Year in Review 2024

It’s been a bit of a grab bag year but overall not as bad as 2023 and a bunch of things seem to be on track.

Health

I got on the neurodiversity bandwagon this year.

First I got myself a self-paid diagnosis for ADHD. This result should not surprise anybody who knows me. I’ve forced myself to be very high functioning throughout my life but it can’t be denied that there were always some underlying issues. I’m on medication from the end of the year and have gone off caffeine.

I also got myself tested for giftedness and got a positive result there as well.

Both of these results were validating if nothing else and put a lot of things that happened in my life in a different perspective.

For anybody who’s not sure whether they should pursue this, my recommendation would be: You will only know how differently you can feel if you do.

I got a mole cut out of my skin. It’s a nice scar to have.

I’m fully vaxxed against FSME and got a booster for COVID in November. That brings me to six jabs in total.

Sports and Injuries

It could have been a great year for sports. After having a great time on our yearly trip to the Alps, I came back to Berlin and badly sprained my ankle after falling off some stairs. I didn’t need any surgery, thankfully, but it did set me back some 8 weeks of physical therapy and having to build up to walking again.

That notwithstanding, I managed to participate in three road cycling group rides this year. MAAP opening up a store here and organising open weekly rides has been really cool. The cycling and the coffee were lit. 🔥

I cycled up the Brocken for my first ever mountain and clocked 4201km in 2024 on Strava.

It’s my goal to weigh 75kgs and I’m still as far away from that as I ever was.

Movies

Letterbox does a good job tracking this and it was a pretty good year for movies. I review all of them over there in detail but I can say the non-Potter kids movies we watched were nice and the Japanese cinema on the whole was excellent. I saw Evil Does Not Exist two times with the second time in the local theatre live scored by its composer Eiko Ishibashi.

  • Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
  • Dune: Part Two
  • Curious Tobi and the Treasure Hunt to the Flying Rivers
  • Glass Onion
  • Frozen
  • Tangled
  • Raya and the Last Dragon
  • Shoplifters
  • Luca
  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
  • Yojimbo
  • Drive My Car
  • Perfect Days
  • John Wick: Chapter 4
  • Evil Does Not Exist
  • How to Blow Up a Pipeline
  • Harakiri
  • Evil Does Not Exist
  • Die Hard

Television

Trakt is doing a great job keeping track of which episodes of which television series I need to watch. It’s the only way I can possibly stay on top of this.

  • The Last of Us
  • Spy x Family S2
  • Death Note
  • Frieren
  • Tour de France: Unchained S2
  • Vigil
  • The Peripheral
  • Kaiju No 8
  • Bluey
  • Arcane S2

Looks like I’m turning into a weeb just like everybody else in the culture. I watch anime in part as light entertainment and in part as Japanese immersion. It’s very hard to find anime that has any kind of thematic depth. Frieren comes closest because of how it twists the standard fantasy trope into a story about loss and reminiscence.

Books

It was a fair though not great year for reading.

  • Sheaf Theory through Examples, Daniel Rosiak
  • Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel
  • Min kamp 2, Knausgård, Karl Ove
  • Maria Stuart, Friedrich Schiller
  • Arkada Yaylılar Çalıyor, Melikşah Altuntaş
  • My Tender Matador, Pedro Lemebel
  • Kafka Connect: Build and Run Data Pipelines, Mickail Maison
  • Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, Forugh Farrokzhad
  • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault
  • The Kubernetes Book: 2024 Edition, Nigel Poulton
  • Kafka Troubleshooting in Production: Stabilizing Kafka Clusters in the Cloud and On-premises, Elad Eldor
  • Conversational Capacity: The Secret to Building Successful Teams That Perform When the Pressure Is on, Craig Weber

I’m continuing my trend of reading one Knausgård and one Mantel book each year. No reason not to do that again this year.

I picked up some poetry at Perdu during my visit to Amsterdam and have been enjoying reading that.

Every time I see Maria Stuart (which I got put on to by Past Present Future’s fantastic Great Political Fictions series) in the list, I think: “I need to read more Schiller.” but then I keep forgetting to get the files off Gutenberg. Germans sure knew how to write back in the day.

Trips

Besides the trip to the Alps, I went to the Netherlands once in 2024 for Kars’s viva and we took a trip to idyllic Hiddensee after my foot was healed. Much more travel is slated for next year!

Other Culture

I don’t go to exhibitions for lack of time. Besides seeing Evil Does Not Exist in the theatre I managed to burn a ticket to the opera and one to a dance show due to conflicting commitments and forgetfulness. I’m not sure whether I’m going to retry this.

I took the kids to see Ronja at an open air show which was fun.

Miscellaneous

I was a member of the Greens but I cancelled that because even if they’re the least bad political party in Germany, they have been doing a lot of things that I do not wish to support from the inside. I wrote about that here.

I continued to learn and maintain my Japanese level in preparation for my trip in 2025.

I learned a bunch around Kubernetes and Kafka but would have liked to do more programming. I refreshed my algorithms a bit and picked up Factor to play with.

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