HAPPY NEW YEAR! I am so glad to be done with 2025, yuck. Super turbulant, stressful year for me. But I did make a lot of cool additions to the website and I made some necessary life changes, so it’s not all bad. I’ve got a new job, and I’m happier with it. I’ve gotten some healthier habits, got some stuff off my chest, and we even grew a vegetable garden. It’s hard to call this a bad year at all, just a difficult one...

At the start of each year, I write up a post with goals for the coming year, and I like to see how many of the previous year’s goals I met. So, let’s do that now!

“I love hosting games on my website!!! To this end, I want to learn a good free engine for making simple web-games. I want to make memory match, breakout, etc. style minigames in particular, which shouldn't be too difficult. I’ve been sniffing at GDevelop. But we'll see.”

Done! I’ve started using Construct 2 and I’ve been really enjoying it so far. It’s perfect for making simple games to put on the site. You can see it in use in the new minigames on Clovenglade. This was my biggest goal since it’s always been a huge part of my “vision” for the site to have games and stuff like that. I am super pleased to have found a tool I like.

“I’d really love to redo the CSS on my OOE shrine so it doesn't use a clunky looking template. Nothing can replace just doing the CSS yourself, and I wish I had actually attempted to at the time! It's just hard to find motivation for this kind of thing.”

Done! It was a pretty simple fix and I’m happy with the result.

“I’ve got plans for a shrine that, if all goes well, should randomize some text on the page-load to give the illusion of the webpage being “alive” and “talking to you” (if you're at all familiar with my tastes in online horror webseries you can probably guess what this shrine will be for.) The concept is that it's an in-universe website for an in-universe media property. I dunno when I’ll get around to this but I think the concept is pretty solid!”

That would be my Angel Hare shrine from late January, which turned out great. If you don’t know what Angel Hare is, it’s an analogue horror/mystery animated cartoon series on Youtube where guardian angels speak to children through the television, so the goal of that shrine was to kind of simulate that, like the angels were speaking to you through the website as well. It was a lot of fun to make and there are a ton of text variations implemented. I’d call this one a success.

“I want to get back into writing music... I wrote a lot of shitty vocaloid music as a teenager but now I want to try actually cooking lol”

Working on it! Kind of. I’m learning bass guitar slowly but surely. I hope to have something out by the end of 2026 maybe but we’ll see.

“I believe I mentioned before my idea to make an interactive pet code snippet that accommodates for any image resolution and can be hosted 100% locally, called LocalPet and based on the code for the Clovenglade stable. That's still on the table as a future plan.”

The future is now- LocalPet can be found via the menagerie directory. It’s a little clunky to set it up but I am pleased with the results, as you can probably tell considering I used it on almost all my virtual pets.

I didn’t write a ton of goals last year. But I did accomplish a lot. I added a new expansion to Clovenglade and the next one is nearly finished. I made another shrine (my Undertale essay) and I made a new Adventure Game Studio game (Werewoods) with some new experiments in using items and boolean logic and having an effect on the game world, and fun stuff, like character customization and a following companion character. I plan to use this experience to its fullest when I do my expansion to Clovenglade’s Go Riding game. And I made the Picture Palace which is one of my favorite pages I’ve made, it’s a virtual movie theatre! I also wrote a novel-length fanfiction. That was fun.

As for my future goals...

-Finish Galloping Games. I only have the cards and one more minigame left to finish!

-More games. I really like having them on my site. In particular I want to put more on my arcade, little standalone projects. It is a road I wish to follow.

-”Cherished Celebration”, the largest Clovenglade update, which will expand the Go Riding game as well as some other features. I want to have it out by the end of 2026 in some capacity.

-Better blog posts. I feel like they’re getting back into “droll life update” territory which I’m kind of dissatisfied with. I want to make more analysis content like that post I did on werewolves. In particular I want to do a full retrospective on Stranger Things now that it’s Over since it was pretty special to me back when season 1 came out and it’s only gotten disappointing from there. I also want to make a post on Hypnospace Outlaw now that I’ve played through it for the first time, though I think I’ll eschew the review format and just write about my thoughts on it. That kinda stuff. I want to shift my focus here to something a little more interesting to read.

-I want to read more, and to write more. I particularly want to make more original works.

-More shrines! I was chewing on the idea of making a shrine for lesbian vampire movies and why I tend to gravitate towards “problematic representation”. Maybe you explore the essay by exploring a castle via point and click mechanics?

-I want to be on my phone less. I’ve been thinking a lot about the sentiment that “the internet used to be a place” (in that, you visit, and you leave, and your computer is the dedicated “space” to engage with it. Like, yeah, I am kind of sick of my attention span being totally shot and always having that constant tether. I want more intention to the way I use the internet and break that addictive loop. Like, the way the infinite slop-scroll of youtube shorts can hook you so quickly is frightening. I’ve tried many ways to wean myself but always “relapse”, so I’m going with the nuclear option- I can’t turn on my phone on my days off unless ABSOLUTELY necessary. I’ve already been spending more time outside, watching clouds, stuff like that. On the first day I enforced that for myself, I saw a woodpecker just in my backyard. I kind of hope that it sticks.

Here’s hoping for a calm and less crazy 2026.

Today's song is: Hypnospace Outlaw OST - Millennium Anthem (2000 New Year’s Eve)

Today's tarot is: Temperance (reversed), Ace of Cups, Seven of Cups (reversed), Three of Wands, The Star