Well, here where I sit in this little part of the globe it’s been 2026 for one sleep now, so I figure I might post a recap/plans thing. This post contains a list of things I did in 2025, and what my plans are for 2026. As much an inventory for myself as anyone else.

First, and most obviously, I shipped Death by Scrolling with Ron Gilbert (which you should go grab on mac/linux/windows if you haven’t).

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Some time back, I bought a Leica IIIf**, a 1955 model (one of the final ones produced - the III series was discontinued after 1960). It’s one of the last of the original Barnack-style Leica rangefinder cameras. I’d wanted one for a while, but to be honest the main reason I got it was that for a Leica with a lens it was absurdly cheap, and came with a 3.5cm lens which I knew I could use on my other rangefinders.

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We live in a time where we have access to a true embarrassment of riches when it comes to media access. By that I mean, we have truly enormous number of movies, TV shows and video games are accessible to us across digital store fronts, physical media stores (at least, while they still exist at all), and thrift stores. If anything, the biggest issue many of us face when sitting down to watch a movie or play a game is choice paralysis. When you’ve got a collection of cartridges on your shelf to pick between, it’s a bit of a difference to your thousand-strong Steam library or the like. In a bad way for options; in a good way for choice.

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Note: Yes, I know I wrote a complaint about ’everyone reviewing things’, and especially how ‘reviewing’ things meant I stopped enjoying them. I’m starting a new little series here, not to review films I watch, but to provide some thoughts on films I am re-watching. I’m going to putt them in sets, I think, several at a time. So, here’s the first bunch:

Sorcerer (1977) and The Thin Red Line (1998)

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Around the time I was pushing 18-20 years old, adventure games died. RIP adventure games. Gone forever, never to come back except in Germany, etc, etc.

I wasn’t particularly upset by this at the time, because iD software had let off an atomic bomb on PC gaming, and I was too busy being excited by 3D graphics and fast-paced action gameplay of a sort I had never even imagined before to actually recognise that I was not really that into playing what we now call first-person shooters.

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Today is a big day. In a few hours as I type this Death by Scrolling, a game I made with the man who needs no introduction, Ron Gilbert, becomes available. It’s been an amazing project to work on. But it also got me thinking about my personal projects.

When I began to put up my vampire prose and my weird little throw-back BBS game (Swords of Freeport), I was struggling with a day job that was rapidly falling apart (because, video games industry). That’s no longer the case. I’m still in a messy place of having no real idea just what I’ll be doing next year, I now know that short of disaster I will be able to finish and release Dungeons of Freeport (a semi-classical roguelike) and Deck & Conn (a Super Star Trek-like game being published by Microprose).

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To get this out of the way: working from home is good. It’s good for me, it’s good for many other people. The studies agree. I’m not saying it’s always the best fit for every industry or even every company, but I am saying that most of the pressure to come ‘back into the office’ come from overly-controlling bosses and people who are sitting there eating the rent on very expensive offices for their companies.

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Note: there are a lot of generalisations in this blog post, as it’s kind of a stream of thoughts. Most things are more complex than the way I word them below, so please don’t @ me saying as much - I’m well aware.

My life isn’t what I expected it to be. Not in a bad way, just in the kind of way where if you described who I’d become and what I was doing to me at age 25, you’d probably get a reaction of extreme confusion.

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A good friend of mine just made an observation:

“We don’t have profit seeking capitalists anymore. They had a moral compass. Usually a fucked one but they had one. Now we have rent-seeking post-capitalists.”

If you ask anyone around my age or a bit younger (at least, one who wasn’t born with a silver spoon massaging their gums) which category of human they hate the most, they’ll probably answer landlords. See, most of us still rent the roofs over our heads. I don’t need to go into detail about all this because, frankly, there’s a million articles and videos on how the housing crisis and cost of living has fucked pretty much anyone who’s a millennial or younger.

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What follows is a sort of loose collection of thoughts I had during my current re-visit of 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Don’t expect some grand conclusion or an essay; just come with me on this little trip, won’t you?

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