2020 in review

2020 in review

These review posts have proven incredibly useful when looking up stuff, so I'll continue this tradition.

(2019/2018/2017/2016/2015/2014/2013)

Non-Board Games I've played/bought

  • World of Warcraft - subscribed the whole year, played quite a bit
  • EVE Online - subscribed for ~9 months, played a lot
  • Borderlands 3 - had started in 2019, was still playing at the start of the year

Books I've read

Zero novels and one technical book ("Database Internals" by Alex Petrov). An alarming trend continues.

I started with both "Laika's Window" by Kurt Caswell and "A Guide To The Good Life" by William B. Irvine though.

Movies I've (re-)watched

  • Rise of the Guardians - discussions about whether this is a Christmas movie aside, it was very funny
  • Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse - the best Spider-Man movie, one of the best Marvel movies

TV Series I've (re-)watched

  • Dr. Oakley - Yukon Vet on Disney+ - no idea why, but I really liked it
  • Encore on Disney+ - stopped after 2-3 episodes
  • The Mandalorian on Disney+ - *it's Star Wars and I didn't like it. Weird.

CDs I bought

  • Nightwish - Human II Nature
  • Nightwish - Endless Forms Most Beautiful
  • Sabaton - The Last Stand
  • Sabaton - The Great War

Other stuff I bought

  • moto X4 64 GB - my Nexus 5X died, so I needed a phone. 190 EUR and completely happy after 10 months
  • a Geforce RTX 3070

Social network usage

  • Twitter - no change - regularly, not overly much
  • Facebook - not sure I logged in even once this year
  • Instagram - not sure I logged in even once this year
  • Fediverse - back for a short stint, mostly not

Messaging

  • IRC - daily use, default communication channel for many people I communicate with
  • Matrix - daily use
  • MS Teams - work stuff
  • Email - same as usual
  • Slack - using two communities, sparingly, but one is a different one than last year
  • WhatsApp - kinda unavoidable

Trips

  • other countries: zero
  • other German states: zero
  • one actual holiday trip, cycling in the summer
  • one trip for a family birthday party, under protest

(Online) services

  • Still subscribed to Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime, but I don't personally use them a lot
  • Mostly MMO subscriptions this year

Programming languages used, roughly in order of hours spent

  • C++ - work, I came to terms with the fact that it won't be my favorite language
  • Python for AoC and other small stuff
  • bash - still too much
  • PHP - just a little, for one private project

Podcasts I listen to

Very irregular this year:

  • ATP - I'm not using any Apple products and still listen to these guys sometimes.
  • some real gaming podcasts, but even less regularly

Stuff that kinda worked out

  • I don't have a real podcast downloader (yet), but I have something like trakt but for podcasts (mentioned last year)
  • be able to read cyrillic letters fluently and practice enough to memorize them (mentioned last year)
  • not going bonkers while confined to the apartment for most of the year

Stuff I planned to do this year but didn't

  • more blog posts
  • do more Rust
  • do more Clojure
  • "focus on one or two languages for hobby stuff" - focused on zero languages, only wrote very little (C++, Python, PHP)
  • read at least 3 novels this year
  • more cycling, more mountain biking - the former fell flat because of perma-WFH and no motivation, the latter because of the pandemic
  • watch Hamilton

"New Year's Resolutions" aka stuff that would be nice if it would work out

  • starting a new job in February, so of course I hope it will be a good gig
  • (more) mountain biking in the summer