Happy New Year

1 January 2026

Happy New Year!!!

Yeah, it's the year 2026. We made it! Not bad, not bad. I figure this is a good time to come back to the blog and write something up. I wanna be more consistent with this, it's just hard. The New Year is a good excuse to try to start on some new habits, but we all know that a habit is only as meaningful as your ability to keep it, so we'll see how it goes.

2025 In Review

Man, last year definitely kinda sucked. I finished university, got my degree, but then like.. what happens after that? Nothing really came afterwards. I started working from home, really. I tried setting goals for the future for me, but you know how that goes. You have goals, aims, ambitions, and then when you're finally in the position that you can do something about it, you just can't. For me, I'm not sure what it is. I think it's a mix of fatigue and the void.

The fatigue is easy enough to understand and put into words. College was hard, it was so easy but it was so hard. The last academic year of my time at college, especially, was just purely physically and emotionally draining, for many reasons. The obvious one is, well, the whole school thing. The classes I was taking during my last two semesters were among the most intellectually taxing things I have ever had to do. Extremely low-level computing concepts just don't stick in my head and click in the same way. I guess that's why they put them at the end of the degree path, obviously, but it's not like it makes the courses not difficult.

In addition to my classwork itself, I had like work work. Physical work, especially in and around kitchens, it's just not for me. I tried, I stayed at that old job for three years, but I know I couldn't do it for much longer than I had to. By the time I was graduating, the job I held was with my university's dining services, most of the permanent staff and student employees had cycled through and changed. Workplace culture and morale only ever degraded while I was there. I came out of that job with a long-term friend, but he got fired (and no one even told him, they just removed him from the work group chat one day and never gave him another shift) so now he's working twice as much somewhere else, and we never see each other. Another close friend moved hours away, and I'm still an hour away from my main circle of friends from my hometown. When a major part of my hobbies always included physical tabletop gaming, suddenly not having my gang to do that stuff with weighs heavy on me. Well, that and some long-lasting mental gunk surrounding tabletop games thanks to some stuff that happened last December with someone who was a friend at the time. That entire extended interaction probably put my social battery in the negative for the entire year of 2025, possibly even more.

The void, on the other hand... I don't think it makes things bad by itself, but it definitely makes anything negative-feeling going on a lot, lot worse. When I'm talking about the void, I'm sure you've felt it at some point. When you finish a big thing that you've been dumping your time, energy, and passion into, you finally cross that finish like, it feels great! But what comes after that? You finished your big goal, you're done. What now? It's that, that I've been dealing with. College is over, what now?

I've broken the curse on a couple things, this year, at least. I finally found myself in the right headspace to beat and finish games and books again, it's been a while since I've been able to consistently do that. Metaphor: ReFantazio was delightful. I've been making slow, but steady, progress through the Wheel of Time series. It's not been all doom and gloom, but it's not been the easiest. I don't find it healthy to think in superlative terms when it comes to self reflection. I don't like thinking about "best"s and "worst"s of my own lived experience, I feel like a lot of nuance is lost with saying that. While it may easily convey 80% of my feelings to say "2025 was the worst year I've had in a while" or something like that, it's better to take the long route and get something that feels more accurate, even if it is less concise.

Well, What About '26?

I don't know what to say about it quite yet, we'll have to see how it unfolds. I intend to keep up with the remote work I've been doing, until I can find something more stable. Student Loan repayment starts this year, which is a bummer. It's not like I can't make enough money to keep up with it, it's just never fun to have another deadline every month to worry about.

I have that tower defense game I was starting to work on, but the more I make progress on it, the more I feel like I'm not in the right space to be working on a big project right now. I need to start with some smaller projects first, I'm not sure. I want to write more, I want to be more consistent about updating things here. I want to write more fiction, also, but getting back into the swing of that has been hard. I like the blog as a way to experiment with words, writing these personal essays and blog posts, and I really want to do more with my words moving forwards.

I'm taking a break from Final Fantasy XIV, or at least I aim to. Been getting back into World of Warcraft, currently hitting up the tail end of Legion Remix before getting into the TWW and Pre-Midnight grind. I started paying for a Minecraft server again, a world I hope to make into something more permanent than Minecraft worlds have been for me in the past. I plan to show off what's there so far sometime soon.

I'd love to do more, especially more creative, but that comes down to getting the gunk out of my head and actually recovering from my university experience, which still hasn't happened yet. We'll just have to see how things go! I re-created my games spreadsheet and my books and comics spreadsheet, also. I feel like the old format for the list wasn't the best for me. I just want to start a new list, starting from (more or less) now, and we'll see how it develops over time. No back-filling, just 2026 and onward.

I guess I'll finish the blogpost by sharing a video from last New Year's. My friend had finished FFXIV Endwalker while on a Discord call with us, and she actually captured the footage of it. I figured a throwback to the beginning of the year would be a fun way to send it off. Thank you for reading, I hope to write again soon.

Spoilers for Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker Below. Final Trial and Ending!!!