2026-01-10 08:00:00
Everyone wrote one of these and I wanted to too. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my incomplete projects, and then recently about my unproductive but joyful holiday break. And currently, I’m busy procrastinating on my media recap, which feels bad, and has felt bad for the past few weeks while it’s loomed over me.
I was scrolling through my sketchbook gallery and thinking—hm! I did draw quite a bit last year! So maybe I should record all the things I did accomplish, creatively speaking. (I already wrote about this briefly on Mastodon; here is the non-abridged version.)
I redesigned my website, and restructured it under the hood. I still need to write an updated Eleventy setup post about it, but I’m most pleased with how I fixed up my templates so that it’s easier for me to maintain all my custom pages now.
I’m still happy with how Version 7 is looking—love some pink, pointy letters, and Tiempos Text, especially how it renders nicely on MacOS. There is of course the usual laundry list of improvements I would like to make—dark mode! better mobile styling! sensible collections filtering!—but that can come later.
I updated my homepage to what I call “tiles.” It’s simple in concept and execution and I like it!
I had been tired of my previous homepage (“halloween”) for a while, but didn’t know how to update it. I’ve had comic homepages for the last couple of years now, and I wanted to continue that and was half-heartedly writing some scripts, but it was all very fuzzy.
At some point I started doodling little icons in my sketchbook, and then realized putting it into a bunch of orderly tiles would be easy to do.
I think I threw it all together on a weekend. Simple drawings, simple CSS grid layout. The most complex bits may have been the little animated details, which weren’t really complicated at all.
I’m ultimately happy with it, and think it feels very me. I’m especially pleased that I finally was able to incorporate the dynamic media—the “last watched” VHS tape shows the newest entry in my watchlist; the “on repeat” vinyl shows my latest favourite song. And I’ve been wanting to do this kind of dynamic media on physical object kind of art for a long time. It sort of exists on my listening room page, but I think there’s a lot more room to take it further, artistically speaking. Contorting an image is easy with modern CSS; I need to draw an amazing frame for it. All of my latest watched movies should be VHS tapes, actually.
I designed two bespoke weeknotes posts this year, which is fewer than 2024, but I had also stopped writing weeknotes halfway through the year, so it’s not too surprising.
The colour palette of Weeknotes 30 formed the foundation for my redesign. I found that I liked the soft pink background and blurple text, and ended up redesigning my whole site to use it. That’s the nice thing about experimenting with smaller pages. If you try something and really like it, you can reapply it on a larger scale.
I was interviewed on Foofaraw and People & Blogs. This was exciting because I’ve never been interviewed before!
I did 19/30 paintings for Plein Airpril. I missed a chunk of days because I was on vacation (New Yawk Citayyyy babyyy) and then important life stuff; otherwise I committed time every day to painting. I’m proud of myself for the consistency! Some days were worse than others, and there are a couple I’m embarrassed about, but I shared them all anyway.
Speaking of New York City, I visited twice this year (exciting!) and sat in a few museums to draw. Reviewing them all now, I can see how my observational skills have improved since 2023, which is really cool.
I’ve compiled them in my sketchbook. I don’t have plans to visit NYC again anytime soon, but I hope to find more opportunities to draw my surroundings this year.
For my second art challenge of the year, I did Cringetober, and succeeded in drawing for 29/31 days! I have tried October drawing challenges before; my previous record may have been four or five days of Inktober, years ago. This year, while many days were still minimal effort days, I was consistent.
I’ve been doing Hourly Comic Day on February 1 every year for at least ten years, and 2025 may have been my most polished year yet. I’m proud of myself! This year’s is coming up in a few weeks and I’m looking forward to it. It falls on a Sunday, which means I can be leisurely about it.
I finished a sketchbook! I started it in February 2025 and it reached its last legs in December. I drew a few nice things, all inked and shaded properly; I drew a bunch of fanart; there’s a lot of cringetober stuff; I did my museum drawings in here. There is, of course, still less good stuff, but I think it’s proportionally less.
Something different this year that I had a lot more drawing than design work. My previous sketchbook was filled with website sketches and the like. I think one of the reasons is that this sketchbook had thicker paper meant to be used for artwork, while my previous sketchbook had thin paper that saw lots of ink ghosting and was thus much less suited for drawing. The presence of suitable paper probably spurred me to draw more.
Another cool thing is that I think my general baseline quality of drawing is improving. I know beautiful, polished sketchbooks are popular to show off online, but that is absolutely not the case for me. Polished works are the exception. But with that said, I realized that I’m mostly happy with it, rough edges and all. A friend asked if they could flip through it, and I think I would have been too embarrassed to share previous sketchbooks, but this one could withstand a flipthrough.
(I am actually toying with the idea of recording a flipthrough—me! a notorious video hater! making a video!? blasphemy—because I like seeing people’s sketchbooks, especially if they’re imperfect. But first I would need some kind of phone mount, lmao. The logistical hurdles are too high, so I have not yet done it.)
My 2024 media recap was published on January 2, 2025, so I supposed it would still fit here. This remains my highest-effort blog post to date.
A year later, I can see all the flaws in it, but it’s still something I’m proud of. I worked hard on the art and design. I tried to be sincere in my reviews. I remember finishing it overnight in a strange, intense nine-hour sprint, went to bed around 8am, and woke up a couple of hours later for my first day back at work after the holidays. Not a great day, physically, but I felt quite fulfilled.
And then the day after, I started working on my site redesign. I think the creative energy from that project kept me moving forward.
I have mentioned repeatedly how I’m working on my 2025 recap, which I had hoped would be beautiful and amazing and completed by now. But it’s not! Not even close. Last year I had a much clearer vision, probably because I didn’t have big expectations for myself. This year I’m like, I need it to be EVEN BETTER!!! which is kind of unhelpful to think at this point in time. I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s a struggle, but I’m chipping away at it slowly.
I hope to continue to create things in 2026, try new things, experiment, make something weird, make something good, make something bad, make something no one but me likes, try really hard at something, and so on and so forth.
2026-01-08 08:00:00
I’m trying to read more this year. Have I said that before? Let’s pretend this isn’t a goal I’ve had every year for the past ten years, mostly to sad results.
Some good things:
I’m not one for reading poetry (maybe one day in the future), but here is one:
Good Bones
By Maggie SmithLife is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
2026-01-03 08:00:00
“Unproductive” in this context refers to my many creative projects I wanted to tackle over the holidays. Instead of working on them, I spent a lot of time hanging out with people. As someone who is unpleasantly introverted, I usually do not like hanging out with people that often. I would rather be at home! But it was good, and I was happy, and there is time in January to do what I wanted to do.
Unsexy Emoji (0) to Sexy Emoji (100), where would you put the luggage emoji? My answer: 40.I’m thinking maybe I should lower/shift my ambitions for my planned blog posts. At some point it becomes more of a hindrance, expecting myself to do something high-effort in a certain way while I can feel my interests shifting. There are many paths to creative fulfillment!
Anyway, I return to work in a couple of days, which is dreadful, but that’s how it goes. I hope I can finish up my blog post drafts this month :-)
2025-12-27 08:00:00
I start so many things and then talk about them and then don’t finish them. I thought it might be fun to compile them all here so that they’re not lost to the sands of time.
In February (February! geez) I had the idea to write a recap framed by the fashion of xyz, which I excitedly posted about and then never touched again. I still like the idea and hope to return to it some day!
In August, I thought about doing a low-effort (writing-wise) weeknotes layout structured like a calendar. Retro.app is structured like this and I think it’s really effective for showing a weekly overview.
I did something similar in October 2024 for Weird Web October’s day #4 prompt “Lists.” (Wow, it took me a moment to find this page because it’s utterly unfindable, lol. Also my WWO archive somehow still uses my old site version 6 layout. Perhaps I’ll leave it like that as a little snapshot, haha.)
Back in February I started Yuhki Demers’ visdev cityscapes class and made barely any progress. Embarrassing! I want to finish it this year (preferably, in the next couple of months).
This is from 2024, but I actually wrote what would have been “Weeknotes 20” as a tiny zine, photographed it, put it into a blog post, and decided it wasn’t good enough to post.
Well, I’m dropping it here now. A fun detail I can pick out is that this must have been shortly after I acquired my f/1.4 camera lens, haha.
(here is what weeknotes 20 actually turned out to be)
I got back into Stardew Valley in the summer/fall, and was motivated enough to start writing a farm tour post. Then I went on vacation, and then Hades II came out, and I forgot about it. Perhaps I can still pull something together though, even if it’s more screenshots than writing as I initially planned.
Some screenshots, originally posted to Mastodon in September:
This is published, but pretty much a work-in-progress still. I hope to fill it out more this year.
Since my 2024 post about my Eleventy setup, I’ve redesigned my site and restructured my templates. I’ve started working on an updated post, but this languished and was forgotten. I want to finish it sometime in the next couple of months!
I briefly tried creating a font out of my own handwriting, which was fun! I want to spend more time on that next year, which will take some work since I think I’ll need to learn how to use more complex software to do the ligatures and things that I want.
I try not to complain too much on social media because I know that it’s mostly just unproductive. There are more worthwhile things to spend my energy doing. But of course, sometimes the compulsion to write something mean is too strong to resist—especially when I’ve repeatedly encountered something frustrating. Perhaps I’ll compile these every year and it will form some kind of interesting anthropological look for future readers (me) at the modern issues that plague us (me).
Anyway, here are my drafts, which is complaining and a bit of shitposting.
I wrote these in a big text file.
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2025-12-13 08:00:00
and other things I’m thinking about
It’s nice to return to this format after a while. I don’t feel the need to adhere to my previous structure. I sat down and wrote this in less than an hour, which is very freeing.
2025-11-02 08:00:00
