Year in review, 2025
Here, an obligatory end of year wrap up kinda post that, as I started to write in what I assume is the classical platonic form for all blogs wherein I reflect thoughtfully on stuff I read, or games I played, or projects I twiddled at, and what not, I became overwhelmed by the act of creating a kinda cursory and meandering review, because, what, in this run on sentence, do I have to contribute that I really wanna commit to you, dear reader?
Instead, let’s try the following.
Right now, in 2025, I’ve got an enormous list of books that I’ve read, Spotify provides nearly eugenic stats on my listening habits, Steam will tell me what games I played (or at least left launched), I have a directory of hobby projects that grew over the course of the year, and my mandatory time tracking from work lets me recreate every single work day down to 15 minute intervals…but none of these really reflect how my year was — how it went.
Zooting past the requisite virtue signaling to indicate my constant and painful awareness that the state of the world writ-large is probably best summed up as “not so great” between the rise of fascist nationalism, the world’s continued headlong plunge into “certainly, capitalism is the one and only thing to fix the problems of capitalism,” and all center’s of power continuing to totally disregard the reality that we’re not awaiting climate collapse, but are activity living amidst it…I think I had a good year?
A lot of aspects that contributed to my having a good year were result of my doing uncozy things.
Primary among these uncozy things was coming to terms with the fact that I can’t see for shit, and it is getting worse. Rather than continuing to hide this from friends and coworkers (which mostly meant living my life through a computer and pretending that I could totally make out the poorly organized FigJam board they were screen sharing over a Slack Huddle) this year I finally (a tiny bit) opened up about it and it was totally fine. I obsessed about it previously, convinced that there’d be questions or it’d be weird to navigate stuff like “but you can still drive?” I was scared of it being taken as a costume I was wearing instead of, like…my lived experience.
With that admission made, my phone’s magnifier app and I were able to do a bunch of traveling this year. The whole family went on our first international vacation, I went to a work retreat (kinda mandatory), and I visited a long-time internet friend in person in Minnesota. Despite loathing the physical act of traveling, being in each location was amazing.
…traveling a couple times a year doesn’t solve the whole “living like a hermit” thing, though. So, this year I’ve also started to make more effort to interact with folks outside of required settings, which are work and school pickup. I honestly have done a pretty shit job of this, but I am thinking 2026 will be better for it. I’ve been trying to play with folks online more. Scheduling remains an impenetrably difficult problem of the contemporary human condition.
Another thing aligned with “uncozy” is that I became increasingly frustrated with how uncozy much of the software I’m required to use has become. So, in an effort to return to cozy, this year I developed a handful of applications that are adequately “me shaped” to help seize back some cozy from our cozy-hating computers.
So, what about next year?
Some aspirational goals include…
I wanna make more games, and I wanna push myself to figure out the bits of game development that I’ve shied far away from so far, including narrative, graphics of any real effort, 3d environments, and audio. I also wanna do more collaborative projects, but, again, see the difficulties of scheduling.
I wanna let my note taking system fix me, and totally give in to just using the cheapo journals and bic pens i like rather than pretend that obsidian will ever do anything at all for me.
I wanna keep up what I’ve been doing at the gym by being kind of a chaos goblin but a chaos goblin focused on cultivating more usable strength, stamina, and flexibility — in 2026 I wanna double down on the usable stamina and flexibility especially since right now the strength bit is kinda my easy-mode gym time.
I wanna figure out how to make a good matcha latte (this is a rollover goal from 2025 that I’ve failed to accomplish).
I wanna engage more consciously with stuff. I read a lot, but I mostly read because I love the act of reading. Kinda letting it wash over me. To accomplish this, I like the framing of thinking “with the grain,” and “against the grain.” I know some folks who write responses to everything they read. This seems like a blush to far for me…but who knows!?
Last but not least, I’m really proud of a bunch of the stuff I’ve made this year, including
- bicross RPG, a picross-a-like RPG game with procedurally generated, provably solvable levels
- leibovitz, the 3rd web camera I’ve made. This one combining everything that I’ve learned from the others
- floating clock, a big floating clock for macOS
- notepad, doesn’t have a web presence because it is really just for me, but it is a swiftUI clone of the classic Mac notepad app
- strata, a game of grids and probability that I kinda modeled off of Sol Cesto
I also did a bunch of programming language design adjacent projects which taught me a heap about programming, language design, and what I’m looking for in my own personal toolkit — and, while it isn’t its own language, I’ve extended a little functional programming library that I’ve dragged around for years into a full fledged thing that I’m pretty darn tootin’ pleased with, b.js.
…maybe in 2026 I’ll be better about making week notes weekly. Time will tell!
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