Outlook for 2026

"Instead of looking at every item on the shelf, examine three options and then choose from that much smaller list." - Rachel Jonat, Do Less

Here's my plan for the coming year; no resolutions, no counting anything, but one needs a plan, even if only to track how far one deviates from it, for good or ill.

Games

The group games can carry on rolling as they are, with me running The Aslan Route and playing in Deadlands, Leaves of Chiaroscuro, and whatever else starts up next.

Choosing the next solo campaign was more difficult; so many games, so little time. That's where Jonat's rule of three comes into play; after a couple of months' dithering off-camera, I'd whittled the long list down to the desired short list of three:

• 5150 No Limits Maiden Voyage played straight. Fast, simple, tight focus on the story.
• 5150 for Savage Worlds, i.e. SWADE in the 5150 setting. The objective here would be to find out whether this would work for a group game someday.
• 5150 for Savage Worlds with the SF Companion added. Objectives: Would it work for a group game, and is it worth adding parts of the SFC to the mix?

In the end, I decided on the last of those. I'll give it three months, then decide whether to press on, drop the SFC, drop SWADE, or do something else entirely. Meanwhile, the important thing is to start playing quickly, before I change my mind again.

I really ought to do something with my video game collection, too. How many I'll finish I don't know, but I'll try again with Skyrim, Solasta, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. One per quarter, perhaps?

Growth

I haven't been sharpening the saw much lately, and it will do me good to learn new skills. So, I will:

• Start dabbling in AI, first with Lumo and perhaps later with Claude. My main problem here is finding a use case; I've spent decades approaching life from the other direction, simplifying things until my smooth meat brain can handle them unaided.
• Learn markdown properly, and shift my disorganised and rambling pile of notes into Obsidian so I can experiment with its graphical implementation of Zettelkasten; that method has intrigued me for years but doing it on slips of paper is too much work.
• Continue my Italian studies, possibly as far as some kind of formal qualification. Last year I tried learning French and Polish in parallel, but I had to abandon that as they quickly merged into an unholy Frankenlanguage that was no good to anyone.

Media

I'm spending too much time on YouTube, and AI deepfakes have reached the point where I'm not sure I can spot them any more; so I'll divert that time into reading and watching TV, at least until AI slop reaches the same point in those media. Which books and shows, you ask? These ones:

• The rest of Lindsey Davis' Marcus Didius Falco novels, and then on into the sequels starring his adopted daughter, Flavia Albia.
• The rest of the Wool trilogy by Hugh Howey, Shift and Dust. I understand there is to be a sequel trilogy as well.
• The TV show Sicily Express in Italian (also available in English); this is a comedy, the premise being that a couple of chancers find a dumpster with a magic portal connecting Palermo and Milan. By the people who brought you Incastrati, known as Framed! in English.
• I see Season 8 of Rick and Morty has just dropped on Netflix, and I can't resist the fast-paced insanity of that show, so that's up next.

No plan survives contact with the enemy, but let's try it anyway, shall we?