2025 Year in Review / 2026 New Year's Resolutions

Well that was another Year. I'm currently half-awake and jet-lagged, but I really can't put this off for any longer. My usual thing of doing the year in review on/directly after my birthday was stymied by the fact that we were in China and then spending 28 hours traveling home, aiyah.

Anyway, here goes: ( This always gets long )

China trip reflection

After the disaster of the China trip last summer, we decided to stop going in the summer. So instead we went over winter break. It was pretty good! I think we had a good balance of visiting new places and visiting family. It was 2 days in Shanghai, followed by 2 days in Chengdu (well, actually overnight train + 1.5 days + overnight train), and then 2 days of the weekend with fam, followed by 1 day in Suzhou, 1 day as my bday, and 1 day of cleanup and travel home.

In Chengdu: Sanxingdui was amazing omg the bronzes were ones I hadn't seen in books before it was so good. Pandas turn out to just be bears who are kinda dumb and inexplicable, although their thumbs are legit pretty cool, and apparently their tails aren't black? Honestly artistic renditions of pandas are cuter than the real thing. Next time will need to spend more time in Chengdu city proper.

Takeaways:
- having 2-3 days to deal with jetlag was great. 3 days is better than 2, but 2 days was doable.
- seeing dad from 10am-noon was pretty successful. Don't expect him to do much walking or activities outside the house.
- it was good to clear out the weekend for seeing other fam, but next time maybe we can clarify which day (which would allow for more travel/tourism), and have them come to our place (less cleanup, bigger table, less obligation on family members to cook)
- the overnight train was a big success, Miss Rutabaga loved it.
- Could probably have spent an extra day in Chengdu for fuller experience
- Direct flights are so worth the extra cost. We had such a bad time flying back -- delay after delay of sitting on the tarmac, ugh. What should have been a 16 hour experience (door-to-door) became a 28 hour one (pfah!)


- maybe pre-order some winter clothes and have them delivered to dad's place. If this is going to be a regular experience, can even consider bringing some of my 2nd or 3rd tier shirts and pants and leaving them there


Oh, on the plane, I watched Superman (2025) and Free Guy. Free Guy was pretty fun and cute. Superman was better than I'd expected. I got to skip the part where he turns himself in (which is like, my emotional squick), but the rest of it was great. I was leery of having a Justice Gang of a bunch of b-listers, but it actually turned out really great! Mr. Terrific obviously stole the show, but also casting Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner is perfect re: his blend of douchebaggery + still a good guy. I also loved that it wasn't a superhero origin story, and in fact jumps right in *after* a big fight re: Boravia, and *after* Lois and Clark got together. That was really refreshing. I like that Lex Luthor got to show off why exactly he's a formidable enemy: his smarts, his resources, his mania, his obsessiveness. Clark is so sweet and much-beleaguered. Such a soft boi who is just trying to dog-sit for the weekend. I love that Krypto's desire to chew on toys becomes plot-relevant. :). I ... really don't like Ma and Pa Kent tho? I don't know why, but I have such a different mental image of them. Probably from Unpretty's fics, tbh.

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oof, woke up at 10:30am today, after being up randomly in the middle of the night due to jetlag.

Tomorrow's a busy day (taiko + Chinese School), so gotta get my ass back in gear.

Watched some videos of Encanto with Miss R while on a nostalgia trip (she was really into the songs back when Encanto first came out), and then she had some Family Feels and there was very emotionally cathartic sniffling. I think she's getting older and more able to deal with emotions engendered by watching things. Maybe in a year or two she'll be ready to consume actual media with storylines? That would be rad because that's one of my main indulgences that I haven't really been able to do recently (spouse is really meh on movies).

Anyway, stuff I gotta do today:
- vacuum the stairs
- do Chinese school grading
- do Chinese school payroll stuff
- maybe call the rental car lady? (I got into a car accident back in July when we were driving through the adirondacks, and we totalled the rental car. It's been a complete shitshow re: rental company losing our incident report, and then not getting my insurance claim number. aiyah.) I hate calling, but also the last 2 times I called I left very clear messages about what my claim number was so it's really their fault for not tracking it? ugh.

I think I would like to wrap some projects up this weekend and maybe next week so that I can focus on my citizenship comic??? If I want to get it done by June, I'm gonna need to be drawing a page per week, aiyah.

Read this article (from Nov 29) about AI, which is not bad as far as AI bubble explainer goes: https://www.windowscentral.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-chatgpt/analysis-openai-is-a-loss-making-machine We just need to keep telling the companies all of the ways where AI is not useful. (I love that the optimistic estimate is 3 billion users of openAI by 2030. Isn't there, like, 8 billion people in the world total? So basically discounting kids and old people, they're expecting, like 80% of the world to use ChatGPT? LOL)

Also: I knew there was yogurt, matcha, and wasabi white rabbits (the wasabi ones are the bomb, btw), but apparently there's more??? Just ordered a mix bag for sampling purposes: https://www.amazon.com/Toffee】Chinese-Specialty-Chocolate-Childhood-Delicious/dp/B0FT771KBV