Oh my, was I ambitious with my commitments for 2024. Let’s start with my not-so-ambitious forecasts and get them out of the way.
| Forecast | |
|---|---|
| Apple’s Vision Pro will set a benchmark for its hardware capabilities and user experience but remain a niche product with limited mass market appeal and accessibility. | Yes, true. Apple even cut its shipment forecast a few months later. |
| OpenAI will reach another major tech milestone in the first half of the year. | Yes, GPT-4o in May. |
| More first generation AI forward hardware will launch—things that aren’t trying to be phones like Meta Ray-Bans and Humane AI Pin. | Plaud NotePin, OpenInterpreter O1, Limitless Pendant, Even Realities G1, and others. |
| Conversational interfaces will become more prominent even in devices with screens. | “Better” Siri, Gemini Live, Claude, for the obvious ones but it seemed like everyone was spinning up some kind of LLM-powered chat tool as the year progressed. |
| Streaming services will continue to consolidate and then lean on their ability to market “cheaper” bundles. Cable 2.0, baby. | This didn’t happen. Streaming seems to have consolidated as much as it’s going to for now. |
For the commitments, here’s how those shook out.
| To watch | |
|---|---|
| The Wire | No, I made it through two seasons (which were both excellent) |
| Poor Things | Yes, and I jotted some thoughts down |
| Dream Scenario | No |
| Blue Eye Samurai | No |
| Atlanta, season 1 | No |
| Andor | No |
| Game | |
|---|---|
| Jusant | Yes, I reviewed it on whatbrentplay |
| Dredge | No, started but didn’t finish |
| Baldur’s Gate 3 | No, started but didn’t finish |
| Hi-Fi Rush | Yes, I reviewed it on whatbrentplay |
| Witcher 3 DLCs | No |
| Elden Ring | No |
| God of War Ragnarok Valhalla | No |
| Book | |
|---|---|
| Tress of the Emerald Sea | Yes |
| The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England | Yes |
| Yumi and the Nightmare Painter | Yes |
| The Sunlit Man | Yes |
| Song of Achilles | No |
| Personal | |
|---|---|
| Learn to play piano | Yes, technically. It’s not possible to learn piano in a year but I did log about 340 hours of practice in 2024. I have a long way to go but I’m way better then I was at the start of 2024. |
| Launch bundle of links | Yes, technically. You can’t sign up for it but if you visit the landing page you can see a few sample bundles. The app runs just fine (for the most part) but I didn’t feel the drive to try to scale it up after getting through its MVP feature set. It was a good project, though, and I’m proud of myself for getting through it. |
| Publish more to whatbrentsay this year than last | No, not even close. There were 27 posts in 2023 and only 13 posts in 2024. Most of 2023’s posts were my lowest effort, short form posts, though. I did publish four features in 2024, each one being pretty unique. |
| Refresh whatbrentsay posts list design | No, I haven’t touched site design at all, which feels even more necessary now that some features can take several pages to find. |
| Set up home server again | No, and I’m sad that I didn’t |
| Buy a bookcase | No comment |
Weighing all commitments equally, that nets me at a lousy 9/24, or 37.5%. That’s not enough to pass a class in school.
What did I learn from this exercise? It’s hard to measure a year in advance. I vastly overestimated my ability to consume media, which is comical because I was already many years into living in a perpetual state of having missed most popular media.
2024 signaled a significant change in where and how I budgeted my time. I’ve become less interested in using the free time I have on heavy consumption activities. Except for books; they’re the only thing I don’t feel bad indulging in. Given my commitments for 2025, I don’t see that overall trend reversing.
I was also reminded that you can’t account for the unexpected. I lost half of all of my weekends from late August through the end of the year, which was not ideal. Debating whether to use my Sundays to take care of as many responsibilities as I could squeeze in or relax and screw myself over for the next six days was a weekly lose-lose.
On a brighter note, I did things I didn’t commit to or even expect to. I published four short stories here as a feature, all from a shared universe I’ve been thinking about for a while. It’s scary to put them out in the open but I’ve learned that I prefer having something I can point people to even if the quality isn’t where I want it. After Poor Things, I watched four other Best Picture Oscar noms—a rarity for me to see half the category before the award is given out. I saw Dune 2 in IMAX, which was excellent. I rekindled my reading habit which I’m both happy about and disappointed I allowed myself to break. Part of that return allowed me to read two novels written by a couple of friends, which was inspiring. I’m grateful to have people in my life that are doing cool things and I’m grateful they include me in them. I also got to ring in 2025 twice—first dressed up for a fancy home cooked dinner, and second, an hour later, in pajamas in front of a fireplace during a thunderstorm. Again, I am lucky to have good people in my life.
See you back here in ’26. Hopefully by then I’ve turned this post type and the Forecast and Commitments one into a bespoke post template.