Seryndelle's Sanctum

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Thanksblogging, part 1

// 2025-01-01

Happy new year!

2025 is going to be a fantastic year for this site, I just know it. Not only have we got a full 365 days of blog posts to look forward to (disclaimer: I will not be posting for all 365 of them!), but there are so many other projects I'd like to see achieved before the year's out: growing my wall of doodahs and creating a few shrines for the things I love, to name just two.

But before we start thinking about the future, I wanted to take a moment to look back on 2024. It was a great year in many ways; in other ways, perhaps slightly less fortunate. I've long held that we here in Britain are truly deprived of a holiday devoted to gratitude like the Thanksgivings of our American and Canadian cousins, so perhaps I'll make this a tradition on my site: New Year's Day is Thanksblogging Day.

As such, this week I'll be blogging about 24 things in 2024 that I'm grateful for. There is no particular order here—I'm just listing things in whatever order they occur to me.

This website. It's been a real joy to feel like a true participant in the Web Revival. I'm able to improve my coding skills, which were pretty rusty before, and it's darned fun to boot!

My burgeoning CD collection. It's great to have all these wonderful albums on hand if ever I lose access to streaming services for any reason. They sound better, and buying them supports the artist directly. Now all I need is a better way to store all of them!

Gilbert & Sullivan. In 2024, I discovered a true love for them after I watched one of my best friends in Ruddigore. I knew there and then that I had to join her in the cast of the next production; and sure enough, I was soon embroiled in the merry world of The Yeomen of the Guard.

Play-by-post RPG campaigns. I read two blog posts extolling their virtues, and I was immediately enraptured by the very thought of them. I may make my own blog post about them in the future, but suffice it to say, they solve a lot of the problems I had with running pre-published adventures. I'm currently DMing The Sunless Citadel, and it's so lovely to see players who are usually on the shyer side really taking to this campaign!

Letter-writing. I've dusted off my old typewriter (an Olympia SM-8 that was made in the '60s) and started writing letters again, after having done so for a while during COVID. I'm in regular correspondence with two of my friends, and it always brightens my day when one of their letters comes through my door.

The MelonLand Forum, and the Web Revival movement as a whole. The reason I'm singling out the MelonLand Forum is because if it weren't for Melon, I wouldn't be sitting here, writing this blog post. He is responsible for sparking my love of this side of the Web. Although it was 2023 when I stumbled across the forum and Melon's posts, 2024 was when I truly started feeling a part of it. In the time it's taken me to write this much of the blog post, I've received a personal message from one of my new internet friends!

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, and anime as a whole. Again, while I'm not that new to anime (Studio Ghibli was my gateway drug over COVID), 2024 was the year I really fell in love with the medium. Frieren, the story of the eponymous elf mage who outlives the rest of her adventuring party 50 years after their defeat of the Demon King, is a beautiful, reflective story with charming characters and emotional beats unparalleled in any anime I've watched to date. But I've enjoyed other anime series this year, too: Attack on Titan (wow. just wow.), Delicious in Dungeon (which I'm really hoping one day inspires me to learn to cook), and a rewatch of Cowboy Bebop.

Meet-ups with my friends. The latter half of 2024 was less sociable than I would have liked—I'm an extrovert who's now living at home in a rural town with my parents, whereas for the majority of the past three years I've been living in a city within walking distance of my friends. This means that the occasions I've been able to see my long-distance friends are now truly cherished, whether they're meet-ups at Comic Con or camp-outs in the woods. I love my friends, and I feel like I'm missing part of myself when I'm not around people my own age that aren't just family members. Here's to many more meet-ups, including one at the end of this month!

Cosplay. Speaking of Comic Con, I was lucky enough to cosplay twice at cons this year, and once at an absolutely marvellous "cosplay karaoke" party hosted by one of my friends. Cosplaying this year—and putting more effort into it than I have done in the past—has, for the first time in my life, allowed me to feel genuinely pretty. We're going to another con in May, but now my cosplay bucket list is nearly as long as my karaoke bucket list!

Concerts. I've been to a few concerts this year:
- Poppy
- Fizz
- Foo Fighters
- Epic Rap Battles of History
I love seeing live music for a whole heap of reasons, but the concerts this year were all special in their own way. The Poppy concert was my first moshing experience; I bumped into two of my friends unexpectedly at the Fizz concert, and the music was just so fun; the Foo Fighters concert was my first experience of an "arena gig"; and the guys behind Epic Rap Battles of History (Nice Peter and EpicLLOYD) had possibly the best rapport with the audience I've ever seen at a concert. I can't believe that after over a decade of being into ERB, my first time seeing them was upstairs in a pub 15 minutes from where I was living at the time. And heck, even their support act crowd-surfed!

My family's new house. Okay, okay—I know I talked earlier about the challenges of living with my parents still, and somewhere so rural too—but that doesn't stop this new house from being a hell of a lot better than the old one we lived in. It's rented, sure, but that just means we can afford a much more spacious home than we would have had otherwise. My room must be double the size of my old one, and that means I can have some privacy when I'm on my computer (I hate it when I'm writing and people are reading over my shoulder). We had our New Year's Eve party here last night, which was great because I could just crawl into bed once everyone had left.

Doctor Who. 2024 was the first year in ages that we've had a full, bona-fide season of Doctor Who, and the stories we got were a lot better than the ones we've been getting since 2018. I'll be the first to admit there were duds—I don't think I'll be rewatching either the premiere or season finale much in the future—but there were some absolute gems in there too, like 'The Devil's Chord', 'Rogue', and 'Joy to the World' (the recent Christmas special). It's a great time to be a Doctor Who fan, because it looks like we'll be returning to a season per year—no more "gap years"!

Part 2 of this Thanksblogging post will be published later this week! Stay tuned...

This is post 1 of 100 in my #100DaysToOffload challenge.