greetings thatoddhaystack shareholders. we are not providing snacks this time around since many employees are on leave. we still need you to sign in on the check in sheet though. for those who miss the meeting we will be recording this time so that those who are out can catch up when they get back.

welcome to 2026! it will be better for me and for you. this is my thatoddhaystack guarantee. last year I never really did a proper review of 2024 in the new year. and I am Trying not to do that for 2025. I haven’t decided yet though if my yearly review is going to be a public blog post like this or if I’m going to keep it private for myself. maybe I will have a general media and project review on my blog. but for now I will just look back at december.

one thing I did that doesn’t really fall under projects or events is that I deleted my twitter accounts. I’ve been on twitter for over a decade, and I’ve watched it rapidly decompose over the past few years into something that generally Sucks To Be On. I’m a big proponent of you curate the space you want to be in, and for a while I was just doing that, but now with blue checkmarks being promoted over everyone else, the rampant surge of generative AI in every crevice, and the fact that I got censored for putting the word “cis” in a tweet really makes it no longer a place I want to be. I liken it to a bar that I used to frequent changing hands to a guy who started inviting nazis to it, and even though I was there first and am Not A Nazi, anything I do to try to avoid the nazis encroaching on my space is failing. so I am choosing to stop patronizing the bar.

december projects

for the most part in december I stuck to my goals of “just keep doing what I’m doing.” kept reviewing japanese, although I wasn’t able to add anything onto my review stack since keeping up with wanikani/kaniwani reviews during the holiday season was Enough honestly. listened to all the vgperson vocaloid highlights. read more books. watched more movies (a lot of them honestly). managed to squeeze out an oc profile at the end of the month even! one of my necromancer guys. applied to more jobs. practiced coding (although not as much as I wanted to). wrote a blog post.

I did keep picking at my horror vn but I didn’t yet finish the draft like I wanted to. somehow the last 15% of this draft is the hardest part to write. I’ve been having success recently by using a timer to write for 5 minutes at a time, since that’s such a short amount of time I figure I can at least fart out that much worth.

I finished a one-off project in december! crocheting a harley quinn hat for my mom’s cat, miss harley. I loosely followed this pattern and while the color change in the middle was kind of tricky to plan out, I think the result is Serviceable. harley looks cute with it at least.

I also finished one of my extra projects in december, completely by chance. and by that I mean I told myself I would look into it for like a half hour and then the hyperfixation grabbed me by the neck and I spent the next 72 hours furiously grinding away at it. it was porting sandalphon’s model from granblue fantasy relink to mate engine. there wasn’t really a direct guide for what I wanted to do (port an unreal engine model to mate engine) so I followed a couple different guides in piecemeal to figure it out. I did run into some problems and went to the discord for help but… people were less than helpful there haha. I eventually just downloaded the source code of mate engine and poked at it in unity to figure out my issues myself. but he is here! he is not perfect by a long shot since he’s missing facial expressions, but the tool to import relink facial animation files into blender is broken and trying to do the blendshapes manually was testing my very strained patience. so I managed to pull myself away from this project with “good enough for now” and perhaps in the future I can revisit his model.

oh, I’m not sure how much this counts as a “project” per say, but I reached cinemark platinum in december! which gets me a couple extra perks on top of the membership that I pay for. so I felt good about that.

december events

december was a pretty chill month and I mostly stayed close to home for my events. I had a holiday get together with one of my book clubs at a local restaurant that was nice and cozy. I got french toast which is kinda a recent obsession of mine…. oshikatsu photos with my irl as usual :+). my sibling ordered a mimosa flight and one of the mimosas was almost sandalnui size so that was cute.

I went to a local holiday lights drive through and tasked my IRL with taking pictures of our nuis. it’s always fun to come back to this display year after year to see what they add or change up, although this year we went later in the day so it was kinda busy.

I also went on another leg of my Library Quest, which is what I’m calling my goal to get library cards for all the neighboring counties that have reciprocal borrowing arrangements with my home county. it has been paying off, as just recently I was tipped off to an ebook that is only available at one out of the ten or so libraries I have cards for. my irl and I grabbed lunch afterwards. delicious noodles.

I had a good christmas. for once, I had christmas eve through the day after christmas off, so I got to enjoy a five day weekend off from work which was almost the greatest gift out of anything else i got. my brother got me signed copies of the books in the indian lake trilogy, which I was very touched by.

I spent new years eve alone and went to bed early, which I was fine with. truthfully, 2025 had been such a hot mess for me that I just wanted to put it all behind me and start moving forwards.

december favorites

unsurprisingly this month my favorites are themed (somewhat) around the latest ffxiv patch because I really enjoyed it. or at least, I really enjoyed the raid and the trial. still meditating on MSQ.

everything burns

I mean, you know it’s gotta be this. I really like all the music for the raid tier this patch in ffxiv, but having a song that feels like This Is Your WoL’s Entrance Theme is just too good. i’m envisioning my own esteem vs lindwurm fight mv to this in my head and it rules.

hell on rails (extreme)

after taking several patches off from seriously engaging in hard content I had so much fun playing the normal version of hell on rails that I knew I wanted to play the extreme version. it was tough but rewarding!! I blind progged a chunk of the fight before watching a guide and settling in to pf warrior it out. my friend mikey helped me out some; and I got my week one clear while I was streaming it to friends in a discord call. hearing people banter about unrelated things put me in a flow state I guess. I need to go back and start farming it but I took a little bit of a break just because I was Busy busy busy around the holidays.

I saw the TV glow

I had put off watching this movie for a long time because I knew it would explode me and god it did. the credits rolled and immediately I cried for like 20 minutes feeling emotions I couldn’t give a name to. now having some time to reflect on it I have untangled my reaction a bit. and I don’t like it. but I need to confront it. transgender entropy is something I’ve never seen discussed in a media and jane schoenbrun displays it in an absolutely gutting way. this movie opened up my soul and told me to do something about it. and maybe (hopefully) i will

january plans

big plans for january! well. not really. continuing to work on long term goals for the most part. japanese study, reading, writing/drawing for oc profiles, coding practice, job apps. I have a few smaller projects I want to take on this month though, spoons and time permitting. first one is a bit sad, but a pet website that I have been playing on and off for over a decade has shuttered. goodbye, goatlings.com. it’s honestly kind of a hot mess how it ended up closing so I won’t go into that now. tldr huge mismanagement from the owner. the project I have related to it though is that before the site went down I saved webpages of my goats and other account related things, and I want to have them up on my website as an archive.

I want to move all of my ffxiv mods to heliosphere. currently, they are all hosted on ko-fi, and I link to them from the glamour dresser and social media posts. I’ve kind of gotten sick of the glamour dresser’s heavy reliance on paid mods and acceptance of ai generated content, along with wanting for a while to move my ffxiv mods off my ko-fi so that I can just have physical items on my shop. I’m not using xiv mod archive because I’m still burned by how they dealt with trans positive mods. I really like that heliosphere has a plugin that allows for easy download and update of mods, so I am hopeful that it will stick around for a while.

I also want to move my guide to using shareX for ukagaka wiki screenshots onto the actual wiki instead of having it be locked to a discord thread. another thing that shouldn’t necessarily take too long since the information is already written out. I just need to carve out a few hours to knock it out.

I will continue to pick at my visual novel in january. I think this month I will be able to finish the draft, and then hopefully move into an editing pass. still don’t wanna give much out on it but look forward to it regardless please lol.

I might work on some ukagaka projects this month. maybe maybe not. I want to work on the wiki again (aside from my shareX guide) but we will see.

here’s to the start of a new year!