Welcome to my first monthly update for 2024. January 2024 can be summed up as stormy, and I wish I could say I was just talking about the weather!

I don’t think many people have a good January. It’s a month filled with expectations, especially of new starts and resolutions. When you’re chronically ill and life doesn’t change from one day to the other, the start of the year is just a reminder of how stagnant it is. Last year, I attempted some goals for the year, and I’m pretty sure I did hardly any of them. This year, I’m firmly back into “just do my best and enjoy life” territory.

Doing my best was definitely the theme of January 2024 as I attempted to get back into a schedule at the start of the year, and then try to get back to my weekly therapy meetings when they started up again in the second week. I managed to attend one towards the end but missed the rest due to a combination of health and bad weather. The bad weather, of course, didn’t help with my health. The weather pressure has been all over the place, as have the temperatures and the noise from the high winds.

I was excited and terrified to finally get another chance to do Tai Chi, through the same organisation I go to for therapy. I’ve been on the list for over a year, waited for an afternoon class, and then one that I was able to attend. The terror comes from attending something new, the anxiety of going to a new place and taking up a place on a course as a disabled person who would undoubtedly miss some classes. I’ve been kicked off more than one course in the past for missed attendance, you see.

And of course, I’ve missed the first two classes. The first one was due to being unwell, some sort of lergy that we had both picked up from somewhere and even if I had felt well I wouldn’t have attended in case I passed it on. Plus, we were instructed not to attend if unwell. All this meant I could justify that absence.

The second time, I made it to the class, but I was late. I was already running late when we hit a nasty set of roadworks that made me even later, and I arrived ten minutes late to find the doors of the sports centre locked. While I should have been on time, I’m a little irked that this wasn’t mentioned at all. I didn’t wait around, and thankfully Chris saw me struggling to open the door when he drove off, otherwise, I’d have been stuck. So next week we’ll be leaving extra early.

Towards the end of the month, I had a weird and, quite frankly, concerning interaction on Twitter. I posted a comparison of two crime TV shows. I made a very silly mistake in my post which normally would have gone completely under the radar, especially now with the way the algorithms are. However, my post caught the Executive Producer for one of the shows, and she decided to retweet it, correcting me to “clarify things for fans”. Maybe they meant it sincerely, however, they were extremely naive if they didn’t think such a post would do anything other than rile up their followers.

Within minutes, I was being retweeted with flames, being mocked for a mistake. It was extremely humiliating, but I’m proud of the fact that I managed to calm myself down fairly quickly by putting things in perspective. Rather than being humiliated, I was frustrated. As someone who has eight chronic health conditions, I have a lot more important things to worry about than whether I get a detail about a TV show correct! I wanted to yell this back to the few replies I did see, but knew it was pointless.

I had seen someone else make a mistake and be treated similarly just days before. It is terrible how quickly people turn on others when they make a mistake, and it’s not just random strangers. Sometimes it can be people in the same community, and I’ve always found it so hypercritical because anyone can make a mistake.

In this case, I caught the retweet within minutes of it being shared, so unless someone screenshotted it, I’m pretty sure it fizzled out quickly. For a few brief minutes, I was an emotional punchbag so that people could feel better about themselves.

My regular readers will notice a change to my monthly update posts, namely this section formerly titled “writing” is now “blogging”. As Just Geeking By has evolved to become more focused on books, I’m writing fewer non-review posts each month, and so the writing section was being deleted each month.

The title change also provides me with a place to talk about behind-the-scenes updates that I’ve started working on this month. The first update is changing my book review genres to make them more useful and more readable. I noticed that some of my genres, especially “magic” and “fantasy” had grown to be huge and indecipherable.

I decided it was time to start adding sub-genres, and went a step further to add additional categories that might not necessarily be considered genres but help readers find books easier. I’ve started applying them to new reviews, but it will take time to add them to older reviews, so it will take a while before the changes are complete.

In January 2024 I also launched a list of Disabled and Neurodivergent Books and Comics released in 2024. This is my second year compiling a list of books and comics by disabled and neurodivergent authors and/or containing disabled and/or neurodivergent representation. Last year, I wasn’t able to complete the second part of my plan, which was to share these new releases monthly. I’ve already shared January’s 2024 Disabled and Neurodivergent releases and will be sharing February’s shortly.

After pottering around in Final Fantasy XIV for months, I started playing it with more gusto. My anxiety was preventing me from moving forward with a lot of things, as I was worrying about doing dungeons and raids with other people again. I’ve had two out of three of Endwalker’s beast tribe reputations complete for a long time and to unlock the final one, the Omnicrons, I needed to complete a dungeon to progress the quest line. I finally found the confidence to just do it, reading up on the fights beforehand, and it went absolutely fine.

I’ve been doing the Omnicron quests daily and as I’ve started levelling characters again I’ve been using other reputation quests again as part of that.

As of the end of January 2024, here are my current job levels:

I met two big goals for my Island Sanctuary this month. I finally bought all the items I wanted with the main currency and caught the remaining rare creature. Please meet the Adamantoise who had very irritating spawn times, at least for me in the UK!:

At least it was easy-peasy to catch him thanks to the super auto-catch traps! There is still a mount to get, which will take a lot longer to get. I have to complete certain work orders to obtain tokens for the mount.

I’m working on levelling up my Summoner next, then probably my Dragoon and Dancer. There’s an event on at the moment that gives players an easy chance to buy mounts, pets and other items by completing dungeons and raids. These events are a great way to get hard-to-get items (from hard content or involving lots of grinding) and doing daily roulettes is the best way to level characters, so it’s great timing.

It was TV shows all the way for January 2024. Let’s start with the TV shows and seasons I finished:

• Major Crimes – all seasons
• FBI – Season 5
• FBI: International – Season 2
• FBI: Most Wanted – Season 4
• So Help Me Todd – Season 1 – I loved this show! It was so funny and original, with great actors who delved into some serious topics of family dysfunction.

I was surprised at how many crime shows had Christmas specials in 2023, many of which I had no idea about. I had a great time catching up with the ones for Vera, Death in Paradise and Beyond Paradise.

I also finally watched the Doctor Who Christmas Special: The Church on Ruby Road and enjoyed it immensely. By the time I watched it, I had managed to forget most of the spoilers I’d seen and the one I did recall wasn’t that big. I can’t wait until the new season!

The new TV shows I started this month were:

• From Darkness – Mini series – This was advertised as a new show on a channel but I didn’t realise it wasn’t a new show. By the time I did, I was halfway through, and even though it wasn’t very good I stuck with it as I didn’t feel too good and couldn’t be bothered finding an alternative. I’d advise skipping it.
• SurrealEstate – Seasons 1 & 2 – This has been on my watch list for a while and it was great! It’s a show about a real estate company that specialises in haunted properties. It’s such a shame that it was cancelled after two seasons.
• True Detective – Seasons 1-3 – There are quite a few “popular” crime shows that I’ve avoided as they seem too dark or not my thing. The problem is I’m running out of shows to watch and as a result, I’ve started to try some of them. After all, if I don’t like them I just stop watching. It’s not like I have to completely commit. True Detective is very dark but watchable for me and I binged the first three seasons.
• Father Brown – Seasons 1-9 – Another show I wasn’t sure about, I decided to give Father Brown a try and loved it. Mark Williams, who many know from a certain fandom, was (and still is) a well-established British actor before starring in that. He is a delight in the titular role with the fabulous Sorcha Cusak and other actors, most of whom were not familiar to me until I watched the show. One thing I particularly loved about this show is that even when the main cast changes the actors pop back at various and random times, and not just for Christmas and New Year specials!

Returning TV shows with new seasons that I started in January 2023 are:

• Magnum P.I. – Season 5B
• Silent Witness – Season 27
• Vera – Season 13
• Murdoch Mysteries – Season 17
• True Detective – Season 4

I read the following books in January 2024:

• That Self-Same Metal (Forge & Fracture Saga #1) by Brittany N Williams
• So Let Them Burn (Divine Traitors #1) by Kamilah Cole
• To Cage a God (These Monstrous Gods #1) by Elizabeth May
• The Graveyard Watch by R.J. Eason (Did not finish)
• Relight My Fire (Stranger Times #4) by C.K. McDonnell
• The Cursed Rose (The Bone Spindle #3) by Leslie Vedder

I’ve been catching up on DC Comics in between books as I’m over a year behind, and this month I read these comics:

• Batman vs. Robin
• Wonder Woman, Vol. 3: The Villainy of Our Fears
• Lazarus Planet
• DC Power: A Celebration #1
• The Flash, Vol. 18: The Search for Barry Allen
• Wonder Woman, Vol. 4: Revenge of the Gods
• The Flash, Vol. 19: One-Minute War
• The Flash, Vol. 20: Time Heist

This month’s book reviews were:

[rcno-book-listing ids=”32809, 24816, 32807, 32789, 33402, 33500, 31136″ wc=250 readmore=”Read my review”]

Using money I got for Christmas I was able to get new desk storage which enabled me to move stationery from my bookshelves, freeing up much needed space for books and letting me organise my stationery properly.

I now have two more sets of desk drawers:

Spread across these three storage boxes are all my stationery supplies, all nicely organised! It was so cathartic organising everything into individual drawers. I would love to have pen pots for my pens rather than wasting drawer space for them but Milo is such a pest for knocking things off my desk that it would be a disaster waiting to happen. I hope to do a virtual tour of them to show what I’ve done in more detail, but that might take me a while to get to.

Thanks for reading my January 2024 monthly update!

How was your January?

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