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| You vs the guy she tells you not to worry about |
Should old acquaintence be forgot? Nay, I say. This retrospective blogpost might be a week late to actually matter to anybody, but if you'll give this simple country farmer a moment, I'd like to look back at what all I've gotten up to in the year of 2025 before I turn my sights to that bright and shiny tomorrow. For old time's sake, if nothing else.
Howdy, Farmhands. I'm glad to see us all still here.
About this time in 2024, I made a grand announcement. For the latter half of that calander year, my creative output had been waning. I still was publically considered a Vtuber, with my appearances on stream becoming less and less. I tried to return to the screen in grand fashion a couple of times, but always fell off any semblence of a schedule due to issues with my dayjob and problems with my Beautiful Wife's health. We became foster parents for a succession of dogs, we cycled through roommates, and the structural integrity of our bedroom floor failed, leading to months long construction efforts that were required to fix it. By the time 2024 was coming to a close, my 5 years of being a Twitch streamer felt more like a far off memory than an active aspiration. That December, I decided it was time to officially retire and move on to a new passion of mine. Blogging.
PART 1: I BLOGGED
This didn't come out of nowhere. I'd already spent most of my tenure as a funny internet man who played minecraft with a virtual puppet waxing poetic about the tabletop roleplaying game hobby, spending hours yelling about discourse on twitter and slowly but surely accuring a collection of books and zines from various kickstarters. I'd tried on occasion to include my enjoyment of ttrpgs in my streamed content, but never truly managed to meld the audience I'd grown around the aforementioned funny minecraft stuff. I'd been blogging since February of 24, but only as the spirit hit me, and with really just for a place to put my Sanic Hack musings that wasn't Twitter. With my Twitch tenure coming to an end, I entered 2025 with the goal of blogging full time, weekly, even.
This, dear reader, was a mistake.
I'll get the obvious out of the way. Blogging does not pay the bills. Twitch streaming, for the hours I put into the production and performance, was not a viable second job. However, there were highs and lows of the added income, and recieving a few hundred dollars quarterly on top of donations was a very nice boost to my less than fantastic financials. Of the audience I'd accrued being a silly minecraft man on the internet, few were interested in following me to this new venture. Of those that WERE interested in supporting came a new stressor I hadn't anticipated- while offering subscriptions for entertainment that could be measured in hours of footage and chat logs made sense, asking for money in exchange for words I would work on sporadically, to be read in maybe 20 minutes at best felt... off. I struggled to find a reasonable balance of effort in producing the work with the amount of Stuff my paying readers could read. This lead to me scouring my folders for old wips, pushing out articles before I personally felt satisfied with them, and so many d20 roll tables that i wasn't even properly in love with, all in the name of getting SOMETHING for them out to read.
For anyone who's followed me on the internet for a reasonable amount of time, this probably sounds familiar. It is a known character flaw that I throw myself into whatever I start with a ton of gusto, only to realize i've overpromised my capability and peter out within six months. Completely ending my existing, ongoing creative output, and expecting to replace it with an entirely unreleated hobby as if the two were interchangable was never going to work out as I envisioned. If this year has taught me anything, it's that I can write some good posts*, but perhaps man cannot live** on blogging alone ***.
*(when I give myself the time to properly develop them)
** (express myself creatively)
*** (daddy needs some short form content)
That said, there ARE projects and posts I'm proud of! 2026 will feature more, longer posts that I allow myself the room to properly settle before hitting send, is all. I'd probably have more glowing things to say about this year if it weren't for-
PART 2: I DIDN'T MINECRAFT
There's a Genocide happening in Palestine, and while it certainly didn't START in 2025, a significant amount of details pertaining to who financially supports it and how became public information. Microsoft and by extension it's purchased game developer, Mojang, were added to a list of targets by the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions National Comittee for... well, boycott, divestment, and sanctions. As someone who, even after retiring from performing on camera, was the maintainer of a Minecraft server for other Vtubers, known as Hey!!!Craft, this news led to some awkward choices. I could not, in good faith, continue to support the company that profited off what is essentially free advertisement for their video game, but multiple other individuals who had joined the project I headed used the server for their own video creation- pulling the plug would screw them over. Thankfully, everyone on the team was on the same page as I, and the server was put into permanent hiatus.
This was sort of a Big Deal for me personally, as Minecraft has been something I've played almost daily since discovering it way back in 2010, during the Alpha versions of the game. I met my Beautiful Wife on a minecraft server! And, more important to this blog post, I had begun a project I called The Nether Depthcrawl, that I was very excited about. This boycott, which I was very keen to participate in, did take the wind out of my sails, as I'd been writing a not insignificant amount of work in private drafts, waiting for just the right moment to start releasing it in chunks so as not to overload my audience with posts.
The suspension of Hey!!!Craft, and the end of production on the Nether Depthcrawl cleared my dance card, but left me without a project to direct my attention towards, right at the very beginning of my self ascribed year of blogging. To spoil what comes next a smidge, I do spend most of this year being relatively aimless where once I felt great purpose. Ah well.
PART 3: I JOINED A NEWSLETTER
Have you read Carouse, Carouse? It's a monthly Newsletter where a bunch of bloggers share their favorite posts from across the ttrpg blogging hobby, as well as produce bespoke new articles for our dear readers to enjoy. I won't tell you where the majority of my effort went, if only to keep the magic in our relationship alive. I do feel like I didn't give the project as much of my attention as I could have, however.
In my haste to increase my output to match my previous production capacity as a Vtuber, I actually spread myself too thin across platforms, with my contributions to Carouse, Carouse being minimal. I treated it like a second blog to maintain, without increasing the time I spent on writing to make up for the added workload. Things I planned either shipped unfinished or not at all, and I am quite regretful about that. My hope is that with my more lax approach to my primary blog, I will be able to properly offer more to the newsletter; the folks working on it are all great and deserve the world.
PART 4: I WAS PUBLISHED IN SOMETHING
I was a kickstarter stretch goal in 2024, somehow. That zine was completed early this year. It was my very first time working with an existing publishing group and having to adjust my writing to better fit their house style- I'm proud of the final result and thrilled to have had the experience. I wonder if I should make a stronger effort to collaborate with people this year, pitch a few projects, get more credits under my belt.
PART 5: I STARTED A DIGIMON FANCOMIC
The launch of both Digimon Story: Time Stranger and Digimon Beat Break has been a boon for one of my favorite childhood franchises, and as a result, a ton of my friends from childhood are indulging in both nostalgia and new appreciation for our shared youthful obsessions. A few of us decided to get back into making Sprite Comics featuring our OCs, and I couldn't help but join in. For my part, I intended on using the setting and assets from my favorite entry into the video game franchise, Digimon World 3. Only, as I began collecting resources, I became aware that said assets were less than accurately documented publically! This led me down a rabbit hole of emulators and github repositories to try and acquire the graphics I needed to bring my story idea to life. I've managed, somehow, but this little diversion became a month-long fixation for me, and I'm only 20 pages in!
PART 6: THESE ARE GETTING SILLY I DON'T NEED TO KEEP MAKING NEW PARTS FOR 1 PARAGRAPH
Sanic Hack had a couple of new entries, but to be honest, they were mostly proper blog versions of ideas I'd had in 2024; no serious development went into the ruleset.
Had a congaline of vehicle-related troubles. A torrential rain washed my road away and we had to team up with the neighbors to get it fixed. Car almost exploded due to a malfunctioning air compressor.
I moderated the Discord Server for R.R. Slugger's Summer of Slug! Technically I do this year round, but every summer the server gets a boost of new folks, and this year was pretty tame!
We adopted our Foster dog, Wendy, only to learn that she had a tumor that would become inoperable within 4 months. She was a very good girl who deserved so much better.
I played and 95% completed Pac-Man World Re-Pac, which I didn't blog about but DID have a few brain blasts about mid-tier platformers and their lack in the current gaming ecosystem.
I started and then paused an IRL homegame, the first I've been able to run since 2021! The previously mentioned road issue put a massive hamper on that.
I started my own static site instead of relying entirely on blogger! You might even be reading this on that platform now! It's very basic and I'm not very good at making it pretty, but it does the job!
PART 7: PLANS FOR 2026
While I firmly believe that had 2025 not been so absolutely horseshit for literally everybody I could have met my goals, 2026 is going to have to be significantly dialed back. Having these expectations for myself and being unable to meet them due to outside forces sucks, and I ought to be kinder to myself while the world continues to burn. With that in mind, here are my plans for the coming year.
1. Blog When The Moment Hits. Forcing a weekly schedule just caused problems, and I do better work when I have an idea, start a draft, and whack at it slowly over time instead of trying to rush it out. I cannot keep treating myself like a content machine, it's unfair.
2. Focus on existing projects. Digimon Comic and Carouse are the main ones, but also getting Sanic Hack into a playable state. I let these go in favor of trying to do it all, but they're what really bring me joy and I shouldn't let myself be distracted.
3. A Secret Third Thing. You'll know about this later next week probably.
And that's the long as the short of it. Now I can sit back and wait for that ball to drop, kiss my beautiful wife and sleep in on this, Janurary Firrrrrrrrrrrs-Eighth. Janurary 8th. 9th if you're not a member of my patreon.
Hmm.
Until Next Time,
Farmer Gadda.
