I am extremely late in posting this, but I’ve been incredibly busy in 2026. In 2025 I ended up playing 2 days (48 hours) less than in 2024. It would have been way less if I hadn’t been playing Slay the Spire while exercising. More on that below.

Games Played in 2025

1. Slay the Spire (4 days, 22:42:57): You may remember that, a few years ago, I played a lot of Slay the Spire but eventually decided Monster Train was better. Before going on a flight I saw that this game was on sale in the Google Play store. It joined Gwent as the second game on my phone. Having it available for random moments of play made its play time rise up throughout the year. In fact, on the all-time charts it rose from the 39th position to the #4 position. I’ve been working, without success, on beating the final area of the game (essentially new game +).

2025 was the year I leveled up my TTRPG skills (no pun intended). It started off with my participation in New Game Master Month in February. Kobold Press was a sponsor and had a coupon for the core books so I moved off the free rules and onto the main, published rules. I consumed lots of TTRPG content on YouTube, reddit, and enworld - lots of it focused on being a better GM or a more creative GM. This may have come out already if I published the other end of year blog posts before this one, but TTRPGs ended up eating up a lot of free time and reducing the time I spent on reading, video games, and programming as the year progressed.

Trends

Just like last year, I spent a lot of time listening to the Chillhop seasonal albums. They provided an easy soundtrack to work without any distracting lyrics. That said, there were a few exceptions to that. In February I used Spotify to listen to Bad Bunny’s New Album “Debi tirar más fotos”. In March I made a Cover Songs playlist and spent a good chunk of the month listening to it. I also listened to a lot of Kill Lincoln while prepping for their September concert. When I wasn’t listening to chillhop or those albums, I mostly listened to random music while at work. For some reason, the random radio doesn’t work on the phone app for me, so if I wanted to listen to random music while on my phone, I would listen to my favorites radio. I have a decent amount of tracks so it’s not too repetitious, but it does tend to concentrate the songs I listen to. Also, when I was at work, if I wanted to listen to a whole album, the design of funkwhale biases me towards more recent additions as those appear right on the home screen.

Since I started making my end of the year posts this is the year in which I did the least amount of programming. This was actually slightly done on purpose. When 2024 was ending and 2025 was starting I looked around and realized that I only have a few years until Scarlett is an adult and a handful after that before the twins are adults. I don’t want to get all Cat’s in the Cradle about it, but looking at my own life, I know that even if we maintain the best relationship, the kids will never have as much time to hang as they do now. So I prioritized playing with them - mostly TTRPGs, but also video games and whatever else they wanted to play. Programming is often a solitary pursuit and most of my utilities do what I need them to do anyway. I also spent of a lot of my weekends cooking and baking - again providing for the family.

When 2025 started, I had 2 goals - to get caught up with the October Daye series and to read my Science Fiction and Fantasy magazines more regularly. I was able to finish October Daye, but things fell off a give on the magazine front. I read many, many more October Daye short stories than are listed here. Many of them were not on Goodreads, so I couldn’t track them. As I got to the second half of the year, my reading fell off as I spent a lot of my free time planning for various TTRPG campaigns that I was running. I did just about finish my re-read of my Discworld books. I just have Snuff and Unseen Academicals left, but I wasn’t a huge fan of them so I don’t think I’ll read those.