Since it's traditional to reflect on New Year

It's the new year! 2013! An ugly number; some mathematician is bound to disagree with some substantiation.

Am I going to reflect on the year that just passed? Summarise it? Hmm. I'm lazy to but I think it's important. Or it gives me a sense of completion.

What's 2012 to me? Shallow as it sounds and because it's the first thing that came to mind, it's the year the world discovered Carly Rae Jepsen. Important to me because she's the second female pop artiste after Katy Perry whom I will claim to be a fan of. It helps that I fell utterly in love with Call Me Maybe. It also helps that she did a collab with my favourite male artiste early on. Her and her sugary tunes and buoyant beats.

It's also the year of Gangnam Style and one billion hits on a single video: some part of me is proud just because he's Asian, which is odd because that means I'd be proud of anything of note done by any member of half the human population. Which I would be. But yes, an Asian artiste and an Asian song, topping our local top 100 list, which has seen only songs in English so far. Not only that--all top three songs were debut singles. All got popular via viral spread online. All three were by non-Americans. This is globalisation revealing its countenance, I think; this is the internet and social media and improved information--and cultural--transfer between nations. It's not perfect and provides substrate for the contempt of some, but I think it's quite glorious what we've come to.

What else besides this? It's the year of the Avengers. One two hour movie and we have explosions of fanart, fanfiction, fan-stuff all over the internet. More internet. It's been quite a phenomenal year in a very soft, intangible sense. It's the year of One Direction and the revival of the boy band.

It's the year I began to stay up till one o'clock in the morning regularly. The year I got a computer that was as good as my own. The year I began downloading my anime instead of streaming it--all because of my first experience with downloading--Avatar--and my thirst for quality which was so painfully lacking on streaming sites.

It was the year I admitted to myself that I wasn't all straight. Refreshing, really. This was the year I decided it didn't matter anyway because love is love, between any people, and the sexual nature of that love comes in different degrees. It's not yes-or-no.

The year I began to hate my sisters for real. Or at least become wary of them. I do fear them, I fear and abhor them, but we're still living together and there's little I can do.

It's the year of the A levels, how could I forget. My mind's tried so hard to forget. It's the year I decided I didn't quite care for all that hard work anymore, and that I should learn to be happy again, and that any job requiring of me good grades will probably be one too stressful for my enjoyment. I learnt I loved Biology this year. I wrote my first 21 mark Literature essay this year.

This year is the year of Umbrella Story. Can't doubt it, I wrote 250,000 words of it this year--more than the full length of OTDOTS. OTDOTS took a backseat this year; it's not as easy to know what to do, now I haven't touched MapleStory for two years (speaking of which, it's also the year Wizet ruined MapleStory, the game I once knew). I fell in love with my characters again, and again, just by writing about them. And that--in turn--because it was also the year I read the Leviathan Trilogy, which primed me, which relit that blaze of interest. Which made me want to create and characterise people like that.

I've lost track of the things I want to say. This is the year of all sorts of things--like any other yet not at all.