40 for 40 in 2025

Happy New Year Folks!

Most of you probably know that 2025 is the year that I will turn 40 years old, and while some people have been asking me how I want to mark the occasion – a question that I am almost completely unable to answer, I don’t really do birthday parties anymore – there are some things I would like to achieve for myself based on the milestone age. 40 achievements for 40 years, within certain aspects of my life. 40 for 40, so to speak. I’ve started many of these already, as they are ongoing projects, and they are things I’m interested in doing so it’s not like I feel I have to wait until new year to make a start. I’ll be updating these on roughly a weekly basis as we’re going along, but I’ll describe them in some detail now, so you know what I’m aiming for:

Lose 40lbs.

Yeah, we know. Chance would be a fine thing. But here’s the thing: Most people who know me know that I haven’t been going in the right direction physically for years now; roughly half of my lifetime if I’m being honest with myself. Damage like that doesn’t get fixed overnight, but it does need to get fixed; my doctor warned me a couple of years ago that I need to lose weight and, while I’ve kept it around where it was, I’ve not lost any substantial amount of weight, nor keep off the weight that I lost.

Here's where I want to change it: I want to make a few small changes in my lifestyle that will mean I can drop some weight at a slow but safe rate – no point losing 40lbs in a month, as some Facebook adverts have been cheering about, if I go ahead and put it on again the week after. I’m starting off at 18st 5lbs, so if I lose all the weight I’m hoping to lose by the end of the year, I’ll be 15st 7lbs. Will I manage it? Maybe I will, maybe I won’t, but any progress on this at all would be a step in the right direction.

Play 40 Board Games.

I have a stack of board games in my spare room that, yes, do get played, but not often enough. Over the next year I would like to play at least 40 different board games with friends, family, and people who I meet out and about in gaming shops and conventions. It doesn’t matter what the game is – board games, card games, table-top roleplaying games or war games – or even whether I own the game in question. But I’m only allowed to count each game once.

Can I do it? Quite possibly, yes. This year, I managed 42 different board games, and I didn’t even count my Dungeons and Dragons campaign that wrapped up in May, or the two games of Warhammer 40K I managed to play. It will depend a lot on the UK Games Expo, where I try lots of different games. Either way, it will be a laugh finding out how many different games I’ll get to play.

Do 40 Gigs.

I’ve not been hugely active on the music scene over the last few years, mainly due to work and childcare commitments, but it would be great to get back out and do some more shows. I’m thinking small, here – most of the ones I sort out for myself will be some sort of open mic, as none of the bands I’m currently in are particularly busy or even active. But I’ve got a gig at a local residential care home that I’m hoping to take into the mid-long term, I’ll hopefully manage a few shows with Sam Draisey and the Revolt, The Fakes if we can manage it, and all the shows that I do for work - there's usually around seven or eight of these per year.

Is this achievable? Well, if I keep an eye on what open mics are around, and when, I reckon it is, but I’ll need to be on it for the year to get up to 40. As other commitments get in the way of me being able to go out and do a gig or open mic whenever I feel like it, some forward planning may be needed here!

Beat 40 Video Games.

I like video games. I’ve always liked video games, and always will. I’ve got a huge backlog of games I need to play through and hopefully beat, but doing this will be a challenge for me – I average out at about 12 a year, so I’m going to need to put some effort in to beat more than that!

For this reason, I think I’m going to be getting a lot more use out of my Switch this year. I’ve been playing a lot of games on Nintendo Switch Online that were originally released for the NES, SNES and Gameboy, and while those games are usually quite hard, they are also often quite a bit shorter than their contemporary counterparts. So, I imagine I will beat some of those, which will make up some of the numbers to offset the long-form Role-Playing Games and Strategy games that I play for most of the rest of the time. Also, I’m going to allow myself some free passes here: I don’t have to play the game from the start, and I’m allowed to come back to old save files. Also, I am allowed to play through games that I’ve beaten before, because in most cases, I beat them years ago, and if they’re enjoyable enough to come back to, then they’re worth my time to attempt to beat again. This is my insurance against the fact that I’m almost certainly going to want to play XCOM: Enemy Unknown again at some point.

Will I beat them all? Er… well, we’ll see. Let’s hope so.

Paint 40 Models

This is probably going to be the easiest target to achieve, because I tend to paint in batches of five or ten models at a time. I’m also allowed to come back to ongoing projects – the aim is to get them done, after all. I’ll probably paint 40 models and then some, so this is a challenge I’ll likely put to bed quite quickly.

Can I paint 40 models? Almost certainly.

There are some other things I want to achieve for the year:

I’d love to get a band going that writes and performs original material. Since I first picked up the bass guitar, my aim was to be in a band where I’d made some significant contribution to the music that the band is making, and while I’m long past the point of being able to make any substantial amount of money doing this, I might try doing it for fun – certainly, at this point in my life, it would be a massive achievement!

Also, I’d like to do another Dungeons and Dragons game. This year saw the end of my Tomb of Annihilation campaign, and while the ending was somewhat bittersweet (two of the players dropped it for life-getting-in-the-way reasons,) I have missed running the game since then. It would even be nice to play every now and then!

Unfortunately, there are barriers getting in the way of both of those things, mostly stemming from the fact that they rely on other people to make it happen, and most of my contemporaries live very busy lives. Asking people to drop everything at a certain point every week for what is essentially someone’s hobby is a fairly big ask, and experience has taught me that it isn’t something I can necessarily rely upon, nor should I expect to be able to. That is why I’ve stuck to challenges for the year that I can accomplish by myself.

I’ll keep everyone updated with my progress on my social media sites, Facebook and X (formerly Twitter.) Not YouTube, though. I may upload some videos if I feel like it but doing that in any kind of structured format is something that I’m going to need a lot more time to do than I really have! Hopefully, by the end of the year, I’ll have achieved some – if not all – of my goals. If not, well, hopefully I’ll have had some new experiences and achieved some things along the way.