I am thrilled to report that I started 2026 on a good note, with a new three-year subscription to EdX (which will hopefully help me learn lots of things but which I will probably forget about in a couple of days) and I've also bought three more ebooks from Kobo because the sale ended on the last day of 2025.

I was also hoping to get another one of these newsletters out because I’ve had this for over a year and haven’t even managed to get out an issue a month but in the end I decided that was one self-imposed deadline that I could skip. That, and the fact that the ageing Chromebook I was using to draft couldn’t keep up with my typing - add “buy new Chromebook” to my list of things for 2026. Still, my minor and easily defused anxiety was nothing compared to the people who were trying to spend $500 before it’s taken away.

Two days before the end of last year, Singaporeans rushing to utilise their SkillsFuture credits crashed the redemption system. You see, in 2021, the kindly government of Singapore created that scheme in an effort to encourage lifelong learning which gave every Singaporean a $500 credit to be used for courses and training, in-person or online, either for self-improvement career development. Naturally, not everyone used the funds, because who has time to study while they’re holding down a job, assuming that you even want to, and this was in the wake of COVID, which caused a massive disruption as we learned how to work all over again.

Study for its own sake is a luxury, and while some people (many of them retired or elderly) easily made use of the credits, other people were a little less enthusiastic - to the point where training providers were hocking their wares in public libraries and in front of supermarkets, asking people if they’d used what was supposedly free money.

Others, like me, work for organisations that have training budgets and didn’t have to tap into their own funds for continuing education. For whatever reason, four years passed by with the majority of people not using up that lot of money (more credits were offered in 2024, including a $4000 grant that could only be used for more serious career-switching or upgrading).

The credits given out in 2021 expired on the 31st of December 2025 - and everyone who hadn’t used it was desperately trying to book a course, any course, at the end of the head because otherwise they’d lose $500 that they never even had in the first place. The most favourable option was to sign up for online courses: a year of Coursera or Udemy or EdX or the like. Gives you more time to choose what you want to study, and the mode of education is self-paced, which is also convenient. But again, the problem was simply that a large number of people were trying very hard to do a fairly complicated bit of online admin, all at the very last minute.

I want to claim that I don’t know what to make of that, but I’d already used some of my money for a meditation course, and earlier in December signed up for three years of EdX for just about almost exactly $500, so I was in no danger of losing out. This is one of the few instances where I actually did something sensible, and did so early (even though it was still very, very late).

Which means that I have yet another subscription, but at least this one has no risk of auto-renewing. I hate subscriptions, as anyone who knows me will tell you, but so many things are subscription-based these days that I reluctantly sign up for things that I enjoy.

I actually spent some time in 2025 rationalising away some of them, resulting in quite a substantial savings.

(Eagle-eyed readers may notice that the version of this graphic I posted on my socials before had an approximate $600 total, but I re-subscribed to Marvel Unlimited which took 89 off my total, so I recalculated.)

In an attempt to avoid becoming a nasty old guy (see previous newsletter) I thought I would take some of that savings and put it to good use.

Locus Magazine is a mainstay of the American/English-language SFF scene, and like many publications in the United States finds itself greatly under threat from the wave of financial measures designed to keep American stupid. There are probably better causes (I donated some of my savings to other places) but Locus seems to be a good one: especially since their end-of-year fundraising effort only got about 60% of the way to their 100,000 goal.

I thought that I would support Locus, and get a subscription. The kind people at Locus get money, and in return I get something lovely to read (offline) every month as an epub. I made a living in the magazine end of the publishing industry at one point in time, and I still delight in the format.

Except that it turns out that I can’t. Despite the fact that I can use PayPal to pay for other subscriptions, when I tried to pay for a $48 12-issue subscription to Locus, PayPal throws up a window that says that I’m not allowed to in accordance with international law.

I couldn’t figure out a way around it, more’s the pity. PayPal is the payment processor, and even putting in my credit card details (instead of logging in with my PayPal account) doesn’t work. What international law I’m breaching (and why it doesn’t apply to other publications) is entirely beyond me.

I could, I suppose, try Patreon: the $9.50/month tier includes the digital issues that I want, but that’s nearly double what the subscription would cost. I’m happy with the idea of supporting Locus in the abstract, but not enough to fork out $114 a year.

So it turns out that I am a nasty old guy after all, or at least a lazy and stingy one. Is it too much to expect that things “just work”? I already expend too much mental energy avoiding AI, dodging advertisements, spotting various grifts and scams, proving to automated systems that I am not an automated system and otherwise living with far too much friction - most of which was introduced so that techbros can get and stay rich.