What's in store for 2026?
You may notice one of the tags in this post is "fake-resolutions", something I came up with on another blog a long time ago. I don't know why I did that but the name stuck with me all this time and feels extra snarky, so why not? I guess if I were to think about it a little more, it relates to me more now than before because I dislike the idea of making "resolutions", specifically for January 1st, because there's no reason one can't make changes at any time of the year. January 1st is an arbitrary date that make some people feel good, so if that's your bag then that's great! It's not for me.
More of a rant than I expected. Anyway. I'm sitting at my desk, on my last day of work for the week, putting off work on my to-do list. I have quite a bit to do still, I just don't feel like doing it :)
A head's up now - this isn't planned as a structured post, so I won't feel offended if you don't read it. Not like you need my permission or anything.
A tiny look back at 2025:
While 2024 was a year where I did a lot of cool things (launching a couple of websites, learning 11ty), I didn't do as much of that this year. Well, I did put a server together and do some neat self-hosting stuff, but that mostly impacts my own life more than others'.
At one point late in the year I did a 75-day challenge that included daily reading as one of the goals, and boy did that ever jump-start my reading. To date this year I've finished 15 books; of those 12 were read August onward. I have three books on the go right now but I won't be finishing those in 2025.
We made great progress at the gym this year, after finally finding a trainer with whom we mesh well. Looking forward to more sessions (we should be cramming in some twice-weekly sessions for the Winter before we get back into softball).
And I also got back into video games this year. I bought a PS5, mostly so that I could watch 4K movies. The side benefit was that I could also play video games. It started with NHL 25 and MLB The Show 24 but morphed into my favourite game of the year, Star Wars Outlaws.
And now for 2026...
I don't expect a lot to change for everything I mentioned from 2025. I'm going to continue reading at my current pace (or, that is the plan) but I'm not going to set any reading goals. I'm having fun reading again, and even though it might sound like I'm pushing myself to read for the sake of reading, I'm really not - I like what I'm reading. It's purely for enjoyment though, don't ask me to write any book reports.
I realized recently that I let my physical projects slide since getting back into video games so that's something I want to return to. I have a great LEGO set waiting for me (the Tantive IV from Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope), several puzzles, and another diamond art poster thing. These things are generally my Winter projects because I have more time, so that's something I wish to continue.
Another thing I've gotten away from: podcasting. I have a really nice setup in my basement that I barely use. I really want to start releasing some more episodes of...anything. I haven't figured that part out yet.
Music: intentional listening is my goal here. I realized a week or two ago that my Spotify playlist for 2025 is unwieldy long and I'll likely never listen to it again. I'd like to make sure that what I listen to is meaningful in some way, and that I don't just throw stuff onto a playlist because I can. Thankfully I've already kind of started doing this...I purged my "Liked Songs" list this year and have been slowly adding songs back, being as selective as possible.
Writing: This post is a terrible example of the writing I want to do next year. Casual blog posts like this are great and fun, but I also want to write some polished, structured pieces using things I learned from "On Writing Well". Thoughts of starting a single-topic blog somewhere have been rolling around in my head for a few weeks.
Lastly I just wanted to mention that I'm moving my Weeknotes from my personal website back over here. I feel like this is a more relevant space; the original idea of putting them there was so that it might showcase some of the things I've been working on for anyone not already following me in other spaces, but it just felt like a bit of wasted space to me. I'm not moving any older notes from there to here, they'll stay up as archives, but weeknotes will be here as of 01/05/26 (Week 1 starts Monday December 29th).