It’s been just over a year now since I finished Friendship is Dragons.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking “It’s Monday / Wednesday / Friday, I should check to make sure the next comic’s up.” Every so often I wake up from a concerningly compelling stress dream where I’m unfathomably behind schedule, continuing the comic endlessly via meaningless AI slop because someone is blackmailing me to never stop.

So yeah, my relationship with stress is still about as good as it’s ever been.

Look, I’m not going to try to mansplain to you, the reader, how 2025 has been nightmarish for everybody, nor how it doesn’t look like the broader situation is bound to improve anytime soon. It’s my birthday, and I’m taking the opportunity to make this about me and me alone.

And the situation there isn’t complicated: I wish I was doing more, but I have to keep reminding myself that what I’m doing has to be enough. But man is it ever frustrating.

I don’t have a thrice-weekly comic to publish anymore, which gives the impression that I’m spending most of my weeks doing nothing. Fanfic-wise, I completed a very basic editing pass of the entire Interference saga and published… three new chapters. Which, after nearly 20 years, is significant, but less so when it’s over a period of 9 months. Modding-wise, I’ve got the engine groundwork, two-thirds of the first day’s storyline written, and ten bosses done. Which, just for getting the first-day demo out the door, probably puts me at around… 10% completion after months of on-off work.

If this was my full-time job, I’d be an unjustifiably terrible employee who would have been fired years ago, is what I’m saying. But I’ve had to remind myself that the main thing I’ve been trying to focus on this year is: Myself. And not with a great deal of success.

My disability application got rejected, so we’re on the appeal process, which has been stalled for literal months in no way I can control or speed up.

My stressful home situation hasn’t changed much, except that my younger brother has now graduated high school and gotten his first part-time job, so the handful of hours each evening of rare quiet I get is balanced out by a new source of frustration that can lead to his explosive temper tantrums which lead to my night-long panic attacks. Same crap as ever, different context.

The one thing that has been going mostly right is that I made a New Year’s resolution to exercise regularly and I’ve been mostly sticking to it.

I’ve been playing Ring Fit Adventure for about 30 minutes several evenings each week. It doesn’t take much to wear me out since I’m a hefty guy, but I’ve definitely seen improvement and become more limber. At the start of the year I aimed for three nights a week, though as the desert summer has worn on it has whittled down to more like 1.5 nights on average. Still, I’ve kept up the habit for just over 50 sessions without completely falling off the wagon, so I’m relatively proud of myself.

What makes RFA work over, like, running on a treadmill or lifting dumbbells is that it’s deeply, deeply silly. No really, that’s been a huge sticking point for me. Standing in my room, unhealthily overweight, dedicating time out of my day to working out, already feels absurd to my deeply depressed brain. So interacting with a program that is relentlessly positive, never judgmental, always surprising, and has its tongue firmly in its cheek as it says “Do squats to defeat these RPG monsters!” is exactly the kind of over-the-top absurdity I need to make the fact that I’m working out alone in my room at over-30 and over-300 to feel like the less silly thing happening at that moment.

So that’s one personal victory I can mark, at any rate.

The Twitch streaming has basically shrunken down to just the family co-op time with Nyx and GreyDuck, playing Satisfactory or Warframe or maybe other things coming up. Which, honestly, I’m pretty happy with. Years spent on the streamer treadmill only proved that I’m not cut out as an entertaining personality, and I’m enjoying myself way more just streaming as a family unit for posterity.

Actually, the fanfic and mod progress is all victorious, too, it’s just that the results of those have been harder to see and feel than the sweat.

It mostly just frustrates me because I’ve had to beg and scrape for enough money to survive all year. The Patreon helps with one major bill, essentially, and food stamps get me through about half a month, and then the rest I’ve gotta rely on the generosity of others. And I hate that. So much. With a fiery passion. Not because I hate people or resent when they can’t help, but purely because I hate having to be a bother, to be non-self-sufficient, to have to advertise myself like I’m trying to trick people into giving me their money so I can consistently eat.

But if there’s been a running theme of the last few years of my life, it’s been the importance of getting over my pride and asking for help. Sigh.

That said, I’m allowed to be frustrated, especially when major costs are looming on the horizon. My six-year-old Windows 10 computer – that was itself the result of generous, unexpected, extremely well-timed fundraising – is about to lose official support, and can’t upgrade to Windows 11 according to the official tools. I’ve already had to replace my old phone that bricked earlier this year, and I wasn’t sure if that was going to be feasible. I certainly can’t afford to buy a new PC that can handle both the gaming and technical things I want to do on it, and I don’t know anyone personally that I can lean on to handle that cost. So Microsoft is basically holding a gun to my computer and there’s not much I can do about it.

And it’s stuff like that – needing money to replace essential things but scraping by and letting things slide into desperation instead while I barely manage to make progress on my personal projects – that has broadly defined this past year for me.

On top of all the societal and psychic damage being inflicted on all of us by The Goings-On.

Whoops, this retrospective got all vent-y and depressing again.

I want to leave off on one important positive note: The baby steps are continuing. The anxiety and depression combo haven’t gained ground on my psyche – they’ve lost ground. I’m more aware of them and how they work, and how they affect how I work. I’m still failing and faltering in so, so many ways, ways that make me a terrible Content Creator ™, not worth the webpage his Patreon squats on, but as a person I’m still putting all the (limited) energy I’ve got into clawing back every ounce of hope and spite and motivation I can to keep this going as long as possible, including making sure my body has a better chance.

And if it seems like I’m quiet and putting out nothing for weeks on end, it’s because I’m battling ALL OF THAT every. single. goddamn. day. And on quite a few days, I lose.

Which makes me, as ever, so incredibly grateful to everyone who’s kept on supporting me, or even just hanging around with mild interest. I don’t take a single one of y’all for granted. You’re all much more kind, patient, and generous people than I truly deserve.

Welp, back at it. Gotta survive to 2026.