Another journal

Ah, the last update of the year! I suppose I could make an accounting of what I’ve done over the year. I keep track, because I’d forget and then think I did nothing at all but read possibly too many books. This is a common brain thing, I think, as I see others putting together their art versus artist, or otherwise also looking back over the past 12 months.

(I have a very legit excuse for not posting this yesterday, btw. My laptop decided it did NOT like being charged and just… ran out of juice after I’d typed up the above then gone to have dinner. I had to stay off it while it got back up to speed.)

Anyway, here’s the bodycount of Shit Did, links go all over, will note where. Now, most of this happened in the front half of the year and you might have already seen it in my mid-year roundup, but odds are you also didn’t so! Please have fun counting how many things are for my favourite franchise. A lot of this is documented in blogposts because I started blogging weekly about halfway through the year! (in fact, you are at this moment reading it on the blog, which I’ve crossposted this Patreon/Comradery update to).

The real bulk of it is zines and bookbinding:

– Book gifts I made my family for the holidays (blogpost).
– More book gifts, for the same reason (blogpost).
– A very dorky fanbind of a Locked Tomb short story, that keeps getting hits on tumblr, where the nerds are (blogpost).
– Flash Fiction February 2025 collection, my standard yearly collection of the best ten flash fics from the monthly challenge. (Itchio)
– I laid out my newsletter (which is coming up on its third year?!) as zines, which are available as physical prints or a collection of digital files, and it was really fun. (Bigcartel shop, Itchio)
– I did a paperback fanbinding of a favourite unfinished fic–yes, it is a Fallout: New Vegas fic–which turned out very cool and also gave me a reason to source some classic mass market paperback-style paper. (blogpost)
– A zine of the campfire recipes from Fallout: New Vegas, because I needed a reference sheet so why not. It’s free, also. (Itchio)

Illustrative stuff:

– The finished Labours of the Month calendar was dropped on Itch and I 100% then forgot about it and did not promote it monthly like I should have. That’s a years worth of illustration lol, such is life! (Itchio)
– I did hourly comic day, which is always a fun time. (Tumblr post roundup)
– Made the final card in my nostalgia 3 card draw, which is stickers and really was an indulgent fun thing for me to do. (Bigcartel shop)
– Neil banging out the tunes, which y’all fucking loved, wow. (Bluesky)

Writing stuff:

– When I finish a Flash Fiction February zine, I then also release a handful of my top faves from the previous year’s collection onto my blog with illustrations. (Blog archive)
– For my best friend’s birthday I wrote a fic using his OC ghoul from Fallout: Jammin’ With Junker Val -02.02.75, 16:23, (Archive of Our Own)
– The Fourth Step, a short story from last year’s Ominous October. (blogpost)
– Any Small Town, a short story from last year’s Ominous October. (blogpost)
– Café By-The-Sea, a scary short story that I shopped around to a couple markets then decided to just share on The Blog. (blogpost)
– Continued sending out a monthly newsletter over at Any Tree, Flowering.
– Also nearly forgot: I serialised that old book of mine, The Audacity Gambit, and included extra short stories from the world of it. (blog)

Other stuff:

– Papier-mâché dice tower video, part of the cleanup of old projects thing. (YouTube)
– Unearthed a 1998 video I made of Julius Caesar, because it’s stupid and silly and fun to see old work. (YouTube)
– Otter Pop*Stars Neocities page, which was partly a thing to remember “oh I like coding a little.” (webpage)
– I made a real-life model of a 3D asset from Fallout: New Vegas: A Sierra Madre Casino snow globe, which btw part of it broke inside so now I get to decide if I drain and fix it. (blogpost)
– A monster brainstorming worksheets game, which I made to help me generate some creatures for a project. (blogpost)
– I made a linktree-type page, because I realised that I own my own website and could just *do* that instead of using somebody else’s kit and url. (webpage)
– Dyed yarn for the first time, and did also finish crocheting a sweater, though it needs more work before it’s done-done. (blogpost)

Plus all the stuff that feels incidental, like helping out at an art fair, sewing a pair of shorts, finishing mending my coat, figuring out a cool map-making hack (play a game of Carcassone), made nine different cool prints as part of a challenge with Chase, and whatever other little fun things one does to fill the days. I think? A pretty fruitful year and full of Stuff Did.

Also I managed at least four posts a month here, swapping from private to public updates in early July. I just! Don’t care any more. I like sharing information. There will always be things that I gotta keep behind a paywall like if I start serialising something new and there are early updates, or if I make a short story collection and there’s a free download. But I got nothing going on behind the scenes that is worth paying a dollar for. I just like making things I dunno. My best friend sent me the script for Ricki Hirsch’s latest video (because she knows if I am given a video link I will just never watch it), and then I read the originating blogpost, which has this line at the end that I like a lot:

You can control how you and your work are received just as well as you can control lighting but you can always control whether you’re going to try.

Like, the script has the same line worked more cleanly but for some reason the way it resonated more with me in this form. Anyway, I will keep making things and thank you for looking at them with your eyeballs, whoever does. I have some cool things to show your eyeballs this upcoming year.