Roy Tang

It’s always weird for me when people do their “year in review” or “X of the year” any time before Jan 1st of the next year. You’re making Dec 31 feel left out. It’s one thing the Oscars get right. Anyway, here’s my personal year-in-review, such as it is.

Essay-writing section

It’s probably impossible to talk about 2020 without talking about the Covid19 pandemic that has ravaged the world. My country is sadly still under a state of quarantine/lockdown, I believe the world’s longest. I am doing relatively well during the pandemic, nobody I know personally has been infected, and I’m not exactly averse to just staying at home all the time. Compared to other people, it has for me at worst been a minor inconvenience. For that I am grateful.

I miss being able to go out to quiz nights or visit friends or eat at restaurants or even the occasional paper Magic tournament. We haven’t been visited by my the pamangkins in a while, most contact relegated to Zoom calls. I haven’t been unable to do my regular walks. Other than that my life remains relatively the same compared to last year, since any work I’ve done has been from home for the past couple of years.

I don’t feel like I have accomplished much in 2020, but maybe given all that we had to go through this year, just getting to the end is enough.

2020 Statistics:

Work, Travel, Learning and Self Improvement:

• Hours worked: ~100 hours (estimated) - down from ~200 hours last year
  • I still have the occasional support consultancy work, but for the most part work has wound down, and I opted not to take on additional work to replace it. Maybe someday I’ll write about how I can afford to work so few hours. (Hint: It involves being very frugal)
• Programming languages/frameworks learned: 1, same as last year
  • I learned the Flutter mobile framework to rewrite a mobile app charity project I did for some friends
• Some other stuff/projects:
  • I rebuilt this site in the latest version of Django
  • Migrated this site to a new webhost, learned some server deployment stuff along the way.
  • Migrated my main email usage away from Google
• Duolingo streak: 718 days (from 355 last year). It seems that I never broke the streak from 2019, so my longest streak continues. The numbers don’t add up - 355 + 366 should be 721 - but this may be because this wasn’t a true streak. I think I used the “streak freeze” powerups a few times throughout the year, so I probably actually broke the streak thrice lol. I don’t care, I’m counting it!
• Other countries visited: 0!

Social media:

• Facebook activity:
  • 32 posts (down from 315 last year, and 1081 in 2018). I deactivated my Facebook account in the middle of the year, so I can say Operation: Reduce Facebook Usage has succeeded.
  • 322 comments (up from 138 last year). I did however have more comments, because of quiz nights being held on FB live during the pandemic!
• Tweets: 1037 (slightly down from 1124 last year)
• Instagram photos: 46. Vs 108 last year. Most of these were for the usual Inktober thing.
• Reddit activity:
  • 6 submissions (20 last year)
  • 31 comments (172 last year)
• Answers written on Quora: 0.
• 0 words written for Nanowrimo
• 0 sketches submitted to r/sketchdaily
• 115 blog posts, 98537 words worth; down from 224 posts and 119529 words last year. Some posts that I liked or got some reactions:
  • Tales from the Old Web (Development)
  • Burnout
  • Thoughts on Blogging 2020 Edition
  • Quitting Facebook
• 115 links shared (all via Pocket)
• 410 comments! Way up from 75 last year. But this was probably due to some integration stuff counting likes/shares from Mastodon/Instagram/Twitter (?) as comments.
• Full stats for content on this blog and social media activity available here.

Media consumption:

• Things watched on Netflix: 802 (as at 12/29) (416 last year). Pandemic meant more binge-watching. I also rewatched some old (and long) series like The Big Bang Theory, which really adds to the count.
• (New) movies watched: 47. Here’s the list
• Books read: 2, half as much as last year T_T
  • Atomic Habits by James Clear
  • Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson
  • Action item: read more books (again)
• Music tracks played (Spotify/LastFM): 773. (1048 last year). See listening stats here.

Gaming:

This year I tried getting into game streaming via Twitch! Haven’t been super successful so far, but it’s been fun, especially when my friends are around to watch and keep me company. Subscribe at twitch.tv/twitchyroy or at the youtube channel where I upload all the stream vids afterwards.

There’s a lot of gaming stats, so they’re collapsed:

Others:

• Fitbit activity: 657,713 steps, 513.03 km walked. Down from 1,766,878 steps, 1,378.15 km last year. Down to a bit more than 1/3 of last year! Largely because I didn’t want to go out too much during the pandemic. Looks like my counts for Jan and Feb were on track for hitting 1.8m steps for the year, but then dropped off drastically starting March. Sadface. Hopefully I can get back into it once things settle down.
• Donuts eaten: 2, up from 1.5 last year. In my defense, they were Dunkin donuts, which seem to have gotten smaller during the pandemic!
• Baptisms attended: 1 (up from 0), managed to sneak one in right before the pandemic lockdowns started
• Weddings attended: 0 (down from 2)
• Wakes attended: 0
• New pamangkins: 2 (!)
• Quiz nights attended: Unable to count, since the pandemic forced the shift to more frequent online quizzes!
• Grab:
  • Trips: 3, down from 46 last year, for pandemic reasons obviously. All 3 rides were in January!
  • Food delivery: 3
  • Express delivery: 1
• Times I won the lotto: 0 (I declare in advance that I will remove this stat for 2021, it doesn’t mean I won the lotto!)
• Bears defeated in single combat: 0

Moving forward using all my breath

Plans are still hazy for 2021. On a personal level, I have been feeling a bit lost in terms of direction, since there’s always so much stuff I want to do or try out. I have been considering taking the year off completely like I did in 2016, but that may need further evaluation. As always, we take it in stride, and move forward one day at a time.