2015 Personal Retrospective

David Stark / Zarkonnen
1 Jan 2016, 11:48 p.m.

I've done plenty of gamedev-related retrospectives recently, summing up the first two years of Airships development, doing a presentation on distribution and marketing to local Zurich game devs. So for this quick retrospective, here's all the non-work stuff that happened.

In May, we switched out our flatmate, as the previous one went back to the UK. New flatmate K has been working out really well. We enjoy each other's company, and K is fine sharing a flat with a couple and a cat with occasional health troubles. Eventually, K will also depart, at which point we will probably just pony up the extra money so we won't need to find someone new. We haven't minded sharing our flat with good friends, but we would mind sharing it with some random person we didn't know.

We live in hope that in 2016, we might finally see some of the money owed to us by a startup we both worked at back in 2013. It's been more than two years of forms and court appointments and fees, but the jaws of justice may be finally closing around those "entrepreneurs" we generally refer to as "the weasels". (Apologies to the noble members of the mustelid family!)

I spent some time going to Impact Hub Zurich, a nice coworking space. I'm not sure yet if in 2016, I'll spend most of my work-time there or only go on occasion. It depends on whether I can make it work with my weird ergonomics requirements.

I've had some fun health scares. Turns out that I have a hormone imbalance that probably contributed to me becoming rather round over the last few years. Thankfully, there's medication that's an easy fix. Then the next thing was that my blood sugar levels were pre-diabetic. I started using a step counter and made some adjustments to my diet, and now levels are back at the top end of normal. At least they were before Christmas. The plan is to keep slowly losing weight, and I think with the hormone thing fixed, that should be possible.

The cats have gone from being small cute adolescent cats to gigantic orange beasts. Sinister in particular is huge now, a big friendly cat-pillow of more than seven kilos. He's not exactly overweight, just large-framed and fuzzy. Dex has lagged behind because of his recurring health problems, but even he is now more than 5 kg, so not a small cat by any means. They are both really friendly and very forgiving animals that have brought us a lot of joy.

Rae and I are still happily doomed for each other.