Hey Look Everybody! It’s New Year’s Eve.

Another year is over and the Dark Lord Char’Nagh is stopping by to make sure we’ve all improved our vocabularies over the course of the last twelve months. I hope you’ve all augmented your verbiage.

Haiku!

Fight for your candy.
Don’t let them take your candy.
It is your candy!

I have to admit that 2019 was another year of general unhappiness and confusion for ol’ PDR, but I guess I’m hopeful that it’s getting better. My life, I mean. The world in general still sucks. But I’m trying to make my own situation better. I’m only three months from being through the bankruptcy process, for example.

I assume I’ve mentioned on this site before the way that I try to create a Goals List every year, which is mostly just projects I want to get done and culture I want to take in. I used to base it around the New Year, but this year I’ve decided to base it around my birthday. This has proven to work better, given that the last three weeks or so of every year are generally full of distractions that make it harder to keep on top of things I’d rather be doing. The way I’m doing it now, I’ve still for until January 18th before I’m halfway through my year and I’m already more than halfway through my list. I assume I’ll talk more about it in 2020, but it feels good to actually be crossing things off and counting them as successes.

I hope the new year brings more of that along.

How is it possible that a year can feel like it is over in the blink of an eye, but also be a slog to get through? I guess that’s just how aging works.

But we did get through 2018. Congratulations, us. I’m still a failure this year, as Secret Government Robots is still about twenty pages from completion. Still! It was supposed to end in 2015, I think! But I am 80% sure it will be done this year and I will never have to draw another page of it again. I wish I could be more confident than that, but I have disappointed myself too many times.

But also, I didn’t get sick this year. That’s a win! I did have a sudden upheaval in my life in the form of leaving my home of fifteen years for some other place. This did derail me, but unlike the illness, this is probably a good thing ultimately.

Overall, 2018 was a year. In spite of some major life changes, I have little to say about it. Life is just an unending blur anyway.

So, how will the Dark Lord Char’Nagh treat us as we go into 2019? Nobody can know. Such is life.

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…

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.

The Dark Lord Char’Nagh rides anew, sending lightning bolts flying and creating vast, coastline-shattering waves. Will we be able to stand this? Only time will tell.

Okay, another new year. This is definitely the year that Secret Government Robots will be ending. I’ve been slacking for the last few weeks, and this story has already grown two chapters larger than it was when I first plotted it out, but I should soon be back on track and we’ll get through it at last. One thing that will help, is that I’ve done some damage (thanks to effin’ snow) to the car I drive for work. This is going to set back my climbing out of debt by several months, but one the “bright side” I am unemployed while it is being repaired. If nothing else, that’ll give me time to work on stuff…