2026-01-02 12:59:00
The blog that started with this in May 2025 is now in its second year. The big blogging streak (#tbbs) that started on August 11, 2025 (a post every weekday) is also now in its second year. I feel good about those things. I also feel good about my analytics, which tell me that a lot of people read this thing despite the fact that I don't promote it.
I also (still) feel good about writing whatever this blog is here on Bear and not on Substack or whatever. The way that blogging and posting culture became turn-your-posting-into-a-paid-product culture really bugs me. Paid newsletter products deserve to exist but IMO they should be beats —— narrow and niche nerding out and/or drilling down.
As I wrote in October:
The only thing I really want to do as a job is get paid a normal, non-obscene amount of money to write and/or blog and/or make videos about the handful of things I really like and know a lot about.
I think about that post every day. I think about how I can't square the circle every day. But I know I'm right. I know when the idea that can and should grow into an actual productized thing happens I will know it. But this blog about everything blog ain't a product, and it was never meant to be.
==Also also also also:==
✅ Post title format (2025): lowercase month + arabic numeral day + "etc"
✅ Post title format (2026): lowercase month + arabic numeral day + "omg" or "lol" or "wtf" or "xxx" or "fml" or "brb" or or or anything else of that nature (and yes, "etc" will still be in the mix).
I'm starting this year out with "omg" bc I'm on my grind.
==Also also also:==
🎮📺 I miss Nintendo Saturdays. I saw this and immediately thought of all the time I killed playing RC Pro Am, Contra, and Tecmo Bowl. Someone just cued up "Where'd All The Time Go" by Dr. Dog in my brain so I'm gonna do that for a while.
==Also also:==
Something I said during the Masterchef Canada Season 8 finale: "Cattle rancher cook's husband looks like yassified Alex Horne."
The actual episode was good, too, even though I thought one of the cooks kind of got shortchanged and none of them could hold a candle to Beccy Stables.
PS/FYI: This image was glitched with this tool.
==Also:==
The vehicle is ridiculous and the story is kinda fun so I'm linking out to it. Wanna fight about it? Didn't think so.
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch to
🌳 grass bed
🌷 now now
Be good to yourself.
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2026-01-02 07:10:00
An astoundingly shit year. Let's talk about video games.
2025 games I might play one day
Shine Post: Be Your Idol, Blue Prince, Promise Mascot Agency, The Hundred Line: Defence Academy, Silent Hill F (well, watch a playthrough of, anyway), Fantasy Life i, The Great Villainess: Strategy of Lily, No Sleep for Kaname Date, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, Strange Antiquities, Digimon Stories: Time Stranger, Vampire Masquerade: Bloodlines II, Dispatch, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, Despelote, And Roger, Keep Driving, Skin Deep, Seance of Blake Manor, Mars First Logistics, Demonschool, Kirby Air Riders, Angeline Era
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Patrick's 2025 Old Game of the Year: Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown
This is a bit cheat-y because I already knew I loved ACE7, but playing it recently because of the ACE8 trailer reconfirmed: god damn do I like ACE7. It's a perfect mix of whirling through the sky dodging missile fire and lining up shots as a radio drama barks in your ear and the sickest music known to man blares. Impeccable. I might end up working out how to play the rest of the series and see if it's up to task.
Runner-up: Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords
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Best/second-worst gacha of the year: Umamusume: Pretty Derby
I've always liked the sheer ridiculousness of the franchise as an anime, and to see it translated into a pretty interesting roguelike raising sim with fairly excellent localisation was enough to hold me in its grasp for most of September to November. Pity about the godawful drop rates and, you know, the whole gacha thing. Also once you play it a few dozen times you realise it's pretty much dice roll on dice roll on dice roll and the magic breaks.
Worst gacha of the year: Medical disasters
Something with odds of 1 in 2,000 would be classified as an exceptionally rare SSSR item that people would spend hundreds or thousands of dollars trying to pull; our luck that we managed to get an awful, earth-shakingly devastating diagnosis in one go. Fuck you, luck.
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Game that was pretty good but went on too long: Donkey Kong Bananza
Award title says it all. I still enjoyed Bananza a fair amount (though it didn't quite make it to Odyssey levels in terms of 3D platforming), but sometimes games just overstay their welcome.
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Not Quite There Yet Award: Pokemon Z-A
Tale as old as time: new Pokemon game has interesting ideas and overhauls, but can't sustain past a certain point. Z-A has loads of great ideas that feel like they're at iteration one and iteration three will be killer. Having a friend squad and characters that actually turn up constantly throughout the story, the real-time battle system, ambushing people, the verticality of the map design... it all shows promise, even if it ends up being a slog to actually play.
Runner-up: Two Point Museum
I buy one of these Two Point games every few years, fiddle with it for a bit and drop it eventually. This one came closest to drawing my attention longer-term, but still didn't quite have it.
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Game I enjoyed but which disappeared from my mind immediately after finishing: Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
Usually a Yakuza game will have something that really sticks, but Majima's latest adventure - while fairly fun while I was actually playing it - just didn't have enough to hang about. The brawler combat is still crap and while the performances and incidental writing are as good as ever, without a strong sense of seriousness in the story tied to the main character, the goofy hijinks don't have enough definition to contrast against to make much of an impact. It says a lot the most interesting part of the game to me was the post-credits cutscene.
Runner-up: Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition
Playing XBX was sick af but my mind cannot grasp onto it and keep it around, probably because of the game's MMO-esque storytelling style. Also unfortunately, I don't want to listen to most of the soundtrack outside of the game except for Black Tar and the Overdrive song.
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The It's Fine Award: Hades 2
A lot of people were deeply disappointed in Hades 2. I'm not among them, but it does strike me as a very safe, iterative sequel. There's loads more content, a fair amount of changes - not all of them for the best - and so on, but at the end of the day while I liked booting it up and doing a run and getting more story and whatnot I can't say it quite hooked me the same way the original did.
Runner-up: Hollow Knight: Silksong
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Smaller game I played this year: A Dragon's ReQuest
This fun, horny, one-person project - about a bunch of lesbian princesses teaming up to do a Dragon Quest and save the world - is both one of the funniest and one of the most sincere games I've played. I highly recommend it to anyone who read that description and thinks it could be cool. Check it out on itch.io.
Runner-up: The Roottrees are Dead
I was looking for a logic puzzle game and by god I got it. My only issue with the Roottrees (besides the AI art in the jam version, thankfully removed) is that the actual story itself is not particularly enthralling or twisty in the way that, say, an Uchikoshi game would be. But it was still incredibly satisfying to solve its puzzles.
Game of the Year: N/A
To be honest, no game I played this year really captured my imagination and maintained it in the way that I feel is needed to take out the crown. The games that came closest were...
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Runners-up: Death Stranding 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong
I found DS2 to be a ruggedly satisfying experience (combat aside) for about 25 hours and then kind of tiring and empty for the final few hours. Great soundtrack though. On the other hand, once Silksong opens up in terms of tools and options, it really does feel deadly competent - but some aspects, like the RNG quests and the feeling that I might ultimately need to resort to a guide to figure out what the game wanted from me - prevented me from being fired up enough to pursue the whispered-about act 3.
2026-01-02 03:27:00
It's that time of year when the excitement of the holidays is dissipating, the loved ones have departed, the gifts are consumed and the bank account is empty.
Welcome to January.
But I didn't write this post to be sad and depressed, The beginning of the year is also meant to herald positive change.
I'm writing this to remind myself (and anyone reading) that if this is the lowest point of the year, then that must mean things can only get better.
And if 2025 was rubbish, remember that what's behind us does not dictate what lies ahead.
I may not be able to change the world, but to anyone who needs to hear a kind word right now:
Now let's leave 2025 behind and give 2026 a chance to shine.
Happy New Year. ❤️
2026-01-01 12:49:00
[Several things from 2025]
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
I write this from my short term rental, a one bedroom flat in district 2. It is seven minutes past midnight. There are fireworks in the sky of Ho Chi Minh City, 4 different songs in my ears, and smoke in the air. I have written these points while thinking about my life, sitting in cafes in different cities, climates, and over many infectious glasses of Vietnamese iced coffee.
Books read: 32 Pages read: 11k
Movies watched: 75
Days I have eaten eggs: 73
I would like to end here.
Love to Nats, from Nats.
2026-01-01 11:32:00
Heya!
As I mentioned previously, I'm working on a guestbook website :3 Things are coming along pretty great! No guarantees on getting it done this month, but I'm making pretty decent progress! Also, i recently got help from dabi, so things are moving a tad faster now.
Here's what I've got implemented so far:
Making guestbooks will be invite-only so i can ensure that the platform doesn't grow way too big and I'll be able to afford running the thing. I'm also not using any SAAS pay-as-you-go BS for the hosting, so this thing won't be able to accidentally bankrupt me. It's also written in php, using laravel, meaning that the chance of anything vital this depends on getting deprecated is very low.
In the very unlikely case something goes wrong and the site shuts down permanently - exporting all your data is very fast & easy, and you should be doing that regularly no matter what service you use. (As previously mentioned though, I've made sure that the tech here is going to last, and the costs for running this thing on my end will always be a fixed, very low amount of money. There might be some downtime, but i don't see this going down permanently.)
In the future, i might also add a feature that auto exports all your data periodically and sends you an email with the exported files as attachments.
This isn't live yet, and when it does go live I'll probably keep invites exclusively to friends for a week or two to make sure nothing goes wrong. But, when i eventually publish this for real and am ready to send out invites to more people, I'll make a blog post announcing this. Be patient though, I've got a job and also finals are coming up, so things will get very busy for me in the foreseeable future.
Anyways, if you've got any questions, email me. I might do another post going over things in more detail tomorrow and showing off some pictures of the UI.
2026-01-01 04:40:00
I can't stop thinking about one of the lines towards the end of UNBEATABLE. It's a game that hit me like a truck, and happened to be made by a bunch of folks I have gotten to know, and so I felt extremely clocked by this feeling.
"It takes seven years to completely remake a person."
I'm paraphrasing here, and I promise it isn't much of a spoiler until you also finish the game, but it's something that wormed its way into my brain as I started to think about the year ending and a new one beginning.
Seven years is also the period of time that I've been thrust into the spotlight of the gaming world, and figuring out what that means for my life. It was a complete full-body shock that upended me in a lot of ways. For over thirty years prior I was content to sit at the back of the auditorium and be relatively unseen. Despite Celeste and everything that followed being a wonderful success, it also caused a lot of traumas that I realized I carried with me for a really long time. Seven years, in fact.
Sometimes I feel like I exist entirely within a photograph that was taken of me in 2018. There are children out there that discover my music in their favorite comfort game, and draw fan art of a photograph that was taken of me in 2018. I don't have anything to really, like, draw from this observation.
But, as all holidays tend to do, separating myself from the endless onslaught of work gave me a chance to reflect on all the things that had been haunting me at the back of my brain and preventing me from moving on. There's a hesitance, a feeling that you aren't allowed past a threshold that has been drawn for you. I've been changing, all these years, and not allowing myself to really show why or how. The internals are moving around, reintegrating with new systems and ways of interlinking with the senses. I don't know if any of of this makes sense.
It's more of a personal thing, but I did feel like I reached a threshold. Too many things had changed internally without any of it being reflected in the outside world. It needed a place to escape.
I hate the concept of new year resolutions. It's too easy to say things without meaning them. It's too easy to simply rattle out the things you wish you could change about yourself. Something that feels different about closing out 2025 is that I don't need to state anything. I don't need to draw up a list and state my intent, because I've been doing that for seven years, bunched up taut in a sealed door of "I should make this plan." "I should do this." Too few things slipped out under the threshold. So it feels like 2026 is less a year of wants and more a year of doing. Not letting my executive dysfunction control me. Not letting the anxiety prevent me from doing what I am actively feeling in the moment. I'm done with that.
So, yeah. Seeya 2025 Lena. Farewell 2018 Lena. Let's just do shit.
