2015: You were okay. 2016: More fun. Less nonsense.

I write a (very irregular) newsletter for my mom. I also let anybody else who wants to subscribe do so. This was the newsletter I wrote for her about my year. I figured it might be interesting to those who don’t subscribe, too. So here it is.

Hi mom,

and everybody else. Welcome to the special holiday year-end recap edition of this newsletter! Can you believe that 2015 is almost over? No time to lose! Let’s dive into this recap shall we?

This Year, in Rose World

This year had a lot of ups and downs for me. I won’t go into them, because it’s boring and nobody likes a whiner, but I’m hoping 2016 is better. Despite these annoying blips, I did produce a lot of work this year that I’m really proud of.

I wrote about why the autism spectrum is such a slippery thing to define, and why that matters.

I tried to inject some healthy skepticism into the hype around 3-D printed hands. Bonus: the kid in this story’s dad recently got in touch with me. He wants to give his son a big blown up copy of this story for Christmas. That melted my grinch heart a bit.

I published my first long profile, of a guy who hated all the prosthetic knees he tried and decided to build his own.

I admitted my love for Sydney Leroux’s eyelashes, and used them as an excuse to write about the d double standards female athletes face.

I started writing more about my thoughts on the tech world, and its flaws. Things like treating the body like a machine, and why exoskeletons might be technologically sexy, but have a darker narrative to them too.

I covered the lack of women in popular futurism, and why that makes our imagined futures really monolithic and not all that interesting.

I wrote about why sports bras suck.

I indulged my weirdo side by trying to figure out how many photographs of me exist in the world.

And I joined the incredible journalists at the group blog The Last Word on Nothing, where they’ve encouraged that weirdo side.

But perhaps what I’m most proud of from 2015 is my podcast, Meanwhile in the Future. Each week I took on a possible future — from the completely absurd to the terrifyingly likely, each episode takes on a specific future scenario and tries to really think through how, why, when and if it could ever happen.

Every episode starts with a little radio drama, a trip to the future we’re looking at. These range from future commercials, documentaries from the future, scenes from labs, conversations between space pirates, voicemails and more. (Many of these voices are actually recorded by fans who volunteer to act out parts each week, and one week you get to hear my mom). Then we talk to experts about how that future might really go down. Those experts include historians, engineers, scientists, futurists, anthropologists, science fiction authors and more.

In the first season, we tackled everything from artificial wombs, to drones, to robot UN secretaries banning weapons, to an evil mega company building so many wind turbines that they actually alter the climate, to the discovery of an alien probe that is almost exactly like the Voyager probe humans sent out in the 1970’s. Our scariest episode is the one where we talk about antibiotics, and what happens when they stop working. Our most popular episode is about all the reasons that we might, collectively, as humans, abandon the internet. (You can see all the episodes in their fictional future timeline here, or you can subscribe on Soundcloud or iTunes or any other RSS reading app.)

The show is really fun to make, and I’ve been so pleased to hear from fans that they like it too. Wait, let’s try that again. People like my show. A lot of people! I have actual fans, who email me and send me messages about their thoughts on the futures I take on, and with tons of ideas for future episodes. Teachers have told me they use the show in their classes. A dad emailed me to tell me that he listens to the show with his nine year old son, and sent me his kid’s ideas for season two. Since the first season ended I’ve gotten tons of emails asking when the second season is going to start. And that is incredibly rewarding, considering that I make the show alone, recording my voiceovers sitting on the floor of my closet.

The show is on a break right now while I figure out the logistics for the second season, but you’ll hear new episodes soon! And that’s one thing I’m really excited about for 2016.

2015 may not have been my best year, but some great things happened this year too. I made a lot of new friends that are really dear to me (shoutout to my snails) and I got a dog who snuggles me all night long. She loves squirrels and other dogs, and hates the shady “ice store” a few blocks away from our apartment that is clearly a front for something. I got a book agent. I went hiking and saw several of my friends get married to the people they love. I biked a lot of miles, I assembled a lot of furniture, I made a lot of kimchi and I played a lot of soccer.

And that’s what I’m going to commit 2016 to. Playing. Doing things that I like and things that excite me. I’m going to get back into the weird crafts and paper automata I used to make, and I’m going to teach my dog how to pull a bike. And I’m not going to care what The Internet thinks about any of it.

2016: More fun. Less nonsense.

I have a question about: Why can’t urban engineers make a super strong durable road surface?

Best Vine of 2015: These foxes laughing at each other. Kirstin Butler captioned this “Me and @roseveleth laughing on her bday because men” and that is very accurate.

YouTube hole I most recently fell down: Choreography videos.

Weirdest thing I googled this week: “jane goodall autobiography watching chick hatch” and “gimlet media office silence of the lambs.”

What my mom said about the last newsletter: n/a Mom I need your thoughts on this newsletter thanks.

See you next year, friends!

~(˘▾˘)~ Rose ~(˘▾˘)~