![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
acequeenking) wrote2023-01-01 12:40 am
A Very Sorry No Good Look Back at My Goals of 2022
Drink 64oz of water every day (24 + 24 + 12)
- This one is a kinda. I....sometimes did do this and sometimes did not. More often than not I got somewhere around the middle and then fell off. For a while I was really hitting it well and then just not so much. Overall this was probably the goal I was most successful with and even that is like...half credit.
Exercise at least half an hour 5 times a week
Hahaha no. I was able to get to a pretty regular pace where I started off three times a week, sometimes hit four or five, and I was able to keep that for like...most of the year. In October, after my mom had to be rushed to teh hospital, I really fell off the exercise bandwagon and I think I've only exercised a few times since then.
Use this journal at least 1x a week.
HARD FAIL. I didn't have the spoons for it, I'm sorry. Not only did I vanish from this but also Tumblr and Twitter so hey I feel like I got a platinum trophy in fading into the background.
Try to go to bed by 11pm every night instead of 12am or later.
Mostly fail. I really struggled with this one and towards the end of the year my bedtime has been closer to 2 than 11pm. Bad. I really want to reform this one in the new year because my sleep is, still, suffering for it. So this one I will carry on into the new year for sure.
Try something out of my media list of things to check out at least once a week.
Mostly fail. I did so little I am going to go through and talk about what I thought about all the media I watched on my lists from last year now:
TV
Ghosts (BBC): I did see this whole show; my parents are big fans. I enjoyed it as well and thought it was very cute. Very solidly good. The British husband character is more fun to me than the American one. I enjoy some of the American ghosts a bit more than others, but it's a very solid show and even if I'm not fannish about it, I'll watch the next season when it comes out.
Ted Lasso: I've gone through most of the seconds season of it, stalled out after a weird episode with the secondary Coach guy. It is Fine, enjoyable even, but again, no fandom worms really bit me on it. Kaylee and Roy are my favs and I also like the relationship between Kaylee and Rebecca.
What We Do in the Shadows: I really loved this show and surprisingly I've fallen off quite a bit on it. I greatly enjoy the storyline of the Nu Colin Robinson child but I feel like they wasted a lot of potential in what Season 3 set up with them far apart by having the Season 4 opener basically be "Nevermind, everyone is together again now." It felt a bit disappointing that Nadja goes to England and immediately fails, then comes home. I'm not in love with Nandor's terrible no good very bad storyline about the genie and him using up/wasting wishes thus far. I will probably keep watching but I'm not as passionate about making it a priority to do so. Still good, just not as good. I don't know why it feels so much worse to me than the first couple of seasons; am I tired of the novelty? Have the characters gotten stale? Or is it just that the last two seasons have had plotlines I'm just not as into? Was there just a Cultural Vibe Shift???
Games
Hades: That's it, that's the game, that's the only game I've spent meaningful time with in 2022. It's good, very good, possibly my favorite Greek mythology game ever and certainly one of my top 10 faviest favs for games. I finally got to the epilogue and it was v. v. good v. rewarding and v. v. bittersweet as there isn't much left to do. I'm one trophy from platinuming it and I'm probably gonna try to get it. I really enjoy this game and am very fannish about it but I haven't written much fanfiction for it...which is surprising because you'd think extreme size difference Hades/Seph would be like, my kink. (And it kind of is, but more so its the "we were apart for twenty years" that I find fascinating.)
And yes, I am going to preorder Hades 2 the SECOND I get the option to do so.
Books:
Shadow and Bone - It was Aggressively Okay. It was Fine, and it was Easy to Read in a year where I felt sad and didn't want to do very much very often. You can read my longer review of it on goodreads, but the basic gist is just that it was solidly okay. It made me appreciate that the show was a very good adaptation -- one even better than the source material, honestly, but that might just be because my favorites in this story were always Inej, Kaz, and Jasper. It's not Bardugo's fault that they weren't in this book, but man, they really made the TV show so much better. I'll try for Six of Crows next year and hope for better times.
Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World - Another okay-ish read. It was fine, it wasn't bad, and I somehow manage to write a review on goodreads of this one too. It was...odd, at points, in its writing style. I know Pop History is a very popular genre but its weird to read the tumblrfication of Published Works; every time someone "bonked" (had sex with) someone else or "felt stabby" (caught a case of the murdering) I could imagine it in one of those "imagine urself..." posts that were common a few years ago. It felt WEIRD. And it felt like a particularly bad choice going over the late Julio-Claudians, an unstable dynasty that so beloathed one another they managed to basically wipe one another out within Agrippina's lifetime (or, almost, anyway; Nero would die almost a decade after his mother). Doesn't seem like the right source material for "stabbity" and the like to me.
And this is the second biography I've read that has had the weird thing of basically being like...too into the source material to be objective about it? There were so many times the author would say things like " "I am SURE that [Agrippina] would NEVER grovel to her brother" or "I am POSITIVE that Agripinna looked like a stone cold bitch" and it's like...this all took place in a time before any of our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents were around. No one knows what it was like. The paucity of sources on Agrippina in general are so thin that its very hard to get much of a head of her character at all; we can only say she was a somewhat savvy politician until she wasn't, and even that is mostly inference based on how much more stable Claudius' rule got when she became his wife and how bad Nero's got once he had her murdered. It's hard to figure out the temperament of a person who lived thousands of years ago whose primary sources are all primarily as footnotes in other people's lives and to the author's credit she does point out they are things she thinks are true and not things that they know happened, but it still gives off a weird eau d'fanfiction that I found off-putting even though the book is for the most part solidly written. Just didn't mesh, so good, on the Vibes.
no subject
no subject
I need to become a more positive person, I think.
no subject
2) thank you for the review of Agrippina. I read historical fiction for the difference between then and now -- I LOATHE stories that make their characters gratingly modern.
no subject
Being too hard on my self is a fault I've had for a while but struggle with correcting.