed to progress substantially on some of the most important tasks. By the end of the year, I had straight up given u on some of them, and that's genuinely unprecedented. 

There are two big things and a lot of little ones that contributed to the disaster. One of the big things was mostly my fault, the other mostly wasn't. There was some bad goal setting. That's the one that's on me. Some of what went wrong there is covered in my post from a few months ago titled Oops... in which I discuss how my goal for handwritten pages go away from me, and why my Unity goals weren't well structured in the first place (more on that below). I also set a couple of goals that either I didn't care about very much or weren't entirely under my control. Trying to build a wiki for my epic fantasy setting was a neat idea in theory, but both of the projects it serves are kind of back burnered right now, so I wasn't making any natural progress, and the whole thing was just stressful and tiring. I still want to cook more, but changes to my living and financial situation mean that trying new recipes would, at present, require spending money rather than making more innovative use of extant resources, and that there are substantially greater time constraints on when it's actually productive to cook. Astute readers will notice that goals requiring resources I may not always have, or with timing limitations not fully under my control, are not good goals. 

The other thing that happened was a grueling, miserable, socially fraught two month move. That part is not my fault. Our housemate kicked us out, and even if his reasons were coherent (they're weren't), he did it with basically no notice, expecting us to find a new place and finance and carry out the move in less than a month, and threatening us with legal action when it took longer. Like, I try not to bring up outside factors as though they're an excuse for not getting my work done, but this was a whole thing. With that out of the way, let's talk about what worked, and didn't work, about my goals for this year. 

One thing that went wrong with nearly everything was trying to learn Unity in the way I was trying to learn it. Those tutorials, while not necessarily ineffective, were pretty miserable a lot of the time, not least because of the condescending video lectures in the first unit on game controls, so I'd check my spreadsheet to see what I was working on next, see that it was an hour of Unity, and be possessed by a spirit of Don't Wanna that could stymie me for days. Since I try to work on the thing I'm most behind on first, this reduced my progress on literally everything, although it had a greater impact on other things that could only be done on the computer. I found a workaround for this over the summer, kind of, but there was no way to recover the time I'd already lost. The presence of tasks I didn't really want to do also exacerbated my existing irrational fear that I would somehow "run out" of things like "books read" and be left with only the difficult, onerous stuff.

I honestly don't remember where I got my target figure for new cars, but it was hilariously too high, and while working on it wasn't disruptively unpleasant it would have been prohibitively time consuming had I not just...stopped trying. 

Successes, Such As They Were

There are a few areas in which I did better, in relative terms, absolute terms, or both, and I think listing them may, if nothing else, illustrate how useless and soup-brained I was this year. I read 7 fewer books, but actually got a bit more than 1% closer to my goal than I did last year, thanks in no small part to the goal's having been reduced by last year's similarly catastrophic reading failure. I got more handwritten pages done, but that's largely down to catching how the way I counted it had slipped over the past few years. You can see that in how I only managed 16 blog posts this entire damn year. I uh, I sure did spend more time playing video games, and got something like commensurately more orbs. My big takeaway on this is that even though Orb of Creation is on the computer, I need to treat it like a mobile game, and not count it towards my progress on video games. I watched more television, more movies, more YouTube videos. Most telling, I think, is that I spend 88 more hours reading and 171 more hours writing, and accomplished less in every category to which these timers apply. Brain not good this year. 

First Year Goals

We discussed in the introduction most of what really went wrong with our newly introduced goals. For some fucking reason, I added 15 of the damn things: Wiki Read (mostly SCP), Wiki Words, Wiki Planned, Foods Made, New Foods Made, TV Rewatch, Webcomics, Podcasts, Sewing Time, Repairs, TCGO Time, TCGO Matches, New Cards, Short Fiction, Programming Time, Programming Skills, and Duolingo. For reasons described above, the cooking and wiki creation goals will be dropped for the coming year. Having a goal for reading SCP stuff actually worked pretty well, and put me on the way of some short fiction, so we'll be keeping that. I'm not yet 100% sure yet whether my goals for rewatching tv or listening to podcasts are working how I want, so we're giving them another year, with the standard adjustment to the targets and we'll see how it goes. They didn't interact with my sewing goals how I was hoping they would, because it turns out I can do enough sewing to keep it from becoming the thing I'm most behind on while playing TTRPGs. Webcomics, again, I don't feel like I know yet. I got enough of them on my RSS feed that it never really become a Thing. 

My big takeaway from short fiction is that reading fanfiction does outcompete other things if I track them together, so we're adding a separate goal for that. The TCGO goals did pretty much exactly what I wanted them to, making space for them in my year where they neither strictly waste time nor have room to take over my life. New cards was set too high, as I discussed above, but standard adjustments should take care of that for the coming year. Programming (recorded in the 2022-2023 year as "Unity") is something of a sticky spot. We're keeping the thing where time spent playing romhacks counts for time, and skills encompasses completing a discrete part of any programming tutorial. I was already feeling like Unity might not be my thing, before the company so thoroughly crossed the Trust Thermocline a few weeks ago, but I don't yet know for sure what I'm doing instead. Python feels like a solid option on the actual programming side, and I'm increasingly feeling like I should learn Java, but Godot might be worth trying out if it turns out I do need a game engine for something, and I haven't settled on learning resources for any of this yet. I'll try to keep you posted. 

As first year goals, my new targets for each of these, except the ones I'm dropping entirely, will be calculated by multiplying what I accomplished last year by 1.5. 

Adjusted Goals

This past year and the year before, I set my fiction writing goal manually, so to speak, at 50,000 and then 60,000 words, rather than using the standard formula. I feel like this was a good idea, and we're making it 60,000 again this year. It's also getting some friends. Books Read, Rereads, and Blog Posts are core, mission critical goals, and letting the targets go to low because of a few bad years would be disastrous. Something I noticed this year is that words of fiction written has a hard time getting much ahead of pages read (see: trying to write without reading is like trying to only exhale), so keeping a high fiction writing goal with a too-low book target would just be silly. So I'm making the book goal 110, rather than the 87 indicated by my usual goal adjustment process, and increasing my page count goal to match. Rereading is also very important for my writing, so I'm setting that to 78 (75+1d10, if you're wondering). I should have just let it be 89 in the second year, rather than trying to get cute with it. And I'm not leaving you guys with only 42 blog posts this year. I'm never gonna get the goal for that fall below 50, so this year it's gonna be 57 and we'll see how that goes. 

New Goals

Dropping like four things means that for the first time in Mint and Brambles history, we aren't increasing how many goals I have, but we're still adding new things. I need to listen to new music and sort it into playlists, that's important for keeping my brain in good shape, so we're adding that. Probably I'll mostly do it through spotify's Release Radar and Discover Weekly playlists. I'm also adding a goal for little administrative bits like dealing with emails and organizing files on my computer because they will never get done otherwise, because it's as good a time as any to listen to podcasts etc, and as a kind of test run for adding a cleaning or organizing goal next year. For reasons previously discussed, we're adding a separate goal for fanfiction - this is important since I write fanfiction. 

I also added a goal for earning money. I'm not going to tell you what it is, and I'm not going to track it publicly, but I do want you to know about it. If this become the thing I'm most behind on, I will have to spend time trying to get more money, even if that means filling out surveys on Qmee. You don't want that. I don't want that. If you'd like to prevent it, please consider becoming a patron. 

Final Thoughts. 

That's...really what there is to say about this year. I' not gonna do last year's goal-by-goal breakdown because the same couple of things went wrong with everything, and there's no interesting discussion to have there. Except where otherwise specified, goals that were in their second or later year will be adjusted by multiplying the average of what I accomplished each year by 1.25. I'm exited to get started with something like a clean slate. Still hoping to get you a Dresden Files post by the end of this week. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!