As we leave 2025 behind and begin a new year, I thought I’d take a moment to write down a few expectations I would like to set myself for 2026.
I can't keep up with everything on the Internet anymore.
This is partly my fault. I've always considered myself to be a fairly online person. This means that I'm active on various social media platforms, follow a variety of different creators releasing videos, podcasts, and newsletters, lurk in too many Discord servers, and keep up with several different websites and the articles they publish. I also tend to follow local news for at least 3 different countries, as well as global news in general. It’s endless, and there's not enough time in the day. Especially with a full time job, a kid to care of, and lots of other roles and responsibilities.
But why do you do this to yourself, you might ask?
Well, I have a variety of interests and hobbies, and most of these are analysed and discussed online. I can't just buy a book and suddenly become up-to-date on what's happening in game development, or tabletop RPGs, or programming
Naturally, this isn't sustainable. Instead, this year I want to focus on following fewer and more high quality sources, and spend the little time I have in more productive ways. This also means making sure that I'm not constantly checking my phone or doomscrolling, as well as limiting social media in different ways, since it's is very good at capturing the entirety of your attention.
Secondly, the internet is ephemeral. Nothing lasts forever, and I'm old enough to have migrated across several different forms of social media platforms over the years. Inevitably, this means that I've lost contact with many people that I connected with or met on those platforms, and unless I've archived my posts on those platforms, anything I've ever posted there is probably also gone.
I can account for this in some way by posting more often to my own website, since it's a platform that I have full control over. However, a long form blog post takes a lot longer to write than something that can be shared in a short post on a microblogging platform (and not everything makes sense as a blog post either). Decentralised social media platforms are a partial solution to this (usch as Mastodon for example), but I haven't really used them as much since the communities I follow aren't as active on those platforms. Furthermore, some use cases for social media platforms don't really translate well to a personal website; I use Instagram primarily to keep in contact with friends by sharing images or videos in the form of stories, but there's no suitable way of doing this on a personal website. I have also thought about perhaps setting up a newsletter to keep people that are interested in what I'm doing updated and informed, but at the same time, I don't write consistently enough to warrant running a newsletter, and I don't think there is anyone that is interested.
The internet has become flooded with content generated by LLMs. AI generated art, videos, music, social media posts, comments that reply to those posts, entire articles, the list is endless. I'm not interested in engaging with any of this; my policy has been: why engage with something that no-one bothered to thoughtfully make? So in response, I want to spend more of my time offline, where LLMs are less useful. This year, this means focusing on reading physical books, listening to music on physical media, cooking, and making ice-cream, rather than roaming a dead internet populated by bots.
Over the years, I’ve found that it’s incredibly easy to have the things I made vanish into the aether. It's understandable in a way; you take part in a game jam, focus on it for a weekend or so, and then after it's over, you tend to complete forget about it and move on with your life. Inevitably, computers age or break down, new devices are brought in, and unless backups were made, both the source code and the game itself are now lost.
This makes it incredibly annoying whenever I want to go back and reference something I made. Also, with the amount of lost media out there, I want to be able to have a complete archive of my personal work at my disposal!
While last year I managed to identify my current ludography, this year I want to be able to find the actual games I worked on, put them online, and fill in the gaps in my ludography.
I tend to have a couple of projects active at any given time, meaning I spend a lot of time context switching between them. Inevitably, this means everything takes longer than it should.
This year, I want to make a concerted effort to focus on one ongoing project at a time. This allows me to dedicate the time needed that the project deserves, as well as allowing me to more quickly get to a point where I can call something done.
One of the biggest things I want to try and prioritise this year is to make more stuff.
Coming up with ideas for things has never been a problem for me; I have pages and pages of ideas for projects that I think are awesome. My problem has always been scope and perfectionism; I spend ages thinking about and doing research for these ideas in order for them to be as awesome as I can possibly make them. Unfortunately, this is not sustainable, and I also don’t ever get to make or finish anything!
This year, I want to try and switch my brain off a bit, and just focus on making small things that I deem good enough to release for free that people can play around with it. In particular, I want to work on video games, tabletop RPGs, writing, and perhaps a bunch of other things!
From a game programming perspective, I also want to focus on getting back into classical game AI techniques and procedural content generation, which I haven’t touched since my MSc and PhD days, and which I don’t really engage with professionally anymore.
Finally, I tend to want to make things on my own instead of working together with others. I want to instead prioritise making things with people, partly because I think it’s cool to learn from other people’s expertise, but also because it’s fascinating to see what other unexpected ideas people have!
This year, I want to be slightly more thoughtful about the stuff I engage with. I want to do this in a couple of ways.
First of all, I want to get back to logging what I’ve finished! I used to log the books I had read on Goodreads, but after I moved to StoryGraph, I haven’t really kept up with the practice. My logging of video games I’ve finished on Backloggd is also relatively spotty. I’ve only really been consistent with my logging of films I’ve watched on Letterboxd.
Secondly, I want to slow down a bit while engaging with material by taking handwritten notes, and evaluating what I liked and didn’t like about the piece after I’m finished with it. Having an analytical mindset will help exercise muscles that I think will be useful when making my own stuff.
I used to be pretty good at keeping up with some amount of reading, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside lately. This year, I want to get back into it again.
I tend to read non-fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy, but this year I want to try and broaden my reading a little bit more to include the classics, poetry, and plays.
I also want to read more in Maltese, regardless of the genre of writing! Since I live in Sweden, I’m no longer as exposed to the language any more, and I’m starting to get rusty.
As explained in a previous blog post, I mostly have experience with playing and running Dungeons & Dragons, primarily with 5th Edition. However, my TTRPG collection doesn’t reflect that at all, and I have a wide variety of games that I simply haven’t gotten the chance to play yet.
As I’ve started to take an interest in TTRPG design, I want to make the effort to bring some of these games to the table (and hopefully finding a willing group in the process!) In particular, I’d love to run Blades in the Dark, Everway, Dogs in the Vineyard, Ten Candles, and many many others.
Perhaps you have suggestions of specific games I should try?
I’m lucky enough to have gotten the opportunity to take part in various public speaking events, such as speaking at conferences or presenting my PhD work in different venues. I quite enjoy public speaking, since I get to the opportunity to travel to different places and venues and meet new people, and I’d love to get a chance to do more of it this year!
Ultimately, I can only do what I can with the time I'm given. Since I'm a parent to a toddler and work a full time job, that means I don't have much time at all right now. That doesn't mean that I should waste the hour or so I have every day though. Any progress, no matter how small, is progress! This year, I will attempt to remember that and not stress over all the things I planned to accomplish and didn't manage