"You're gonna put a lot of effort into mastering things that, to outsiders, appear inconsequential, and to experts, insignificant. But that doesn't mean it's not an accomplishment. Good job."

I am quoting Pat Gill, once producer for Polygon and now self-proclaimed "Computer Fool" [x]. He's talking about what it may feel like to figure out fighting games for the first time, but really, these are words that I stand by any time I'm trying to figure anything out.

Oops, I got ahead of myself there, didn't I? Hehe. Heyy, what's up? How was 2025 for you?

I'm trying to channel rizz as learned by an FF14 friend! Is it working? It's definitely not working.

What can I say about 2025? It's been a formative year for me, I think. The sort of year that, like Pat Gill said, would look inconsequential to strangers, and insignificant to anyone who's lived a long load of life. When I think on it, I haven't done so much nor made any progress; and yet when I lay it all out in front of me, the things that I've read, the things that I've studied carefully, everything that I've made, it's an undeniable sight that some progress was made.

I want this post to be like a walk in some sort of outdoor garden museum. The wing to the west will contain all the readings/listenings that have left a sizable mark on me, while the wing in the east filled with the little things I've made. Then, maybe on the walk in the hallway back to the entrance, I'll think about what I want for this coming year.

The Things I've Seen

Welcome to the West Wing. In the first mark of the walk, I'll have to take you to Thomas Pavel's The History of the Novel. True to its title, it's a recollection of early narratives found around the world leading up to what we understand today as a novel. This is a must-listen for me. If you are reading this, you should stop and just listen to Thomas Pavel tell you about some stories. Trust me that you will find it leagues more amusing than anything I have to say here.

The spark that started me off in Pavel's lecture was his explanation of stories throughout history. One chain of stories, he describes, is formed of idealizing traditions, i.e. heroic, chivalric, noble, those sorts of things. The other chain is what he considers a derogatory response to tradition, stories where "human beings are so terribly imperfect, they are so bad, okay, they cannot do anything properly, or they are really evil." It occurred to me then that even in Don Quixote, a novel written and published 400 years ago, the romanticizing of chivalric knights and princesses were a distant, storied thing.

I really, I have to stress, I found it profoundly funny and amusing, the fact that humanity has been yoyo-ing back and forth on the "we're so good" vs "we're so bad" camp for literally thousands of years. Growing up, I definitely wanted to idolize the cynics I saw in my youth, because they seemed inherently more complex and smart and contemporary than the "simpler" people who preferred stories with good people and good endings. What an embarrassment for me to find that these folks have always been around, side-by-side with the idealists!

Breaking that youthly assumption was passing the first door. After that, I found it so much easier to engage with the things I actually enjoyed reading on the regular; and when I said "so much easier to engage with," I meant it. I read a shit ton of Asian novels online, each one around a hundred chapters which is like, the equivalent of 4 or 5 half-inch-thick books, the sort you might pick up for a casual read while traveling. I actually did not realize the amount of words I had consumed until I sat down to compile the list of titles to rate them, and the list just kept going and going. Many of them were queer (BL or GL), a fraction of them were heterosexual, but the important thing is that most of them were the same variations on like, a handful of tropes. Transmigration. Time regression. Unexpectedly falling in love. I really couldn't get sick of them.

I realized afterward that the appeal of these stories for me was rarely the content, but more about the people who were writing them. Between those layers of narratives, regardless of whether they were expertly crafted or not, I would sometimes find some true treasures. There were a lot of people who were clearly writing to create a sense of comfort and many people who were layering their narratives with the wildest agricultural/economical/psychological/geological details that they had picked up from school. It was an endless source of entertainment for me. What I didn't expect to find, however, was the incessant drilling that you have to take care of yourself, no matter how difficult things may get.

I am reminded of the beginning of a talk on queer histories in American art in 2023, where art historian Ksenia M. Soboleva says that "queer people are forced at a very young age to think about the world and the politics that rule it in a critical way, because we feel rejected and we feel displaced, and in order to envision a world that we want to be a part of, we have to identify the power structures that repress us." [x]

I belong to a generation of people who thinks that everyone who writes around the same tropes is inherently uninteresting. Adherence to these tropes imply that they all consume the same thing, ergo the feelings that they express in their writing are recycled and have little value on their own terms. Having read the absurd amount that I have of this so-called slop, I no longer believe this is true. It's difficult to place a tangible and easy-to-explain meaning to these things, because more often than not they are written by people who are boldly putting things out there without worrying so much about the deeper implications or the finer lines, but I really do feel it over and over again: the feelings of being rejected and displaced, of attempting to make a world that makes sense of the shadows imposed over our shoulders; to still interweave all of that with a firm insistence on looking after oneself feels so special and valuable, no matter how plain or poor each story reads.

And so, I begin my next arc. The next room of the West Wing. The Greatest and Most Pathetic: Queer Style and Failed Masculinity in Postwar Soviet Unofficial Poetry.

As Thomas Pavel previously describes, there are stories idealizing traditional values and there are stories disparaging from them; always they have existed. Hence, in the late Soviet era, where societal and literary ideals are pushed to the forefront, there are also words of failure. In many of the underground and unofficial poems cited in this paper, a portrait is painted of the many different facades of failure: lazy, selfish, perverse, incapable, unwilling, and more. It's clear that their intention is neither to boast nor embrace finer ideals; sometimes, the message they send is no deeper than the words placed on the page. Still, to me, through all that distortion and poor, imperfect form, they are worth every word.

The Things I've Made

As a practitioner of failure myself, I have a pretty neat track record of never finishing the stories, the notebooks, the sketchbooks, and honestly any project that I start. Particularly, I like to mess up my intentions. I'll litter my sketchbooks with recipe notes, litter my notebooks with scraps and smudges, ruin my projects and stories with every reason imaginable.

Welcome to the East Wing! This year has been different. There are a few notebooks now, some with my stories, some of the things I've read, and some about the things I've read. I keep a sketchbook that I insist cannot be filled wholly with text; there has to be a drawn element on every page, and that seems to be working out well. I have a few little crocheted guys, I've made some music to torment my friends with, actually, I've made a lot of little stuff purely to torment my friends with...

Life feels so different when you make tangible steps forward. It sounds so silly, but I really think this is the first year that I've started anything and then followed through. The biggest change was accepting that natural feeling of resistance. I've always tried to go for "push through" & "exposure therapy redux" strategies, and it works short term, but never long term. I had to admit to myself that it is perfectly normal to resist learning new things or keeping new habits; like 95% of the time, it's not because I don't "actually" want to do it, it's because I'm not used to doing it often.

After having made that effort of finally understanding myself and how I work, I feel like making strides is finally becoming a little bit less daunting.

This Coming Year

When I wrote this recap last year, it was a little less unhinged and was more clearly an outline of what I'd learned and what I wanted to do.

Let's see... "more writing, more drawing, more reading," yep, did that! We're going to ignore the bits about coding LMAO. Maybe I'll feel a little less intimidated about that this year. "Practical experiments for drawing/writing" and "physical projects," I can tick those off as well! Probably more of that this year. I'm adding more ambitious projects on the agenda, but, well, they're the type that are better to brag when I don't say what they are.

I'd like to be braver, this year. I think that's my one big ambition. Everything else that I need to do, I trust that I will do.

I hope everyone has a nice and kind year. Eat plenty of good food, live plenty of good life. You know, all that jazz!

| >:3c