Year in Review 2024

With 2025 waiting in the wings, I am casting an eye back over 2024 and finding that it looks pretty shiny from here. Overall, it felt like there were fewer extraneous disruptions and distractions than there have been for the past few years - I got the chance to dig in to my hobbies and push hard. I also feel I did a good job of moving existing projects toward completion and taking a few overdue items off the backlog, instead of just starting new work.

Per my personal tracking, I've logged more hours of total "work" than I did last year, and kept the creation/maintenance ratio above 3x ... just barely. Monitoring my own time usage over a long period raises some interesting flags. For example, I spent more time on my blog articles this year than I spent writing and publishing short fiction, by 6+ hours. (Those "AI Ideology" articles were a lot of work. Writing about real people's viewpoints and trying to be critical but fair eats serious hours.) I don't think I want the blog to be taking that much, so I'm not planning an in-depth series for 2025, and I'll probably let my article rate drop below two per month. But where writing tasks are concerned, even the blog loses the time hog prize to journaling. I'm a little uncomfortable with the fact that recording my life uses so much of it up, but I also really like journaling (and it's easy, so if I dumped it, some of those hours might go to recreation instead of harder tasks). Other mundane time-stealers are on the small side, but still galling. I logged more hours on food preparation than on studying, and more on housecleaning than on art.

Acuitas remains the king of all my hobbies at 360+ hours invested. That's a good number - I found more time for him in 2024 than in any other year of the past five. The robots also fared very well at 110+ hours.

So what did I achieve with all that time? Well, here goes.

*The first major Acuitas milestone was completion and demonstration of the "Simple Tron" story in February. This was a target that I had been silently keeping in mind and laying groundwork toward for years.
*I have unified issue tracking across multiple code blocks, such that the Game Engine, Executive, and Conversation Engine all now use the "scratchboard" structure I developed for Narrative understanding.
*I integrated the improved Text Parser, achieved substantial benchmark improvements in the number of parseable sentences, and worked on a number of ambiguity resolution problems.
*I overhauled and improved the Conversation Engine, and released a demo video just this month.

*The Atronach's Eye project is almost complete. This year I finished rebuilding the case and demonstrating eye centering with the limit switches, and I reworked the software to use a better motion tracking algorithm. All that's left is a power cutoff to keep the stepper motors from getting hot when not moving. By early next year, I'm hoping the Eye can be a working fixture on my living room wall.

Final version of the peristaltic pump (without its front shell/lid)

*I completed my homemade peristaltic pump design and ran a performance comparison on several pumps.
*I built and demoed a second iteration of the prototype small-scale hydraulic system, including my first homemade fluid bladder actuator.

*ACE didn't get a lot of love this year, but I did run some more motion tests and decided gearboxes would be needed - after which I designed and built one to work with the existing motors.

*I wrote two new short stories: a science fiction piece about alien plant life with an unusual way of communicating, and a fantasy piece about a young woman who finds the rules of society standing between her and her perfect pet.
*One of my previous stories, "Peacemaker's First Strike," was accepted by Abyss & Apex and is on contract to be published in July 2025. This is very exciting. (Check out the new "Read my Writing" link in the top bar to see all my published work and where to get it.)
*My blog publication rate stayed at/above two posts per month for the third year in a row.

One of the display cases, acting as a home for D&D characters past

*I designed a series of 3D-printable medallions and printed examples of all the designs to give as gifts.
*I also threw together a fully-enclosed hexagonal display case design and fabricated four of them, for dust-free housing of my miniatures and curios.

*I hired a plumber to fix the kitchen sink, and thereby got rid of the last known high-priority breakage in my house.
*I cleaned out and organized two different "disaster rooms" and tore down some e-waste for salvage in the process.
*I grew potatoes again. The garden wasn't especially successful this year, but I at least maintained production of my staple crop.

I wasn't terribly successful at adding native plants to my yard, but Blazing Stars were one of the species that worked out, and they bloomed this year.

*I made a road trip to Arkansas and observed totality of the solar eclipse that crossed North America in April (with a detour by Space Center Houston on the way).
*The first Worldview Legion satellites were launched. I made a small contribution to these, in the form of some post-delivery debugging and feature enhancement work on the component my employer built for them.

Until the next cycle,
Jenny