Jan 06, 2026

Habby New Year

Christmas Break!

Whoa hey, it's 2026 already! I've been pretty not-busy the last couple o' weeks. The short version is that I went on a winter vacation to visit my parents for the last couple of weeks. This was mostly relatively off-internet relaxation time, which was pretty nice! It was real nice to take it easy on the game dev side, and watch a bunch of movies and chill with family. I played a buncha games and watched a buncha movies (which you can read about on my letterboxd or backloggd). Overall lots of roguelites on my steam deck, and lots of cheesy horror/general schlock for movies. Also, there's a nice sledding hill nearby my parents' place, so me and _Jenbarb went sledding a good couple of times. Also also, lots of home cooked meals and probably a few too many glasses of wine. Christmas itself was pretty low-key. Just some nice family time and a few rounds of A Fake Artist Goes to New York and Railroad Ink.

NYE Party

We got back home in time for New Year's Eve, so we had some friends over to ring in the new year with board games, drinks, snacks, and a cheese board by yours truly. One of my friends who's also into cocktails brought a real tasty pre-batched rum cocktail that I don't remember the ingredients of, but I'd love to try and make myself one day. I had hastily assembled a cocktail menu for the night too, which you can find here. (I'll get proper recipes up for most of these eventually) We started the night off around 7ish, and a round or two of Poetry for Neanderthals. A pretty light party game, but I definitely had fun talking like Grug and bonking people with a big inflatable club. Then we moved on to some Fake Artist rounds which were a blast. We then moved over to The Fuzzies for a bit, and rung in the new year with perennial party classic Drawful. All in all, a bunch of light gaming and good hangs with friends! I lived off of leftover cheese board bits for the next few days.

Post New Years' Stuff

Since then, I've mostly still been taking it kinda easy. I felt like I wanted to wait for the first full week of the year to start back on work-type stuff, so I've mostly been playing the early access to WoW housing for the last few days. It's been fun going around seeing the latest patch content and doing some Sims house decoration there. I feel like I can see myself getting sucked into the next x-pack for WoW once it comes out for sure. Once an addict, always an addict. I've also still got a few other games in my backlog to get to from the steam winter sale that are calling my name too. Another cool thing that happened in the last couple days was going to see a screening of Spirited Away at my local indie theatre with some friends with drinks/snacks after. That movie is great, but you already likely know that. I finally got back to work on the game today a bit, and I'm looking forward to getting back into the usual day-to-day routine for a bit!

New Years Miscellanea

I'm looking forward to some cool stuff this year I think!

• I'd like to continue updating this blog, since I've found it helpful just as an e-journal and way to do a bit of writing.
• I'd also like to start actually picking up a pen and learning to draw a bit! I'll probably start just with some simple shapes and stuff to build up some fundamentals before I try to draw anything with any complexity. Maybe I'll put up a low-quality gallery of cubes on the blog at some point, but more likely they'll live in a little shape sketchbook.
• This year I also am nearly 100% certain I'll release my game on Steam! This is something I've been working real hard on for the last while as a bit of a sabbatical from paid work, and it'll be good to get it out the door. I'm proud of the work I've done, but it likely won't really amount to a huge commercial success. That's ok, but I'll probably need to go back to the web dev world again. Such is life! I don't dislike web dev either! Just making stuff is fun, but I really needed this break over the last year and a bit to try making something on my own. (Of course, if for some reason it goes crazy viral or whatever, I'd like to keep doing game dev full time, but let's be real here.)
• I'm gonna continue my other usual gaming/magic/d&d/going to live music shows hobbies too! These have been a great way for me to stay social, so I'll definitely keep them up!
• On the less certain side, maybe I'd like to get back to twitch streaming a bit! It's been a while since I did that with any consistency. I used to mostly just stream Magic drafts on Arena, but I'd like to branch out to more indie/variety gaming. I feel like I enjoy being able to verbalize how I feel about games as I play them, and streaming helps me feel like less of a crazy person talking out loud (even if to just the 0 viewer void).

Mostly just putting this out to the internet to keep myself a bit accountable I suppose! We'll see how 2026 goes!