New Year, new me, baby! 2025. 

sometimes I like to make New Year's resolutions, as many people do (or at least so cultural wisdom tells me). every new year, and indeed every time I think about beginning some new habit at a fixed date, I like to begin beforehand so I can get a head start and I'm sure everything will go smoothly by the time I begin my commitment. This has been going fairly well so far, although I want to change a lot of things to improve them in 2025, so I haven't gotten a head start on all of them.

starting the resolution beforehand is also usually quite useful because often a resolution is, like, "no more of X!", usually necessitating that you finish all the X you're in first.

I have purchased an enormously bright light, rivaling, in its own small way, the sun, which I am already feeling the positive effects of owning; being that I live in a gloomy and overcast place otherwise for much of the year. 

i am getting back into exercise. normally my only course of exercise is taking 10+ mile walks from time to time. which people often find impressive, but I believe is not intensively strenuous enough to actually achieve many of the benefits of exercise. so I will be adopting a more rigorous and hopefully less time-consuming form of exercise as well. In the past year I tried to get into weightlifting but it was too inconvenient because I lived too far away from the gym. This year I will also instantly achieve "couch to 5K" (I guess walking multiple 5Ks every time I decide to exercise is sort of cheating on this, spiritually), because back when I did cross country in high school I didn't think of a 5K as a very long distance actually. so it seems very doable just simply get up off of a couch and then go jog one of those.

i am also quitting several miscellaneous things, triaging my activities so that I can get to better ones. i am also taking up some other miscellaneous activities because lol I gotta be me.

(for instance, did you know that I've been painstakingly electronically typesetting two books over the past couple of years? What the hell! Why did I do that?!)

(I'm not even done with them. I still need to finish them. and I will. But I'm not going to do anymore) 

(It turns out, when you get right down to it, all activities are sacrificeable.)

I'm spending a certain amount of time before the end of the year finishing some books that I began this year or some other time, because I'm in a book reading competition with a friend of mine. It's been going pretty well for me, but only if you think that when I read a volume of a comic book it counts, exactly the same as when she reads War And Peace. We may have to go to a panel of judges on this one. I read a lot of books that are sort of only technically books, and she reads a lot of books that are the equivalent of multiple books, sometimes.

I have gotten rid of several things, processed several pieces of paperwork that were lying about and nagging me and so forth, and have generally gotten a number of possessions in order.

I'm not sure whether the true bottleneck on tidying up is time per se or the time it takes to figure out what you should do with everything. luckily you can sort of run those in parallel in your head. 

I remain more committed than ever to reason and philosophy. although I feel that I have studied philosophy too much, and now wish to go live in the world and have fun instead of simply rotating concepts in my head. 

I will be continuing no link December into no link 2025 

the motif of the year 2025 — unless something should go horribly wrong, or perhaps right — is a comment my friend made to me: "pimpin' is easy".

in 2024 I took a spur of the moment trip. both because I wanted to do something, and also to show myself that it could be done. It went pretty swimmingly. I should have scheduled a day on either side to beat the jet lag, but other than that it was pretty good. i will probably do more of those in the future.

One of the great troubles of I don't know being alive or something. perhaps a trouble that only becomes apparent when you figure out what you're good at and your capacities and so forth. is that inevitably, at least in my experience, you're good at doing about X things of Y type, and then the vagaries of life demand, a demand you could technically turn down but would be sacrificing a lot to turn down, that you begin doing additional z things of Q type. This is greatly frustrating. however, I've managed to whittle the number of those down, with time, and also I'm making sure to build additional slack into my scheduling so I can gracefully handle these when they come up. hopefully. 2025, baby!