Happy New Year

Here we are, 5 years after the relaunch of The Anny Blog after a turbulent 2013 when it just seemed to crash and burn. The Annyversary is on Saturday, but I won’t do anything special for it.

Let’s go over the past year though. 2017 I got a child and I spent the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018 focusing on that, to return to The Anny Blog in May again. At the time my child was 7 months old.

I think that was a fairly fast bounce back… maybe? Especially for someone as frail as me.

After that I posted almost every month. I feel like not posting was the biggest mistake in my life, but if I see it from a reader’s perspective, I wouldn’t have blamed any of the bloggers I occasionally read blogs of if they missed a couple of months when they had a child within approximately a year. So I’d say all is good.

I didn’t play four games, as I had hoped, and some of the content I wanted to share got the backseat to anime, which I binged in periods. I mean, it’s so much easier to watch anime and write a review of it than, say, play a game and finish it. A game needs a console and at least some amount of effort to move (your fingers/hands – depending on the game) while it’s just a couple of clicks and then I’m watching a show on Wakanim, Crunchyroll, HiDive or Netflix.

And I can’t tell you how many times this past year I’ve watched True in the Rainbow Kingdom and Word Party on Netflix through my Playstation 4, because it’s been the only things my child has been willing to watch to stay calm. I hope we’ll be able to pick up Pokémon again though. But I have to admit that Pokémon in Finnish is horribly dubbed…

But I digress. I did start a few games though. We’ve been playing Little Big Planet as a family (one parent with one baby, one parent with a 8-year-old – then switch parents), for instance. I surprisingly liked that game now. I did play the demo before and really didn’t like it. But when with someone else, it was not too bad. It’s interesting. I also started playing Tales of Zestiria, but I’m unsure if I’ll review that. I also began anew with Atelier Rorona this year. But I finished none of them. And i might have forgotten some games I played, and I didn’t list any of the mobile ones.

Turning to books in general… My Goodreads challenge was 20. My end result was 60. Not bad. And that’s not counting all the children’s books I read during 2018, because we borrowed some from the library and I didn’t bother to add all of them into the Goodreads library. It’s probably closer to 80 or 100, really. At least if you could the fact children love hearing the same stories over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. But part of that count was all the 25 volumes of D.Gray-Man.

“I think that was a fairly fast bounce back… maybe?”

So, now it’s 2019… I have a few goals, actually. And I hope you all will help me fulfill them. Let’s start with the ones that are at least to most part related to this blog!

Reading Goal: 50 books
This is a considerably higher number than the 20 I had for 2018. I clearly managed to read this much over the past year, but to make it more challenging I added a few extra things:

• 20 children’s unique books: As I have a child I end up reading children’s books now. I expect to read at least 12-14 because I get on average 2 books from the book club I have the baby registered in. The remaining 6-8 books will be whatever children’s books I get my hands on otherwise – because I own them, buy them or borrow them.
• The Bible: While I’m not Christian, I was raised Christian and I have an interest in religion and mythology. I never read the Bible in full, so I think I should at the very least see how this book has affected how I was raised. And maybe I can understand those who have that faith just a little better. And, well, I may also understand fiction better, because the Bible affected at least western fiction. (No review will naturally be done.)
• Author surname represents one letter in the (Swedish) alphabet: These books can’t be in the children’s book category, simply for fairness sake. The Swedish alphabet also has three more letters, so the total is 29; A-Z and then Å, Ä, Ö. I don’t have to read them in alphabetical order, but each author’s surname needs to start with one of the letters. If I were to read a book whose author’s name start on a letter I already have checked off, it doesn’t count to my final goal.
• Aside from the Bible, which is a religious book, all has to be fiction. That being said, it doesn’t mean I won’t read non-fiction. But they won’t be counted to the final goal.

Will this be tough? Of course it will! Will it be a great opportunity to look into new genres and read new authors? It’s a perfect opportunity! I don’t read much by authors in the area, but there aren’t that many options when you have to pick authors for the letters Å, Ä and Ö, compared to the rest of the alphabet, so I think it’ll be interesting.

Post more batches
A lot of the titles I read or watch (or even briefly play) get lost in a void. I don’t feel making a long post of them is worth the time for various reasons, so I just don’t post at all. But if I strive to make more batches, I will have an outlet.

I also hope to post these outside of the regular schedule. Still on Sundays, just not necessary on the last Sunday of the month.

Finish 1 game
This year was, as I mentioned, not my year for finishing games. I just started a lot. So my goal is to just finish one. Any of them. Hopefully that’ll be Amnesia Later, which I recently picked up again after a long hiatus from it. Toma is traumatising even when he’s nice.

Widen my view
I have dominantly posted reviews of Japanese media, and within that it’s mainly been comics and anime. I want to post more varied material with these things among my sub-goals:

• 1+ drama CD
• 1+ music CD
• 2-3+ streaming and/or reading services
• 2+ visual novels
• 1+ game
• 1+ anime from each ongoing season
• Include western material
• Post more extra material on Patreon for my patrons
• Post more on Instagram
• Livetweet regularly

It would be awesome if I got my people to comment on my blog, or join the Discord. And if I could start streaming again, it might also be fun. But those aren’t so much goals as just fun extras if anything.

On the more personal side of my goals I have more or less one:

• Get math off my list of subjects I both need and want to study for my university qualifications.

I’m not getting any younger, so it’s time to get that off my list of things, because I’m going to get my degree in physics one day – one way or the other. I don’t care if I’m 50 by then. But I need to take the first step, and getting math off the list is the first one. So I plan on taking two exams this year.

I’d also like to get better at Japanese, but as I’m basically drowning myself in that and three more languages, it’ll likely just come naturally, as it has over these many years of not studying but reading and gaming in Japanese, so it’s not as much of a goal as just me stating the obvious, isn’t it?

Do you have any goals for the year? I’d love to hear about them.

And thanks for reading my blog this past year (or two years, actually) and for staying with me for another year.