2025 in review

2025 was one of the years of all time. Far more astute observers of culture have said and written way more than I could ever sanely do so I'ma leave it to the experts. Here's my little slice of reality parceled and presented in an almost-bite-sized-piece for your amusement. 

Hobbying 

Most of you are here for the glamor shots so let's lead with that. It feels like there was a lot going on thislast year and as a result I didn't paint nearly as many minis as I have been the last few years. Due to Battletech figs being on the whole easier to paint than the normal fantasy characters, I cranked out quite a lot in the last month which elevated the total to land at 5/week which I think is pretty respectable. 

 

I hit 2,000 minis painted lifetime sometime over the summer which seems significant and though I completed 13 high quality (for me) works for the display case, I'm not sure that quality is going up all that much though they're also not going any faster. 

 

What other stuff was going on that ate up so much time? 

 

I'm Building a Game!

It was probably inevitable that I'd get back to game development in my retirement and I guess that this was the time. At the end of 2024 I started messing around with Godot and at this point I don't even remember why. Turns out, it's not only very full featured, it's convenient in all the ways I wish Unity was. 

I've always said that you want to start small and keep it small if you want to finish with your sanity at least partially in tact so naturally I picked the second biggest thing that I'd always wanted to make. Roughly a thousand hours later and it feels like it should go up on Steam for fun and almost no profit, probably nextthis year. If you're bored and want to take a look, send me a ping.

 

Gaming 

Most of my gaming happened in the last quarter of thislast year but what it lacked in quantity, it more than made up in quality. 

 

Star Traders: Frontiers (2018): ***

If you like super deep space-opera-like captain sims, this game is for you. If you like straightforward and approachable games wrapped up in a bow, you might take a pass. Star Traders: Frontiers is extremely complex and does very little to explain how the game works (insert ominous foreshadowing here). The intent (as I gather it) is that you'll play it multiple times on multiple difficulties with multiple different builds and whatnot. I completed my first game on super duper easy mode in about 80 hours. Do with this information what you must. On the whole, it's a little clunky and near the end I found the endless "jump all over the galaxy to deliver someone's coffee" style quests super tedious. I really wanted to like this one (hence the 80 hours) but I don't see ever going back to it. 

 

Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries: Shadow of Kerensky (2025): *****

There's been a lot of MW5:Mercs over the years and since MW5:Clans was released last  year, I was surprised to see a new expansion for the older game late in the year. My love of most things BattleTech is pretty well documented at this point so I had to buy it and had to start a new playthrough and had to begin at the earliest year possible so it'd be the longest possible. Notably, most of the new content is at the end of the timeline but it's not like I didn't know that. Smashing clanners is as satisfying as I'd expected and getting to go through all the Duncan Fisher missions again was an added bonus. Notably, every new expansion raises the power level a bunch so that first encounter was missing some of its edge, probably. 

 

Endless Sky (2015): ***

As a liker of space sims, Endless Sky seems to have everything I like: space-y combat, alien diplomacy, trading simulations, deep ship customization. Unfortunately, it really only delivers on one of those. The combat is iffy given that there are no ship stacking rules and the RNG can be particularly punishing even beyond the emphasis being on commanding a multiple ship fleet. The text is extremely over-wrought in places and there is just plain too much of it. The whole thing is tied up with an economic model that only a banker could love. The worst part, IMO, is that the customization system is so...fiddly. You've got multiple overlapping budgets to manage none of which is either super well documented or obvious to new players, and a fairly narrow list of places that you can get the components that actually matter that are inconveniently scattered all across the galaxy if you can even buy stuff there at all. Add to that the emphasis on multiple ship fleets and you're multiplying your frustration across a bunch of ships each with different weird sometimes hidden statistics. Not a fan of that. Also, the interface is only barely usable which makes everything just a bit more janky. I spent way too long on this game which I found to be mostly frustrating but it was free, still gets regular updates, and had a non-zero amount of legit good moments. 

 

Wildermyth (2021): *****

I purchased Wildermyth a while ago at the recommendation of a pal and I had opportunity to take a look at the end of 2025. It as a lot of aspects I really like and not terribly many that I don't. It has the trifecta I look for in indie games: distinctive style, interesting gameplay, good humor. The characters are cardboard cutouts and hop around the map in exactly the same way you would if you were using standees on a tabletop which I can't imagine isn't the intent. The dialog is all character-focused and the writing is good enough that I kind of felt bad when whupping some of the bads. It has a lot of replayability as one might guess from a game that's mostly procedural with the expected gajillion chievos if you're into such things. On the whole, it is well constructed and has a lot of charm. I really liked Wildermyth and if you've ever wondered what a non-grimdark and slightly more tactical version of Darkest Dungeon might be like, give it a shot.

 

Lego 

I hit the typical two shows again this year (BricksCascade in the spring and BrickCon in late summer) which spawned the usual flurry of activity and participated in the annual SHIPtember as per usual. We built a giant collab at BrickCon which showed well at least partially due to my insistence on lighting every ship. As a bonus, due to some very fiddly, fragile builds, we got a staff-selected award for the display. That was dope. I haven't super well documented those because, well, mostly I'm lazy but here's a collage of the shots I did take. You can find more deets at flickr.

 

Hardware Hackery

It hasn't come up super often in these uh-hallowed pixels, but I've been building computers since the mid 90s and have amassed a vast collection of mostly well-loved hardware. As a side-effect of doing a much needed deep clean on my house, thislast year, I re-organized some rooms and ended up with enough space to start tinkering again. Lots of said tinkering done and I've re-cataloged most of my collection and will hopefully be liquidating a lot of it in 2026 which pains me more than I'd like to admit. If you have a need or a want of mid-90s to more recent consumer computing hardware, drop me a line.

 

Furthermore, it's worth noting that the NAS I've had more or less since I moved to WA has been running non-stop plus or minus the (frequent) power outages we (don't) enjoy here. The drives were second hand when I got them and it's been a decade. That makes me nervous. I also ended up doing a bunch of speed tests and re-familiarizing myself with modern hard drives, SSDs, and NAS software. Fast forward a couple months and I've built a new NAS off of SSDs keeping the old NAS for backups, and have updated at least part of my network to (mostly) 2.5Gbps.  Good times.