1) My niece was born, and I am surprised at how much I love this child and want the best for her and how much joy I get from watching her grow. Since my sister cooked such a perfect human, I should convince her to have two more.
2) Movies - I don't watch many movies, but of the ones I did watch, I loved "Mad Max: Fury Road" and "Godzilla Minus One." Studios making movies might be coming to an end. I think very soon you will just be able to feed a story into an AI program, and it will spit out a full-length movie in the style of your choosing, just like AI is able to do with images today for free.
3) TV Shows - 'X-Men '97,' 'Dark Matter,' 'The Penguin,' 'Fallout,' and 'Kingdom.' Maybe I should stop listing TV shows in these reports because sometimes a show is great at the start, but they go bad in the later seasons.
4) Games - 'Dyson Sphere Program' - I don't know if I mentioned this game last year, but that is the only game I have been interested in playing this year. Hopefully, with pressure from Elon Musk and companies just losing money, wokeness will die in gaming and we will start getting games worth playing. Having said this, there were a couple of demos this year ('Crimson Desert' and 'Squadron 42') that got me excited for things I will be playing in the coming year.
5) Straw Water Bottles - These water bottles from Kmart with straws that pop out every time you open them, so you don't have to hold up the bottle to drink water, are so much more of a convenient way to drink water. I think I drank far more fluid this year than I have done any other year.
7) Wax paper - These have been around forever as well, but I learned a use for them this year. I have been using them to separate butter into single solid servings, and I love it. Also, eating butter feels so good; I have so much more energy and less inflammation now.
8) Coles flavoured sparkling water - It's been a long journey for me to step down from drinking litres of Pepsi Max a day to this drink, and I think this will be the last drink before I go to completely drinking water. But if I don't, I'm happy to stay with this drink. It has very few ingredients, just stevia and minimal flavouring, and can be diluted fifty percent with water and still taste great.
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| Passion fruit & Orange flavour is the best |
9) Costco Forequarter Lamb - Forequarter lamb is my staple food of choice, and this lamb tastes very different from any lamb I bought from Coles or Woolworths; it's like the lamb from these supermarkets is domesticated while the Costco lamb tastes more gamey. Costco usually offers this lamb cheaper, and they don't hide the fatty and bony lamb pieces under the good ones. And you can buy these in bulk and waste less packaging and move and store more meat at a time.
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| Best forequarter lamb in Australia |
10) Cooking Frozen Meats: This year, I discovered that I don’t need to defrost my red meat before cooking it in the air fryer. I just add about a third more cooking time. As long as the pieces of meat are frozen side by side in the same bag, rather than stacked on top of each other (to prevent sticking), they cook even better than defrosted meat. This method is so much more convenient than the way I used to do it!
11) The Supplement SAM-e: This supplement is expensive, but it significantly improved my sleep. After taking it for a few days, I was literally going to bed, falling asleep immediately, sleeping soundly (though I did wake up a couple of times to pee but fell back asleep quickly), and getting a full eight hours of rest. I am waking up feeling healed on this supplement.
12) The supplement Benfotiamine - This is high-dose vitamin B1. I learned of this from Dr. Berg. I've had inflammation in my feet for the last ten years, crippling me from any running, jumping, or doing anything that requires a lot of bending of my foot joints. I started taking these for foot pain, which has largely recovered, and I feel like straining my feet now will not cause too much inflammation. I think in about a year I should be able to start doing all the activities I used to love doing that require strong feet.
13) The self-service car wash in Minchinbury - I had never known this was a thing, but one time this year we had to make a trip to a Bunnings that was not local because they did not have what we wanted. When we noticed an interesting-looking car wash that we had to check out, it became one of the most fun discoveries my brother and I ever made. It's a car wash where you just pay for the time you will be in it, and while you have your car in the bay, you can press several buttons to make the various pipes in the bay produce different sprays; one of the pipes even has a brush that you can use to brush your vehicle. It's the best thing ever! The first day we discovered it, we cleaned three cars there and even took our mom there as a fun day out.
14) Handheld foam spray bottles - I don't know if these things came out this year or if they have been around forever, but I love them. They are these little two-liter bottles with a spray and pump attachment at the top that allows you to pressurize the fluid chamber so you can either create a spray or a solid stream of water with the device. It uses so much less water than using a water pipe to wet vehicles and is even great for doing things like watering gardens because you don't have to drag a water hose to where you want to water.".
15) Hobibear barefoot shoes - For some reason, wide-toe barefoot shoes have been extremely expensive until now, but not anymore. Hobibear breathable barefoot shoes are extremely comfortable and low-cost. Just avoid getting the leather ones until they figure out breathability because they will cook your feet.
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| Hobi's are so comfy |
16) Amazon Returns - This is amazing! If you buy something from Amazon like Hobibear leather shoes and they don't work for you, you can just return the item. You don't even have to post it - just pack it up and drop it off at a news agency. That is so good. Thank you, Jeff Bezos! I don't know if I ever mentioned this, but Kmart returns are pretty good too. As long as you return something in the same condition you took it, they will let you return it for thirty days. This is how businesses should operate.
17) The website Cronometer - I have been taking supplements and trying to eat healthy forever, and it has normally been very difficult to know if I am getting all of the correct nutrients. But thanks to this free website, I know exactly what vitamins and minerals I am short on, so now when I use supplements, I am no longer wasting money on things I am already covered for like omega-3s, which I thought I needed to get from fish, but there is plenty of omega-3s in red meat, and when I do take the supplement, I only take the minimum amount to cover my RDA for that micronutrient. Vitamin E, for example, comes in 1000 IU doses, so I only take that once a month because the amount I am short per day is far lower than that. I take cod liver oil for Vitamin A, and I only take that three times a week. I need more magnesium, so I take my magnesium malate capsule every day, plus twice a day three times a week. I feel amazing doing this because I am not wasting money or health by causing hypervitaminosis, and I feel as healthy as a twelve-year-old with how much energy I have.
18) The website AliExpress - It's full of low-cost products from China, I may even buy a bunch of it and go sell them at the markets, so I can meet new people and hopefully make my money back.
19) Canva - It's an amazing, easy-to-use photo and video editing program. I mainly use the free version, which has plenty of useful features, but I have used the paid version as well, and it enables so much creativity. The story behind Canva is really inspiring as well; this half-Asian girl from Perth had an idea to make photo editing easier and managed to gather the programmers, money, and support to become a multi-billionaire with this program. I have a box full of ideas that I think are worth millions that I gave up programming on because it got too hard and because I was not around the right people, but now with AI assistants and the ability to follow the steps of this girl, I think I am going to start programming a few things again... I will probably give up after a few months... but I am inspired for now, lol.
20) CapCut - Like Canva, this is another alternative to Adobe programs, and it is all free. ByteDance put it out into the world so that people can make videos for its TikTok platform, and it is very easy to learn and has amazing features like avatars that will look like they are speaking your script.
21) YouTube summaries of Movies, TV shows, and manga - Who has time to watch a movie these days? They are not very interesting after you have seen so many already and know what is filler. Whenever I watch shows now, I spend a lot of the time just clicking on the skip-by-10s button; I don't want to spend the time. I just want the story, so these summaries, which are very entertaining, cut out all the filler in the movies and just give you the stories. I've spent hours watching these and have moved onto manga now, and they are a very good service.
22) It's impossible to mention exciting technology without talking about multiple exciting things Elon Musk's companies have done:
- SpaceX caught the giant Starship lower stage with giant chopsticks - I watched this live when I was going on a first date with someone I really liked, and when the rocket was caught, I think I stood up and cheered.
- Robotaxis - He showed off beautiful driverless cars. Maybe in the future we won't be buying and owning cars because it will be cheaper just to call a driverless vehicle to take you places.
- Boring Tunnel - The Boring Company built a tunnel that starts inside Tesla's giant factory in Texas and will be delivering Cybertrucks out into a different land area of the Tesla property in Texas.
His companies have done several other noteworthy things, but those were the things I was most impressed by this year. There is more great technology this year:
Anduril, a company founded by Palmer Luckey - is developing and showing off all sorts of new military tech that are sure to scare China and anyone else who would want to mess with the United States and its allies. And this is a new defence company coming in with things the military needs that the old companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin can't develop fast enough.
AI advancements - There are so many that it's hard to keep up, but I will mention a few. This year we got the first AI video generations by the program Sora. When it came out, it was really good, and over the year different companies have come out with programs that generate video even better than Sora. AI voice dictation by a company called ElevenLabs has gotten incredibly realistic, and music generation from a program called Suno is very good. It's possible that by next year, full realistic-looking movies could be generated by AI. A human would just need to tell it what type of story they are interested in, and the AI will create something unique for us.
This was a pretty good year, full of new personal discoveries and advancements in the world. I hope in '25, I will have a bigger list.
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