I'm a slave to the Power of Death

In your own space, set yourself some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I normally love this time of year and I love goal setting. I love the feeling of fresh and new and it feels like a good time to try something new. Although, mine tend to be goals/targets/things to try, rather than giving things up

But this year, with Da dying and everything that happened around Christmas, I haven't really had time to regroup myself let alone even think about 2024.

Book-wise:
Read 100 books
Try and expand into different genres
Complete at least one of the reading challenges I've signed up for on storygraph
Try to leave a review for every book I read - even if it's just one or two lines
Learn to use Borrowbox because my library is switching to that app for ebooks
Figure out using Instagram and Threads

Life-wise:
Build my emergency fund back up - travel disasters after Christmas almost wiped me out
Restart blogging
Stop using electronics in bed
Go on holiday to Egypt
Start playing Palia again - or a similar cosy game
Look into adopting cats
Decide if I'm actually going to write fanfic - and do it

Thank you for all the well wishes on my previous post, I appreciated them a lot.

I think I'm mostly back to being well. I still get tired very easily, and those first few days back at work, even though I continued to work remotely, were exhausting. I've started back at the office today and I've survived the morning if nothing else.

I think I'm as up-to-date on reading and commenting as I'm going to get which, sadly, is not hugely and I apologise for that. If there's anything important that happened in your lives that you want to tell me about, please do so because I'd love to hear it.

Although, I am trying to avoid the news situations in the world right now, my mental health is a little fragile after being sick and I'm head-in-the-sand for personal reasons, because I know I can't handle it. I also recognise the privileged position I'm in to be able to do that

I think I'm going to draw a line and start afresh today, although I'm still fairly fuzzy brained and not completely sure what I'm going to post about. I'm sure once I get back into the swing of things, get back into the habit of opening up Dreamwidth and seeing what comes out, usual service will resume. But somehow getting re-started feels harder than starting itself did.

Logic says it's because when I started, I didn't know what I was going to talk about. But I seem to find my flow in fandom thoughts and meta, so now I feel like I'm putting more pressure on myself to do that again.

Maybe I just need to watch some more Stargate. How terrible a thing that would be!

It's kind of eerie when one is poking around Dreamwidth how many seemingly abandoned journals there are. I understand that a lot of them might be restricted, posts visible to friends only but it gives quite the ghost town vibe

You find some where people have only made a couple of posts so you assume they were trying blogging out but found it didn't work for them, but they left the journal there, without deleting it.

You also find some where people have used it for years but then appear to have suddenly stopped using it. It makes you wonder what happened to all these random people that you've never even heard of.

(I haven't gone to their profiles to look and see when their post was because that feels a little too stalkery - I don't know why that feels different to just randomly wandering around Dreamwidth to people's journals, but it does!)