Farewell, 2015

It's incredible that we've already reached the end of 2015. It doesn't feel like I was in London last year. Did that really happen that long ago? Sheesh.It's really been an amazing year, to say the least. Just to list off a few of the events from the top of my head:I traveled to London with some of my best friends and marched in their New Year's parade. We led the parade with Big Bertha and were on TV! What an awesome experience. It was my first time in England, and I hope it won't be my last. Here's to more trips up there.I moved in with my best friend from high school (finally!). Our place is way more nerded out than this of course.My company got a new office! It's pretty awesome and is located directly above the new Trader Joe's downtown. It's amazing that we've already almost filled up occupancy in that space, and we haven't even been there for a year. We're growing like crazy!During SXSW, there was a K-Pop night that featured one of my favorite Korean bands, Epik High. They were phenomenal, and I'm so glad I got to see them live! Hopefully I can see some more K-Pop bands show up in the US. They're grabbing more and more attention over here!As per tradition, we made our trek to the RTX expo! We took our traditional Tower of Pimps picture and waited in line for hours for panels. Just your standard expo life.It's been a while since I had done karaoke. There's no better choice than to have a bunch of guys sing Nickelback to some ladies. It's rather gentleman-like.Watching one of my best friends race was pretty cool. Look at him go!I also took a trip to New York with some friends to go see Mango. For just a few days, we ended up seeing a pretty big majority of New York! I'm proud of us.There were so many other great things that happened this year, including having an incredible time in San Francisco for WWDC, having probably one of the best birthday surprises ever (Master Sword and Shield, which I still need to hang up), Longhorn Alumni Band fun times, and experiencing probably the best work holiday party so far (it's much more fun bringing someone!). It's been a fun-filled year, and I can only hope that 2016 brings the same and more.---Taking a look at some of the resolutions I set out at the beginning of year, I didn't quite complete some of them. Let's take a look at some of the things I planned for, and reasons for why some of them didn't get finished.2015 Resolutions1. Finish every game that I've bought, but haven't finished.This one was probably the hardest one to do, and I obviously didn't make the mark. I didn't take into consideration all the different games I'd end up buying throughout the year. I ended up buying about four or five games, a few which took longer than normal to beat. But, I still made a pretty significant dent in my library, which is awesome (and relieving).The list of completed games includes:

Mass Effect 1, 2, 3
Bravely Default
Final Fantasy Type-0 HD
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past
Shin Megami Tensei IV
Halo 5: Guardians
Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;birth 1
Valkyria Chronicles

There might be more, but this is a pretty good summary. I still have a lot of games to play, so I'm still going to retain this resolution into the new year.2. Finish the current queue of manga and books that I've bought, but haven't read.So here's a before and after of the damage I inflicted on my novels.And, after:As mentioned in the caption, that picture includes some books I've already previously online, but bought to support the author. Disregarding those, I've made a pretty nice dent in my manga! I also started reading a lot of light novels this year, which took away from some time from this collection. Still not bad, though!3. Lose 10 pounds in fat, gain 10 in muscle.I've been going out to the gym fairly often with my roommate, and I can confidently say I've reached this goal. My weight has stayed the same for the most part, but I have seen definition in areas that haven't had it before, and some slimming down. As long as we keep this routine, we'll be looking good.4. Produce videos more often.I failed at this, and I think the biggest reason was a lack of motivation/ideas. I had a few ideas, but my week was already saturated enough with work and working out. Unfortunately, I never got around to actually committing these ideas. So rather than try and produce complex videos, I should focus on making smaller flicks to grab more experience with my camera.5. Create programming libraries in Swift that will help others.I ended up learning Swift and started writing a lot of my new ideas in this language. My current app has a lot of Swift integrated in it, and I am just about finished writing up a library that will interface with both Swift and Objective-C! Mission complete.6. Write a RESTful API in Python.I didn't get around to this similar to the video resolution; lack of motivation. There's an API that I host that I've been wanting to migrate, but is also based on scraping HTML. This was due to the official API not being updated in years. However, an announcement came around in October mentioning a new API would be coming at the end of the year. Because of this announcement, the real motivation for creating a RESTful API was shot down. However, I'll still end up doing this just for fun and for my own benefit. If anything, I also have separate API endpoints that I use for my apps that would love to see a good migration happen.7. Cook more often.I started cooking some new Japanese dishes, including katsudon, tonkatsu, okonomiyaki, and yakisoba. All of them have been pretty major successes! All very tasty dishes, too. I plan on making more Japanese and Korean cuisines so I can become proficient with cooking. I still look at ingredient charts since I don't know them that well enough, but hopefully I can know how to make it off the top of my head. --- What's in store for 2016? I'll be making a separate blog post for those resolutions. Until then, have a wonderful and happy new year!To finish the last blog post of 2015, here's a fun song to get you through the day: Clawdaddy Beach, by Tomoya Tomita and Misaki Asada, from Yoshi's Woolly WorldIf you've never played Yoshi's Woolly World, then realize that this is an incredibly adorable game. They take the already cute Yoshi, and somehow make it cuter. I mean, just look at this picture!Anyway, this song is from one of the first few levels. One of my favorite things I love listening to is the triangle in this; it's pretty intricate, and you kind of realize that the song might give off a different feel if it weren't included. You could say it acts as a soft drum set, providing some rhythm in some of those open spaces to push the song a bit.It just sounds so damn happy, and I love it.[audio mp3="http://coreyjustinroberts.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/08-Clawdaddy-Beach.mp3"][/audio] That's it for this year. Until next year!Corey

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