So. Today is April 1, which means it's time for—no, not April Fools' Day; I've said I wouldn't be doing that. It's time for the first-quarter check in for how I'm doing with my resolutions for 2026. (Including the two "new" ones I added after the initial post on my 2026 resolutions.)
Short answer: Not very well!
Long answer: Well, I mean, that's the rest of this post, innit? Anyway, here we go.
- Get regular exercise
- Okay, to answer whether or not I've been keeping this resolution, I suppose it's first necessary to define what constitutes "regular" exercise. By "regular", do I mean every single day? I'm going to say no. I'm going to say... as long as I average working out every other day, I'll count that as keeping the resolution. And have I been doing that? I have not! After a strong start to the year, I pretty much completely fell off the first week of February, and only started working out again last week. To be fair, there are reasons for this, but I'll get to those at the end of the post. Anyway, how many days have I worked out this year? Let's see... out of the 90 days so far, I have worked out... 32 of them. That's not half! That's barely a third! Still... it's not impossible, if I shape up (in more ways than one?), I can still end up working every other day on average. But I've got to get back to doing it a lot more often than I have been the last couple of months.
- I have not done this. Granted, the resolution was only that I would do this by the end of the year, and the year is only one quarter over, so I still have time, but... not infinite time. I need to do this.
- Register the Wongery as a private limited company
- I have not done this. Granted, the resolution was only that I would do this by the end of the year, and the year is only one quarter over, so I still have time, but... not infinite time. I need to do this. (Yes, I just copied and pasted that from the previous entry; it holds here too.)
- Make the Akinetic Media License a thing
- I have not done this. Granted, the resolution was only that I would do this by the end of the year, and the year is only one quarter over, so I still have time, but... not infinite time. I need to do this. (Yes, I just copied and pasted that from the previous entry; it holds here too.) (Yes, I also copied and pasted the parenthetical bit from the previous entry about having copied and pasted that from the previous entry.)
- Have at least some content up on every subspace of the Wongery
- I have not etc. etc. you get the idea
- Rewrite the first hundred articles in the Central Wongery!
- I rewrote the article on the Free Republic of Avelax! That was a big one! In fact, it's now the longest article in the Central Wongery! However... it's one article. And that was back in January. And I have not finished any new articles since. So... yeah, not going great. It's not impossible I can get a hundred articles done by the end of the year, but not at the rate I'm going. I have to seriously pick up the pace.
- Write at least a hundred new articles for the Central Wongery
- Ugh, okay, I'm doing even worse on this one than on the rewrites; at least I've rewritten one article, but I've posted zero new ones. Well... okay, that's technically not entirely true. Tada has finished one new article, on procreation. But that doesn't count. Why not? Well... while I didn't spell it out explicitly, my intent for the goal of writing a hundred new articles was always that it would mean a hundred full articles about the Wongery's imaginary worlds—articles that could potentially be chosen by the random page selection or show up in the "Random Article" box on the Wongery main page. That excludes any articles with the unlisted template, which means it excludes stub articles; it includes disambiguation pages; and, to the present point, it exclused articles about real-world topics, which is just the sort of article that this one was (on procreation), specifically[1]. So... if that article doesn't count, which according to the way I'd intended to count new articles it doesn't, then yeah, that leaves us with exactly zero new articles posted in the last few months. Which isn't good. But, again, which doesn't preclude me still posting a hundred articles this year, but I'll have to do a lot better in the remaining months.
- I have not done this. Granted, the resolution was only that I would do this by the end of the year, and the year is only one quarter over, so I still have time, but... not infinite time. I need to do this. (No, I didn't copy and paste that this time; I typed it all out again. Why did I do that? For no good reason!)
- Complete and publish at least four RPG supplements or adventures
- Okay, this is something I really want to prioritize doing, for reasons I'll get to later in the post, but it is something on which I have made no progress whatsoever so far this year. Why not? Again, I'll get to that later in the post...
- Average at least a half hour a day on Wikipedia:Udemy
- Okay, I... actually am not sure how much time I've been spending on Udemy. I know I've been spending at least a half hour a week, because I've still got my "current streak" on Udemy and that's how much is needed to keep the streak. In fact, I know I've been spending significantly more than a half hour a week, because Udemy only counts the time actually watching videos, and not the time spent on "homework", on pausing the video to do exercises, or rewinding to review a bit of the videos you missed or forgot. Still, there's a big gap between a half hour a week and a half hour a day, and while I haven't been tracking the total time I spent on Udemy, in all honesty I'm fairly sure it hasn't averaged a half hour a day. But once again, it still can if I do better the rest of the year! I really want to do better the rest of the year...
- Get straight to the point in my blog posts on the Wongery
- Okay, I haven't been making many blog posts on the Wongery. There are at least four blog posts I wanted to make in the last week or two and didn't get around to writing. (Maybe I'll make at least some of them this coming week.) But in the few blog posts I have been making, I feel that yes, I've been pretty good about getting straight to the point. At least in comparison with my prior circumlocutory habits in which the putative main subject of the blog post didn't begin to be addressed until more than halfway through the post. So yes! Here's a resolution I've been keeping! Finally! I'm not a complete failure! I'm just mostly a failure!
- Draw something every day
- And here's another one I've been keeping! I have indeed been drawing, or at least sketching, something every single day. Well, okay, with one slight caveat; it depends on exactly how you define "every day". There are days I was busy and didn't finished the sketch till after midnight. But, I mean, it's still been the "correct" day in some time zones. Like, it was still the right day in most of French Polynesia. I do not live in French Polynesia[2]. But I'm still going to count this resolution as kept.
- So, do I feel like my artistic skills have been improving? No! Of course not! My drawings still look terrible! Which of course is exactly what I expected because, as I said before, I've drawn a lot for most of my life and never got much better at it; why would one more year (or three months so far) of daily sketches change that? It's been very clear for a long time that I lack even the barest vestige of artistic talent or potential. But if that's the case, why bother with the daily sketches, if I know I'm not going to improve? That's... a good question. I guess because there's a part of me that isn't willing to accept that, that insists on hoping that if I just get more practice, if I just keep drawing a little more, then eventually I will develop some level of skill and be able to produce art that doesn't look like a godawful mess. Again, that obviously is not the case, because if it were it would have happened by now; I am completely and utterly hopeless as an artist. But that one part of me that refuses to acknowledge that is still there so, even if the rest of me fully recognizes the futility, I guess I'll keep going with the daily sketches anyway.
- City '26
- Finally, there's the City '26 challenge, building a fictional city one day at a time over the course of the year. And this is another one I've kept! And without even the caveats of the previous item; I've had the City '26 entries up before midnight in my time zone. So... again, I'm not a complete failure; I've at least been keeping some of my resolutions. Anyway, there's more I could say about City '26, but instead of saying it here I've made a separate blog post on my City '26 blog.
So... there we have it. None of my resolutions have I completely, irrevocably broken, in that most of them only refer to things I want to get done by the end of the year, or averages that I can still meet if I step things up. But I do need to step things up; otherwise I'm not really on track to fulfill them. There are only three resolutions that I can honestly say I'm good on, and ten on which I haven't been doing so hot.
So why haven't I been doing better? Well, I did have something going on in mid-February that basically lost me a week, but after that... actually, after that I've been working long hours almost every day for the last month and a half or so. Which, as I've said in the past about similar periods of heavy work, has been good for me financially, but not so good for letting me get other things done. Although... honestly, I could, and should, have been getting more done than I have. I often have downtime at work when I can work on my own project—I am at work right now as I am typing this post!—but I have not been putting it to good use; I have been spending time browsing the web on my phone that I could have been spending writing Wongery articles. I need to buckle down and use my time more wisely.
Although... there are other things I can't do when I'm at work. I can write articles, sure, but I can't, for instance, actually work on the coding for the Wongery site, since that requires a PHP installation and local web development environment—I have WampServer installed on my desktop computer, but I don't think the cheap laptop I bring to work can easily handle it. I can't really do the Udemy lessons at work, partly because even if I have downtime where I can work on my laptop I still have to be somewhat attentive and watching videos on my laptop with headphones on would be pushing things, and partly because most of them involve using other software that, again, my cheap laptop can't easily handle. Obviously I can't work out at work. But I can at least work on Wongery articles while I'm at work, and I... really need to get better about doing that; it will be a far more productive use of my time than reading random Reddit posts.
As far as the exercise, one thing that's made things difficult the last while is that, while my work schedule has generally been highly irregular, for this latest job I've been on for the last month or so I've always had an early morning start. Given that I want to work out in the morning, that makes things difficult; in order to work out before going to my job and still make it to work on time I'd need to get up very early, and I... haven't been doing that. Of course, much of the reason I haven't been doing that is because I've been staying up far too late at night, and much of the reason for that is because I want to get my City '26 posts and my daily sketches up before I go to bed, and those have often ended up pushed until very late. How can I stop that from happening? Well, one thing is, again, getting more done while I'm at work... I can't easily do my daily sketches while I'm at work, but the City '26 posts I certainly can, which means one more thing I don't have to do after I get home. But also, I mean, if I could get things done before work I wouldn't have to do them after, so I just need to try to shift my schedule earlier and get more in the habit of being, as Franklin said, early to bed and early to rise. That's hard to do when I'm working every day, but the next day I have off—which should be this Saturday, unless a different job comes up that day—I'll try to make a point of getting things done earlier in the day and getting to bed early. Will this work; will I be able to make myself get up early enough to get in my early-morning workouts? Well... maybe not; I've never been good about getting up early. But I can at least try.
There are other things I could do to help my productivity, some of which I have long been saying I need to do and still haven't done. Like setting aside some time for planning. I've said before that I'd probably be better off taking some time for planning rather than spending all my time sitting in front of my computer, spending more time on brainstorming and prep work, and I still haven't been doing that. When I'm at home I'm still spending probably upward of 95% of my waking hours sitting in front of my computer, most days getting up only to use the lavatory or prepare food (which I then bring back to my computer to eat). When, for instance, I want to think up a new NPC for the latest neighborhood in the City '26 challenge, rather than just setting aside some time just to think of that, I feel like I have to be doing something else in the meantime, because just... thinking doesn't seem productive. So instead I end up sitting there paging through my Tumblr feed while maybe sort of in the back of my mind occasionally giving some thought to character possibilities, which makes it take much longer to come up with the NPC than it did if I had just focused on that. Just thinking and planning doesn't feel productive to me, but it is productive, because it means once I do start writing I know what I'm going to be writing about. Again, I know this; I've posted about this before; but I haven't done anything about it. Well, I will. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to set aside... I was going to say an hour, but let's start slower and say at least a half hour a day for just sitting and planning, away from my computer. Ideally early in the morning, if I can make myself get up early enough.
Oh, and one more thing. I think another thing that takes up time is when I have little tasks to do that in and of themselves wouldn't take a lot of time, but I put off doing them, and because I know I should be doing them I'm kind of hesitant to start another project, so I end up just... wasting time instead. Well, on Sunday I made a little to-do list of some of these tasks I needed to do, and decided I would do that that day. And I... mostly did. Well, I didn't do them on Sunday, but I did do them on Monday... mostly. I got four of the six items done, anyway, and one of the two I didn't get done was something I couldn't do yet, because it required me to have received something in the mail I thought I would have received by then but didn't. As for the other, it had to do with the Wongery forums and is... one of the four items I mentioned above that I'd intended to write a blog post about, and that I'll probably be writing a blog post about within the next few weeks. Anyway, even if I didn't get all six of them done, or even if I didn't get all five of them done that I could have gotten done, getting those four things done was still... unusual for me. Apparently writing a to-do list like that actually helps me, and is something I ought to do more often. And okay, yes, I know, writing to-do lists is basically Baby's First Method Of Dealing With Executive Dysfunction and something I probably should have tried long before now, but... well, better late than never.
So if I managed to get all those items done on that to-do list, and if I'm managing to keep up with the City '26 challenge and my daily sketches, why am I having so much trouble getting articles done for the Wongery? Well... I think there's one very significant difference between these cases. The items on the to-do list were small, discrete items I could do in less than an hour. The daily sketch I spend maybe a half hour on. The City '26 posts... okay, they can take me more than an hour, though that's at least in part due to what I was writing about in the previous paragraph about not taking time to plan, but still, they're a discrete, defined task for me to do every day. And those I apparently do well with. Again, I've succeeded every year creating a comic for with 24-Hour Comics Day, despite never managing to keep updating a daily webcomic for long. Heck, I think the reason I was able to finish this blog post and not the several other blog posts I'd intended to make this past week is that this post was supposed to be posted on this day, specifically, while those other posts had no particular deadlines. Single, discrete tasks with well-defined timeframes and deadlines I can deal with. Ongoing tasks without such set schedules... those I apparently have a problem with.
So the obvious solution, I guess, is to set myself specific timeframes and deadlines. So here goes: I will set the goal of posting one rewritten article and one new article to the Central Wongery tomorrow. Will this help? I don't know, but it's worth a try.
Of course, the biggest thing that would help me get more done on the Wongery is to not have all the time taken up by my job—even if I can sometimes make some time on the job to work on my own projects (again, I'm typing up this blog article at work right now), the job still does take up significant amounts of time, especially counting the time driving to and from the worksite. But the only way I'm going to be able to not have that time commitment is to be making enough with my creative pursuits that I don't need this job. And to do that... well, I've got to make some progress on my novel and/or my RPG materials.
Of late, the matter of getting out of this job has become especially urgent since I... kind of want to get out of here. That is to say, I want to move, not just to a different city but to a different country entirely, given that the country I was born in and still reside in, while it's long been kind of backward in many ways, is more and more becoming an actively dangerous place even to visit, let alone live[3]. However, I just don't have the means to do so. Moving to another country isn't, of course, just a matter of driving across a border or paying for a plane flight (that I could do); to obtain legal residency in a country, let alone citizenship, you generally have to show that you'd have the means to support yourself there, and I... wouldn't. As I've mentioned before, I work in a very specialized job, so specialized in fact that it's rather locally centered and I don't expect I'd be able to find work in that job outside of this city (well, this metropolitan area), let alone in other countries. And, as I've also mentioned before, I'm one of relatively few people with the certification required to do this job, but I don't think I have relevant education or experience to get work in other fields, certainly not anything with comparable pay to what I'm currently making (not that I'm making a lot of money, but well above minimum wage). As long as this job is my main source of income, there's no way I can afford to move outside of this metropolitan area; I'm stuck here. I'm actually doing pretty well financially at the moment, making good progress at paying off my debts, but I'm not doing so well that I can afford to just... drop everything and live off savings while I'm training for a different job. My only hope is that I can somehow make enough money on my creative pursuits (by which I guess I mean mostly writing) to make a living that way, but it's a thin and desperate hope.
So if that does happen, will I actually move, or am I too cowardly and complacent and will I still stay here in familiar territory despite the danger? Well... honestly, I don't know; I hope I'd be able to muster the courage to take the leap; but if it does become a possibility (a big if), we'll see. I have been considering what other country I would move to, and have narrowed it down to my top three choices... none of which, I reiterate, would possibly let me immigrate currently without an ability to demonstrate that I'd be able to provide for myself.
(For what it's worth, though, quite apart from the job situation, I do feel more attached to the city where I live than the country. Certainly my city has its flaws, some of them pretty significant, but there are things I'd miss if I moved. Not that my country doesn't have its good points, of course, and not that there aren't beautiful and interesting places elsewhere in the country, but I have no personal attachment to those places, and there are beautiful and interesting places in other countries as well. Yes, the thought of moving to another country is a bit daunting, but the thought of moving to another city within this country is just as much so. Not that I'd have any reason to do that anyway. Anyway, daunting as the prospect of moving to another country may seem, I kind of feel like it's something it would really be a good idea to do ASAP the way this crumbling country is heading. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I do not feel safe, and I want to get out of here before it's too late.)
So... anyway. That's how I've been doing on my 2026 resolutions so far. Which is to say... not all that well, but I do have some ideas for what I can do to do better. Now if I can only get myself to actually do them.
- ↑ Why does the Wongery even have articles on real-world topics like that? Well... that's another thing I intend to eventually write a separate blog post about. (In fact, I wasn't completely sure that I hadn't already written such a blog post, but it seems apparently not.)
- ↑ Yeah, I try to avoid giving too many hints about where I live in these blog posts, but in this case I'm not revealing anything new, because I have mentioned before that I live in one of the sixty most populous cities in the world (well, technically I said sixty biggest cities, but I meant most populous), and I doubt anyone would be surprised to hear that none of the sixty most populous cities in the world is in French Polynesia. (According to Wikipedia, the most populous city in French Polynesia is Faʼaʼā on the island of Tahiti, which as of the 2022 census had a population of 29,826, more than two orders of magnitude too low to break into the top sixty list.)
- ↑ Again, I don't want to reveal too much about where I live, but sadly I fear that description may fit more than one country at present.