January 2026

It was our tenth anniversary this month. Sunday the 25th, specifically. We're actually not sure what day it was that we got together, which we both think is very funny. We know it was late in the month, so a few years ago we decided to split the difference and officially call it the 25th. We do still just sort of celebrate 'anniversary month', which is equally fun.

Anyway, I feel old now. Ten years is long time and it feels like we've only just begun accomplishing any of the goals and dreams we had in our minds back then. Some of theirs have changed over the years, but that's for them to write about. Mine haven't really changed. The shape of some has morphed a little, but I'm still chasing the same old things.

At the end of the month I'm crashing headlong into a massive deadline at work that I'm barely ready for, having been horribly short-changed on time to complete it, and I'm essentially doing it solo at this point because my team keeps getting picked off for other things. I also lost the client I was doing some consulting/freelance work for because they sadly folded, so work has just been constant and sometimes uncompensated stress.

In order to get my thoughts back together, I've taken up bullet journaling again with a passion. I find bullet journaling (or my own flavour of it) to be extremely successful, but I end up failing to stick with it or truly commit to certain parts of it. I decided to sit back and examine why: knowing myself, it's almost never a lack of desire, but rather a systemic block. I just have to design a better system.

I'll give you an example: I put some 2B lead in my favourite Rotring 600 pencil recently (going from 2H). I have sat and sketched almost every single night this month, which is up from not at all in December. I'm not a gear head for the sake of the gear, but rather because I cannot abide friction, and sometimes it takes a while to figure out exactly what's causing it. Sometimes it's as simple as changing the lead in a pencil and sometimes it's as complicated as rebuilding my entire way of thinking or the entire workflow that plumbs my tools together.

I wrote up some of the basics of this new bullet journal system, which mostly consists of simplifying everything. I also somewhat guiltily retail therapy'd myself a little with some new stationery, because January is my absolute worst seasonal depression month.

In my own time, I'm making slow but steady progress on the painting app, which is good news, but I'm deathly tired of reading thousands and thousands of words about digital colour, colour science and spaces and graphics APIs and all other kinds of fun stuff. It's like putting myself through an MA in computer graphics without being certain it's going to pay off and every now and then that anxiety gets to me. I guess skills are skills though.

To get a little break from this, I picked up a little prototype for a game I've wanted to make for a long, long time. It's a puzzle game about water and plants, set in a robot city. I used Forest to quickly build up the basics of the system, then constructed a sequencing tool, animation and tweening systems and a very basic editor. I've not done a terrible amount of art on it in this time because I want to get some puzzles built out in grey box form before I expend too much more effort; I've got plenty of historic sketches and visions for the aesthetic. I'm an animator at heart though, and I couldn't resist making a handful of quick animations while stress-testing the animation scheduler with different reactions to the player character's movements; stopping at different speeds, gracefully changing direction, and a handful of little idle animations which are randomly dropped in when standing still. I need to introduce more life and reaction into these movements, but it's a good start.

There were also some smaller wins worth mentioning —

• I got internet! My ISP was convinced that my new apartment was a business, something which should take a phone call to fix, but actually took two months fighting several layers of bureaucracy. I now, finally, have 900Mbp/s plumbed directly to my workstation, which is both the fastest my internet has ever been and making my work life so much easier.
• I managed to play and finish a bunch of brilliant games. My partner and I played through What Remains of Edith Finch, Return of the Obra Dinn (100% solved!) and finished Hollow Knight, which were all fantastic.
• I joined 0dd Company, a collective of makers and artists started by MVU, who was also the one to invite me (thank you!) It's hopefully a great excuse to get more work into the world with the encouragement of like-minded people.

Everything I tended to this month —

• Added Bullet Journal
• Added Composting

Interesting links and reading —

• Ink in the Stomach.
• This is an old one, but it illustrates precisely why I'm making my painting app: It's easier to rewrite the nomenclature of an entire scientific discipline than get Microsoft to make software that works.
• Emily Hare's updated website shows even more of her her beautiful work.
• A wicked deep dive into ASCII rendering with some novel methodology from Alex Harri.
• A beautifully-made essay about the design of RSS readers that's also about so, so much more.
• This is for Everyone, a small celebration of various efforts to reclaim the web from big tech.
• Studio Ghibli publishes 400 still frames from their films. I'm including this because of the Miyazaki quotes. For better or worse, everything that man says resonates with me.
• A study on dementia's effect on writing and language using linguistic analysis of Terry Pratchett's Discworld across the known timeline of his diagnosis. This is both fascinating, terrifying and has potentially huge implications for early diagnosis of dementia.
• A tiny webserver in a tic-tac box.
• Mastodon thread: a hilarious love letter to French motoring.

Some interesting and atypical resources on colour I've collected this month too —

• Mitchell Charity's blackbody temperatures mapped to RGB values.
• Randall Munroe's most common RGB monitor colours, a sample of human colour interpretations from real-world monitors.