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.

Methodology Changes ¶

I didn’t change anything significant in my approach from last year, but, as promised, I did restyle the mind map to take advantage of Freeplane’s colourscheme options.¹

How I Did ¶

2024 represented a slight improvement on last year, with 40% of my goals achieved (plus 11 cancelled and 13 blocked) compared to 31% in 2023.

That the completion rate was still so low is at least in part due to the fact that I started a new job that necessitated moving to a new country. Turns out it’s hard to plan activities or maintain consistent habits when you’re hopping across the English Channel every few months. But even then, things definitely settled down in the latter half of the year but this relative calm was not reflected in an increased goal focus; to be honest, I think by that point I rarely looked at my mind map and was not making decisions with it in mind.

As usual, let’s break it down by area:

Health, Fitness & Well-being ¶

Much the same story as last year: I did okay on the ‘Health’ goals I set myself, did not do so well on the handful of ‘Well-being’ goals and did very poorly on the very large list of ‘Fitness’ goals, resulting in an ultimately weak showing. Being unable to maintain any fitness or exercise has been a problem for me for years, and as far as the ‘Well-being’ goals go I just don’t think meditation is ever going to click for me.

At the same time, my weight (and related metrics, like body fat percentage and waist circumference) has been on a pretty consistent upwards trend ever since I got back from travelling, and I broke my own personal record about the same time I moved to France. It turns out the ‘wine and pastry’ diet is not, in fact, particularly healthy, and I shall instead be returning to the the ‘rice, beans and profuse sweating’ diet that saw me consistently maintain my healthiest weight since I started tracking it (even in spite of plenty of drinking). However, I do seem to have levelled out a bit in recent months, or at least reached a fairly stable range of fluctuation.

Assets, Finance, Location & Security ¶

I ticked off a lot of stuff-related goals, such as replacing clothing and tech.  equipment. I also reviewed many of the services and software I use regularly, which resulted in me changing my VPN provider, finally trying out Arch GNU/Linux and replacing Thunderbird with Betterbird as my email client. One of the perks of my new job is that they have given me a MacBook Pro, but I detest it and am eagerly awaiting M3 chip support so that I can install Asahi Linux.

One of my key focuses for this year was rebuilding my personal finances following my recent jollies. At the end of 2023 I had just gotten off of Universal Credit (which was its own Kafkaesque delight, and just the kind of experience immediately upon returning to Britain to remind one why they left in the first place). I had found a couple sources of irregular income to tide me over and my expenses were low as I was living with my parents. But, finally, in January 2024 I started a new full-time job.

Though moving to a new city and country brought its own expenses (and you can see the spike in the chart above around May, when my visa finally came through and I moved over permanently), the lower cost of living in France and my new regular salary has helped me re-stabilise myself. That said, I’m not sure I did my usual quarterly reviews of my budget towards the latter half of the year, hence the consistent divergence from my actual expenses.

Values, Purpose & Identity ¶

This is perhaps one of the more idiosyncratic areas in my ten-way division of concerns, combining as it does everything to do with this Web site of mine (under the ‘Identity’ umbrella) along with a disparate mix of spirituality, political values, legal identity (i.e. , citizenships, driving licenses) and more. It was also one of the areas that saw the most development over the past year, for better or (mostly) worse.

bengoldsworthy.net ¶

First, the good: my ongoing Web homesteading efforts.

I finally remastered a few posts that had been broken ever since I migrated my site: namely the posts Chernobyl, which I peppered with inline photos and videos, and Class of 1996, to which I introduced interactive charts that I’m very proud of. I added a first pass at a geospatial visualisation of everything I’ve collected on this site over the years, polished up the CV section and finally discontinued my old WordPress site.

I also made a lot of progress on migrating over to my home-made media cataloguing tool, and I even added a couple of slash pages (/uses and /now).

Lastly, I played around with a few new CSS tricks such as logical properties and font variants. Try highlighting some text, for example, and just look how delightful and old-timey these new lowercase numbers are:

• Before: 0123456789
• After: 0123456789

Values & Purpose ¶

Here the picture is much less rosy. I think it is impossible to have been paying the slightest attention during 2024 and not have been radicalised in some way.

From January 1^st to December 31^st (and beyond in both directions), we have collectively had to watch as the state of Israel daily obliterates children, women, and men in Gaza (and, again, beyond in all directions) with near impunity. The political establishments in the US, UK and many other Western states have fallen over themselves to defend, excuse, bald-facedly lie about and materially facilitate this genocide. This remains one of the most evil things I have ever witnessed, and whatever residual liberal sentiments left over from my comfortable middle class upbringing have now been thoroughly scoured away.

I see now that these political authorities can dare claim no legitimacy and deserve neither deference, respect, nor peace; the Mandate of Heaven is utterly forfeit. I am left with no faith in their supposedly democratic institutions, nor their rituals of elections, petitions and peaceful protests, as means to affect necessary change. I see that Mao was correct in saying power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and that international law (at least as currently constituted) is little more than a pleasant fairy tale. Despite my previous reticence, I see now that dismantling the present world order is, in fact, a desirable end in and of itself, independent of the merits or presence of any proposed replacement (though I do, of course, have preferences).

I see, in the end, that the necropolitics of Gaza is an extreme expression of a future we all face sooner or later.

This is a brief summary of my political disillusionment, though there were of course many other contributing factors: the UK elected a noxious cretin with the sheer perversity to present the reheated far-right politics of his predecessors under the utterly undeserved banner of ’labour’; the US decided to launch itself whole-heartedly into fascism, nukes and all; annual conflict-related deaths are the highest they’ve been in over a quarter-century; income and wealth inequality continue to skyrocket; and the odds of a runaway collapse of the planetary ecosystem raise daily.

That’s not to say the year has been without positives and small causes for cheer. Moving to France has brought me to a country that retains, however imperfectly, a vibrant, muscular Left, a widespread syndicalist tradition and a diffuse sense of resistance to government authority. The Assad regime finally fell in Syria, opening new doors for the Rojava revolution (as well as bringing peril, of course). And the actions of both state actors (South Africa, Spain, Ireland, et al. ) and grassroots efforts (e.g. , Palestine Action, the Hind Rajab Foundation, Tech for Palestine and, of course, the unfathomably resilient Palestinian people) in trying to halt the extermination campaign and bring Israel and its accomplices to justice have been truly inspiring.²

I’m also pretty confident that this isn’t some sort of displaced depression or malaise: my own situation is very comfortable, and I’m generally happy with how my own life is going. But I don’t expect it to last.

This is the culmination of a years-long process of education, reflection and observation; perhaps I’ll write about it some day. But in short: it is clear to me that there is simmering global struggle ongoing that will determine the future in which we are to live. I’m happy to call it the class war, others may prefer other terminology, but whatever we call it: now is the time of monsters, and that simmer is rapidly coming to a boil.

I am increasingly sure that we are lurching towards some sort of planetary conflagration, whether that’s a traditional world war,³ a rolling series of individual insurgencies or a mass global uprising from below (both in the socioeconomic sense and in the sense that it will come, predominantly, from the southern hemisphere). It will probably be a combination of all three.⁴ It will almost certainly be bloody. And I know that the UK, the US, the ultra-wealthy and their governments will stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the wrong side of history, if there is anyone left alive after the dust has settled to still write it.

I do expect that the current ‘great’ powers will eventually be brought low and humbled, by a combination of united external forces and their own rapacious missteps. I can only hope that whilst they are weakened, other forces will be ready to seize the opportunity to bind and hobble them for good, structuring a new order in light of the failings of the old so as to also dissuade future aspiring hegemons.

I do not claim to know what my modest role in all this may yet be. But I am clear-eyed that the time draws near when we will all be asked: Which side are you on, boy?

I can only truthfully answer where the heart lies: below and to the left.

Productivity & Organisation ¶

I never have much in this section—mostly just completing some percentage of my goals (both annual, quarterly and monthly), fulfilling themes (again, both annual and quarterly) and creating and/or maintaining a few routines. As a result, it tends to be quite easy to get most of these done.

Fun, Travel & Adventure ¶

It’s probably not possible to follow something like my time in Central America with anything even half as thrilling, unpredictable and challenging. In fact, my financial situation meant I had to kill off a goal of going Interrailing again before my 28^th birthday, and a couple travel plans with friends also fell through.

However, with my new job came relocation away from Hell Island and on to the sunny shores of southern France. Traditionally we English must await retirement to move to the Mediterranean, but I have lucked out and jumped the queue. And with my more level head on, focussing on more than just how much I missed the daily novelty and excitement of 2022–2023, taking on a new job abroad is probably the ideal compromise: I can continue some form of the travel and discovery that I was so sorely missing, whilst also making proper money and having a stable base for the first time in a couple years.

I am still encountering new things almost daily, but I am no longer living (more or less) out of a rucksack. And that’s quite nice.

Career & Work ¶

The theme I chose for 2024 was ‘Year of Career & Work’, and I think I fulfilled it pretty well!

As mentioned, I started my new full-time job (courtesy of the monthly Hacker News “Who is Hiring?” thread) a few days into the new year. Roughly three years since the end of my ill-fated KTP experience, and after a brief but unfulfilling detour into consultancy, I am now a software developer once again.

What’s more, I’m working in a small start-up comprised of around 7 people, two of whom are also developers. This means we get to be a tight-knit team with a lot of individual scope to set our own tasks, explore parts of the entire app.  stack and devote time to things like refactoring and accessibility. That is all to say: we work in exactly the mode I naturally gravitate towards and thrive within.

Also, whilst the app.  we work on is not necessarily inherently sexy, the context surrounding it—the festival and events sector, of which I have rather quite a history—is rather sexy indeed (as is the perennial promise of complementary tickets).

I am also finally a union man once more, having come in from the cold and joined Solidaires Informatique shortly after arriving in France, in part to protect myself in an unfamiliar labour regime and in part because I arrived just as Macron called elections and I wanted to meet politically-minded comrades as soon as possible.

I helped a long-time freelance client to migrate their sites from one tech stack to another. And, lastly, in a long-term side career of mine I transferred back to a previous group and role I had really enjoyed, and I have already achieved quite a bit in terms of advancing my training and re-integrating with the team after my time away.

Volunteering, Contribution & Impact ¶

I didn’t set myself an awful lot in this section this year, but I did hit my goal for spending on others: pretty much bob-on my target of 20% of my expenses.⁵

I also published a couple of articles and attended my first protests, plus I took part in an effort to reorganise and restructure a group I’ve been part of for several years but which has lately been a little moribund; time will tell how successful that effort has been.

I’ve not been as successful with finding volunteering opportunities in France or contributing to free software projects, but I’m going to keep plugging away at both in 2025.

Knowledge, Training & Education ¶

This is always the area in which I bite the most off, and invariably then struggle to chew through it all. But the dominant study topic of my new life by the Med has been, unsurprisingly, French. Progress has been excruciatingly slow, and every day I use it and am reminded of how much I love Spanish, but I think I’m very gradually getting there.

Alongside French, I also continued to take salsa classes (having first dipped my toe in the water in Mexico), as well as online Woodbrooke courses in Relational Campaigning and Nonviolent Communication.

Then, right at the end of the year, I finally earnt my amateur radio Full License, bringing with it the ability to operate around the world; now I just need some kit and a shack to house it all…

Arts, Culture & Creativity ¶

I certainly didn’t do a very good job at creating things (i.e. , blogging regularly), but I did a better job on the consumption side. I finished a good number of books, games, films and TV series’, including several I had specifically marked out for myself (such as the complete reading list for a Radical Approaches to Filmmaking course I took the year before).

I also, in a surprise bit of luck after I’d largely given up on it, chanced to run into someone with a copy of Autonomía Zapatista to spare. It’s now at my parents’, awaiting my next visit back to the UK, along with Daybreak (which I bought the moment I heard Matt Leacock was involved).

Social Life & Relationships ¶

After my time away, I managed to catch up with most of my friends and family over 2024, including many that I hadn’t seen since before my trip. I also visited a few pals I had med in Central America, now that we were all back in Europe. And, I had a very pleasant surprise when someone unexpectedly came back into my life several years after I thought we’d drifted apart for good.

Taking Stock ¶

This is my third year of this mind map approach to setting annual goals, and I’m faced with a pretty dubious average success rate (43%). I think it’s time that I had a real rethink.

Clearly, part of the problem is still that I set myself far too many things to do; I’d likely struggle to complete the bulk of them even if I didn’t face unforeseen disruptions and distractions. That said, I do think that part of the problem is that I’m not very consistent in my goal definitions.

For example, ‘Meet friends I haven’t seen for a while’ and ‘Meet up with UK friends at least quarterly’ are superficially similar goals, but behave very differently. The former is much more flexible when it comes whether or not I feel I’ve achieved it (in a similar vein to the thematic approach I mentioned above), whilst also doing a better job of capturing why I want to do it (i.e. , I haven’t seen some people for longer than others, so I should prioritise doing so). The latter, however, is more quantifiable and helps to capture a different sense of the why with its choice of metric; i.e. , the idea is clearly to meet friends regularly throughout the year, not to just meet all of my friends in the space of one week in January and then go solo for the remainder of the year.

However, obviously I am not going to spend time with other people solely because I wrote it into a mind map at the start of the year. So why do I bother writing these sorts of goals down, but not things like ‘Breathe consistently’ and ‘Eat food’? Well, in the former case it gives me a place to list all the friends I haven’t seen for some time and how many months (or years) it’s been; in the latter, I can use it as a sort of tripwire alarm, in that if I am looking back at the end of a quarter and realise I haven’t meet up with any UK friends, that will flag to me that I should examine why that was (even if it turns out to be benign, like I’ve been in France for the last three months and nobody’s come to visit me), or suggest that I reconsider my expectations (e.g. , should I count videocalls with friends in lieu of in-person meet-ups?). So there’s the further dual functions of ‘recording additional details’ and ‘monitoring & feedback aide’.

I think a better distinction between these different classes of objectives would have two benefits. First, it would make me think harder about why I am adding certain goals, and where I want to find myself in one year’s time. Second, it would help to split an overwhelmingly numerous flat hierarchy of goals into a more reasonable ordering of both long-term goals and the specific sub-tasks needed to make progress towards them.

Lastly, now that I have spruced up the visuals of my mind maps, I want to explore the other things I can do with Freeplane. Specifically: automation, so that I don’t have to go through a manually count hundreds of goals each time.⁶