Ho ho ho! Merry new year, one and aaaaalllll!!! I’ve been ILL all holidays which, on the face of it sounds very bad, however it has somehow managed to be one of the all-time best Christmases anyway. Perhaps it was that my (fairly minor) spate of illness was just in that sweet-spot where it was bad enough that I could legitimately pull out of social events of all sorts, but good enough that I could still lock the doors and enjoy the quiet and stillness of the season without hacking my guts up! Perfect.
Cooked a lot. Laughed a lot. Bubbled with my also-relatively-poorly immediate loved ones a lot. Honestly, it was actually great.
“Oh we should visit … ah, no we can’t.”
“Mulled wine?”
“Mulled wine.”
What a holiday it was. Never been so lazy, nor enjoyed myself quite so much. Perhaps this is how we humans should be, eh? People who stop producing anything for the chilly season and instead opt to close their eyes in sync with the setting of the sun. People who put on animal furs and dig into the back of the cave with some fermented treats, who won’t move unless it’s to fart and giggle in equal measure.
Bliss.
How’ve you all been, eh? Enjoying the consequences of voting for a murderous despot? Splendid, splendid.
Silly times.
Honestly, I feel strangely positive about how everything’s going around the world, at the moment. Sure, we’re on the brink of plopping the majority of the world into the tiny little hands of four or five of the shittest examples of masculinity the planet has ever seen, but you know a big part of me feels this is more than survivable.
It’s certainly not the first time some total cocks have been given more power than the can of tinned spam that would normally denote their limit of leadership. And though it won’t be the last, I do feel like we’re slowly, slowly, slowly progressing towards utopia (certainly if you take the broad view of the last few centuries).
Yes, I do realise that we could be reasonably described as being up to our armpits in dystopia already, having overtaken 90% of the wildest nightmares of the 1950s-1970s scifi writers.
BUT … but. The bad stuff makes the headlines. Particularly when so many headlines are owned by so many with so much money, hell-bent on dividing in order to keep their little conquering business going. As if we’re all still in 16th century Florence. And with media so skewed towards division and misery, it’s easy to miss the broader patterns; the good works that are going on. The breakthroughs. The potentials. The legends, walking among us in plain view.
It’s easy to forget our humanity, lose sight of our brilliance. But it’s there, twinkling away, strong as always.
And as we lean into a new year full of its robust fears and its mustard-seed hopes, I wish us all clarity. Messages of love are those things which will always bring us into clarity, that’s how we can spot them (and their antitheses). Clear words bring us all out from the cloudwork of the shits and into the richly-oxygenated atmosphere of the real, where we can rub our eyes and look afresh once more.
So let our 2026 be decorated with clarity, as we stumble, headlong into love for one another, our dystopian-themed onesies torn from us to reveal the utopia we always were, bright and shining.
Also, boobies.
I had the flu all Xmas, no problem, powered through it with a bit a rum here and there!! Happy new year to you! Looking forward to what comes.
Boobies fix everything! And when boobies aren’t available, a nice Cup of Tea!
Ooh a lovely cup of tea! Splendid idea. (I have literally had 8 cups of tea today, I think I may need an intervention)
Happy New Year’s! Love it when minimal-stress Holidays happen.
My social battery has been zeroed out since Thanksgiving, so I gave myself permission to skip some events and leave the rest early. My social anxiety was well-managed while I was still able to make the most important connections. Success! Well, sorta. I’ve been slacking on my triathlon training (endurance cardio), which is my best (yet hardest) way to recharge my social battery (restore emotional resilience). It’s the New Year, and I’m at least getting back on the spin bike. More success!
I just started experimenting with various LLMs to help distill some of my abstract writings into more compact and artistic forms, such as dialog, poetry and lyrics. Next will come a try at using AI tools for music composition and performance, to be followed by yet other AI tools for image/comic and video/anime generation. In this, I’ve been greatly inspired by the work of Kelly Eldridge Boesch, who uses AI to make music videos like this: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1528161131759111
Sindy’s free downloads directly motivated me to take this path, as my initial eagerness to put them to use quickly morphed into deep frustration due to the learning curves involved, combined with my lack of focus and patience, producing a feeling of incessant itching throughout my mind and body. Sure, I can sketch (poorly), and I’m OK using CAD to design physical objects, but my grandiose artistic goals far exceed my meager capabilities. I’m an engineer more than an artist, so I feel I need to lean into that side of myself, to use tech tools as expression transformers and amplifiers, rather than conduits.
This is partly me hiding my head in the ground until the chaos subsides. I know I need to stay informed and involved, but it has begun to feel like self-torture rather than a noble effort to help improve things. I’m far from hopeless, but acting on my hope (beyond voting) has become too difficult for me. So, no “Save the World” resolutions for me.
Fortunately, we have Sindy to carry the torch and shove it up some appropriate asses. I am very much looking forward to more porntastic political (pornitical?) comics in 2026!
Happy New Year. Hope you’re feeling better now.
And a “Gelukkig nieuwjaar!” to you and your alter ego as well. Perhaps your malady was spread to the both of you and that’s why it wasn’t too debilitating.
This is a laugh. We have truck transportation shipping companies who used to use the abbreviation Trans for Transportation. They have been quietly removing and replacing the abbreviation and using the full word, costing thousands of dollars. Why you ask? Because Magas are canceling their contracts with them thinking that’s the trans they are supposed to hate. Fucking idiots.
Unbelievable, isn’t it. And to think 30 years ago, we thought access to information would help alleviate stupidity.
When friends despair about the state of the world, I tell them to consider what would happen if they dropped a wallet in the street with their name and address in it. They normally tell me they’d never see it again because people are so despicable. I ask if all their friends would all return a wallet with an address in it. “Of course they would”. I then ask why they think all the people they know would return a wallet yet they think strangers wouldn’t. It’s fun to watch the penny drop. And the moral; focus on the good people around you and you’ll remember that the world is full of kind human beings who just want to help one another.
Totally agree, and thank you for that image. Humans are broadly excellent, we just seem to get into rather a lot of bother when the non-excellent ones are put in charge of anything larger than a croissant.
Hear, Hear, Phartiphuckborlz. that does give us some hope for the future.
Happy New Year one and all.
We send you love Sindy, because we mirror your energy.
Very glad to hear that you had an unexpectedly good yuletide break, have to agree that variations on hibernation are the way to go at this time. We escaped to another world with lovely food and bright, cold weather and no of extra familial activity, it’s the way forward in that over hyped season. Keep up the lovely work and have a splendid 2026.