So, how was 2023?

[Sonygamer455]

So now that 2023 has come to a close, how was the year for you and what were the highlights of it for you? Feel free to share them here!

 

[TumeK5]

For me, 2023 was a total waste. I can't remember a single thing that was memorable because it was good.

I applied for work rehabilitation, took half a year for the course to finally start, and at the end of 2023, I didn't get to an internship because every single place I asked could not provide. (I graduated as a welder in Dec 2022, and none of the metal working places could take me in because of the current situation in the field.)

And then, F1. Oh boy, the season was so forgettable, apart from the Red Bull domination, and Piastri being an incredible rookie.

 

[Sonygamer455]

So I have made it a habit since 2020 to make a document of various highlights as they happen throughout the year that I feel are worth noting. That said, now that the year is over, here is everything I jotted down over the past year:

Spoiler: The Good

1. Received a number of PS1 games once belonging to my cousin, one of which with a lot of sentimental value. Then on January 28, I received all of his Gameboy games and on June 11th, I got his old PS1! Lastly, I got his PS2 and all his games for it on October 15!
2. Played Wreckfest on my Xbox Series X a lot and had a good time doing so. It has become one of the best games I have played in a long time.
3. Surpassed one of my goals in expanding my country music library.
4. Took a set of field tests at college and got a $300 Master Card for participating in it. Which I later used to get an 8TB external HDD and a Cronus Zen, all of which I have been very happy with!
5. Learned how to retrieve deleted files from my computers and in doing so, I was able to recover a lot of music from my youth I thought was long gone by now!
6. Had a pretty decent vacation this year. I had a great shopping trip at my favorite video game store and got to go to a putt-putt course I had been wanting to go to for a while, which was adjacent to the remains of an old racetrack I had wanted to see for years.
7. Went back to Red Faction on PS2 and finally finished the campaign I started way back in early 2007 and generally speaking, it was pretty fun!
8. Got a new pool set up this year and it’s much better than the old one we had for years
9. Shania Twain, my favorite artist, released a new album this year for the first time since 2017 and I have been looking forward to it ever since.
10. Moved on from the GED class I started last year and started some new classes at college that I am very enthusiastic about and I am hopeful for the future because of this.
11. Revisited Need for Speed Most Wanted for the first time since 2017 and had one of the best runs I’ve had yet with this game. Later got the game on PC and had a blast playing around with mods and tinkering with some myself.
12. An annoying classmate of mine, who I cannot stand, got suspended and I didn’t have to be around him for quite some time.
13. Got my old PSP fixed after many years of being unable to use it.
14. Found a video to an episode of a TV show I saw WAY back in 2005 and hadn’t seen since and was pretty ecstatic to finally see it again after all these years.
15. Returned to Need for Speed Underground 1 on PS2 for the first time since mid-2006 and was pretty glad to finally come back to it.
16. Got a new gaming PC that is easily the best one I’ve had yet and its specs are good enough to the point I can run every game I have at a decent frame rate including ones I’ve never been able to play on my previous computers.
17. Obtained some pretty good music this year, including a crazy good deal on some Toby Keith CDs, and a record I had wanted for a while, but best of all I got a very rare Kenny Chesney CD that I can’t any information on and that I really enjoyed listening to and it's easily they best CD I've bought in years.
18. My brother and his wife had a baby and I’m now an uncle!
19. Didn’t have any major issues with my ex-girlfriend, for once.
20. I didn't get COVID.

Spoiler: The Bad

1. Had some drama with my teacher that brought needless tension between me and others.
2. Just when we thought we had our basement secure, it got flooded again. Although we were able to identify where it was coming in and kept it from coming in for a while, it later flooded again in December, twice!
3. In March, one of my teachers from high school, who I liked, passed away. Even worse, just shy of 2 weeks prior, I had just spoken to her, but little did I know it would be the very last time I ever would.
4. My iPod Classic gave out on me again in March similar to how it did in 2014, just as I feared it would. Even worse, the HDD was so far gone, I couldn’t restore it. Making matters even worse than that, I opened it up in an attempt to repair it, and got a ton of parts to do so, only for my cat to knock it off and damage the battery connector, which to date has not been fixed yet.
5. Had an issue with my new external HDD I mentioned earlier that really bothered me for a while and I feared I had lost everything from it. Fortunately, it was later sorted out, but the fact it happened at all was not a good feeling I care to go through ever again.
6. Didn’t get to see my old friend while on vacation because we were both too busy and could never arrange a good time while we were there.
7. While the GED classes I started taking at college in 2022 were a nice change of pace, I got pretty tired of them this year. Simply put, it just got so boring and sometimes frustrating to the point I didn’t even enjoy going anymore when I usually do, and I later became somewhat desperate to move on from it. (Fortunately, I eventually did)
8. While I am thankful for being in the classes I mentioned in #10 for “The Good”, one downside to this is I had to be around my annoying classmate again I mentioned in #13. While he might have been suspended later on (and later came back), having to be around him at all was generally not something I was happy about. (in fact, I'm still not)
9. Had a less-than-spectacular Christmas simply because my brother refused to show up which ultimately killed the mood for all of us and created a lot of drama.

While 2023 was not a bad year, it wasn't exactly a remarkable one either. It was better than 2021, but not as good as 2022. Overall, it felt like a "filler" year that didn't really do much to make it stand out from the others and was generally kind of boring. And who knows, maybe I am looking at it wrong and it'll be like 2019, which I didn't like much at the time, but will look back at it fondly years later. As of right now though, this is my takeaway from it.

 

[Jezza819]

My 2023 started very badly. Over the Christmas holidays 2022 it got very cold here in the southeastern US. We're not used to it and neither is our plumbing. Over three days from Dec. 22nd-24th our low overnight was just above 0 degrees F and the highest it got was 20F.

So I'm sitting in my apartment Dec. 24th at about 1pm when the fire alarm goes off. I'm on the 1st floor. I stick my head out of the door and don't see anything but it seems I can hear a female voice up on the top (3rd) floor but I dismiss it as she's also came outside to see if anything is wrong. So I turn around to go back inside then I hear her yell. So I go back to the door and that's when I heard the sound of water running through my walls. I start to see water coming out of the air vents in the ceiling and around the fire sprinkler heads.

What happened was that Dec. 24th even though it was still below freezing was the first day the sun had come out. Once the sun hit the roof of our building it warmed up the space above the 3rd floor and caused the water supply pipe for the sprinkler system to break. But it only broke above our sector of the building. The lady in the 3rd floor was screaming because her ceiling collapsed. She and her dog did make it outside. Maintenance was still on property even though it was Christmas Eve and they came rushing over to turn off the water supply to the building but the damage was done. Our building and 5 others had suffered ruptured pipes. It was widespread over our city.

So I started putting down garbage bags and whatever I could find to try and catch the water leaking through. But again since it was Christmas eve all of the stores were closed and I couldn't get buckets, etc. I was only getting water coming through the ceiling in the front part of my living room. Not back towards my sofa and not into the bedroom in the rear of the apartment. Apparently they got the water turned off quick enough that there was no further damage but there was still a lot of water coming down through the upper apartments. Maintenance came by around 5pm and put a huge dehumidifier and three blowers aimed at the ceiling in my living room to try and mitigate the damage and try to dry out the ceiling a little. Needless to say it was very loud in there.

So I basically spent Christmas Eve and Christmas day confined to my bedroom with the door closed so I hear tv only coming out to eat and use the bathroom. I figured I was going to have to completely move out permanently because of the damage but management assured me they could repair it and I could move back in but it was going to take time. So on New Year's Eve I moved into a 2 bedroom unit 2 buildings down. I'm single and I tried to get as much moved by myself a couple of days prior but now in my late 50's that nearly killed me. To make things worse my regular moving guy was on vacation and couldn't do it but the people he suggested ruined my washer and dryer by loading them on the dollys with no protection.

Long story short I spent two months in the other apartment and moved back into mine on March 5th again it nearly killed me. But now I'm so paranoid that any creaking noise or knocking I hear it scares me that something is going to break again. I do like where I live, it's on the backside of the building facing the woods. My electric bill is very low. The only complaint I have the rudeness and complete lack of respect that upstairs neighbors have for people living below them. But the first part of 2023 was not so good.

 

[DefInfinity]

Pretty solid.

Home between 2021-2022 was a bit of a mess because of family related things. Particularly, there was an abusive member in the household that needed to be rid of ASAP, who had threatened and created chaos for my family and I. Not only is he gone now, but we have been developing a record of his behavior for when authorities will get involved.

Its been exceptionally difficult to get my older sibling to follow through on any of it instead of taking to social media and biting the bait of flying monkeys. The situation was getting messy enough where somebody could have been murdered, so thankfully it was resolved without ever having come to that.

The only things remaining are the golden child/scapegoat dynamic and the results of abuse. For about a year or so I was the scapegoat and now after getting my internship and returning to college, I am the golden child again. Back to our regularly scheduled BS.

At least in the end I might be able to afford to move very far away someday.

Either that, or I can find solace that there are no barriers that can stop me from jumping off that bridge. Its like destiny was calling anyway.

 

[W3H5]

I’m still alive, and I didn’t lose any family or friends in ‘23. I’ll call that a success.