First things, well, first is traditional. I’ve failed abysmally in regards to my goal to blog once a week for 52 to consecutive weeks. I think it rests partly in my reactionary opposition to any task being forced upon me, even if the forcing is self inflicted. If I set myself a goal, with no outside pressure, I immediately begin shrivelling away like a singed hair. It’s not very conductive for personal projects, but shit happens. Well, shall we get on with addressing my goals for 2011, seeing as the year has pretty much come to an end?
1) Blog once a week, minimum – Okay, we don’t need to dwell on this. I failed.
2) Get a job in Birmingham or Wolverhampton by April – Again, I failed this one, simply because I had a hard time getting a job ANYWHERE, let alone in the West Midlands. I did manage to find 3 months employment at the start of the year, but that was a temporary contract. But I am going back to the same company, almost a year to the day later that I first started with them
3) Get Money for Hong Kong – Thanks to the amazing generosity of my granddad, I was able to go to Hong Kong with Viv and her family and I had an AMAZING time. So that’s my first success.
4) Reach a Gamerscore of 25,000 – Okay, I really didn’t think I was going to make this until the very last minute. Seeing as I’ve only obtained 100% on one game since setting this goal (Saints Row The Third, great game), I accumulated the other 4k over several other titles, including Portal 2, Arkham Asylum, LA Noire, Dead Space 2 and, most recently, Assassin’s Creed Revelations. So a second success!
5) Complete an Entire Dungeons and Dragons Campaign – I’m going to mark this as a success. Although the campaign is far from ‘complete’, it’s still on going and we’ve managed to play quite regularly over the past 9 months or so. This has included multi-part story arcs, reoccurring villains and even a pair of holiday specials.
6) Play more Risk and Magic: The Gathering – This was most certainly a success. I’ve been playing a lot of Magic with two friends from dnd, and even got a third interested, who has really taken to it. In addition to playing more Risk, I’ve played more ‘traditional’ games in general, including Setters of Catan (which I now own) and Dominion. I have the Discworld and Game of Thrones board games on my wish list for the future as well.
7) Work on a Video Game Project – This failed more through inaction. I didn’t even install any level editing or 3d modelling software after my computer blew up in the middle of the year. But I did put together a portfolio DVD, which I was quite happy with.
8) Learn Cantonese – No comment (and certainly no comment in Cantonese)
9) Improve my Blog Design – I pretty much gave up on blogging, so I gave even less thought to it’s design.
10) Buy more Books – Now this one is a great success, although not in the way I anticipated. I didn’t end up buying many more Discworld books, only having received the latest book; Snuff, for xmas. But I have bought many other books, including the first 5 ASoIaF books and the first three Dresden Files books. I plan on getting the next paperback ASoIaF book in March, and the rest of the Dresden Files titles once I finish the first three.
So, 5/10 for goals. That’s pretty good. The way I see it, if I had achieved that on one goal, it would be counted as a failure. I’d rather set ten goals and achieve half then set one goal and fail it all together.
But what about 2012? Well, I’m probably not going to set as esoteric goals for this coming year, but I will set some.
1) Work on my story that I’m writing – On some random impulse, I began writing what began as a short story. It’s a bit hard to explain the concept, but it’s basically a story about relationships, those between friends, siblings, kids and their parents, romantic ones and self destructive ones, all centred around ground of people playing a game of dnd. I’m at about 30k words and 1/3 into the story, tops, so I would like to see this through.
2) Play more ‘traditional’ games – This basically means playing more d&d, magic the gathering, risk, catan and any other board game I can get my hands on.
3) Visit Viv as often as possible – Quite self explanatory.
4) Produce a better games design CV – Again, explains itself really.
5) Read more books, more often – Do I have to explain this?
That will do, I’ll go with five this year.
Well, happy new year to all of you.
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