Soooo....Blogger still hates me and doesn't want to let me use pictures unless I either drag-and-drop in new pictures or copy-paste the html from old posts that used the pictures earlier. Not actually relevant to this post, but I felt like complaining about it anyway. (It's probably more Windows 11 than Blogger, really. This is the worst operating system I have ever used. I'd switch to Linux, but that might make my feeble game dev aspirations die a horrible death. Also I'm not smart enough.)
Anyway.
I didn't achieve everything I wanted to as a writer last year, but pretty much the only concrete thing I failed to accomplish was to finish the rewrite of The Tablet of Destinies, book four of the adventures of Atalanta and Ariadne. I'm still slowly plugging away at that (after being stalled for weeks at the rewrite of chapter five, I finally got that accomplished a few days ago, and even managed to get a rough outline of how I want to handle the rest of the changes!) so I'm hoping to finish the rewrite sometime this year. Ooh, that reminds me, I should post a devlog to the itch.io version of book three to say how book four is coming along.
Other than that...well, I didn't get to do much game dev work, either; I went into the year with a grandiose plan for a complex visual novel I wanted to write, but I quickly slammed into the brick wall of not having any idea who I wanted any of the side characters to actually be, so...that went nowhere. I keep hitting that same wall in my other projects I've started working on, too. Some side effect of having been a pantser for so many years, I guess. Hopefully I'll figure out a way to get around that brick wall for future projects. (Or even to revive one of the ones that have already crashed into that wall...) I did at least manage to release one really polished visual novel wherein I didn't have that undefined characters problem, so that's something. Obviously, I just need to focus my game dev on simpler ideas until I get the knack of it better. Or something.
As to things I did accomplish, I actually made a graphic of things I wanted to do at the end of last year. Here's how that ended up working out for me:
The VN mentioned in so many of those squares is the same one I mentioned above that crashed right into that brick wall headfirst. 😰 I'm not 100% sure I truly qualify as having achieved the "Actually play some Steam games" one or not. I did get through a Steam playthrough of My Time at Portia, finally putting my Steamdeck through its paces, but other than that...kinda just mucked about with a few short things. Not sure how fully any of that counts. (Also not 100% sure those short things were in 2025 and not in 2024...) Still, I decided to check it off anyway, because why not?
So....yeah. That's about all I have to say right now, because this new laptop is actually pretty hard to type on if I don't remember to adjust the lapdesk to a tilted setting first. Um, also because I don't have much to say because my brain has been feeling pretty broken lately because the health issues that make it hard for me to sleep at night have gotten worse.
But maybe I'll think of something later and edit this on my phone before it goes from scheduled to posted.
