Year in Review: 2024

Personal Deets

2024 was a bad year.

Unbeknownst to us lowly peons, my employer had been distracted by a legal battle between two of the co-founders since 2022. Apparently the company was run at a loss through 2023. In early 2024, the axe fell.

The same day they announced layoffs — the same morning — I found out a family member had cancer. They’re doing fine, thankfully. Unfortunately, it turned out an ex-coworker of mine was also fighting cancer, and she died in the summer. In December, I found out a childhood friend died from diabetes.

It wasn’t all gloom. I went on two big trips, to St Louis in June and Mexico in August. I still have a job. Trump hasn’t announced an invasion of Canada yet.

Yarr.

Travel

Comox, Comox, Comox
I went there in the spring. And in the summer. And again for Christmas.

Fear the Con
It’s a gaming convention run by the Fear the Boot RPG podcast. Good times! Everyone was friendly, including one of the organizers who picked me up from the airport. And I got to check out St Louis a bit. 😃 (Tweets.)

Playa del Carmen, Mexico
We celebrated my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary at an all-inclusive resort in Mexico. It was a lot of a fun, although I don’t think we spent a single moment outside the tourist bubble.

Daytrip to Seattle
A friend and I had the day off, and I wanted to visit the States before Trump took over (sigh). So we drove down to Seattle for the day. We went to Pike Place, the Musuem of Pop Culture, and some tasty restaurants.

Events

I have no idea what I did last year. I guess I have to go through my pictures.

The Critical Hit Show
It’s still going, it’s still going.

TWRP concert
Fun concert. Playing in those costumes must’ve been incredibly hot.

The northern lights
I hadn’t seen them for ages. When I went out, I wasn’t sure if the fuzzy grey in the sky was the northern lights or wispy cloud. But my phone brought out the green and purple.

Comox Airshow
I got to see some stunt flying and get up close to aircraft. I didn’t have the patience to get into the massive queues to go inside any of the planes.

Eurovision
No watching party this year, but I live-tweeted the experience. About halfway through I went for a bike ride, and wiped out and cut my knee pretty badly. Let that be a lesson: Blow off Eurovision at your own risk.

Vancouver Canadians
One of the perks of having an American friend is sometimes going to watch baseball.

Harjeet’s funeral
Rest in peace, Harj. Part of me still thinks I should ask if you want to hang out sometime. A bunch of fellow ex-coworkers attended — it was good to catch up, despite the sombre occasion.

Canada Day in Burnaby
Food trucks and fireworks! Live music, too.

Book Club
The reason why I read The Silmarillion, The Last Unicorn, and Legends & Lattes.

Orville Peck concert
Good show! Dude mentioned going to high school in Vancouver.

The Celebration of Light
Vancouver’s yearly fireworks competition. I think I went on only one of the nights.

The Vancouver Pride Parade
Disrupted, sadly.

Cats!
A Theatre Under the Stars production. Huzzah!

The P.N.E.
In previous years, work has organized a summer event at the P.N.E.. We’d rent the event space, have a group lunch, then spend the rest of the day wandering around. Last year, due to work craziness, they gave folk passes, but didn’t organize any activities. And so, I wandered around for a few hours, didn’t find a single co-worker, then went home.

That said, it was a great day for the P.N.E.. It was gorgeously sunny, and filled with people. I had a good time.

Bike the Night
It’s a group ride organized by HUB Cycling, a local advocacy organization for cycling. People gathered with their bikes in Yaletowns, with all sorts of lights and costumes, then rode around False Creek. One of these years I should have on some sort of costume.

Dayglow concert
At the Orpheum. Good show.

Taylor Swift conquers Vancouver
Did I go to the any of the Eras concerts? No. Did I bike around town, taking pictures of the art installations and enjoying the vibes? Totes.

The below events were technically in the first few days of 2025, but they still count:

East Van Panto - Robin Hood and his Merry-Thems
I think this was the best one I’ve seen so far. There’s always some satire, but it was unexpectedly pointed.

Metro Theatre - Cinderella
I think this is closer to a traditional English Christmas pantomime than the East Van Panto. It had a dame, and she was great.

Media

Hey. Movies and TV shows. Yeah.

TV

The Decameron
A prestige Netflix series. I couldn’t decide if it was good or not.

Nobody Wants This
A Netflix sitcom about a podcaster who falls for a rabbi. It’s better than it sounds.

Delicious in Dungeon
This anime’s about an adventure party journeying through a magical dungeon filled with monsters, like in classic Dungeons and Dragons, Wizardry, and Rogue. After a terrible loss in the first episode leaves them without provisions, they decide that they’ll survive by eating the various monsters they come across. Enter Senshi, a dwarf who knows how to turn slimes and mimics and hippogriffs into delicious-looking meals.

Dan Da Dan
Aliens and ghosts are real, and are obsessed with people’s genitals. Banger of an opening theme song. It’s wild and creative, and I flip flop between loving it and hating it.

Movies

I guess it wasn’t a big year for movies for me.

The Fall Guy
A former stunt man directs a movie about a stunt man in a movie directed by his ex-girlfriend. It’s a celebration of stunts in the movies, yes; but there’s cognitive whiplash between watching the carefully planned and executed stunts for the movie-within-the-movie, and then the near-superhero action the stunt guy gets into while trying to find the missing star and save his ex’s film.

Fun show, tho.

The Boy and the Heron
The deathiest movie about death that’s ever deathed. I should watch it again.

Video Games

Super Mario Wonder
It’s polished, creative, and bursting with charm and colour. Something held me back from loving it, but it’s great.

Baldur’s Gate 3
We finally beat it. I started a solo playthrough, and wow, we missed so much stuff.

UFO 50
It’s a collection of 50 different games for the LX-I, LX-II, and LX-III consoles from the eighties. You can really see the progress of UFOsoft from game to game. They had some wildly creative and forward-looking games. They even made an idle game back in 1988!

Except UFOsoft and the LX consoles are fictional. It’s a project masterminded by Derek Yu, the guy behind Spelunky. Pretty much every game, no matter how primitive-looking, has tonnes of clever ideas. It’s worth checking out.

Roleplaying

Korvosa
AKA the random 5e game from last year. I believe it was intended to be the Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path, but the DM added his own beginning, and we still haven’t finished the first adventure.

Dan the Baker is a fun character. I love how I themed his bardic powers around food. He wants to get his life together, but he can’t hold onto money, and he cares too much to really get ahead. On the downside, he’s a reactive character. He wasn’t designed for a player-driven campaign, and that’s what we’ve stumbled into.

We met someone who wanted to try out D&D, so we put the campaign on hold for …

Redbrook
It was supposed to be a one-shot, but at this point it’s more of a mini-campaign. You can read all about it in my D&D Venting post. Things have gone well since.

Dragon Fall
It ended quickly. We had some technical difficulties, and (IIRC) the DM got too busy to run. I then bowed out of the group because I felt generally overcommitted … just before work and family got stressful.

Fear the Con
I got to play some games. A 5e one-shot, the Dueling Fops of Vindameer, Blades in the Dark, and InSpectre.

Summation

2025 probably isn’t going to be great — the US kicked off a trade war with Canada (and nearly everyone else), the world’s becoming increasingly unstable, and climate change is causing progressively more damage — but it’s gotta be better than 2024. Good riddance.