2022

When I first started university I did a course on communication & media design. I dropped out halfway through the year due to a combination of mental health issues and a total lack of talent when it comes to design. But before I dropped out, I made some friends that I never spoke to after I quit. When it comes to a more artsy university course, you get more artsy people. And one of my classmates was into less popular music including the duo Pete Philly & Perquisite. I listened to some of their songs, and one got used in a commercial for a DIY store for a while. One of their lyrics has been becoming more and more relatable:

Haven’t you noticed how time flies? Man, sometimes I feel old.

Not the most deep lyric, but it’s relatable and art is at its best when it’s relatable. That’s why an entire generation loved Linkin Park so much. But since we’re on the topic of time flying by anyway, it’s almost the New Year again. That means the curtain is about to close on another year of blogging, writing and unfortunately just existing in general. This year saw the end of covid in our collective ability to care as well as the death of the Queen of England causing many of us to rethink the existence of our own monarchies. But hey, if the crown princess were to be gay, that’s okay, our government said, so maybe we keep the monarchy for being progressive? I digress.

2022 for me was a mixed bag of a year. I had some (mental) health issues throughout but I also went from a pause in my education to going back to teaching. That last one has been consuming a lot of my energy lately. Teaching kids that don’t want to be taught is exhausting. Just the other day we had kids ruin a lesson by logging into a quiz with numerous offensively named spoof accounts all at once. That’s how you get the teacher to make the entire class copy your book pages as homework. We do our best to make fun lessons, you ruin it, you get the boring lessons that take us way less time to prepare. 

But with only one more week of university and internship before the holidays, and my last week of teaching consisting out of guiding kids in their end of year activities, it’s time to start looking ahead at the upcoming year. What good and bad will 2023 bring us? I’ll leave my new year resolutions for the new year, but I want to give a little bit of information about the upcoming week. I mentioned it on twitter a little while ago, but I am currently on a break from writing. After completing NaNoWriMo I felt pretty burned out so I’ve written only a couple thousand words this month. The only posts that are still planned this year are my Bleach episode recaps, and I’ll be honest that even those might be delayed here and there. Part of this is to give myself some breathing room, but a big part of that is also because I want to challenge myself even more next year. I have a ton planned but I’ll summarize the schedule here. If I find the time, I’m hoping to update the introduction page with the new schedule so keep an eye on that if you’re interested.

I want to write five posts a week. This is what you can expect:

• The Hesitant Hero Volume 2
• Weekly anime recap (I’m leaning towards Bungou Stray Dogs but I’m open to suggestions)
• One Piece Wednesday: Starting with the Romance Dawn one shot, I’m going to read and talk about one One Piece volume every week. I’ll be explaining more about this when it starts but I recommend you read along
• One anime-related post: a review, a deep dive or a seasonal recap
• One bonus post. This one will be dependant on if I have something to talk about, and can be anything, just like you’re used to now.

I’m also editing and rewriting The Necromancer’s Daughter. I’ve made it a goal to adjust and upload one chapter a month, so that by the end of the year I have a solid 12-15 chapters written out and posted. I’ve already gone through chapter one, which needed very little adjustment, but once we get past chapter three or four, I’m not too pleased about what I have right now and want to adjust a lot.

And that’s all. This post became longer than I expected, but that’s okay. I’m going to go organize our new kitchen so it’s no longer a chaotic mess and I hope you all have a great rest of the year. Happy Holidays to all and don’t lose any fingers to fireworks.