2025 Year Review
The year started quite horribly with my dad passing. Flew out east to see him in his last few days and am so grateful to have done so and to have had a chance to connect with friends and family who I hadn’t seen in a long time. We all missed him a lot this year.
Quick summary of what I did in 2025:
- Got ChatGPT. Found it invaluable to answer complex legal/financial questions and just any question in general. It also covers a crucial blind spot of life: The Unknown Unknowns. It will offer up often crucial information, unprompted, based on predicting what’s likely relevant to a situation.
- Fixed/optimized finances. Spent a lot of time on this due to accountant mistakes and some from myself. Have better tracking and understanding of everything now and this allows easier projections of future net worth/spending.
- Shopped for a home. Still undecided. Victoria is one of the least good value for money place on earth but it is what it is.
- Spent 6 weeks in Italy. Good learning experience about what I like and don’t like when traveling.
- Improved portrait skills. Well I think so anyway.
- Picked 60kg of blackberries. New record. If I had a house with a big freezer I’d never need to buy berries again…
- Got a family doctor, after 5 years of wait…
- Updated/ported an old Flash game to Steam, Almost 20 years after it came out on Newgrounds! It was fun to do but working 100 hours for 0$ did bring me back to the good ole days…
Anyway, how did I do on my resolutions for 2025?
1- Get a A New Road Bike - A+
Bought the last one in 2017, lot had changed since tech-wise and price-wise. I cheaped-out and bought a bike that didn’t exactly fit me. Used it for a month or so to finish my Salish Sea trip.
Then spent a lot of time researching parts / frames and looking on Ebay/Marketplace to build a new bike. This bike is 13-14k in stores, ended up building it for 6500. I love it and it performs really well. Likely could have found a similar used bike for 6-7k already fully assembled so I’ve learned my lesson for next time.
2- Get down to 148lbs and maintain. A
Did a Dexa scan near start of year and landed around 17.5% body fat. Bryan Johnson, possibly the healthiest dude on earth, sits at 10%. The best cyclist in the world is my height and weighs 144-145 or less in season.
I was a fat teen and just have near limitless hunger drive so it’s a constantly struggle to maintain weight let alone make a dent. Italy was brutal with gaining back 3-4 pounds despite biking 25 hours a week and watching what I eat. Only managed to dip to 148 for a few days during Zwift season then rewarded myself with just eating normal ( to me ) for 2 weeks and bounced back to 158 lol. Just so you understand: Me eating 3000 calories in a day is what my brain considers starvation.
Back to 155 now, essentially where I started. We’ll see if we can build some kind of habits in 2026 or take drugs or who knows.
3- Finish Salish Sea Island adventure. A
Finished it early in the year. https://www.thepoxbox.com/travel
It was pretty fun to do. Did a bunch more camping like I wanted, met lots of local and interesting people and did lots of gravel bike which I still kinda hate.
4- Get This Damn Game to Alpha/Beta F+
Well it has a title screen and a name now at least! Still ongoing, not cancelled yet.
5- Always be talking to a girl C
Didn’t take any breaks and made a few more accounts but didn’t really actively message that many people. Met up with maybe 10 women this year, nothing crazy or too exciting. There’s a growing worldwide gap between men and women, both in their political ideologies and what they want or think they can get from life and it’s creating a huge mismatch in the dating world when it comes to offer and demand. When you get older you also start to ask yourself what you even bring to each other’s life anyway.
6- Hike in Strathcona F
Fine I guess this isn’t happening.
7- Take some class A
Took a portrait class ( sort of ) at the start of the year then started doing Life Drawing sessions by year end. Probably 30 classes total.
Planning to expand my skills in 2026 with more structured training.
8- Out of the apartment 6/7 days B+
I did pretty good with this! Workout Mondays with a friend, usually a lunch/coffee with another in the week, 2 life drawing classes, family diners, Reddit events. Made more connections this year but the reality of getting older is just that you pop in and out of people’s existing routines you kind of don’t become close friends. Or maybe that’s a West Coast thing. Or both!