Five-Year Anniversary Special
28 August 2025
It's been five years since I started this blog — that's a long time. I guess I started this blog shortly before I moved from Long Island to Indiana with my wife, which sort of marks the point in time when I became an actual adult. So, in a sense, this blog has been a chronicle of my entire adult life. (Yes, I became an adult at like 25. Who cares? Late bloomer.)
These annual anniversary posts have inadvertently been forcing me to do a self-review of my year; I don't think that was my intention when I wrote the first one in 2022. But I think that's a good thing, because it's helpful to recalibrate around this time each year. The four-year anniversary post was actually very helpful after it made me go back and re-read the two-year anniversary post, and consequently realize that my thoughts (rather, internal struggles and aspirations) were so consistent across a two-year gap.
At this time last year, I had just been laid off from a job, and so my life as I saw it was very up-in-the-air. It turns out, it took five months of unemployment to find a new job (my current role, which I've been at for about 7 months now). So I had been thinking a lot about what I wanted my life to look like, and what I rediscovered (and tied back to the two-year anniversary post) was that I desired to be masterful in some skill. I wanted to be able to decide on a profession or craft that I can put a lot of time into, and thus "perfect" over the course of a long time. Of course, it has only been a year since the four-year anniversary post, so even if I did settle on a craft to master, I wouldn't have had enough time to master it.
Well, the bad news is that I haven't decided on that craft or skill or whatever it is. It's something I still need to figure out. A major weakness of mine, I'd say, is that I'm indecisive. And another (which pairs poorly with the indecisiveness) is that I don't really try new things or put myself in situations that might inspire new interests. So, the result is that I think myself in circles:
The result is that nothing happens. I get comfortable with routines (even those that I don't necessarily find fulfilling), and I have no reason to make a change.
But, the good news is that I did start a new job, as I mentioned earlier. It's a similar role to my last one, and it's in the same general field. But this one is better in a lot of ways. It's definitely a good experience for me, not least because it's a change of pace from my last (sort of depressing and monotonous) role. I'm learning a lot in the new role.
I shouldn't neglect to mention that I also moved house — again. Just a couple days ago, in fact, at the time of writing (this post will be published on the 28th of August, but I'm starting earlier). My wife and I are still unpacking, but I was able to set up my PC amid the chaos. Speaking of chaos, moving is stressful. Extremely stressful for me, as a neurotic individual who probably over-worries about things that aren't necessarily the most worry-worthy. There are a lot of variables and considerations when moving, and I was very stressed out; I'm glad it's all done with, aside from the rest of the unpacking. (Thanks to my friend Derik for helping me move and for putting up with my neurosis. My wife too; she puts up with that all the time.)
So I'm in Wisconsin now. I'll be here for at least a year, and I plan to do another photo-shoot-style post with Wisconsin pics soon.
Something I was just beginning to work on while I was writing the four-year anniversary post was my Gen 1 Pokémon romhack project. At that point, the project and its driving philosophy were in the early stages, but I'm proud to say that project is complete! For me, that's a great accomplishment, because it's something I really wanted to do (mostly because I wanted to utilize the end result myself). If you haven't seen it, you can check out the Pokémon Solus homepage to learn more about the project. It was also well-received by a decent amount of people on YouTube and elsewhere. So, not to toot my own horn, but I'm very happy with how the project turned out.
If you actually read all of my blog posts, something you're probably sick of me mentioning is my desire to create games. Working on the Solus romhack project scratched that itch a little bit — but game development in a broader sense is something I still think about all the time. And you can probably guess by the way I'm segueing to this topic that I still haven't followed through with it. What else can I say? It's my own fault for not following through, but it's something I plan to work on in the coming year (again).
I have some other things I plan to spend more time on in the coming year, and I think I'll list them here so I can look back at them when I write the six-year anniversary post and see if I followed through.
In fact, all three of those things are things that I'd like to incorporate into my routine in some capacity (not my daily routine, but I want all of these things to be part of my life regularly). I definitely need a routine; now that I've just moved again, it's probably a good time to get one started.
I'm also about to turn 30. I guess that's cool.
Drum roll, please. To accompany this post's release, I'm happy to announce that I'm also debuting two new pages on this site!
crickets
If you read about my recent website update, you might recall my mention of a new page on my site: the Pokémon Team Archive, which was the first example of one of my new one-off Markdown webpages which exist at the /md route.
Now, I have two more to unveil:
Please enjoy those pages.
I also wanted to mention that, since the last anniversary post one year ago, I wrote 9 blog posts (excluding this one). That averages to 0.75 blog posts per month in the past year. That is not enough! I want to write more often than that — at least one per month. Even if I take small breaks, I would like to publish posts in a slightly higher volume per year overall. So my pledge to you, dear reader, is that I will publish at least 12 posts in the coming year, between now and the six-year anniversary post (if I write one). Count on it.
— Derek Andersen