Happy New Year! #
Welcome to 2026 friends! I hope your year is off to a great start. Mine has had a sluggish start due to the fact that I had like, 4 hours of sleep combined between Dec 31 - Jan 1. Thankfully, I have a coffee in front of me and 6ish hours of sleep from last night so I’m feeling a bit better.
Hope Jam #
Hope Jam (Jan 2-19, 2026) is a brand-new event that my good friend, Lemon is hosting! Lemon says that he hopes to host a couple of these throughout the year, and I’m personally very excited about the event. With the year I had in 2025, I could absolutely use some comraderie and solidarity in generating hope this year - for myself, and for others.
The spirit of the event is to choose 2 or more activities that generate for you or for someone else! I have a number of things that I’d like to accomplish. I’ve tried to choose things that have a diversity of impact, effort, and results. Here’s a quick look at what I’m hoping to accomplish in the next couple weeks!
- reorganize my office - I often find that my mental clutter is directly correlated to my physical clutter. With a bit of elbow grease, I hope to put up some new shelves, recycle old boxes, donate unused stuff, and otherwise just reinvigorate my work-from-home space so that I can work more freely without distraction!
- cancel a subscription - I currently subscribe to Obsidian Sync to keep my notes database synced across my devices. However, with my recent homelab explorations (blog post about that coming soon…? I hope?) I’ve found that I can use my NextCloud instance to synchronize my notes. I will be donating my cancelled annual subscription from Sync to The Trevor Project
- practice emotional vulnerability - in my never-ending fight to shake-off the shackles of toxic masculinity, I want to message a friend or two about how I’ve been truly doing lately. I share a lot about myself on the internet; in my Twitch streams, on Bluesky & Mastodon, and in my Discord. However, that always comes with the smoke & mirrors of social media, and lately, I’ve come to realize I really need to practice being vulnerable with some trusted people so I don’t just melt into a puddle of anxiety
- write 1-2 blog updates about Hope Jam - we’re already doing this one! I want to start using my blog more frequently and the new Hugo re-design is a great reason to start again. Even if updates are short, I just want to have a space where I can word-vomit more freely than I can when there is a character restriction.
- make a Picotron proof-of-concept for a new game - I took a long break from game development to focus on my health, and while pursuing more answers & treatments for my health is a top priority for 2026, Hope Jam is a wonderful opportunity for me to do something that is both creative and joy-generating. I’m doubly motivated now after seeing Corgispace on Steam - a delightful bundle of PICO-8 games in a delicious package!
What is hope to me? #
I think to me, hope is a combination of two things. I think it starts with an honest acknowledgement of where we are today - the good and the bad - and ends with a vision of a future that is a bit better. It involves imagination and whimsy, but also I think it is very grounded and comfortable with nuance and compromise.
I think hope is driven a lot by contentment and gratitude as well. Sometimes when I’m feeling really down, I find that it is helpful to start listing very small things that I’m thankful for. A bird on a tree, or tater tots for lunch, or a cozy blanket to snuggle into. It helps to take me out of the despair that’s in my head and ground me in a reality where I do have some of my needs met and I’m doing okay.
Hope is a weird paradox like that. It needs discontentment to exist, because there has to be a desire for a change - a wish for a better future. There also needs to be contentment though - being grounded with gratitude means that we can have a foundation to build from. Hope is very hard to cultivate when you don’t have an emotionally safe space to build from.
I really hope you’ll consider joining me in Hope Jam 1.0, and a big huge warm thank you to Lemon for putting together this lovely event!
