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December 20th - 2025 Recap

The year is nearing it's end and of all the changes this year beginning these yearly recaps is one of them. I'd say 2025 was kind of eventful for me, a lot of things changed within me and some pretty big things happened in my life. Ever since I turned 25 last year I've been dealing with a lot of anxiety and frustration with the passage of time and myself and that really culminated this year.

I've spent most of my time this year working on my art, obviously doing art is working on art but this year I specifically focused on study and practice. I wasn't able to make as much progress in my art practice as I wished I had though. I had a whole list of things I wanted to improve on that I made at the beginning of this year and now at the end I've reorganized the list and narrowed it a bit in scope. I don't know if I'll be able to complete it in 2026, I honestly kind of doubt it but I'll make as much progress as I can. I don't know if I'll continue my practice into 2027, the reason I've been focusing on it so much is cause I feel once I start getting back into drawing like normal I'll forget to do any sort of studying on things I need to improve on, but I don't know we'll see.

Along with practicing I've also been thinking a lot about what I want my art to look like, what themes and aesthetics do I want to focus on. I'm kind of going over things I've already discussed before in my writing but it's a big deal right now so it makes sense to do so. Late 2024 I realized I wanted to draw more porn, I'm not sure what specifically stirred this on, maybe it was because I saw my friends sharing all the porn they drew and I only had 5 drawings to show for myself. It was kind of odd how little porn I drew considering I think I have a higher sex drive than most other people, I'd be lying if I didn't say my dick controlled my brain a bit honestly. Part of it was likely cause of shame, I didn't start being open about being into rapeplay and gore until this year even with my own friends. Some of them knew and I don't think anyone was surprised by the fact, but even still.

With my newfound desire to draw porn I realized my artstyle at the time wasn't gonna cut it, I still like my old artstyle, when I look back at stuff I made just last year I'm still fond of it. However I didn't think the style worked very well for things like depicting characters sucking dick or having fingers in their mouth or eating, I have kind of an oral fixation, and I'd been bumping heads with wanting to depict characters with lower lip piercings and facial hair for a while now, so it had to change. I'm glad I did because even though I liked it I don't feel like it fits the kind of art I want to make going forward.

I had to consider what do I want to spend my time truly making. A while back I once made a comment worrying that people thought my stickman style was my normal artstyle to which one of my friends responded "I thought it was?" and it's one of those moments that got me thinking. The art I had been making up to this point, while I did like it, it wasn't really the kind of art I desired to make, I've always loved horror and gore and it's the kind of art that I was always drawn towards, always wanted to make, wanted to be known for making, but I /wasn't/ making it. I consider my art to be a form of self-expression but what had I been expressing up until now?

This is why near the beginning of the year I went and scrapped a bunch of characters, I went from about 1636 to now just 273 and I'll likely continue thinning them out as I work things out. It was a hard thing to do, a lot of these characters I had made when I was young, I still remember how many I created when sitting in summer school. Universes with interconnected stories, characters I had developed for years and loved and still love, gone, years of my life and development as a person, it's the kind of thing I've cried over, hell I cried while writing this. Truth is though I don't think I was ever gonna be able to do what I want with them, I was never gonna finish the webcomic I started when I was 15, I was never going to tell the story of 21 struggling teens who I was now no longer younger than, I was never going to tell the story of a group of people who had all lost someone important to them and their grief trapped them in a layer of reality outside time and space forced to fight but unable to move forward. Grief was common in a lot of my stories growing up but I had never really experienced it until this year, I had a lot to grieve over.

Even still now that I've done it, now that I've developed and changed as a person no matter how much I miss these things I don't want to go back, I think this is the right call for myself. We all change over time but I feel this year I have changed more than I ever have before, I feel like the empty spots within myself have begun to fill out to truly form the shape that is "me". I feel like even with what little I did this year with my art I'm more satisfied now than ever before though a new feeling of dissatisfaction has also kicked in since I'm not where I want to be yet and part of me grieves over how long it took me to reach this conclusion. Still this is the first year I've actually /worked/ on my art with all the practice and thinking I've been doing and I will continue to do so and strive to make art that I've dreamed of.

I've put all the characters I scrapped into the Columbarium page as a sort of memorial for them all as well as a way to let people perhaps steal them maybe if I can't do something with them someone else will? I don't know but it's there.

This was also the year that I finally got my first job after years of struggling, I worked a full time factory job for a couple months and I think doing so also made me realize a lot of things. It all comes back to the passage of time, prior to getting a job I always thought I could handle having a job and doing art as a hobby because plenty of others do. I am not plenty of others, the realization of spending 8 hours a day almost every day, a third of my life working this job and then to come home and be too exhausted every day to do anything but lie in bed, I was struggling to keep doing art and it was driving me mad. I couldn't live like that and so I was driven to the decision to work on getting commissions set up, I've always been averse to the idea of turning my art into something I do for work but in a society where basic needs are not met I need an income and I'd rather live as a struggling artist than like that. I'll still look into a part time job though, I mean after all I don't really have an audience so I likely won't get very many commissions. Originally my intention was to keep working until I had gotten everything sorted to get commissions set up but my plans fell through.

My grandpa passed away this October, he was an important person in my life. I lived with him when I was in elementary school, he helped raise me. Everyday after school I'd come home and there'd be a cookie waiting for me to eat while I do my homework. On days I got off early he'd take me the local deli to eat and then get ice cream afterwards, even in highschool up until I started going to alternative school. Even up til now I'd go out with him for breakfast on the first sunday of every month. When I was at my mom's house and I could no longer stand the arguing, the yelling, the mocking, i'd walk across the alley over to his house and stay there until I had no choice but to go back. My grandpa had had health issues but despite it all he'd talk about how healthy his doctors said he was and how active he was, he'd say it's because he's not old and that you only become old when you think you're old, he'd often joke that he was only 27 and that he was gonna live into his 100s and beat the record for oldest person alive, he was 79, didn't even hit 80.

A few days prior my dad said we should do something for grandpa as thanks for all he's done for us. The day before he died when we were leaving the hospital we went to say goodbye, when he saw me he began to cry and we promised to go out for breakfast again once he was feeling better, we had missed the sunday of that month after all. His health took a turn for the worst and it was certain he was going to die, I spent all day in the hospital sitting in a chair next to him holding his hand. Sitting there for hours my feeling clashed, part of me just wanted him to die already to get it all over with, I hated seeing him like that, unresponsive and hooked up to these machines watching the heart monitor as it went in and out never knowing when the flatline would happen, he would've hated being like that too, he hated keeping still. The other part of me desperately was hoping that he'd start to get better, that he'd pull through and recover any minute now and wanted him to hold on. I wasn't there when he passed, I hadn't slept and I could no longer stand listening to my relatives talk about how they charge their children rent. Grandpa would've hated hearing them talk like that.

At his funeral they let us take flowers from those placed on top of his casket, my dad had grabbed a red carnation and then told me hold it. Once we got home I put in a book and pressed it, flowers are nice but I don't particularly care for them much less for preserving them like this, and because it was a carnation it didn't press evenly so it's a bit brown in the middle and quite ugly. I don't really care, I just wanted to have it.

My grandpa had also been my ride to work up to that point, with no stable way to get to and from I quit. I was allowed one day of bereavement leave, not paid of course, what a joke. If it had been my mother, who did nothing but cause me misery, that had died I'd have gotten three days off, as if my relationship with my grandfather is lesser because he's not "directly" related to me. And still three days? Three days to mourn and then you're expected to go back to your place of being a cog in the machine for capital. I didn't wanna go back to work anyways. I'm glad working that job gave me the experience and resources so that i could work on improving my life a bit and get commissions set up but I could not continue.

Another thing that dramatically changed this year is this here website! For reference for those who are new here's what my website looked like from March of this year.

Originally I planned to keep this site more utilitarian but as I was working on the separate personal site I had at the time I realized I wanted this site to look cool and eventually I got rid of my separate personal site and combined the two. Managing one big site just seems easier than two smaller sites. I learned a lot about coding this year as a result honestly more than I ever learned between 2017 and 2024 and I'm still planning on learning more (javascript is my current beast to start learning). I've been wanting to learn more coding anyways cause I want to make games and I recently started thinking about making desktop applications (mostly for myself I will likely not publish them).

There's already parts of this website that I look at and think "I should redo this", pages I think to redesign, code I could rewrite, things I could add, in particular I'd love to add more page decorations. I also started looking into learning graphic design this year, originally as just a means to improve my art but it's a useful thing to learn so that will probably affect things as well. I will say looking into skills like graphic design are kind of miserable cause a lot of the people talking about it online focus on "how you can make money" "how you can get client work" etc and using that as a measure of success which completely clashes with everything of my being.

The past couple months my friends and I have also started on working on things together behind the scenes, though that won't be ready to reveal until after the year turns over. I've kind of ended up becoming the sort of manager of it, or as Ian calls me the producer, because I was the one who kicked in like "we all want to do this so here's what we need to figure out and do" and so filling out this kind of role has been an interesting new experience. I've never really been the organizer type, untreated ADHD in particular makes that rough, but being in this position has made me realize things I need to work on, like I always knew I struggled with anxiety and communication and in particular this feeling that I am a blight on those around me ever since I was 8 and crying myself to sleep believing that nobody really loved me and just pretended to out of pity, but I've never really done anything to deal with these feelings up to now have I? Certainly some things I've done as an adult with my own free will has significantly helped me but even on this here neocities I get surprised when I follow people and they follow me back, surprised that people want to engage with someone like me! I struggle with feeling like I make everyone around me uncomfortable and that's something I need to work on.

So now where does that leave us? I think last thing to reflect on would be the resolutions I made for 2025:

• Make Cool Art
• Get Weirder
• Get Hornier
• Make 1 game
• Learn more blender
• Watch 300 movies
• Play 300 games

To start with the smaller topic stuff are "watch 300 movies" and "play 300 games", I can safely say I achieved the latter and I'm planning on adding a recap of what I played this year to the gameyard, the former however it's kind of embarrassing how few movies I watched haha. At the start of the year I kind of engaged with any and every game but as I started to consider how I am spending my time and what particularly interests me that scope narrowed but even still there's a lot of games out there!

"Make 1 game" I didn't achieve but as I said I learned a lot more about coding this year which is a good step to doing so. I've been watching the harvard lectures on computer science because they were linked to on the Godot documentation and now I understand a bit more about code and can actually read shit like javascript some now! (still working on being able to write it though).

"Learn more blender" I made like literally no progress besides watching a video going over how the program functions like how to move the viewport type function. I do want to learn more blender but I've been prioritizing my illustrative work since that's my artistic focus. I did find a playlist for beginners made by someone else when they were learning so I've got that on hand when I need to start learning. I'm definitely hoping to learn in 2026 particularly cause things I'm working on with friends may involve learning it a bit but I think my 2D work will maintain being my focus.

"Get weirder" and "Get hornier" I basically did without having to try, as soon as I started being more open, well to say something I said earlier, I started to fill out the form that is "me". When you start being authentic you learn how weird you can get and that goes for being horny too. Did I know I was gonna realize I think emo twinks getting fucked by giant bugs is hot when the year started? No. Did it happen? Yeah. I'm more genuine to myself than I ever have been before I feel. When I started this year I had no clue the way in which NSFW content especially kink would start getting cracked down on, hell I hadn't even yet revealed my kinks to my friends and wasn't sure I was going to, and it has definitely fueled my "get hornier" aspirations. I have a lot of thoughts on the treatment of porn and adult content and I hope to be in spaces that can discuss the topic like actual adults and not social media influenced one liners, with people who can respect that pornographic works are art and should be engaged with like all art.

"Make cool art" this ones the real kicker and I kind of already discussed a lot of it earlier. Part of the reason I've been focusing on strict practice rather than doing actual pieces this year is because I've always been kind of a slow artist and if I start working on a drawing it's hard for me to do anything else art related cause I'm focused on "getting that drawing done". Part of my slowness is definitely from overthinking but also I think there's a real solid issue of spending longer on something when I don't know how to draw it, like hands. So hopefully with some improvement I can get stuff done faster. That said I should try to get better work habits and hopefully with time my relationship with art improves again cause currently it's kind of rough. I may write a thing sometime on my feelings about art that I've currently been struggling with but not right now.

Lastly is my 2026 new years resolutions! Originally I struggled to even write 9 but after I managed to get 9 suddenly I thought up even more many such cases.

• Open commissions
• Learn graphic design. I started this year and I'm hoping to continue into the next I think it'd help my art a lot and it'd be useful for other projects as well.
• Make cool art. My main aspiration forever and always, "cool art" of course meaning art that makes me happy, the wording can make it feel superficial but it's easier to say than "make art i want to make that makes me happy and I feel reflects my interior world and self and ideas and makes me smile and cum" yknow.
• Improve my real life presentation and space. I want to take active steps to dress and present the way I want such as re-piercing my ears. I already have some things like already having black shirts, chains and and a leather bracelet but I definitely need more, I need fabric paint, black dye, and bleach. I want people to look at me or walk into my room and go "oh this guys queer"
• Learn to sew. Goes with the above, I need to learn to mend and hem in particular.
• Watch 100 movies
• Read 10 books. This year I'm not doing 300 games cause I think rather than amount I just wanna focus on playing games I've been meaning to get to for a while now and instead focusing on movies and books, I lowered the movie count to something smaller, my movie count for this year was 40 so I wanted something more attainable currently. Likewise read 10 books is a much lower amount books take more time and can oft be very long. I wanna get back into reading and develop my own writing.
• Get into skateboarding. I got into skateboarding a bit when I was a kid and I still have my old board, though I probably should get something better than a tony hawk board from wal-mart and I'd like to get into it again once the weather starts not being balls cold.
• Get over my fear of bugs and spiders. Despite earlier talking about finding emo twinks getting fucked by bugs hot I have a fear of them, the bugs not the emo twinks, the interaction between fear and horny is an interesting one. It's a fear i've had for a long time which fucking sucks cause i've also thought bugs were cool for a while now and i'd like to get over this stupid fucking fear. I don't think i'll cure myself in a year but I think I can at least exposure therapy myself to be better.
• Get better work habits
• Get medicated for ADHD. Would help a lot with the above.
• Work on my anxiety. I need to talk to other people I need to feel comfortable going on someones website and posting in their guestbook I need to leave comments I need to express my thoughts!

There are things I want to achieve as well that aren't quite resolutions like make a game, learn blender, learn graphic design, work on moving out, and I probably could put them down but idk there's already a lot on the list and those feel more like "a given". But that's 2025! Hopefully 2026 is a better year for all of us!