I intended to write something a little earlier (i.e. ahead of the Big Change to 2015) but, well, that didn’t happen, so here I am at twenty past midnight trying to think of how to bid farewell to 2014 and welcome in 2015.

When I look back at 2014, I see a year that was somewhat mixed. It was a significant (and good!) year in that I bought my first house with Andie; it was a bad year in that it was the year I had to give up on what had previously been a lifelong dream of working in the games press.

Thinking about it, these two things are probably the two single most significant things that happened in 2014 to me, so let’s contemplate them in turn.

First, the good, then. After renting places to live ever since I left home for university in 1999 (with the exception of a return to my childhood home for a few months in 2010 after Bad Things happened), finally owning my own place (well, sharing it, anyway) is a good feeling. It’s one of those things I felt like would never, ever happen, and I couldn’t see how anyone could ever do it. But fortunately a combination of circumstances saw both Andie and I in a position to be able to pool our collective resources and acquire a very nice house that isn’t falling to pieces or anything.

There’s a lot of work for us still to do — both the front and back garden need some significant “sorting out”, for example, and neither of us quite know where to start with that, so I’m still extremely tempred to just “get a man in” — but we’re in a position where our house is not only habitable, but actually (I feel, anyway) rather pleasant. We’ve hosted several guests, both for day visits and for lengthier stays — we have a spare room, which is a pleasant novelty after only ever renting two-bedroom places in the past, and we also have a sofa-bed downstairs to host further guests if required — and none of them went away with ebola or smallpox or anything, and they still talk to us, so it must have been all right for them.

In 2015 I don’t know if anything significant will happen with the house. I’d like to get the garden sorted so it can be a space we can enjoy rather than feel faintly embarrassed about whenever we look out of the back window. I hasten to add that we didn’t let the garden get into a bad state; the previous occupants obviously hadn’t paid it much attention, so it was already a bit of a shambles when we moved in, and we haven’t really done anything with it to sort that out. That’s a job for this year, then.

So that’s the house.

What about the other thing: the giving up of a lifelong dream? Well, it’s sad to think about, but as I’ve noted on these very pages before, the games press of the 21st century is not the games press that I fell in love with as a youngster. Websites are not magazines, and the art of writing for the Web is very different to the art of writing for magazines. It’s been a significant shift, particularly in the last few years, and I don’t feel it’s a shift for the better, either; I used to love getting in a variety of game magazines each month, reading them from cover to cover and then looking forward to what might be in the next issue. Each magazine had its own distinctive identity, and everyone covered different things in different ways, because they all only had limited space and thus had to prioritise what they were going to allocate pages to.

Nowadays, the games press is much more homogeneous. Certain sites do still have distinctive identities, but it’s a far cry from the uniqueness of magazines. Clickbait rules supreme, with provocative articles making increasingly regular appearances in an attempt to get eyes on pages and ad revenue rolling in, and long-form, experimental or simply humorous work is on the way out. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist at all any more, of course, but it tends to be more on the enthusiast side of things rather than the professional press.

Then there’s the growth of YouTube. This has been happening for a few years, but I feel that 2014 is the year that YouTube really became a significant threat (and yes, I use that specific word deliberately) to the written word. YouTube, or so Google says, is one of the world’s top search engines, despite not really actually being a search engine. People are increasingly turning to video instead of the written word for all manner of things — help and advice, criticism, first looks at upcoming products, comedy — and the narrative that is constantly being pushed is that If You’re Not Doing Video, You’re Doing It Wrong. I disagree fundamentally with this, but that’s something to discuss another day, I feel.

As for my own career, then, well, I just burned out. Being unceremoniously informed by email that I no longer had a job just before my birthday and right as Andie and I had finalised arrangements to buy our house was the last straw: I was sick of being jerked around by a cynical, unstable, manipulative, bullshit industry that treats its employees like shit unless you’re one of the few people lucky enough to become a recognisable “personality”. I was sick of having jobs that I enjoyed but which I was in a perpetual state of wondering if I’d still be in work each morning. I was sick of the feeling of being “gagged” from writing about interesting and unique things in favour of the necessary clickbait bullshit. I was sick of seeing the increasing number of games journalists and critics who appeared to genuinely loathe their audience, and of being criticised for being enthusiastic about the things I was passionate about. And I was sick of a “career” which had seemingly no structure for progression, training, growth, advancement, whatever you want to call it. So when I was shown the door, I didn’t even try and find a new position in the games press. That was it. I haven’t looked back. And while I won’t say I’m exactly in a dream position right now, the stability of a regular paycheque sure is nice.

So what will happen on that front in 2015? Who knows? There are many different paths I could follow from here. I mentioned the other day that I’ve been taking the time to train up my own skills and make myself a more attractive proposition for any potential positions that might appear in the future. And I intend to keep doing that; I enjoy learning, training, bettering myself — it’s just finding the appropriate opportunities to 1) keep the things I’ve learned in practice and 2) being able to apply them in a professional situation.

But that’s something to worry about another day. For now, it’s New Year’s Day, and it’s time to relax and chill out for a bit. I hope the end of 2014 was good to you, and that 2015 is better still to you.

Happy new year.

…and it was with a bit of whimper, to be honest.

This isn’t any reflection on our gracious hosts Tim and Sophie, of course, who not only laid on a sausage-tasting session (no, that’s not a euphemism) for us, but also cooked an immense amount of beef and other goodies, but to the fact that we all, as a group, found the moment of that single digit changing on everyone’s calendars to be somewhat underwhelming.

Is it cynicism? Jadedness? World-weariness? I don’t know, really. Perhaps it’s the fact that staying up until midnight isn’t really a novelty as a “grown-up”, or the realisation we’ve all had at some point of the fact that a new year doesn’t magically mean a new beginning, a fresh start or anything like that.

I mean, sure, the first of January is as good a time as any to say “right, I’m going to get [x] sorted out” but I’d be interested to know just how many people do successfully manage to get [x] sorted out and who are quite happy to maintain the status quo, continuing to allow [x] to do its thing as it’s always done.

I don’t have many things I’d like to do massively differently this year. I’d like to pick up on the exercise again, even though every time I engage in it I feel like it’s an increasingly futile gesture. I’d like to start drawing a few stupid little cartoons on this blog again — not today, though, as it was a busy day; tomorrow perhaps. I’d like to pick up work on my game again. And I’d like to continue learning Japanese.

These are all relatively simple, small and attainable goals. I’m not going to make any grand gestures or promises that are impossible to keep — no “I will be thin in 2014!” bullshit, for example — but I would like my life to continue in a reasonably positive direction, even if my own messed-up brain occasionally gives me days of distressingly dark thoughts.

There’s plenty of possible good things to look forward to in 2014, at least, but I shall spare you enthusing about things that may or may not happen for now because… well, they may or may not happen. But we shall see. I’d like to be positive. I’d like for it to be a good year. But I’d settle for it simply to not be a bad one.

Happy new year, everyone; may your 2014 be adequate for your needs.