Career

Quite good, on the whole. Passed GCSEs with flying colours, got into some nice events, but I feel like mid 2022-late 2023 was my renaissance period; what I’ve done in 2024 is not at all close to those years.

Life

I got a new brother!? He is a baby. 👶 Quite fun.

Mood

I feel better about 2025 than I do compared to 2024.

Culture

• Persona 3 Reload, a remake of Persona 3, was released. I’ve been a Persona fan ever since I played Persona 5. P3:R is the best way to play Persona 3.
• I have already dumped 50 hours into Marvel Rivals, which was released only on December 2nd of 2024. Wow!
• I never watched the original Avengers. I will eventually get through the first phase of the MCU by the end of this year, I hope. I started with a few movies.
• I played a bit of Black Myth: Wukong, but I never really saw what others saw in it.
• I played a bit of Devil May Cry 5 in late 2023, but I didn’t get to finish it this year.
• I played Nine Sols. I really loved it, that game did not get enough love.
• I enjoyed Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy, but I think it is way overpriced. Get it on sale.
• God of War: Ragnarok is a cinematic masterpiece.
• Squid Game 2 was alright

State of the world

I feel very pessimistic about it. Everyone who is in power absolutely should not be, and those who should be in power do very little with their power.

Personal Growth

I feel like I have grown as a person this year quite a lot. I at least started putting in hard work into my academics, which is something that I have never done before. GCSEs I thought were quite easy to coast through. A Levels definitely stressed me out, because even when I was studying more than I ever had before (from ≤1 hours per week to ≥6 hours), and giving it my all, I did not get the results I expected.

Something that I have come to realize over the past three months is that my grades are not a function of: more time ∝ more grades. Eventually, after getting terrible result after terrible result and getting so stressed to the point of being driven to tears by my growing mountain of failures, I eventually… just gave up? It was around this time that my baby brother was born, so I had an excuse to ditch my routine of going to the library straight after school every day to grind through my subjects until 8 PM. Incidentally, it was around this time that my grades started to return to their usual levels. You could argue that my hard work was finally paying off, or you could alternatively argue that I was unnecessarily stressing myself out and jeopardizing my own success.

Not to suggest that lack of work is what helps you attain good grades, but don’t overwork yourself. Your grades are not a function of more work → more good. It’s the net outcome of your whole life, so don’t stress yourself out working until 9 PM everyday, because that’s probably what’s making your grades tank.

Anyways, who am I to say anything? I’m only a first-year A Level student, so I’m sure that there are plenty more horrors to come my way!