Charmingly, last year, I fretted over having published my annual review a mere one and a half months late; alas, here we are, half-way through the following year. Maybe these annual reviews will become like Ramadan, shifting slightly each year until it eventually makes it back to its starting location of ‘being on time’.

Methodology ¶

Last year, I highlighted my unimpressive average success rate over the past three years, and thought that part of the problem is that I’m not very consistent in my goal definitions. For the year to come, I planned to delineate between two different class of ‘objective’:

• what I’m calling ‘goals’ (i.e., targets towards which I aim to make progress throughout the year); and
• ’tasks’ (i.e., a to-do of discrete actions to perform, each linked to a goal).

Here is an eample of each, with goals indicated by a 🏆 and tasks by 📝.

Screenshot by the author

This was a good move and helped me to better articulate some previously-woolly items. Whenever I was uncertain how to convert something into the new distinction (e.g., how to convert one item into one goal- and one task-oriented item) I would ask myself: why do I want to do this?; and how can I get from here to there?

I also explored a little bit more of the full featureset of Freeplane, creating a couple of new styles that allow me to semantically tag nodes and automatically apply some basic goal/task styling (including icons), and to filter nodes easily.

Screenshot by the author

Screenshot by the author

Note that all other icons (such as numbers, checks and crosses) remained manually-applied in 2025.

I also started to use node attributes to hold quantifiable targets, which were previously written inline; this allowed me to better-distinguish between what I wanted to do as part of a goal/task, and how I planned to measure my achievement (though, as I’ve written previously, I’m more than willing to ignore missed quantitive targets if I feel like the gist of the task has nonetheless been achieved):

Screenshot by the author

Lastly, I also spent some time learning how to write scripts in Freeplane (which uses the Groovy language¹), resulting in summary blocks for each life area and for the overall mind-map that automatically summarise their states:

Screenshot by the author

You can see my script here.

How I Did ¶

I think the value of my rethink is borne out by the numbers: 2025 represented a markèd improvement over previous years, with 70.6% of goals and 63.7% of tasks acheived (compared to 40% of the previous combined total for the previous year, although with the caveat that 2025 was much more stable than 2024). Just visually, you can see how my ‘Completed’ areas (in green) much better fit my ‘Set’ areas (in gray) in the charts below:

In short, I’m getting much better at setting myself a target state and realising most of it over the intervening 12 months. My new analytics script also gives me a better idea of the sorts of objectives I’m setting myself in each area, which may help to diagnose repeated trouble spots.

Health, Fitness & Well-Being ¶

Similarly to previous years, I did well in ‘Health’ and ‘Well-being’ and achieved none of my ‘Fitness’ objectives. My weight saw normal fluctuations but remained stubbornly resistant to going down (except for a dip in September, for which I have no theories as to the cause):

The biggest health news was that I finally got laser eye surgery. My vision has never been terrible (I’ve fluctuated between −1 to −1.5 correction in each eye for years) and glasses have never been a huge burden (I now get a couple free pairs a year, and my several people have commented that my latest choices are uncharacteristically stylish), but I realised that my new French health insurance would cover the bulk of the cost, leaving the entire procedure costing me only around €600.

I’m also deeply uncomfortable about eyes. When I first got contact lenses, it took me several hours of trying (and returning the following day for a second attempt) before I managed to get them in and out for the first time (which they require before they let you take them). And some years later, I abandoned lenses after a disastrous hayfever-induced experience at T in the Park where I spent time pinching my bare eyeball trying to remove them before realising I had already rubbed them out hours earlier, and that my eyes were too numb to notice.

When I had cursorily looked into laser eye surgery in the past, the thought alone had made me nauseous and I had decided that I would only ever countenance the bladeless IntraLASIK procedure. But, as I researched options once again, I found that PRK would be much more practical given that it heals properly, and does not leave your corneas at risk of detaching in the event of an impact. But it’s also the most unpleasant of all the procedures.

Franklin Sanchez

The actual procedure was as nightmarish as I had expected, being forced to watch through a later of corneal epithelium as it was dissolved and scraped aside to make way for the laser to operate on my cornea, made worse by my ophthalmologist being such a comically mercenary bastard: the very first thing he asked me after he finished was whether I had sent him his money by bank transfer already (as I lay blinking, bleary-eyed and traumatised, on the operating table). Then I spent a few days blind and increasingly delirious from lack of visual stimulation until suddenly, behind the bandages, my eyes just popped open without feeling like they were full of sand and everything felt pretty good. Big thanks are due to both my current and former flatmate who looked after me during the recovery.

Assets, Finances, Location & Security ¶

Throughout the year, I managed to adhere to my expenses budget pretty well:

Or, at least, until the end of the year. But that’s a story for later in the post…

I did quite a lot to improve my own digs, such as buying (and promptly killing) several plants, improving my lighting (inspired by this article) and even buying a CO₂ monitor to validate my suspicions that my room is poorly ventilated. I also, at long last, took the plunge and bought a security key (which are an unreasonably effective security measure).

I ended the year with a big tech. overhaul, driven by a desire to adopt USB-C as comprehensively as I could. During the year I also received and assembled my new Sensor Watch, and gave my venerable e-reader a new lease on life by installing the fantastic KOReader software.

Lastly, I finally changed my mind on something:

When wireless earphones were first introduced, I opposed them on principle because a) they were being pushed by Apple; b) having to charge my headphones seemed like a step backwards; c) I figured they’d fall out; and d) I was never a fan of the IEM style of earpiece.²

Anyway, last year I ended up with a voucher for a cheap no-name pair and decided to give them a try, and I confess that they did win me over: the battery lasts for hours; they don’t fall out unless I’m doing something jaw-y like eating; and the sound quality was pretty good. Then, I started to find entirely new use cases I hadn’t predicted: popping out of the room (e.g., to make a brew) without having to pause what I’m listening to; watching films on my laptop whilst I’m cooking; and using it in conjunction with my new projector for a home cinema experience that doesn’t bother my flatmates.

So, whilst I was treating myself with new tech., I decided to upgrade to a fancier pair: Sony WF-C710Ns. I’m so rarely impressed with new things, so bear that in mind when I say: they’re fantastic. They have external microphones and you can tap them to switch between noise-cancelling mode or ‘awareness’ mode (where the mics record your surroundings and play it back to you). The ‘awareness’ mode is perfect, because I found with the previous pair that I have a mild form of claustrophobia whereby I get very conscious about my breath when it’s the only thing I can hear and start to breath heavier and harder; now, I can mince about to my heart’s content.

That said, the way the ‘awareness’ mode sounds is quite funky. I think there’s some sort of dynamic gain applied, meaning that if you’re in a quiet room you’ll hear any whirring fans (or even your own stubble brushing against your collar) very loudly, but when you’re out and about the ambient noise is depressed and you can hear speech and other noises. It reminded me a little of The Sound of Metal, when he gets his cochlear implant. I also think I felt a little psychosomatically cold because my footsteps sounded like I was walking on crunchy snow most of the time.

But still, very cool and it’s basically improved on my cheapo trial pair in every way I would’ve wanted. Listening to David Guetta’s Distortion in noise-cancelling mode was pretty transcendent, but one word of warning: definitely do not use ‘awareness’ mode when throwing a load of glass bottles into a recycling bin…

Values, Purpose & Identity ¶

Values-wise, as mentioned, I took the time to learn more about what I could do with Freeplane. I also updated my long-term goals to align with me new goal–task division.

On a lark, I decided to take an IQ test whilst in the UK. I’m somewhat skeptical about the value of IQ, but I think there’s enough of something there that whatever it is measuring is at least somewhat interesting. In the end I received an invitation to join Mensa, but with my newly-accredited big brain I realised that the bragging rights of being invited to join Mensa and actually joining Mensa are about equal, but one costs £70 annually and one doesn’t. Of course, now that I have done well in an exam, I am obliged to conclude that IQ is super important and everyone should focus on it to the exclusion of all else.

Right at the start of the year, I split this site’s theme out into its own project and published it publicly, consuming it in my own site in the same way as anyone else might. I finally, after many years of attacking it piecemeal and putting it off, methodically went through all of my old posts and converted them into post bundles, which allowed me to significantly reduce the weight of my pages. I also conducted a similarly long-postponed WCAG accessibility review of my site, which will one day lead to an equally long-postponed post detailing the results.

I also met up with a Quaker meeting near Montpellier in the commune of Congénies, and the British government gave me a medal (which was jolly nice of them).

But, ultimately, part of the reason for this review’s prodigious delay has been that I was a victim of my own predictive success. As a reminder, in a footnote to my review of 2024 I said the following:

To quantify some of my predictions, I current believe that:

• there is a 75% chance that US police (or military) will fire on protestors within the next four years (increasing to 85% if another George Floyd-esque mass protest movement erupts):
  • if this happens, there is a 75% chance that it will result in more deaths than the Kent State massacre and a 55% chance that it will result in at least double-digit fatalities.
  • if this happens once, there is a 90% chance it will happen again within three months.
• there is a 40% chance that Trump will seek to extend his term beyond four years or run a third time, and a 70% chance that he will attempt to directly appoint a successor.
• there is an 80% chance that Farage (whether with Reform or the Tories) will win in the next UK general election.
• there is a 90% chance that Israel will resume its slaughter in Gaza before the end of March.
• there is a 70% chance that Boeing shares will rise to at least 225¢ by the middle of the year. There is a 40% chance that they will rise to pre-pandemic levels (~350¢) by the end of the year.
• there is a 70% chance that an American will submit an asylum claim in a European nation, Canada or Australia within the next year, triggering a political crisis there.
• there is a 60% chance that another Luigi Mangione-inspired assassination of a CEO (or similar) will take place in 2025, rising to 80% if Mangione mysteriously dies in custody, is sentenced to death or if his trial takes place and recieves significant media coverage:
  • if this happens once, there is a 90% chance it will happen again within three months.

On Mar 19, Israel breached the ceasefire with a massive bombing campaign against a sprawling refugee camp, killing over 400. Trump and his allies have repeatedly floated the idea of him running for a third term. By the end of the year and there were several ongoing asylum cases launched by Americans in places like Canada and the Netherlands that I’m sure have been causing diplomats some real headaches (with their cases bolstered by the International Association of Genocide Scholars’ warning that the US is in the early stages of committing a genocide against trans people). Even beyond formal asylum applications, there is a noticeable uptick in the presence of what Ece Temelkuran calls American exiles, who in my own experience have found a home in the Casablanca-like refugee atmosphere in Montpellier occasioned by the prevelance of Russian, Ukrainian and Syrian emigrés here.

Mangione’s trials were delayed until very late in the year and, whilst there has not yet been another assassination, there was a chap who tried to break him out of jail by impersonating an FBI agent. Also, at the start of the following year the possibility of the death penalty was withdrawn. And, lastly, Boeing shares were trading at $211 by June 1, where they stayed pretty much static until the closing the year at $218; not a bad job for my most quantitative prediction.³

In September, Trump regime forces began an aerial bombing campaign of small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific; brazen murders that continue to this day. This has all confirmed that my predictive apparatus—i.e., my personal intelligence cycle—is pretty well-tuned. It also made very real the implications of some of my darker predictions, which had until now been somewhat theoretical. Faced with the looming promise of Trumpian fascism’s near-inevitable war on the world, it was clear that I had to act. But that’s a story for my review of 2026 (coming some point in 2027, probably!).

However, whilst others talk about about feeling paralysed in the face of the present polycrisis (p-p-p-p-p), I confess I feel more clearer and more motivated than ever. As Rebecca Solnit writes in her exquisite A Paradise Built in Hell:

His[William James’] is in many ways the first good empirical investigation of human nature in the crucible of disaster, and its conclusions are in line with those the disaster sociologists would reach through methodical study of many more calamities. James’s investigation concluded that human beings respond with initiative, orderliness, and helpfulness; they remain calm; and suffering and loss are transformed when they are shared experiences. In the [1906 San Francisco] earthquake he found what he had been looking for: a moral equivalent of war, a situation that would inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper.

In 2024, I decided firmly which side I would stand with, once the chips were down. In 2025, the chips started to topple, and 2026 opened with them tumbling definitively and announcing to all those with ears to hear with terrible clarity: our old lives are over and survival necessitates struggle; though there are many who won’t live to see it, the only way out now is likely through.

Productivity & Organisation ¶

I haven’t yet written about my personal organisational system—it’s in my increasingly overstuffed list of drafts and works-in-progress—but a major component of it is the Johnny.Decimal system. I’ve already been using this for a few years for my digital documents, goals and more, but as I’ve now settled into a pretty durable structure I decided to further commit in 2025 by reorganising my email account and password manager fodlers to align with the system in use elsewhere.

Towards the end of the year, I also got into time tracking. I started with timeto.me which, after a somewhat steep initial learning curve, proved to do pretty much exactly what I wanted. Then, towards the end of the year, the developer made a major (and baffling) change that destroyed the value of the app entirely (unless I really wanted to start setting myself goals for routine like ’eating’). Several other users (me amongst them) tried to get the change reverted, but to no avail.⁴

In the end, I migrated to Simple Time Tracker and never looked back. The UI is intuitive, it has just the right level of extra complexity to delve into when ready and, in the year I have been using it, I haven’t noticed a single change. Perfect.

Fun, Travel & Adventure ¶

My initial French visa was only good for a year, and came with obligations to undertake both rudimentary (A1) French classes and formation civique.

I was prescribed 50 hours of the French classes, but I think this was a mistake: the woman who conducted my initial language assessment was also trying to get me to agree to attend some follow-up meetings on dates that were whilst I would be back in the UK, and she proved utterly inflexible to reality so I just stopped responding to her and refused to sign anything. At A1 level, many of the others in my class were coming from non-Latin alphabets, or were unable to read or write their mother tongues and so were simulteneously learning both French and literacy. I am certainly no French whizz, and I did still learn one or two interesting grammatical things that I had missed in my prior informal education (and my teacher was fantastic; I told him I had some experience teaching English and that I would be stealing some of his techniques),⁵ but it was a longggggg 50 hours.

The formation civique comprised, blessedly, only a few full-day sessions. Some of the things covered were actually quite useful, and I have several times since come to the aid of my French flatmates thanks to my knowledge of random French government agencies (like the défenseurs des droits: free government lawyers that anyone can consult to find out more about their rights in a given situation). Some of the content was useful to people who aren’t me (e.g., an entire day on parenting), but there were still amusing moments (e.g., an hours-long circular debate between the endlessly-patient formatrice and a group of Nigerian guys who were trying to rules-lawyer their way into situations where they could get away with hitting their kids).⁶

As it stands, when it was time to renew, I had my A1 certificate in hand and my formation civique certificate due the week after my appointment at the préfecture (both of which I needed to renew for a four-year residence permit). I had read horror stories online about the local préfecture, both in terms of delays and rudeness,⁷ and I realised too late to do anything about it that I was supposed to have someone professionally translate all of my English documents into French. As it happened, the wait wasn’t too bad and I lucked out with a very friendly Tahitan woman who happily informed me that she spoke English so the translations weren’t necessary, and then gave me her email address to send the second certificate to when it came. A little while later, and I was in possession of a real titre de séjour, good for four years!

Other than all of that, I got more organised with my trying of new things and started recording new recipes, cheeses, wines, etc. in a log. I wanted to expand my culinary horizons by cooking with all of the mother sauces, but I only managed béchamel and velouté. I went hiking with people from a few online groups, found a leftist sports club and even managed to get a little bit of salsa in with a rueda de casino day.

I spent some time back in the UK during the summer, working on-site for a pair of festival clients: Boom Town and Lost Village. Whilst both were very nice and I had a lot of fun (and it was interesting to finally see the software I’ve been working on for over a year in the wild), Boom Town was really something else: the closest I’ve ever come to recapturing the magic of Sziget 2016, and something I’m very excited to go back to again.

Lastly, looking backwards in time (and a mere 8 years after I shuttered my old Facebook account), I finally went through the exported files and found proper homes for everything within my filesystem (along with a library of family photos from my dad’s computer, covering every family trip we’ve ever been on).

Career & Work ¶

In my day job I got some new app. features out, including some accessibility improvements to our UI components and a big refactor of our imports subsystem, consolidating several distinct import flows—each one written by a different developer and with its own quirks and foibles—into a single unified set of abstract base classes for shared functionality and flow-specific subclasses for flow-specific functionality. I do love a good refactor—I got to make a bunch of nice Mermaid diagrams—and the result is a subsystem that is much easier to reason about, where bugs fixed in one process are now fixed everywhere and new features in one process appear simultaneously in all. But the biggest chunk of work in 2025 was migrating our app. to our new parent company’s infrastructure which, luckily, all seems to have gone fairly smoothly.

I also migrated another site for a long-running client of my own onto NationBuilder; my second such migration for them, and much easier than the first as the site in question was much simpler (and I’d already run into most of the NationBuilder pitfalls the first time through).

Lastly, having left it early in 2026, I’m now able to retrospectively talk openly about what I previously only described elliptically as a long-term side career of mine: my service in the Army Reserves. So whilst 2025 ended up marking the final year of my career, it also marked its high point: I was awarded the aforementioned medal and was selected for promotion (many years delayed); I completed the third and final level of my medical training; and I had some success in carving out a niche for myself as a wargaming and comms SME within my unit.

Volunteering, Contribution & Impact ¶

I started to make limited inroads into the free software movement here in France, transitioning my FSF membership to the FSFE and joining April.

As I mentioned above, I made my own small contribution to the software commons by releasing this site’s theme publicly (as well as that of its sister media cataloguing site.)

Last year I mentioned an effort to reorganise and restructure a UK political group I’ve been part of for several years, but unfortunately this didn’t succeed. However, I found a similar group here in France to organise with around the same issue, along with several other groups battled on other important issues and where I feel like my skills and interests can be beneficial.

My two big volunteering efforts this year were the Croix-Rouge Française, where I completed the initial first aider training and got out on a couple of events, and a telehealth app. aimed at people in Gaza and the West Bank. I also did my part for cultural integration and took part in a couple French protests—both the grassroots “Bloquons tout” and the subsequent one organised by the intersyndical—as well as attending a May Day parade along with my own union comrades.

But my other big attempt to make a positive impact on the world, which was concentrated within the closing month of the year, was fiscal: I decided to set up donations for several things I have always freeloaded, in the realisation that I ought to contribute to things I want to see more of in the world. That meant political organisations, advocacy groups, investigative journalists and software projects, amongst others, and all culminated in my decision to sign the 10% Pledge (but more on that in future posts, as I didn’t start actually paying towards the pledge until 2026). Hence, the end-of-year spike in my expenses.

Knowledge, Training & Education ¶

I got a lot of medical training done: CMT1(R) through the Army; and PSC through the Croix-Rouge Française.

I also attended the Progressive International’s People’s Academy, along with several courses via Woodbrooke:

• Talking Peace
• Quaker in Europe
• Challenging Traditional Quaker Histories: Quakers and Enslavement
• The Creation of Modern Quaker Diversity, 1830–1937

Besides my aforementioned A1 classes I didn’t do any more formal French tuition, but I did continue to practice through my various other activities and a little bit of self-study (including with the riveting French Pronouns and Prepositions).

And I picked up a cheap second-hand guitar at the local Emmaüs, restringed it and started self-teaching with JustinGuitar.

Arts, Culture & Creativity ¶

For my media cataloguing site finally got around to processing my exported book and game logs (from Goodreads and Grouvee, respectively). This leaves only: my TV log (from followmy.tv) to finish transferring (but, with no export feature provided by them, I have so far only been able to extract part of my data by modifying an API call to return all of my data and then scraping the resulting Web page); and my music log, which I haven’t even started considering how to export from Last.fm (whilst, ideally, maintaining the live scrobbling from my various media players).

In terms of media consumption, I read 21 books, watched 74 films, started 9 games and finished 14 and watched 363 TV episodes (whilst starting 10 series’ and finishing 9). Some highlights:

From the books, Designing Data-Intensive Applications was an exemplary technical textbook, presenting its complex subject matter comprehensively yet with clarity. Following a 12-year pause after reading (and being less-than-enthused by) The Fellowship of the Ring, I finally decided to get The Lord of the Rings over with: whether because of a quality jump between the volumes, or a change in my own tastes, I ended up devouring The Two Towers in only five days and The Return of the King in seven. Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking is another winner from my favourite food author. Coketown was a fantastically vulgar stream-of-consciousness poem from the man behind the Drunken Bakers, whilst I read Deacon King Kong on the strength of an excerpt I read about cheese and found it perfectly enjoyable, but it never quite lived up to that early high bar.

The second volume of Abdullah Öcalan’s Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization was a compelling articulation of his ideas, but Hope Without Hope: Rojava and Revolutionary Commitment was a really fantastic and unflinching look at the victories (and limitations) of the Rojava Revolution.⁸ Comrades in Conscience: The story of an English community’s opposition to the Great War was a fascinating look at an oft-misremembered element of UK history, and The Solidarity Economy: A visual guide was a visually gorgeous compendium of inspiring mutual aid stories from around the world.⁹ Lastly, the Mediterranean volume of The Passenger contained a wealth of perspectives about my newly-adopted home, with highlights including:

• David Abulafia’s history of the region;
• Rachel Roddy’s sceptical exploration of the myth of the ‘Mediterranean diet’; and
• Nick Hunt’s catalogue of the sea’s characterful named winds.

Plus, I attended the London Anarchist Bookfair for the first time, as I fortuitously happened to be passing through the city at the time.

I played quite a few games in 2025, including some big ones I’ve been waiting to get to for a long time. Control started slow, but that patience was paid off in full with a rich later game full of acrobatic aerial combat, twitch reflexes and rewardingly crunchy slapstick, resulting in a power-fantasy flow state to which I can think of few equals. Red Dead Redemption 2 was a true technical marvel, but as a game? Ehhh…. The Witness was visually beautiful and I enjoyed exploring some of the puzzle variations, but I ultimately found it a little off-puttingly abstract and cold. I also played Bury me, my love, a 2017 visual novel about a refugee fleeing to Europe; it was interesting, but I gave up after my first bad ending after realising that there was no option but to start again from the beginning. I started Disco Elysium in the summer, but kept losing interest and by the end of the year I had only made it to the second in-game day.

I also replayed two classics: Half-Life 2, as I do every few years (this time with the developer commentary recently introduced in the 20^th Anniversary Update); and The Last Express, which I’d previously played around fifteen years earlier and remembered (correctly, it turns out) as one of the most fascinatingly ambitious games I’ve ever played. Lastly, I started to play Arma 3 with a group from the Fight Club International wargaming community, and took part in a Combat Mission: Black Sea tournament based on the early days of the Russian–Ukraine war.

On the tabletop front: I finally got my hands on a copy of Autonomía Zapatista (and it turned out to be a surprisingly fun little co-operative resource management game); I played a little bit of Earthborne Rangers on my own; and I picked up Daybreak because I am endless fascinated with how tightly-designed Pandemic is and so intrigued by anything that Matt Leacock comes out with.

My brother and I went to see Stewart Lee for STEWART LEE vs THE MAN-WULF and I think we settled on it as the most uneven of the three times we’ve seen him live (and obviously nothing will be able to top our experience at Basic Lee, where we sat in the front row and I got to be an audience roastee for a bit, achieving a dream I hadn’t known I’d had).

I expanded my music library quite a bit, which had remained mostly static for some years. A big part of that is finding a fantastic local community radio station with both impeccable taste (not to mention eclectic—one of the first times I listened to it they were playing Huun-Huur-Tu) and no advertisements: I’ve set my alarm clock to play it now, which does have the unfortunate side effect that sometimes I lay in bed identifying playing tracks with Shazam rather than getting up. In particular I discovered several French artists, such as MC Solaar (old-school French hip-hop), La Femme (catchy nostalgic indie folk/rock), Moriarty (silly country with a distinctive lead singer), Sporto Kartes (funky electro) and Sierra Ferell (twangy/gypsy/bluegrass-style country), as well as belatedly getting into KNEECAP. I also, as part of my end-of-year spending spree, signed up to David Rovics’ Community-Supported Art programme; whilst I’m not particularly interested in his podcast or recent forays into AI-generated music, he is my all-time most-listened artist going right the way back to my earliest scrobbles in 2012, so I figured I should chip in towards his retirement fund.

The films I saw ranged from daft comedies (A Town Called Panic) to a slew of Holocaust films (Europa Europa, 2011’s In Darkness, Sobibor and The Shop on Main Street) as I tried to make sense of what was happening in Gaza. I also watched Blue Velvet, re-watched both Children of Men (one of my all-time favourites) and Princess Mononoke in cinema screenings and culminated with a Christmas Day IMAX screening of Avatar: Fire and Ash.

I also watched a lot of TV: I caught up on the latest seasons of both Weimar-era detective drama Babylon Berlin and surprisingly watchable New Testament dramatisation The Chosen; I binged both the medium-redefining classic ’90s sci-fi series Babylon 5 and the oddly-punctuated time travel anime Steins;Gate; I watched Masters of Sex for one good season and one naff season before abandoning it; I finally got around to watching cult psychological horror show Twin Peaks; and I devoured the incredible second season of Andor—easily one of the finest shows in recent memory.

Lastly, regarding my own media creations, I finally got around to two lonnnnng-delayed tasks: I made sure to back up every article I’ve ever written for another site; and I went through the export that I had managed to get out of my long-banned DeviantArt account (from circa 2007). Will I ever share these works with the world again? Who knows!

Social Life & Relationships ¶

Lastly, but not leastly, I saw my family a few times (both in the UK and when they came to visit me here in France), along with a sizeable contingent of my friends both old and new. I saw a lot of films at the local cinema with one my flatmates and started to meet some of her friends, as well as tapping into the Latino community through my Colombian and Venezuelan ex-flatmates. Through staying in touch with another ex-flatmate I got to know his friends. I tried out an intriguing app. called Timeleft that matches you with random strangers for dinner or coffee and met some interesting people, although nobody I ever felt compelled to meet up with outside of the app.

But, most rewardingly, I also had an old friend contact me out of the blue (several years after my previous attempts to connect had gone unanswered and I had given up); we eventually met up and picked up immediately where we had left off, as though no time at all had passed between us.