It's time for me to look back at everything I did over the year via my media threads, pick out some highlights, and also mention some other stuff that happend this year. I actually had two of them. If you want to check them out, I started it on cohost, but had to move it once cohost announced its shutdown. If you're reading this in 2025, you might need to put that link into the Wayback Machine or find some third party cohost archive to view that. I then did the rest of the year over on tumblr (chronological order). I'm looking into starting 2025's media thread here, on my website, but I'll talk more about that later in this post.

Also, check my Backloggd for some of reviews of the games I played.

Once again, I created over 100 posts in the cohost tag, and 39 more on tumblr (which will make the announcement post there for this post the 40th). EDIT: I also beat one more thing after I made this post, logged here. EDIT AGAIN: It happend twice..

Steamboat Willie via the official upload from the Disney Animation Studio's youtube account

The first thing I did this year. I had to, it was basically penciled in as 2024's first meme. Did you know Tintin and Popeye stories are entering the public domain this year?

Mother 3

Finished that off after a break from it last year-ish. That was a highlight.

Star Fox Zero and 64 3D, Pikmin 3 and New Play Control 1

I was originally going to go for the rest of the games in both series, but:

• I found Assault a bit slow, advancing text in the cutscenes skips over some dialogue so I missed some stuff, and you can't set controls for both Landmaster and On-Foot modes independently, and Landmaster was awful to control with strafe on the left stick. Also, this was before I had a Gamecube controller adapter, so I found button placement confusing. Maybe I'll boot it up some other time.
• Since the caves in Pikmin 2 pause time, the days went on for too long.

Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers

Best game I played this year that also came out this year.

Rez Infinite - Area X (in VR) and Star Wars: Droid Repair Bay via Oculus Rift S

Unfortunately my current graphics card only has one DisplayPort output, so I can't use my Rift S unless I unplug one of my monitors by reaching out to the back of the PC, which is super annoying. No more VR for me unless I get a newer/standalone headset, I guess.

Cozy Grove

The biggest project I undertook this year. I liked the characters, but I got really tired of the grind.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

THIS one might be my game of the year, in the sense that it might be the best game I played this year.

Website Updates

• Change how I handle my update log so that I can only show the 5 most recent entries on the homepage, and give it its own RSS feed.
• Added EmuKit, where I organized all the things I knew about emulation.
• Switched from using cbox to Chattable for the chat box on my homepage, which I can actually moderate and customize to match my web design
• Upgraded my blog with webmentions support, time to read articles, style for quotes, custom embeds including using Youtube Lite, and a tag cloud. Also switched comments from Disqus to Commentbox.io, which seems more lightweight.
• Switched guestbook providers from 123guestbook (which shut down) to Atabook.
• Other things I can't remember.

Various Fallen London Milestones

I've reached the point where there's not much to do but grind for whatever I don't have (which includes the final renown items for Rubbery, Docks, Urchins, and Tomb-Colonists factions), so I mostly just log in for events and new updates at the moment.

Started using Freetube

Once Youtube started cracking down on adblockers I switched to using this third-party client on PC and haven't looked back. No ads, video is bigger by default, and SponsorBlock built in.

Super Mario Galaxy

Similarly to the above I was originally going to also beat Super Mario Galaxy 2, but I dropped that off because it was too much Galaxy. Maybe in the future.

Shadow the Hedgehog: Reloaded

RetroAchievements on Gamecube dropped so I used that as an excuse to boot this up. Didn't go through too many Gamecube games after that but that's more because I like to vary what consoles I beat games on. Happy Year of Shadow everybody, funny how I beat this before SEGA announced that.

Cohost

Already wrote my thoughts here. Of course, I've cooled a lot on said thoughts since then.

SiIvagunner Bangers

I started a blog on cohost to highlight cool SiIvagunner rips, evolved out of a "No Context SiIvagunner Comments" concept. I had some fun sharing cool rips and funny comments, and finding other good rips that people submitted. I even held my own mini-event for the cohost shutdown where I posted rips based on endings, and did some roleplay as some characters.

Then I moved it to Tumblr and continued it there for a bit. But one day, the blog was deleted. I don't know what happened and Tumblr support isn't responding. That, along with the stuff involving Automattic's CEO, made me not want to continue my media thread on tumblr. Hence, why I'll eventually add a section to my site for the media thread come 2025.

I don't think I'll start up another SiIva bangers blog for a while. It was a little cumbersome to format copypasted comments to remove the relative timestamp on both sites, I didn't get a lot of submissions for rips to showcase, and this blog deletion really demotivated me. Especially because I'd want it somewhere other than tumblr where that won't happen. I bet Mastodon people might get a kick out of the rips but I don't know of a good instance with Tumblr-like posting to put it on.

Actually using Bluesky (and Mastodon)

I now have enough people I follow there that I browse Bluesky before TwitterX, and I've even got a good enough timeline (and interactions) on Mastodon. Additionally...

Crossposting with Buffer

Because I don't want to deal with tedious copy/pasting, I signed up with Buffer so that I could 3 way crosspost to all 3 sites, to encourage myself to post more. And I have been posting more.

Got a Playstation Vita/Welcome Park

1000 model, with an SD2Vita. Have modded it and loaded it up, but only got it this December. I'll start playing its games once the new year rolls around.

Thing I haven't mentioned in the media thread: I actually beat Welcome Park twice. I had to format the Vita twice due to a step I overlooked. The second time I went through while signed in to PSN and got the trophies, at least.

Didn't use Spotify at all

When 2023 Wrapped came around and I learnt how little I used it over the year, I thought it would be funny if I avoided using it throughout the entire year. And I succeeded. Nowadays all my music listening is done through Freetube and SiIvagunner, and I've got iBroadcast with most of my Bandcamp purchases on the side and foobar2000, also with most of those albums and with videogame music compatability, even if I've barely used them this year.

But once the year is over, I do plan to open Spotify, but only to add two or so songs to my likes[^1]. I didn't throughout the entire year because I didn't want to ruin my streak.

Well, that's the end of the year. Alright year for stuff I did, overall. My next plans include adding the aforementioned media thread, and generally actually learning and using things like Blender and Godot.

Here's to 2025!

[^1]: One I heard from Burnout 3: Takedown, the other I heard from a Tony Hawk video. Those types of games can still be a form of music discovery.