And just like that, 2024 is coming to a close. To me, a lot has happened this year, but also a lot hasn’t happened. It’s all been kind of a blur, really. I got to focus on myself a bit more this year, and the general trend throughout the year has been a positive one for sure. Without further ado, here I go in no particular order.
Family and Friends
I am once again very grateful to my family and friends for their advice and support over the past year.
My coworkers now turned friends have enlightened each other on our homelab journeys (more on that later). We share cool projects we’ve deployed at home, and do the occasional shittalking about each others’ setups. It’s nice to personally know others that also like to invest their time and efforts into hosting things locally.
Trips
Speaking of friends, I’ve gone on a number of trips with my friends NekoDiv, zumanity, KamiCreed, Vestrel, sayaka, and Jeff. The biggest trip this year was one to Japan in March, followed by Toronto in August, and several day trips to Seattle in November and December.
Ever since pretty much a yearly thing at this point. There’s a lot of places to explore in Japan, given that I enjoy the both the pop culture and learning about the historical elements over there. I got to play Tetote Connect, a touch screen rhythm game where you touch the screen and “connect” with the character on the other side of the screen. At the time of this writing, I’m actually planning my next trip as well, though I’m only going for a little less than two weeks and still staying within the Tokyo area.
Toronto was also a nice change of pace, since I hadn’t been in at least seven years, though I still prefer being in Vancouver. We went for our yearly friend group trip, which we started back in 2019. Here’s to another one next year.
I also did a number of day trips to Tukwila in Seattle with NekoDiv, KamiCreed, and Vestrel for the hololive arcade collab events at Round 1, since that was the nearest Round 1 arcade to us. We played crane games, and I managed to catch a couple of plays of Tetote Connect before they ultimately terminated network service at the end of November.
First Car
I vowed to hold out as long as I could without a car, but I finally caved in. I started with an electric scooter in the earlier part of the year, taking it as the “last mile” after I got off the train station. This was fine during the summer months when it was sunny. Once the rain came, commuting by scooter kind of sucked, even with a poncho. I had looked into getting an electric vehicle (EV) during the July/August time frame, and with the the talks of potential tariffs on EVs coming into Canada at the end of September, I ended up buying the Tesla Model 3 Long Range. The ride is super quiet compared to my parents’ Honda Civic that I borrowed from time to time. It’s definitely made getting from point A to point B a lot more convenient, as well as being able to do impromptu trips to get bubble tea or something else.
Consequently, since car insurance is expensive relative to other cars, I ended up going to the office quite a bit in the last third of the year on my own terms: some days going into the office after lunch, and sometimes going in a bit later and staying a bit later to avoid the traffic. The nice thing about going to the office is that EV charging is currently subsidized, so I can charge my car at the office. The number of EVs has gone up in the office, so there is some contention for the four available EV spots to charge. That said, not a lot of folks stay until 17:30-18:30, so even on days with contention, I can still charge enough to make up for the round trip commuting energy.
Aside from that, I’ve been able to do a couple of road trips to Seattle with the car, and I haven’t really had range anxiety with respect to having to find a place to charge. That said, charging costs in the US are 1-2x more expensive than it is up here, partially due to the falling Canadian dollar and what appears to be the cost of electricity down there. It definitely is still cheaper than gas though, which is nice.
Anime
In terms of anime watching this year, I slowed down a bit. I rewatched some older anime, like BEATLESS and Sora no Otoshimono. For ones that aired this year, my favourites are Gimai Seikatsu (Days with My Stepsister), Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete (Gushing over Magical Girls), and Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets the Wise Wolf.
Gimai Seikatsu wasn’t the typical siscon romcom anime like Ore no Imouto or Eromanga-sensei. Instead, it focused more on the character development of Yuuta and Saki, the male and female protagonists respectively. Seeing how they each lived their lives and them coming together because Yuuta’s father and Saki’s mother married, and how they learned about each other after they started living together was just…well, I guess fresh? Anyways, I really enjoyed watching this while it aired and recommend it if you like a nice familial romance that doesn’t focus on fan service.
Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete is probably my meme pick of the year. I like magical girl shows, so I picked it up, and this was definitely not your typical magical girl show. In fact, I think it’s borderline hentai, but the voice acting and character design, albeit very suggestive, was pretty decently executed, so while you can’t really watch this one with kids around, I enjoyed it quite a bit.
The latest season of Spice and Wolf was a nice blast of the past. It was really nice to see the franchise get another anime since their last anime more than ten years ago. The problem solving adventures of Holo and Kraft just gave me lots of nostalgia when I watched the original first and second season of the anime during my high school days, so getting another anime with both the original Japanese VAs reminded me of the simpler days before becoming an adult.
Music
This year in music listening, I definitely listened to more tracks than I did in 2023, and also scrobbled more songs, coming in at ~43k listens compared to the ~39k in 2023.
On Spotify, my top song was a cover of Omoide ga Ippai, which was covered by Alya, who is voiced by Uesaka Sumire. Genshin OSTs are still my top played songs in general, so Yu-Peng Chen has once again ranked number 1 on my top artists.
From my last.FM statistics, as of December 30th, my top song this year was the character song of Matikane Tannhäuser (voiced by Toono Hikaru) from the Umamusume franchise called TAILWIND. This song was released in 2023, but I got into the song during my Japan trip in March, and ended up also singing my heart out at karaoke in Ikebukuro when I was there. Great song all around 🙂
Figure Collection
The collection has grown quite a bit this year. For this year, I’ve added 7 new figures to the collection, with additionally 7 more figures stuck in the postal system due to the Canada Post strike that has since been temporarily resolved.
The best figure deal I got this year was a 1/4 scale figure of Megumin from Konsuba that I found on Facebook Marketplace: someone was getting rid of their figure collection at pretty reasonable prices, and I managed to nab her for $200 CAD nearby. She was a really good deal considering the aftermarket price being at least double that (and that’s not even factoring in shipping) at the time for the fishnet version. I currently have her displayed with Rebecca Bluegarden from EDENS ZERO.
In terms of my favourite figure of the year, this was a tough pick. The most recent figure I got (during Black Friday) of Himeji Shirayuki from Liar, Liar is pretty damn good. Although she was quite expensive (coming in at a little over $500 CAD after shipping and import), the sculpting and colouring was well done. Shirayuki also features a castoff-able breastplate of her maid outfit, which is a nice touch of fan service. I plan to do a blog post of her at some point.
In terms of my favourite figure in the collection, it’s still gonna be the x-10 combat bunny girl. A bunny girl holding a sword is a nice contrast to the usual the erotic nature of girls in bunny suit costumes. I still have yet to do a figure post on her; maybe I’ll try for one in 2025.
Server Homelab Setup
My physical homelab setup has also changed. My brother moved out of his place recently, so I had to also move my server out of his place and into my own place. I didn’t end up setting up another home server: that machine I had before just ended up sitting in a corner of my office (and it still does).
I also bought another Synology NAS this year during World Backup Day in April: that ended up serving as another copy of data. Since I moved the homelab from my brother’s place to my place, I moved the new NAS to my parents’ place to replace of my makeshift file servers. It’s more power efficient so that was nice.
In terms of the logical homelab, I deployed Authentik for internal authentication and Immich for photo storage. I also iterated on my backup scripts, and through my friends, I now use Restic to help do diff backups. This is super helpful when doing backups to remote sites.
Conclusion
And that’s all I got this time around. I’m going to short list a few things I want to get done for this upcoming year:
- Run at least 50 times (average at least once a week).
- Get my average time down to 5:30/km again, stretch goal 5:15/km.
- Learn to cook 10 different things.
- Go to more anime conventions.
Wishing everyone a happy new years! よいお年を！
~Lui
Found this blog by chance, and I have to say I didn’t expect to be reminded of Beatless. From what I remember, it was a pretty mediocre show, but if you liked it enough to rewatch it I might give it another go too.
Yeah I would agree with that sentiment. That said, I did enjoy Touyama Nao’s voice acting for Lacia so I didn’t mind rewatching 🙂