new year

2025

Review of goals from last year’s blogpost:

• related to moving out
  • ❌ get rid of old stuff: There are local places to drop off clothes and books so as soon as we have enough space to bring things up there, I can do it. It’s not a big deal, though. I honestly don’t think I have that much stuff, and it’s okay to keep a few things for sentimental value. I begin to think that absolute minimalism isn’t the best.
  • ✅ learn to cook more things for real: It’s an ongoing process. I did get better at chopping vegetables and generally cooking faster, though it would be nice to have a larger variety of dishes. I am satisfied with the current level of kitchen coordination.
  • ❔ clean better
  • Moving sidenote: I’m happy with the way our apartment arranged. We worked on it slowly throughout the year and it feels nice.
• ❌ finish the late art trade: THIS YEAR FOR REAL.
• ❌ anki: I guess I took a break from it the whole year. Emotionally I’m ready to pick it up again, but with everything else I want to do, I don’t think it fits in the plan.
• ✅ The Project: Launched!
• ❔ exercise: I was basically told by the doctor that I should try cardio instead of strength training because I’m frail and prone to injuring myself. Didn’t do DDR because I was dying from eye dryness, but I’m recovering now.
• ❔ social media / vices: Not sure about results yet but I’m trying to steer myself towards longform. More on this later.
• ✅ clear skin: Work in progress but nothing actionable at the moment.
• ❔ close friends: This one is kind of weird. I’d say the main close friendship I built this year was with my partner. I don’t know if a partner counts in survey metrics of “close friendships”, but it’s not like we aren’t friends. Friendship as an adult is weird in general; you want to make yourself available but not be overbearing. I spend so much time with people at work, but due to the professional distance, there seems to be a certain hard limit on closeness. I hear that people used to make all their friends from work? It’s not a thing anymore.

Looking at last year’s “goals”, it was more a casual dump of things I vaguely wanted to do with no plan. To be fair, I didn’t know what to expect of myself because of the moving out. I think it went fine.

Of course, I did a lot of things that I didn’t write in my goals, too. I picked some good parts and drew a small comic.

The fun thing about writing your own story is that you get to cherry pick. Since 2018, I’ve had a tradition of keeping a journal for all my trips / vacations. Often I don’t keep up or finish it for the entire trip’s duration, but I figure keeping any partial record is better than none. And I’ve almost always purposefully excluded the negative parts. It’s not that I want to avoid spreading poor rumors about others; after all, I am almost always the only one reading my trip records. It’s just that negative emotions are the most useful in spurring change / action, and these journals are created for a different purpose.

AI

I work in tech, this mention is unavoidable. As a completely static site, it’s honestly for the best that my blog can’t support comments. Or else something like this happens… The comments are flooded with AI ads for roofing companies and whatnot. I mean, it probably works and drives traffic to their business. Unfortunately. (Disgruntled)

The ChatGPT craziness began in Dec ‘23 but it really wasn’t until this year that gen AI became actually useful at work. There was definitely a shift late spring, where many people instinctively felt something changed. I do let it write my shell scripts and test cases. It gets some harder stuff wrong but I actually feel like a lot of the learning curve is on me. I’m reminded of how my generation is way better at search engine querying than our parents, and it’s a skill to know what to give the machine to get desired outputs, to understand the limits of its ability. My teammates can get pretty impressive things to work, and I’m expected to learn the same.

Automation has been taking a lot of jobs before the AI thing began. In one of my group chats, a tech worker opines that it is pretty much a software engineer’s higher calling to automate themselves out of their jobs. CMU (partnering with Meta) is trying to replicate LLMs’ general-purpose digital success in general-purpose physical robotics, so don’t think your physical labor is safe, either. In the end, we may all rely solely on the goodwill of our tech overlords to survive. It’s scary to think about.

All the evil AI news, not just jobs but also the environment and computer parts scarcities, does bum me out. Rich people have been doing evil things since forever, though. The standard practice is to turn off the news and focus on yourself. So you could say I’ve been turning a blind eye, but how can you function otherwise? I’m not even mad at the AI bros anymore. The line between the “focusing on my own survival” and “fuck you I got mine” mindsets isn’t always clear. I figure all the AI doomer news I read just makes me sad without spurring me to action. From a purely advancing-technology perspective, gen AI really is a huge deal. A high school friend who also writes software once lamented to me about how it was such a shame that the left represented anti-(tech)-progress, despite being called “progressives”. Ideally I guess it would be progress with legal safeguards.

I do think about my responsibility to society. I make money from work, and while money can be a measure of value, I’m not wholly convinced that what I do actually makes the world a better place. At least I’m not in quant haha. One day I’ll do work for a cause I believe in, but for now I’ll focus on taking this time to build a good life, and making this money to buy my future freedom. There will be time, I hope.

Social Web

I grew up on the internet, in deviantART groups, skype chatrooms, tumblr, twitter, discord, telegram, you name it. From 2013, I’ve been pouring hours upon hours, days upon days into these platforms with my online friends, or keeping up with the latest memes and trends. The overwhelming feeling I have is simply “that’s enough”, that I want to do something else with my life now. Like staying on modern social media and is simply passing the time and ultimately kind of unfulfilling?

I would define a lot of what I’ve done in the past few years as “intentionally shrinking my world”. Participating in an online community (eg. furry) means maintaining some sort of social presence by uploading new content or interacting with others regularly. As the internet is relatively fast-paced, it’s easy to be quiet for a month and then essentially fall out of relevance. And so I’ve done so. It’s not that your current friends won’t be happy to hear from you, however seldom, it’s more of a discoverability and growth thing. Like hmm, new people aren’t drawn to interact with you, you are not the cool thing, you kind of just exist. A lot of fandom online is through groups interacting with each other through sharing new art / media. Past the social stuff, events, news, and culture are spread through word-of-mouth. So it takes continual participation to keep up with everything and everyone.

As I moved past school and into my job and adult life, keeping my online presence just took way too much time. Being basically an addiction to an ever-available fresh content feed, it takes lots of effort to quit. My partner now manages my art posts on social media so I don’t scroll and keep going back to look at notifications. Though reach and exposure and empire-building can definitely generate more art income so that I can dream of pivoting from software engineering, I ultimately don’t think it’s worth my soul. Not having to check on things and not even getting notifications from them reduces my mental load and gives me more energy for everything else. I wonder how I might have done more in high school and college had I put aside this time earlier, but that’s the past. It’s shrinking my world in certain places to expand my world in others.

A specific strategy for Discord and Telegram: These services especially hurt my brain because they house a combination of possibly-time-sensitive direct messages, random leisure chats, valuable “public” resources, and local event plannings (especially for con meet-ups). Sometimes all these use cases happen in a single thread of a group chat. Since it’s impossible for me to separate them, I compromised by leaving a message on a profile that I can be reached via text, email, or Signal for time-sensitive messages.

I hate how so many apps want to fulfill every need and connect everybody, immediately and always. While I reject the corporate vision for everybody’s past-paced real-time multimedia Internet, I still very much believe in a social web. One that has existed for way longer. I was too young to grow up with the early Web 2.0 days of personal websites and blogs and Google Reader, so instead of nostalgia, it’s just a new thing for me. To nudge myself towards reading longform, I set up an RSS feed through NetNewsWire (iOS, Mac). I’m doing my part in supporting NetNewsWire!

People often talk about how the web is becoming boring and AI-generated. Since setting up my RSS reader and bookmarking personal sites, the web somehow feels more alive and real than ever. Maybe the less-monetizeable less-advertiseable web is objectively better. Neocities is a huge example! Not saying that your personal site needs to be cute and artsy like the featured sites (mine isn’t), it’s just the most easily-accessible directory of personal sites that I found. According to the front page, there are about 1.5 million Neocities sites! This dwarfed by the 25 million members on deviantART in 2017, 40 million registered bluesky users, or 500 million active twitter users, or 3 billion (!) active Instagram users, but a million is still a lot. Generally, I don’t think people will be starved for connection just from not being on the behemoth services.

Personal blogs are social, just decentralized. The retrospective on Google Reader reflects this, as its creators recount that people created lifelong connections from it. ActivityPub is mentioned in the end of the article, almost like a spiritual successor. It’s a decentralized protocol for social media, complete with timeline, replies, and sharing. I don’t agree with the premise of microblogging and timelines, and setting up an instance is too complicated anyway, so I’m staying away from those for now.

Who is the audience of this blog? To quote More People Should Write by James Somers: “Writing with an audience in mind makes the writing better, and writing to a friend means you won’t get hung up on how you sound.” … For me, I just wonder if sometimes the topics are too personal for a friend, or the focus too broad and scattered for someone besides myself to read. Also following along the same blogpost, instead of writing emails to friends, I so want to have physical pen pals, perhaps at a quarterly cadence. I also have this really romantic idea of us replying to each others’ blogs, linking back to each other, creating our cool little network.

Media Consumption

From the SF Gazetteer: Print is forever! From time to time, I’ve been picking up free copies of the SF Examiner. Local news is probably better for me than reading random internet drama. It’s better for the eyes, and less distracting, too. Secondly, there are lots of little free libraries around. Picking up completely free books is nice because I have as long as I want to read it. The lack of pressure to return it quickly is great. Once we finish the books, we release them back into the free book circulation. It’s great!

I’ve also considered consuming more media from the library, but it’s not a huge deal. It’s there if I need it. Would be interested in exploring Hoopla and Kanopy. For video, my girlfriend’s family has Netflix and mine has Prime and YouTube Premium. I don’t think I have an unhealthy relationship with watching TV shows or movies so things are fine as-is. My weird Chinese projector doesn’t have a Hoopla or Kanopy app anyway.

Books: I finished a laughingly small amount of books in 2025, even including comics. I don’t measure my life success with the number of completed books, so that’s okay.

Music: I play it when I draw or drive, and I think associating music with certain tasks is helpful. Otherwise, I work best in silence. The amount of music I know is pretty low compared to the average American, but my library still has hundreds of songs. I’m happy without algorithmic discovery. Maybe creating scarcity in media makes every consumed piece more special.

I’ve become uninterested in keeping up with the cultural zeitgeist. This comes with not knowing the up-and-coming musical artists at all those festivals, not watching the latest shows, not knowing TikTok trends, not playing the award-winning game of the year. Does this mean I’m an old person now? I also wear whatever keeps me warm, even if it looks lame, and I like to use grocery dolly instead of carrying everything in my arms. I’m just really comfortable and loved in my relationships that I don’t feel the need to prove anything to anyone right now. I just do myself, and it’s a good feeling.

City Living

I grew up in the Bay Area, but I wouldn’t say I’ve spent the time to explore it. As a kid, I mostly did homework, extracurriculars, or played. As an adult, it’s time to finally be a tourist in my home area. I most likely won’t spend the rest of my life in SF, as it’s louder and dirtier than is ideal. So I better make use of my time and try lots of stuff here while I’m still here.

I love that there’s decent public transit here. It still sucks compared to Taiwan, Japan, or Singapore, but it’s at least workable. Besides transit, many things are under a 20-minute walk away. All the doctors and offices and shops and restaurants. I’m definitely healthier for walking around regularly.

People ask me what I do in SF when I’m not a foodie, and I don’t really do nightlife / bars / clubbing. Shopping doesn’t interest me either. But there’s still a lot to do, so I made a list of things to explore (that may be too long to be completed within the year). Some are typical tourist attractions, others are not. Park events, classes, local volunteering, cycling, skating… there’s just lots of stuff out there! If I find a friend with a car I’d also be interested in hiking farther out, but no big deal if not.

Another benefit of living in the city is that you live pretty close to people. It’s definitely nothing like undergrad, though. I’ll never be minutes away from so many friends like that. We all have our own lives. As an introvert, the amount of proximity and contact required to build a new close friendship feels like homework, and I don’t want to treat my friends like homework. I’m fine with maintaining what I have.

Skill-Based Hobbies

Sometime last month, I drew my first mini-zine. I’m not sharing it here. But like the previous comic, I enjoyed the act of imperfect, personal creation, something I often lose to the social media art rat race. I hope to do more of that.

Every time I see friends make new merch or sell commissions or release whatever new art thing online, I want to do it too. I worry that I need to keep up some sort of momentum with merch or else I’ll have to start all over if I ever want to do anything in the future. I have to be okay with stopping if it’s not what’s healthy for me right now.

As most Asian childhoods go, my parents raised me by always comparing my skills with those who were better than me. I carry this into my hobbies: into art, into music, into language learning. I have such an annoying feeling deep down that if I’m not the best at something, what was the point of picking it up in the first place? I’m trying to unlearn that. Instead of pouring my time into hobby or career skill points, I want to take time to (unskillfully) explore the world around me and figure out my place in it. To really take care of my body and mind and be a healthy individual. To believe that art can be a raw expression of the self that is not limited to those who pour their lives into perfecting its presentation. It will be okay even if it’s been 5 years and I still can’t play a barre chord because I barely practice. (Typing that out made me feel embarrassed. This unlearning is rough.)

Health & Life

This year, I went to physical therapy. I sort of quit before I was back to 100% because the exercises were difficult and sessions were costly, but what I learned was helpful and my pain was mostly gone. I still do the stretches, and I’m a bit more conscious of how I move now. To complement this, I’m hoping to keep up with regular yoga. We’ve been getting into a routine on doing it in the evenings before bed. A shared routine has been super helpful. I think about adding in meditation sometimes but I’m not going to overwhelm myself with to-dos. One thing at a time.

For exercise, the Chinese doctor said I’m not fit for heavy lifting, so cardio it is. DDR and running. I’m too scared to say I’ll exercise every day, but Couch to 5k will keep me busy for at least Q1. Besides that, I can climb once a month. I do eye the company gym, but I don’t want to stay late at work. I’ll probably revisit the exercise routine several times throughout the year.

I’ve had flat feet since birth. Are bouncy shoes in fashion? My mom bought me On Cloud shoes and it gave me pain, probably because I have no arch. My normal non-bouncy shoes don’t give me pain when walking, but maybe it’s just time to see a podiatrist. My joints aren’t going to be flexible and resilient forever. I’m hoping this helps with exercise form as well, since running does give me pain sometimes.

Finally, continuing last year’s goals, I hope to get better incrementally at cooking. I also want to dedicate myself more to maintaining a clean, organized apartment. The head space that comes with cleaning up is nice, yet I’m often so resistant to doing it.

Tinkering

I’ve always wanted to do more stuff on the NAS I randomly bought on Black Friday in 2023 but never get around to it. It recently gave me a DDNS error that I troubleshooted. I guess I should fix it. I currently use it to host my budgeting app and back up my computer to it. I have some semblance of image hosting there, but only barely; the vast majority of everything is on Google Photos. I have a small inkling that I might want to move things to Proton. I want to set up paperless-ngx, Tailscale, and SimpleFIN for Actual Budget. I definitely should organize my digital files way better… And I want to have offsite backups of this thing.

I modded my Nintendo Switch a while back, but I had to update the stock firmware to continue playing Pokemon Unite online. I didn’t update any files on the hacked partition, so I think it’s outdated and incompatible with the new firmware or something? It’ll take time to figure out. I’m not really playing video games enough to justify fixing it. But at the same time, if something is broken, don’t you want to make it right?

The trouble with all this is that I touch it seldom enough that every time I pick it up, I’ve forgotten almost everything I learned from the last time. And the internet is full of unhelpful nerds who say everything is simple if you would just take the time to learn it. The truth is that maintaining any system by yourself takes a significant amount of time that you could be using to do other fun things. I have my fill of debugging at work already.

That said, I did slot these tasks into my planner.

Conclusion & 2026

[P1] Definitely do

• couch to 5k
• host a figure drawing panel at a furry con
  • Participate in Figuary but in a serious way
• finish the overdue art trade
• a regular yoga / stretching practice
• be effective and focused at work
  • see productivity blog for details
• cook more and be a more helpful person around the house
• divorce myself from fast-paced social media

[P2] Want to do

• set up more stuff on the NAS
• fix Switch hacking
• make some merch
• sleep without getting up in the middle of the night
• make my fursuit more wearable
  • Add more fans
  • Head padding
  • Chin stop
  • Zipper on pouch

[P3] Backlog

• illustrate a picture book
• Japanese & Chinese. Consuming media in the target language seems the best way to develop these, but I haven’t been focusing on it.
• add some archival entries from the past. I actually have 59 pages of 2023 journals in google docs.. and some more pages in my brief writefreely stint.

I think it’s a good sign that most of the items here are basically continuations of previous years, in that the new year isn’t a grand renewal of the self. I’m already doing what is important to me, and this is just a time to sit down, check in, and gently push some priorities around.