Bored, quarterly update
1. Get a solid full-time job obviously, but I also need to find some tutoring / teaching jobs for the short-term since I love doing that stuff
2. Spend about 10-25 hours a week teaching myself programming skills I've always wanted to learn but never got around to. This month I'm learning SQL, next month it's Flask so I can hopefully host a website (since I mostly use Python I imagine Flask will be a lot easier than relearning a JS framework for now), month after that it's the more intricate details of GenAI (i.e. understanding the math and current literature), and then C++, ROS, R, Spark, PHP, React JS, etc, etc. Admittedly I will most likely cut this goal if/when I get a full-time job lol.
Recently got a small part-time gig that I can work on at my own pace which is nice. I'm putting these two together because I also have a very big interview I'm still waiting on getting scheduled, so all of that "learning new skills" stuff has been on the backburner and all that time is instead being funneled into grinding leetcode problems (though admittedly I did indeed learn Postgres and I'm still making time for other job app-related work). I anticipate my new part-time gig will probably get me to start learning GenAI just for the hell of it (or at least general dev tools), so we'll see how that goes I guess. I still kinda want to get into tutoring now that I'm reminded of it, but I feel it might be too late into the school year...will make a note to self for next week.
3. Get back into developing the game I was working on this past Summer/Fall; I'm blessed that my team (online people I met during a jam) is still wanting to work on it and that my local city also has a pretty solid dev community, so I'm aiming to do progress showcases at monthly meetups and have a 30ish min demo ready in mid-October that we can submit to a local indie game expo (I do not expect the full game to be done any soon, I'll be shocked if it gets done before Trump leaves office)
Taking this very slowly but I've been getting back into this over the past couple weeks; I've been doing some scriptwriting to hammer out the intro to the game lately in the hopes of submitting a draft for my local writer's group this week. We'll see how that goes. I'll need a big push if I'm planning to submit something to the expo tho
4. Spend a few hours a week on (getting better at) video editing. Can also learn Photoshop while I'm at it.
LOL.
On the bright side, I'm pretty satisfied with the projected workflow of Smogon's YT content and I'm finally making plans to create videos for my own channel, so I foresee myself spending a healthier amount of time on this in the coming months rather than what the fuck January/February was.
5. Spend some time each week (maybe an hour or two total?) learning piano. Alfred's book for adults was the main recommendation I saw, so I just want to finish that book by year's end.
Book's going a bit quicker than I expected and I'm currently averaging closer to 1.5-3 hours a week, though I have slowed down on it as of late. Still, I'm about halfway through it so I'm pretty sure I'll finish the book by the end of the summer. There's two more volumes I can buy after this, so I'll be aiming for those once I'm done with this.
6. Continue learning Japanese, I've been using Duolingo to practice kana and Genki for everything else. My goal for this year is to finish the first Genki book and pass an N5 level test. If I have time/energy, hitting N4 would be a cool stretch goal, and getting good enough to do a fan-translation of Wagyan Paradise is my eventual goal (probs 2026 lol)
At this point I'm done with Duolingo kana, but the app very nice and easygoing so I'm still using it a lot for vocab and kanji. I got back into Genki earlier this month and have caught back up to where I had stopped last year, but I still have a looooong way to go if I'm planning on finishing the book. No shot we're hitting N4 this year, but I'm definitely still gunning for N5.
7. Get a more organized sense of what games / mangas / animes / movies / albums I want to get through and make a media thread for it on twitter or something; would be nice considering I spend a disproportionate amount of time just dabbling through my backlogs rather than actually playing or watching something lol, and I like to write and talk about what I experience. Aiming for an album a week, about one of every other category per month (aiming for animes that I could watch while doing basic exercise on the days I'm not going for a run or doing something long at the gym), and being able to write about what games I've played on a monthly basis for the vg thread because I love getting better at writing. Eventually I'd like to host a site for all of my reviews lol.
Averaging a movie a month which is great, album listening is still a bit slow but probably average to 1 every 1-2 weeks. Everything else has been very inconsistent lol, after finishing like 20+ games last year I haven't properly finished any games this year...but it looks like I'll be finishing my first one soon, and I hope I'll be using it as my first video topic. Additionally, I need to find a simple game I can play in Japanese just to practice my skills, maybe Earthbound or Undertale since they have the Fangamer pamphlets?
Have some other looser goals like trying out more social events and hanging out with friends (though I'm admittedly fairly happy with the bimonthly writing clubs and software dev groups I've found so far), making sure to go to therapy (I think I'll aim for monthly at this point), and contributing to a cool Python package I saw someone starting development on, but in the coming weeks I just gotta experiment and see what works best for my schedule and energy levels (WOW this post was longer than I expected)
Still doing social events and those are going nicely, though I didn't go to much last month so I wanna do some more to make up for it this month. As for the Python package...I completely forgot about that lol, but yeah maybe I'll look into it again next week just so I can polish up my dev skills.