So this is it: December 31st, 2023. In the tradition of this blog, here's a rundown of things big and small that made this year for me what it was.
First and foremost: I'm wearing a ring now! It was a small ceremony at the end of September with just core-family members. Still turned out to be a fun bash, and we were so delighted people came from all over – Austria, UK, Sweden and even the US of A.
With my co-conspirator Daniel we finally wrote a book. It's twenty stories from history, it's named just like our podcast and wouldn't you know it, it became a bestseller. Thanks everyone who bought one (or two – it was actually given as a gift quite a bit).
With my wife, we spent three weeks of January in London. It was great to just live there and still be able to do everything the city has to offer. We went to nine different museums.
I finally went back to the US again. In April, I spent a week in Kansas City to celebrate my host-mother's 70th birthday. I have such a soft spot in my heart not just for my second family, but also the Midwest. Everyone should go and visit KC once in their life (and Lawrence, where I picked up a lot of info on John Brown, which resulted in a pretty nice podcast episode.)
With the podcast we toured Austria, Switzerland and Germany, during which we not only talked in front of thousands of people, we also finally got to meet a lot of them face to face. Always such a pleasure to actually see and talk to the people who listen to us. All in all we had a fantastic year with the podcast. Thanks to all those people who supported it and keep doing so.
In more techy news: I more or less left Twitter. We still use it for the podcast, but I've stopped using it personally. I mostly hang out on Mastodon now, but have generally somewhat slowed down my social media behaviour.
Probably because I've started using this blog more. Not necessarily for actual blog-posts like this one, but rather as a sort of hub to collect whatever I post. 2023 was a big year for federated software, so apart from Mastodon, I'm also using Pixelfed, which is also automatically pushed to this blog via the photolog. I think I started this last year already, also with the filmlog (where I pull in my reviews from Letterboxd - 63 films this year!). And the linklog, which pushes interesting links both to my Mastodon account and this blog.
I also started playing around with the various LLMs out there. For example with my poached egg site, that does not a whole lot more than generate images of poached eggs (results do vary). I wrote about it here.
Of course, I didn't forget to eat and drink well. I drank a fair few cocktails, but I think I calmed down in the taking photos of said cocktails department.
By any metric, 2023 was one of the best years of my life. It can only go downhill from here! See you on the other side.