2026 Resolutions

[kradeelav]

amused i have a habit of doing these resolutions about this time of year ~ the way i see it, it gives you a month to finish the old resolutions with a grace period and trial run the resolutions if anything needs to change. :P



2025 resolutions -> successes in meeting them

(the previous year's post is access locked given some slight sensitive personal info, but it's there for those who have it.)

• give back more to my corner of community (online kink artists)
  • originally i think I had my eyes on collaborating with fancoders when writing this, but this really happened when the itch.io censorship hit in early August and I was able to do some incredibly hands-on, real time, digital rights work in the trenches. learned a lot, learned what kind of work i'm able to do long term emotionally, learned what i'm good at (networking, resource sites), and what's most effective versus what's needed. also? learned how i want to keep taking this in the future, more on this later.

• hone time management
  • when writing this, i was starting to scroll through bluesky & tumblr a liiiittle too often again. i've since fixed this by porting back all bsky & tumblr follows to RSS feeds for good. the grayscale bro extension for firefox was also an unexpected champion since if i check a site more than once a day (such as discord), i'll toggle that site to greyscale which is such a useful and genuinely solid reminder deterrent and real friction. noticing i'm also starting to regularly post random links from the world wide web again which feels like another good indicator ~

• art projects 
  
  • (ashes & ghost, femslash strip, NaZine anthology collab, "tellius year"). while the femslash strip didn't happen and tellius year got tweaked into 'zihark year' (lol), all of the others did (and more), and getting the extra chance to draw Gaze backgrounds was so, so sick, and i still can't believe that one's happening for real. :D
  • i think releasing ashes & ghost deserves a special call-out since it got printed beautifully, released..... then the itch.io / anti-kink censorship hit not three days later, it got pulled with payments briefly frozen, and i still got every one of them shipped out internationally ~ there was additional logistics hell situations i haven't mentioned publicly but god damn. i  am fucking proud of myself for riding that one out with pretty impressive project management. the things i do for handsome old gilfs lol.

• read/see/archive more media (books/games/anime/manga)
  • got up to 58 items on the list; a little shy of the 75 that I wanted to finish the year with (it's close enough i still might hit it through the month of December tbh); but between playing more games on the steam deck, actively watching more old movies, in addition to reading books, looks like i'm holding my own. (2024 was exactly 75, and 2023 was 34). I have massive respect for folks who can hit those numbers in a single month, can't seem to do that XD

• dayjob; figure out this "manage multiple people" thing
  • still managing multiple people with a fairly good tempo! there's a promotion i've been eying; it got put on hiatus since the tariff situation kinda hit us hard, but i got a small raise, so that's a win. given the promotion situation's one of those "scheduled, will happen when the budget opens up since your position is all but required for us to scale up" situations, i feel like i'm okay here.

penning down 2026 resolutions

in a lot of ways since I was very happy (and successful) with last year's, most of these are simply continuing them with tweaks ~

• purge & prep for home move
  • as mentioned elsewhere, moving somewhat soon to a larger / more permanent space versus living and working out of essentially one room like it's been for the last five years x) i anticipate quite a lot of time dedicated to designing the space, prepping, purging (even though i live minimally as is). might even sell some of my old rare artbooks, will mention here if i do so. :o

•  digital rights / kink art circles 
  
  • erocreativeresources.org is very, very quickly turning out to be filling a legitimate need with some very interesting and resourceful allies behind the scenes. there's a pretty tight roadmap planned, it didn't take much to set it up and the "financial/emotional" bandwidth of hosting it is pretty negligible. the mental list of allies to continue to reach out to is.... exciting ~~

• finish & release zihark doujin "killing edge"
  • one strip's almost done, and i've got a pretty firm idea of the structure of the doujin & what i want to do for the other three! given this is quite possibly *the* bucket list item i've wanted to do since i was fourteen, this .... means a lot. <3
  • funnily enough this will be a ""mostly"" sfw/non-spicy doujin but there'll be plenty of bishie cheesecake don't worry :D

• continue tempo of art collaborations 
  
  • eg: Gaze backgrounds, an anthology, and a handful of exchanges. while i think i slightly overdid the tempo this year (more to do with the itch.io censorship eating up a full 3 months i didn't anticipate, emotionally), i'm still thoroughly enjoying these projects, and they happen to work amazingly as a mental warmup to more free-form drawing.
  • also hoping to learn blender as a side-branch of this! i've been increasingly frustrated at the lack of google sketchup on linux but blender (thanks to webtoon creators) technically has all of those capabilities; i just need to commit to learning them like i did krita lol.
  • also want to release my art dump for 2020-2025! the previous (2011-2020) art dump has over the years, unexpectedly turned out into a fantastically resilient way of archiving my work, and i want to start a tradition of doing one every five years.

• read/watch/play 100 items on the media list (books, games, movies, anime, manga)
  • & format the offline spreadsheet so these are trackable (like goodreads's challenge). 
  • so interestingly, i've tracked my "books read per year" all the way back since 2012 or so; in the last year i folded in games/movies/anime in that so it's more of a generalized media list where they're rated, i write down personal comments, and see how much i've been able to chill and read in a year (i have a bad habit of replaying the same games over and over and kinda want to get more worldly here).  the one thing I miss about the goodreads tracker is slightly better UX of seeing how in-progress you are during the year and what the previous years were like; and i know spreadsheets in general has the capability to do some wicked cool forms and real-time charts. not a bad skill to learn also for dayjob reasons.