a-flyleaf.github.io

time and things and such

December 21, 2025

new year

soon

photo of a sticky note with a scrawled figure crawling, shakily, out of a scribbled ravine. reads text with an arrow pointing towards the pitiful sod: “had to ask for a favor”
image unrelated.

[gripping the arm of a chair] I will not succumb to FOMO(?) I do not need to join Spotify to see what esoteric little tunes I have been listening to throughout the year I do not need to log, nor to have logged, every little thing I do throughout the year in general despite the odd and inexplicable compulsion to do so, possibly borne from journaling habits of youth and/or my archivist tendencies and/or something something existential miasma, the last of which likes to lurk about at the end of each and every year simply because it can.

It’s almost 2026.
Have you done enough?

year of @a-flyleaf (@-flyleaf?), #wrapt

  • wrote some untold fuckload of words between personal docs, playing and chatting with friends, and various little creative whims in between that caught my attention
  • played piano sporadically, mostly towards the beginning of the year while transcribing Autoheart’s “Agoraphobia”—an endeavor which is Basically Done except for the fact I wanted to ~put it aside for a while & revisit with fresh eyes for polish~ and have not actually done that.
  • pushed 142 GitHub commits, not including this one. Also not including a handful of pages and minisites that either exist solely on my machine or got tossed directly to Neocities. Random niche (private) scraps.
  • moved & re-sorted an unholy number of books for the job, which is as of writing (and will continue to be moving forward, indefinitely) of a state that would’ve been mostly-unrecognizable to me earlier in the year. Mildly surreal thought, that!
  • drew less than usual but more than last year, probably, bearing in mind that my benchmark for “usual” is still like… pre-2023, when I had enough to fill giant canvases of monthly roundups. Mentally I refuse to acknowledge that this has not been the norm for at least a couple years now, depsite both drifting hobbies and changing time-availability meaning I am objectively drawing less. Boo….
  • revisited at least 3 4 old favorite albums/artists, including but not limited to:
    • Aphex Twin’s Drukqs,
    • an indie person who I knew on tumblr many many many years ago & have not stayed in touch with but they sent me the files of their music and I still like it a lot (are you even still out there? everything under that name is an ancient dead end, if existent at all),
    • and (in the background as I write) Halsey’s Badlands.
    • Oh, and Caravan Palace! I like most of their discography except the odd remix that I don’t. Full playlist (with some other electroswing outliers) here, for your listening delight.
  • got ???into?? professional wrestling, something about which I knew basically nothing going in except for this half-hour video essay. Have since watched 4 pay-per-view events and counting. I think I understand why gladiators were a thing, now. The whole thing is sociologically fascinating to me on multiple levels but it’s also just really swell to see people beat each other up live, for sport for drama for the thrill of it all, in the modern era.
  • got back into pixel dog micromanagement game Wolvden, mostly as a way to fill idle minutes and writerly gaps; have now been playing for about 57 non-consecutive days. Unsure how long this stint will last but it’s been a chill time.
  • things watched include but are not limited to, in no particular order:
    • Flow; 10/10 very good, neat music, masterclass in storytelling without dialogue. Feels both timeless (no dialogue, no humans, not at all without a sense of place but what’s there is somewhat mystical) and fresh (animation Good!!), very nice watch.
    • the Knights of Guinevere pilot—which, listen, I probably won’t touch it again until and unless the full show releases, but it is bleeding influence from Utena and Satoshi Kon (particularly Paranoia Agent) and I am extremely here for that. Placing bets now for a disastrous lesbian breakup but maybe there’ll be a heel-face turn about it. (Hey, that’s wrestling slang!)
    • the Silent Hill 3 remake, which was extremely fun to watch & hear the streamer yell about. The final note and the different ways it’s contextualized based on the endings is incredibly haunting.
    • Arcane, as previously mentioned, and which I continue to be regular about
    • K-Pop Demon Hunters, a film which is pretty fun and did not stick in my head the way it seems to have with a non-small portion of the internet (and The Populace At Large apparently) but I’m glad it’s taken off the way it has. I’m still stunned that they dropped the whole fuckign artbook online, need to look through it, and am #manifesting this energy for basically every other creative project ever. Give! me! the Process!!!
  • scrolled past frankly too many anti-generative-art screeds that would not be out of place in some anti-Dada and/or “but (photography/digital art/insert new technique du jour) isn’t Real Art™!!” snobbery. I, too, am struck with some flavor of “oh god what are we doing“-type malaise when I see, like, misshapen claws on a self-published chapter book cover, but also every time I see people lauding the ~inherent humanity~ of art or whatever I’m just like… we’re doing this? We’re doing this, now?? This is the hill we’re dying on, art is good becuse of some transient nigh-spiritual quality only possible to be imbued by The Soul Of Humanity and not, idk, because people making things is good and fun and an activity does not need objective value by any benchmark to be worth doing?? aughhhhh okay ok I’m done. Please focus on the insane energy wasteland that this stuff is allowed to feed and stop giving me “but it’s degenerate” hives. Thank you. I hook myself at the waist with a cane and drag myself comedically off the bullet-note soapbox.
  • forgot that this was supposed to be a cheesy fun manual statcounter list at least once. Look, I don’t draft and review these posts. If I did I simply would not post, ever. It gets #writ✏️ it gets #posted📌 I spot #500errors❌❌❌🙁 post-push and fix it #SeveralMonthsLater⏳ that’s just how we do. I have to assume that if you’re still reading this textwall behemoth, this amuses you somehow.

Okay. I’m tired of numbers.

2026: Will You Do Enough

This is not a to-do list. It is just like, stuff I am gesturing in the vague direction of Would Like To Do. No promises no gods no masters etc.

TL;DR

Here’s to next \o/