Much of the first half of the year was taken up with the slow, stressful process of my girlfriend getting fired. Her very incompetent HR person decided that she must be got rid of, and instead of simply letting her go - Switzerland has at-will employment, you can just do that - he instead spent months repeatedly moving goalposts and insinuating things until she inevitably had a complete burnout. Then fired her.
Next, we moved flats, which was good in that we're now in a bigger, cheaper place, but also very stressful, not helped by a shoddy moving company that broke a lot of our stuff and tried to argue on price after the fact.
Then in August, I managed to severely mess up my shoulder, leaving me unable to work or really use my computer much at all. This took a lot of physiotherapy to fix and is just about resolved now. In September, I caught some kind of virus, which I then just proceeded to just never recover from. I have spent a lot of the time since then in bed. Doing basic physio exercises or going shopping often leaves me so tired and nauseous that I need to lie down for several hours afterwards.
It now looks like a lot of this was actually caused by the vast amounts of statins I've been on since my heart attack, so I'm hoping to change up my meds and be more functional in the next year.
Apart from that, we of course had the ongoing genocide in Palestine and Trump somehow winning a second term as US president. Basically, the Bad Timeline.
Donald Trump winning the US presidential election, 2024, colorized
(actually, the Eye of Wakboth event from Six Ages: Lights Going Out)
Oh, and our cat Sinister ate a pumpkin seed and had to have a very expensive operation to have it removed from his stomach. (He's fine now.) His brother Dexter is also somehow still alive, despite constantly throwing up no matter what we feed him.
Sinister, Dexter, sheep
So yeah, just a whole lot of unpleasant things of various kinds at various scales.
Anyway, on to cool stuff:
We went to Egypt with a tour organised by the History of Egypt Podcast, which was absolutely amazing. Two weeks of seeing a truly overwhelming amount of fascinating history - pyramids, temples, artworks. Tasty food, good weather, interesting travel companions. I do recommend it, but it was not a cheap holiday.
The Bent Pyramid looking like a sandworm
My girlfriend and I went to Worldcon Glasgow, which was her first one, and my third. As always, it was a great time with fascinating talks and some amazing costumes on display. We did skip on most of the last two days though, as the number of coughing, unmasked people went up exponentially day by day - and indeed, many people did catch Covid, which we thankfully avoided.
I read a bunch of the Hugo nominees, and I was especially fond of Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh and Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo.
Oh, and my 2014 National Novel Generation Month entry Moebius Octopus was selected for inclusion in Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023 by MIT Press so I'm technically a published author now.
Games-wise, I played a lot of Solium Infernum, a turn-based strategy game set in hell that for some reason did not become the hyper-success it deserves to be. Maybe it's a game designer's game, I don't know, but I love the different paths to victory and the turn limit that prevents the game from becoming a drag. I also played a lot of (too much, see August) Endless Sky, a top-down space RPG/shooter game heavily inspired by Escape Velocity, which in turn is basically the game that turned me into a game developer in the first place.
As for my own game development efforts, Airships: Lost Flotilla is nearing completion and will be ready to release on January 23, 2025. It was meant to come out about four months earlier, but then I spent roughly four months unable to work, so I'm calling that a win for my time planning. It's a top-down airship autoshooter heavily inspired by Brotato, though of course it's evolved into its own thing. You should try it out, it's really fun.
Airships: Lost Flotilla gameplay
Also, excitingly, our games coworking space / incubator Swiss Game Hub is finally moving to new, bigger, fancier offices in one week. I expect to be pretty busy with the hub over the next year, but I also expect it to be pretty amazing.
So at the end of this year, I do find myself hopefully on the mend, deeply in love with my partners, accompanied by my two daft cats, and with some cool things coming up.
Cuties!