I think New Year’s resolutions are a pretty stupid idea. Humans are weirdly programmed. Generally its enough to talk about something we want to do. People who share their goals don’t reach them as often as people who don’t. You get some of the sensation of accomplishment simply from talking about it and for most people that’s enough. Actual accomplishments require actual work and that’s hard. Today’s culture is much more about instant gratification than hard work.

Although that’s clearly a generilization, you should not – under any circumstances – make New Year’s Resolutions.

With that in mind, here are mine.

Magic: the Gathering: Reaching PwP level 30

I’m currently level 25 with 453 points. Reaching level 30 requires 900, so I’ll have to double my points. This year I took part in 16 FNMs, couple of game days, couple of prereleases, couple of other small sanctioned tournaments, one Grand Prix Trial and one Grand Prix. I’ll probably have to play some more in order to reach the level I’m aiming for. Probably at least one more Grand Prix and maybe more GPTs and WPN tournaments. There’s also a Pro Tour Qualifier in Tampere early next year, which will help. We’ll see.

Magic: the Gathering: Vikings

I will try to make a full set during next year. Its hard to qualify when this is going to be ready, because I can’t really develop it on my own and I’m not going to find art or art direct it, so I’ll have to do with a design. Currently the goal is 229 cards, with a few reprints, which is the size of Theros (not counting basic lands).

Magic: the Gathering: EDH Software

I’ll release a version of my EDH deck building software to the public. Not commercially and I probably won’t host it, but I’ll still release it, just in case someone else wants to do something with it. I have pretty good version of it for my own use, but since I found MtGDB, I’ll rewrite the thing pretty much from scratch with much better functionality.

Role-Playing Games: Con-GMing

I’ll finally do this. Probably at RopeCon, probably tremulus.

Role-Playing Games: GMing in General

This past year, I’ve managed to run some games. Not many, but some. Actually, since I haven’t run that many games, I know I’ve ran exactly four sessions this year. One session of Vampire using HQ rules that was supposed to become a campaign (and I haven’t given up on this despite massive problems with finding good dates), two sessions of tremulus one-shots and Lady Blackbird, which we didn’t finish due to time limits, but it was fun.

Because quantity is easy to measure, I’ll say I’ll try to double that. Eight sesssions still isn’t very much, but based on the issues I’ve had with scheduling this year, eight sessions is going to be plenty.

Boardgames

Admittedly, I hadn’t thought about this beforehand, but I do want to make one that’s boardgame centered. I guess what I’m promising is to try to maintain our biweekly boardgame days, which have been faltering a bit lately.

Non-Gaming: Reading

I’ve read about a dozen books this year, which is less than I would have liked. However, the main problem here is that I haven’t read a single book of fiction (not counting graphic novels) this year. I’ll try to remedy that next year and read… something.

Non-Gaming: 7000 Artists in My Last.FM Library

Current number is 6413, which is pretty good, although its somewhat deceptive, because it probably includes plenty of collaborations, different spellings, typos in artist names, and so on. Still, understanding this, its the best number I have. Now, it could be argued that this number is meaningless, and you’d probably be right. Quantity is definitely not above quality in this case (as in many cases), but since I enjoy finding new artists, this is just a fun challenge for myself. On the other hand, almost 600 new artists is probably too much, because I can’t really get acquainted with roughly 1.6 new artists a day. Then again, I’ve added about 900 artists each year of membership for the last seven years I’ve used the service and I do listen to a lot of lesser known artists (“lesser known” meaning not strictly mainstream, but often the artists I do listen to are pretty successful at least within a genre or subculture) and several artists on my top 50 list are pretty new. Basically, this method of just listening to random stuff works. At least to a point, since I don’t do this all the time.

(It should be noted also, that since I do have my own office at work, I’m able to listen to music throughout my workday, which often stretch to 10 hours.)