This year I did a lot of stuff; I especially valued breadth over depth.

Fitness

The accomplishment I am most proud of is working my way up to being able to bench press at least my body weight. Considering that I was near 135lb at the beginning of the year, basically untrained and could lift 120lb at max, I began my training without much strength. I am now 155lb and can take on 165lb as my one-rep max; I recognize this magnitude is not impressive for my size but, given my progression, I am proud of myself. I began squatting halfway through the year so my gains there aren't as impressive in that area, but hey, who's looking at your quads anyway?

Physical Fitness became my hobby and obsession this year. Being in my gym is fun. My gym is in a building butting against a church and behind what one person described to me as “the main strip here” which really means a gun shop, laundromat and a physical Verizon store. It seems businesses in these leased buildings rotate in and out very often; that may be just a small-town thing I hadn't noticed before I understood debt; previously this place was also a gym under a different name, offering tanning services, childcare and everything short of small engine repair, on top of being a gym, that was displaced from its original location some miles down the road by a US post office. Unclear what it was before this.

There is a local chain gym that is less than 1000 feet from my gym but sports 2 fewer power racks, a number more treadmills + elipticals and additional square footage reserved in the back rooms reserved for hydromassage machine(s). But I've never visited there. I like mine because the guys I meet at my gym seem hardcore and I want to be like them in many ways. They train hard. They're in their machinist jumpers when they come by to lift after work. I recognized one of them as the mechanic who inspected my BMW 318ti during its annual safety inspection. But more than anything I want to be as strong as them; I don't envy being a machinist or a technician at a general automotive garage at all.

My goal for this upcoming year is to bulk to 160lb then cut down the incidental body fat I've gained while bulking and training so I can look fresh as fuck #wagmi

Drawing

Around the time I began to seriously train I began to learn to draw too. Everyone draws as a child; it's just a natural language of expression. But many quit early; I know I quit around 8 or 9 years old. That's the age when children develop from just scribbling into the simple “schematic” drawing which features basic representations of objects; they make the important parts of things larger; this is a trend you can find in prehistoric art like the cave paintings; at this age you choose whether you put your sun in the corner of the page or put it over the house.

Witnessing the evolution of generative AI focused on art over the past few years from the GANNs that powered This Waifu Does Not Exist to Stable Diffusion more recently pushed me to approach drawing again in February of this year. In 2018 I took Introduction to Art History at Sophia University while studying in Tōkyō; it was my favorite course I took there and, looking back, it exposed me to many pieces of art I fell in love with. Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus is one such piece I had never heard of before this class introduced me to it; that class turned me on to many different styles and mediums but especially oil painting and sculpture; I wish I kept my textbook but I threw it out to make room for more dōjinshi right before my flight back to the states along with my translated copy of the Genji Monogatari.

As for drawing this year I started slow and practiced deliberately when I did, reading theory and copying drawings as well as I could. I ought to have drawn more this year, I only filled out a quarter of my sketchbook since February, but all things considered this year was a good start; next year will be even better for my creative output. I still have not drawing anything “from my head” as I have simply drawn what I have seen in reference drawings, still-life scenes and landscapes.

Tōkyō

In June I visited Tōkyō with friends. It was the first time I had been back since I lived there in 2018. I was so happy to go back and visit a city that had such an impact on me during my formative back-9 at uni. From arrival to departure I was flooded with emotions I had forgotten, some negative (mostly incompetence like you're not fluent enough; didn't you study this language for years?) but most emotions I felt were positive. This was the same smattering of emotions I felt when I lived there; I loved showing friends the city too; one week was not enough. I dream of living there some day but reality keeps me anchored.

Piercing

I had my ears pierced in December of this year. My fiancé had this done about a year ago and since then I had always thought about getting mine done, not because I am gay, but because I thought it would look tight as fuck; I was right.

I got four piercings, two in both ear lobes. I am letting these stab wounds heal for now, then I may well get more done in the future.

Sewing

This year I also began to sew. One of my first projects was Rendering Jeans into Hemmed Shorts. Bulking from 135lb to 155lb has raised a technical challenge fitting into the short shorts I made while learning to sew then; I can barely squeeze my ass into them now; it looks great when I do :) I will probably have to retire those shorts after I bulk to 160lb.

Picking up sewing sparked a new confidence in me that has encouraged and pushed me to explore beyond just sewing. I have also cut off and hemmed about every crop-top hoodie or shirt I wear. Next year I will try to design my own piece of clothing, likely starting with a skirt as that is the most simple garment to design.

Millennium Strike Prologue 2023 — Chicago

In October I played my first proper “in-person” DJ set in Chicago at the Digital Art Demo Space there with a longtime friend DJ'ing under his alias Bushmaster for Millennium Strike. I was under my DJR3 pseudonym and wearing a crop-top I sewed a few weeks before.

Some things fucked up in the Unity window I was using as a visualizer while I was playing (mostly my fault) but it was all okay in the end :)

HooYa! Image Management

I learned to program when I was 13 so programming feats are kinda meh at this point. When I was a freshman in college an engineer at Intel explained to me that he used to program in his free time until he took it as a job. He still did program outside of work every once in a while; it was very minor stuff though, baseball stats. I was incredulous at first, having just entered school, but I understand him now at the green age of 27. But unlike him instead of writing Python to track RBI statistics I am writing image tagging software.

This year I pushed my HooYa! image tagging software to a decent state; now I host images on this wiki from my own cluster of the HooYa! network, how cool! Those links on this website to the current build of HooYa! always start with web.hooya.wesl.ee which is a web gateway proxying HTTP traffic to the protocol's native gRPC calls brought to you by protobuf. I have not written anything about how the current build works because it's still pre-alpha software. I do not promise any functionality beyond what you see today; I have a normal job to focus on, dummy.

Cryptocurrency

Speaking of normal jobs in February I transitioned from building DeFi products with insane amounts of possible leverage to building regulated crypto TradFi offerings together with Nasdaq's Digital Assets business.

In terms of personal investment in the crypto space I have done a great job at managing my capital this year, considering what my batting average was in the Terra ecosystem for 2022.