2021 in Review // Hopes for 2022

What better way to start off the new year than to review last year? - Sebastian Lau, actually 2022 (actually 2021)

The year of 2021 is declared the Year of Stanisław Lem in Poland, according to the November 27, 2020 resolution of Sejm (the lower house of the parliament of Poland). […] 2021 is the year of the 100th Stanisław Lem anniversary.- Wikipedia

Incidentally, I only found that out because my sister kept pestering me to finish Normal People by Sally Rooney so that she could read it.

Since 2021 was the year of the 100th anniversary (of his birth), what better way to pay homage to him than to read Solaris?

Not to say that I am incapable of reading a novel in a short period of time but I had given myself such a sudden deadline. If I remember correctly, it was only a week or so. I plodded along slowly, reading the better five-twelths of the novel within a span of a few hours at a NYE celebration with “family friends”. So, I am elated to tell you that I finished the novel with 24 minutes to spare.

To be perfectly honest with you, my reading literacy has probably dropped significantly; I haven’t read many novels since Year 13 / 7th form, and so that probably influenced my perspectives. Anyways, I found it an interesting but confusing novel (it doesn’t help reading the synopsis of the movie adaptations and realising that the ending is different).

Some background information is useful: first, the English translation is based on the French translation, which is to say that some of its meaning has been lost. Second, Lem was known for his neologisms (new invented words) which made translation of what he was trying to say quite difficult.

Third, it can be said that writers / people of that generation didn’t likely have the same general understanding of science as we do today and so techno-babble-like phrases was used without concern for whether or not they had any real meaning. Which imo, is no.

The premise of the novel is that a psychologist, Kris Kelvin, has been invited to the research station on the planet Solaris, in order to find out what is going on there.

Throughout his exploration of the station and the phenomena occurring there, Kelvin consults the scientific literature on Solaris and he discusses the development of the field, the schools of thought on what exactly is on Solaris, and just generally the amount of fruitless research that has been conducted over the years.

From what we are read of the literature, it echoes how ill-defined some technical and scientific concepts are (and how we frequently redefine them in subtly different ways), how haphazardly defined research nomenclature can be, and the vacuous jargon we have in modern society, especially in technology and marketing (if only AI was as useful as we are told it is).

~, that is to say, I saw it as a critique of the use of jargon, and helped to reinforce a core theme — the futility of the scientists’ efforts aboard Solaris. Nonetheless, it was an interesting novel and I’m glad to have read it.

PS: I’ve managed to somehow basically write a review. Well, there you go.

So… How did I do with my NY’s Resolution?

Poorly.

I had a streak of 6 posts from January to March, with three posts written in a very short span in January so let’s just say I wasn’t very consistent.

In one of those January posts, I even amended my resolution to give myself more slack. For the fun of it, let’s calculate the stats based on the original resolution and based on my amendment.

Taking the default case (once per fortnight, i.e. Expected=26),

Stat Value
Streak 6
Completions 9
Expected *26
Completion Rate *9/26=34.62%

Taking the amended case (once per month, i.e. Expected=12),
Stat Value
Streak 6
Completions 9
Expected 12
Completion Rate 9/12=75%

Wow! Based on my amended resolution, I did pretty well. Though reality tells another story since the gap between my later posts was around three months long.

I wrote only 9 posts in the year though based on some of the ideas I had, I might’ve written around 12-13.

On reflection, I probably should’ve (pre-)pre-planned my posts and written them in advance of when I intended to post them. If I’m being even more “work smart”, I should’ve set a schedule to measure my progress against.

As you can tell, I was originally going to talk about some hopes for 2022 (if it’s at all interesting) but since we’re already in late January, it no longer feels right. I’ll just talk about how January’s been and how the year looks like it’ll shape up.

Having lived through most of January by the time you’ll be able to read this post, I have to say that Year 3 of COVID does not have me optimistic about the rest of this year. Nonetheless, it’s going to be interesting. We’re moving into… well at the time of writing, we’re 32 minutes into living under Red again. At least, it is pretty certain that we’ll be going back to uni in-person for the most part.

I haven’t done half the stuff I told myself I was going to do at the beginning of December but to be honest I wasn’t expecting to. It takes continuous effort to write an app or (re-)learn some stuff.

Wanting to “rest”, I restarted playing Destiny 2 sometime in December and well… it’s been an arduous but fun grind since. As Paul Tassi put it, 2021 might’ve been “the best year of Destiny 2 we’ve seen so far”.

Bungie got rid of sunsetting (hard-earned gear? well, wait a few seasons, you won’t be able to use it anymore), the reason I stopped playing; finally added transmogrification (reskin your armor so you don’t end up looking like a random mess); honestly, I don’t know what else they’ve done, I hadn’t been playing but the game feels a lot better than where I left off.

My sister started watching Money Heist and Superstore (f*ing hilarious), which we’ve been watching on VodafoneTV (EOL in September tho 😢). No Way Home was a lot better than I thought it was going to be; Matrix: Resurrections wasn’t; Ghostbusters: Afterlife was good. I don’t know what else to say.

Summer Lab, an entrepreneurship programme run by the uni, has started and it’s been both chill and intense at the same time. We essentially chose what we would be working on for the next three weeks on the first day. The pressure to be on top of things hasn’t been helped by my terrible sleep schedule and the fact that Summer Lab starts at 10am well.., we’re meant to be there by 9:45. (in fact, super secret I’m meant to be researching right now).

We’re so close to going back to uni and I just got the news (email) today that Clubs Expo won’t be as in-person as before; those virtual Zoom stalls will be happening again 😞, but what can you do with Omicron threatening to get all of us… (Is this meant to be a secret?)

I thought taking a “rest” in December (to play Destiny 🙄) meant that I would be energised enough to work on my projects in January but honestly I don’t feel like it. Even a new project inspired by some really trippy in-and-out-of-wakefulness dreams I had couldn’t get me to do stuff. I am excited about the Witch Queen expansion though! (The hunter armor in the trailer looks really cool).

I’m just done with working out plot holes, both as a result of forgetting about things and redoing them as well as accidental ones.

So… this seems like a good segue…

My resolution for 2022 is to do more writing things, which is essentially the same as the one I set in 2021. Which ironically, I’m not doing right now. And fancily:

I resolve to write more, work out the issues in my projects, and to be more willing to throw things out.

There are some thoughts I had on metrics to meet this resolution, and whilst none of these are solid requirements, it’s nice to make them public (accountability, right..?).

  • at least one post a month with a minimum word count of 600
  • two posts a month, one at least 600 words and another shorter text
  • at least one post a month with a target word count of 1000 words. Intent to write more varied posts — long and short form, some stories…
  • one work per quarter. Includes academic essays as long as they are 1000 words or more

And… <Insert segue>

because promising things that I don’t deliver is great…

Maybe… a Cowboy Bebop review?

I said I was going to write one but I still haven’t finished watching either series. And watching them both at the same time has actually not been a great move. Who da thunk it?

“Other stuff”:

Long story short, I was working on the idea for a video game set in New Horizons’ future (one of many) and developed a whole lot of backstory for NH in general. A video game isn’t currently in my skillset but a lot of the details are quite useful for building out my universe. But I have to merge it all into NH and *incoherent rambling about organising files and documents*, so… that’s a task.

^the rambling: (don’t read this) that project, originally called Quirinus, was meant to be relatively separate from NH, with its own characters etc, but is really not. It also contradicts or complicates many of the ideas in another future timeline, and merging them together is an issue. That future timeline, called Terran Federation or TF for short has three variants, and is also not itself consistent.

The other issue relates to how I’m going to store the information. I did a lot of Quirinus on Google Docs whereas most of NH is in a Git repository as plaintext files. TF exists in fragments within that Git repo that I haven’t yet recovered. As that Git repo assumes that NH is (and it is) the main timeline for the overall NH project, a lot of the information doesn’t apply to TF or Quirinus. But I don’t want to duplicate information and then lose track of it (a big problem historically) or occupy more space than necessary, so everything is in a different place.

There’s also the structural issue. As it stands, NH is the baseline for the entire repo; if I were to add these other timelines/projects, would they have their own subfolders, or be unified? If they are put into subfolders, then do I put NH into a subfolder as well? That impacts how easy it is to access files, etc… But if these subfolders exist alongside NH on the root, then what do I name NH’s folder and since there are other non-timeline folders, how does that affect access?.

Anyways, thanks for reading. I think the next post will be me lamenting how I have no clue what my career looks like. Fun, isn’t it? 😀































2021 in Review // Hopes for 2022 was written by Sebastian Lau filmed in front of a live audience at three points in time: end of December 2021, early January 2022, and revolves around three best friends who arrive in Cleveland on a fluke and end up making it their home and late January 2022 in vastly different states of motivation.