I must now face the wrath of the Dark Lord Char’Nagh, for I have failed him this year. I set a bunch of goals for myself at the start of 2017 and I not completed them all in time. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised about that, considering that I apparently labelled last year’s End of Year post as the “2017 Ender” so, as far as this site knows, the year was over before I even started on those goals. I doomed myself!

Realistically though, I did alright. Only three goals on my list were not completed. The sad thing is that two of them were the biggest projects I set for myself:

Obviously, one of those is Secret Government Robots. My webcomic is now several years past the time it was supposed to end. I swear I have worked on it. I’ve even got pages fully completed and ready to go up, but it remains incomplete. One obstacle I’ve got here is that I’ve finished the story in my head and in my notes, so all that is left is the drawing. The drawing is my least favourite part of doing a webcomic. I am a reluctant artist. And I don’t really have an audience here. This is a story I told for myself, and myself knows the ending. But I’ll get it done.

The other of my largest projects this year was to read the Decameron. I didn’t even get halfway through. Other reading-based goals included just “Read Ten Novels” and “Read Two Collections of Short Stories” and I beat those easily enough, then exceeded them. I spent lots of time reading extra books when I ought to have been reading the Decameron, because it was a written goal of mine. This is a symptom of my second obstacle toward getting these goals done, they were both pretty daunting. I put them off as long as possible, to focus on other things, and then as the end of the year drew close, I knew I wasn’t going to get them done, so I just didn’t do them.

Clearly I need to find another way to focus on large projects. Perhaps the best thing about setting those goals is that it’ll train me to recognize how I focus on things and I’ll be able to plan accordingly in the future. Perhaps.

(I mean, also I was sick for three months of 2017. The kind of sick where even reading was hard for me to focus on. I didn’t want to use that as an excuse, but I have to admit, it did happen. Let’s hope I won’t have that in 2018.)

As I said, there was a third project I did not complete. It’s just a minor little thing (though it got more complicated as I went on), and is about half done. I don’t feel as guilty about not finishing, and still intend to do so this year and put it on the site. I will say no more at this juncture.

So this year, I’ve set fewer goals of some kinds, and more goals of other kinds (expect more Beekeeper Reviews this year than last, for example), but I still feel like I’ve got two big projects (and one small one) hanging over my head. Let’s try this again…

Since I’ve been free of illness, I have had less of a need to do updates, but I’ve got some time so I will do so right now:

The big thing this week was a minor, but expensive, car problem. I am used to one big car problem every winter, except for last winter when the car did not break down, but I did. So, I don’t know if the recent problems are a leftover from last winter, or if this is the first and only problem that I will have until this time next year. Let’s hope for that one. Anyway, it was just a case of replacing the rotors. Cost me about seven hundred bucks. Coulda been worse.

Apart from that, little to report. I am trying to work my way through the goals I set for myself to accomplish in 2017. I am almost done goals related to reading and have been making progress on goals related to writing. One goal that I have really been slacking at is Secret Government Robots. It’s as if I have this mental block where I want to get all the other goals done so I can focus on it, but that just leads to me not working on it. And 2017 is nearing completion, so I had better get going.

The year of 2016 is coming to a close and the Dark Lord Char’Nagh is here to demolish what came before and hopefully replace it with something better. Hail the Darkness of Char’Nagh!

“This is definitely the year that Secret Government Robots will be ending,” I wrote last year. Oops. I am afraid that after the monetary issues that started my year, I fell out of the habit of doing the comic, and never really got back into it. It’s been a rough year in many ways and I haven’t been as productive as I would have liked. The only real upside, if it can be called that, is that it seems like it has been a rough year for a lot of people, so if nothing else, I am kind of in the zeitgeist. That counts for something, right? Right?

Anyway, I’m going to hopefully get SecGov done for real this year. I’ve actually got about fifty pages pencilled that I “just” need to scan, ink, color, and letter. But that fifty is, I estimate, only about half of what is left. But once I start getting them online, they’ll all follow. Otherwise, what creative energies I did expend in 2016 have been on projects that don’t really have any immediate payoff (as well as the creation of a host of alien species that nobody but me has any interest in). Ideally, in 2017 I will get SecGov done so that, if nothing else, I can feel less guilty when I work on other things. I’ve said it before, but it is a good thing I don’t have an audience craving this stuff or I’d feel even more pressure.

Haiku!

Potatoes for sale!
Get your fresh potatoes here!
But them, you morons!

In other news, the little add-on thing that was putting my Twitter posts onto this site seems to have ceased to function and I have no idea how to replace it. Without those little blurbs, this site seems to have even less content than I can condone. I guess I will have to start to try doing little post here now and then too. Geez. So much work.

Anyway, 2017. Let’s go.

In the interest of bulking up the amount of content I got onto the site before the year end, here is a bunch of sentences. BUT NOT JUST ANY SENTENCES! This is a list of sentences that, according to Google, are not appearing anywhere else on the Internet and therefore I am cool and original for having thought of them.

Go!:

• “Never trust the gerbil.”
• “Humans should colonize Earth.”
• “Do beavers know what time it is?”
• “Let Jesus bake the cake.”
• “Don’t let Jesus bake the cake.”
• “The doctor told me not to touch a butt.”
• “Shut up about igloos!”
• “My philtrum is just right.”
• “Schools need to teach about trilobites.”
• “The best movies are long movies.”
• “Osmosis was invented by frogs.”
• “The internet has sentences on it.”

There! I’m done! What more do you need?

So anyway, a buncha years ago I created a blog on which I wanted to post stories while hiding my identity. A secret pseudonym identity where I could just write more things and nobody would know. Why? Why do I do any of this? For my own amusement.

But, as should be evident by this site alone, I haven’t had the time to write as many prose things as I’d like. For a while I was getting stories done both here and there, but I let it slide. And then I started a webcomic and then I went back to school and then I started my Super Sunday things. Before long I was getting things done here with some consistency, but I pretty much forgot about that site (but never the story I was telling). I recently realized I haven’t updated that blog since 2012. So, I quit. I’m going to fold AbatwaX’s stories into this site over the next week or two and hopefully get back to them here someday. I admit, it was somewhat foolhardy for me to try working under a pseudonym before I even had a regular writing thing going on here.

Also, I did some short stories for my Creative Writing mid-term. I’m going to transcribe those and have them up over the next week or two as well. This will bulk up my prose section a bit. Obviously, nobody cares about prose stories, but hey, they’ll be there for me and that’s what I want.