So what happened in 2013 then? It was another mixed bag. The best thing ever happened: I stopped smoking. And I don’t even miss it. I’m not suffering from some black depression because I’m holding myself back from smoking my precious cigarettes, I’m not deluding myself by switching to an eCigarette, I’m not counting down the hours until I can have a sneaky fag while going out for “a walk”. I’ve just stopped. Worked out the reasons why I smoked in the first place, realised they were shit, and made the positive decision to just stop doing it. On the flip-side, something bad happened. I put on four stone, and all my creative productivity just stalled. It’s not for a lack of inspiration, or a lack of ideas, I just find it very difficult to maintain focus? I don’t know. The weight thing is my metabolism slowing down a little due to the lack of stimulus from the tobacco, as well as me subconsciously trying to fill that nicotine void. I know there is no nicotine void to fill, but chocolate bars are nice.
For some reason, I thought I would try to double the amount of “friends” I had on Facebook in 2013. I did it easily, but I’m still not really sure why I bothered. I changed the look of the blog, drew a zombie Pikachu tattoo for a friend, Jane and I went on our Honeymoon to Lurcombe Luxury Apartments (which was amazing), and the Xbox One failed to utterly captivate me. I reviewed some gorgeous Street Fighter art books, started reviewing browser games every week for randomfury.co.uk, and also started doing a weekly update on here.
I had an urge to try and get RF back on it’s feet in 2013, which resulted in one (almost fatal) failed attempt of merging the phpBB forum with a BBpress forum. I got all the important stuff across and it was amazing to see the soul of the forum in a different body, but BBpress is not as fully functioned as phpBB, so I abandoned the idea of using it. The idea is for it to be a hub for like-minded gamers, with not just a forum, but content as well, written by the users. This in turn will attract readers, who will join to comment, and thus have the ability to keep the content fresh by contributing themselves. I will be having a crack at framing the forum inside the WordPress installation in 2014 – I want users to be able to contribute to the forum and main site at the same time with one unified account, and this seems the best way to do it.
Although I drew it in 2012, David loved his Spider-Man canvas in 2013. I drew a few more characters in 2013, and some of my friends enjoyed canvasses of Thor, Bat-Man, and a Dalek. My favourite films of 2013 included Dredd, Drive, The Hunger Games, The Wolverine, Star Trek Into Darkness and X-Men: First Class. Music that got me going included London Grammar, Disasterpeace, Paramore, Daft Punk, Bastille, Disclosure, Electric Joy Ride, Naughty Boy, Rudimental, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Haim… Too many to mention. The Sound of Deep House was pretty spanking too.
In terms of games, I enjoyed Halo 4, Fez and DmC the most. Plants vs Zombies befuddled me, while Spec Ops: The Line, Batman: Arkham City and Transformers: Fall of Cybertron were pretty rad. I’m currently enjoying Adventure Time simply because of the connection to the cartoon. The game itself is shit to be quite honest, and a waste of a license. I failed in my “quest” to reach 100,000 Gamerscore, I only obtained 12,000 G’s out of the 14,000 required. Looking back at the post I made at the start of the year, I only played one of the “new” games I was looking forward to, and that was Splinter Cell: Blacklist – sad times. I did decide to drastically change my outlook on Achievement whoring though, see here for more details.
So, that was 2013. A bit shit to be honest, as I lost momentum after I stopped smoking and just couldn’t seem to do anything. It’s like all those little highs that the cigarettes gave me (that I never even noticed towards the end) spurred me into action. I know I’ll never smoke again, but that doesn’t stop me from wondering. I know it can’t be true – how can a little stick of tobacco motivate me where my sheer will cannot? I need to focus on something, like how I focused on the wedding to lose all that weight. I need a focus.
Anyway, I made roughly 100 posts on here, 17 posts on the community site (not bad considering the whole thing only started in October), and 10 posts on eyess.net. I’m sure WordPress are going to send me a link in which they drop all kinds of stat bombs for the three blogs I’m running at the moment, they did for 2011 and 2012. I’ll mention them as and when. For more information on the future, please see the post I’m about to write in 2014. Hopefully it’s a better year than this shite was.
Please note, none of the websites mentioned in this post are still active.
