Here are some things I did in 2024:

#EVERYDAY 2024

If you tried visiting this website any time in 2024, you would have found that it was “under construction” with a temporary landing page, which might suggest that nothing was posted here all year, but that’s actually not true.

This year I decided that I wanted to revive my #EVERYDAY project that I worked on from 2014-2017. The original plan was to keep it going but life kinda got in the way (in a good way). So after 6-7 years of not really doing any of this kind of creative work, my Cinema4D and After Effects skills had grown pretty stale. I knew that I wanted to get back into it but I wasn’t very confident in my ability to come up with new (good) ideas every day without getting some practice under my belt.

I was looking through all of my old Cinema4D files and realized that a good way to get some practice would be to use all of the files from 2014 as a starting point instead of starting from scratch. This made it feel a bit less daunting and seemed like it would be a good way to evaluate my skills. The idea being that I would try to make a “better” version of each of the pieces I created in the first year of the project.

I’ve just relaunched the site with a pretty basic (but new) design, so you can now access all of the #EVERYDAY posts, including all 365 new posts that I created this year. So, yes that means I’ve been posting on my website pretty much every day for a year and yet none of the content was available for anyone else to see. Kind of a weird decision, but it felt right at the time. I felt like I was doing this more for myself than for getting any sort of recognition or exposure for my art from others, so after a few weeks I decided that I would do the entire year of #EVERYDAY posts and THEN relaunch the website, instead of the other way around.

Website Redesign

I’ve been working on a redesign for this website on and off for a few years now. There’s a lot of backstory here, which I will talk about in another post. But basically I had gotten to the point where I was bored with WordPress, frustrated by some of my experiences using plugins to add more functionality, and was eager to learn something new. I started rebuilding the site in SvelteKit and GraphQL and learned a lot along the way, but eventually realized that I was spending all of my time learning these new technologies and almost no time at all being creative.

So I just stopped working on the SvelteKit site and started thinking about how I could redesign/rebuild the site in WordPress. I spent a lot of time in Figma on the new design. Probably too much time. Trying to come up with the perfect new design that would show off all of my design and development skills. And I was just going around in circles, constantly changing my mind about page layouts and the overall style/vibe of the site.

I wasn’t super motivated to actually launch the site because I felt like all I really had was an idea for a new design, but no real plan on how I was going to publish content on the site. I finally realized that I needed to get back to the things I enjoy doing and restarting the #EVERYDAY project (at least for this year) seemed like a good way to generate a lot of new content for the site without having to do a lot of writing before the launch.

Not Writing (Still)

If you’ve been on this site before, you’ve probably heard me talk about wanting to write more, and that’s still something I want. But the perfectionist in me wouldn’t let me get past the initial draft stage with anything. None of it was good enough. It was too boring maybe? Or had I simply lost my (writing) voice? It all used to come so easily and now I was struggling to complete a single post that I was happy with.

So this post is the first thing I’ve written in quite some time. Is it good enough? I don’t know and I don’t really care. The only way for me to get better and get back into a flow of writing on a regular basis is to take the same approach I did with the #EVERYDAY project. Not necessarily writing everyday, but setting some kind of schedule and sticking to it without being so concerned about each post being the best thing I’ve ever written. All that got me was a whopping ZERO posts about anything (good or bad writing aside).

When I look at the #EVERYDAY project, especially now after being back into it for a year, I see some things that I’m not super happy with, but I see a lot more things that I am happy with. I need to be OK with creating something bad in order to create something good. That’s just the reality. I’ve learned this lesson over and over again both while working on this project and in the work I do professionally, but for whatever reason, I haven’t applied it to my writing.

Listening to Music

I listened to a lot of music in 2024. According to my Apple Replay, about 40,000 hours or so. Here are some my favorites from last year:

The Jesus Lizard – Rack

Bossk – .4

Tycho – Infinite Health

BADBADNOTGOOD – Mid Spiral

Man Man – Carrot on Strings

Sex Swing – Golden Triangle

Ministry – HOPIUMFORTHEMASSES

Watching Movies

I didn’t see a lot of new movies in 2024, but I did see a few and these were my favorites:

Alien: Romulus

Nosferatu (2024)

The Substance

Saturday Night

Dune: Part Two

Of the movies I didn’t see, these are the ones I’m most excited to catch up on in the new year:

• Conclave
• A Different Man
• Heretic
• The Brutalist
• Aggro Drift
• I Saw the TV Glow

Reading Books

OK, so I didn’t finish any books in 2024. Sorry. I started reading Midnight in Chernobyl but just never got into it. So my official count for the year is less than 1. Maybe in 2025 I’ll start reading a book I actually want to finish reading.