2018

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the year 2018.

Unbelievable! The year flew by and suddenly we are facing the end of 2018. Some might say that a lot has happened, others, like me, are surprised as they were so busy and did not even notice that we completed yet another orbit around the sun.

The word busy pretty much describes my year 2018. My primary goal was to finally finish this PhD thing for once and for all. While this was not in the cards for me this year, I at least managed to pave the way for it. Next year, I will hopefully break the chains of being a PhD student and move on to new challenges in academia.

In this year, I wrote 9 papers of which 5 got accepted. 4 of these papers are already published and the last one will be published May 2019. The other papers are under review and, if all goes well, will be published, soon. The overall workload of this year was even higher as some of the 8 papers had to be submitted twice due to some very bad reviewers.

Reviewers who decide to reject papers without even providing a comprehensive review are one of the major problems in current research. While some scientific quality assurance is needed, the peer review process itself requires a major overhaul to stop bad reviewers. Not only that a bad review might result in the rejection of good work, it also sends a message to the authors who then do not feel welcome by the community.

In respect to gaming, the year 2018 was relatively boring and also affected by my high stresslevel. In spring 2018, I decided to stop playing World of Warcraft after 13 years of playing it. This decision was not easy as many great memories are connected to the game. However, the game also ceased to be fun due to some bad design decisions from the developers. This also resulted in me loosing interest in playing the game after a stressful day at work. It just was not rewarding anymore.

Really fascinating and engaging releases were also rare this year. I think I had the most fun with Astroneer during the first weeks of 2018. For the rest of the year, I went back to older games that provided me with way more fun. For instance, I played RimWorld and Euro Truck Simulator 2 for a very long time and recently re-discovered Factorio.

For the next year, I do not have many concrete plans. Obviously, I finally like to finish the PhD. Based on this year’s stress, it probably will continue to be a tough time until it is finally over. In terms of gaming, I lost track of the upcoming releases and just need to see if something great suddenly pops up. Thus, there is a high potential to be surprised by 2019 as it still hides its events in dense fog.

Goodbye 2018, hello 2019.