2025 was an abysmal, stupid year. Vast amounts of figurative and literal blood had been spilled. The playing field is littered with corpses, the seats are soiled, and those in the back rows of the 500s are fighting over who has the better view.

2026 is coming in like: Scream Saver (Trailer)

I bought a Nintendo Switch 2 this year (funded mostly by selling a lot of old games which itself is a side story). Literally the first time I’ve been contemporaneous with a home console since the ‘00s. One of the early launch window games, which I haven’t played, was Chronos. It had a marketing line that got lodged in my brain this last half: "Survive two distinct eras: a ravaged future and 1980s Poland."

As a child of 1980s Poland, and a father in this ravaged future: I’m trying.

I’m trying.

I’ve never been a big resolution type of person. Motivations to improve your life don’t follow the flips of a calendar. Struggles persist for years. We quit smoking on a random spring day in London 14 years ago, fed up and nearly out of rolling papers. We ostensibly went vegan on new year’s 2016, though I think we had one final brunch that weekend. There were minor lapses and mistakes. Eventually it sticks.

It’s a process. That said, I did want to give myself a few quantifiable goals for the year:

2026 Resolution #1: Clean up (tabs), don’t horde (tabs). 

I have a hoarder’s attention. I leave tabs open to get to them later, to read them later, to write something about them later, and I never do that later. When later comes, I’ve moved onto other tabs and articles. 

At the end of 2025 I had several hundred tabs open across a half dozen browser windows. My phone’s tabs are perpetually near the arbitrary 500 limit. It’s stressful. 

Close them.

2026 Resolution #2: Write More. At least 100k words.

“SMART”, they say. Specific. Measurable. Achievable. Etc. 100,000 seems like a lot; our brains are not wired to think at those scales. Then you let your rational side take over and realize it’s a little over 8,000 a month. Freeform. About anything. Seems fine. I’m already 1,554 words in.

2026 Resolution #3: Read More.

In hindsight I have read a lot of books this year. Children’s books. I’ll keep doing that, though what I mean is to read more at my reading level. Novels, non-fiction, magazines, so long as it’s physical and not blasting photons into my eyes. I don’t have a good baseline target so more.

2026 Resolution #4: Make Something Physical.

The internet is dead—long live print media! (Elysian Press), ‘The internet is dead.’ Long live print | CBC Arts, Tech once promised connection. Print magazines are delivering… | Huck, Gen Zine: DIY publications find new life as a form of resistance against Trump | US news | The Guardian

Trend chasing mother fucker. I don’t necessarily mean make a zine though. This is just the most obvious thing. I had been making little story book scenes with my son this year. I had printed more photos last year. Maybe I should take up pottery.

2026 Resolution #5: Make Something Digital.

Despite everything the internet has become, and the monopolist powers that have seized all of tech in their stupid grips, and the capitalist extraction that has consumed any form of “gaming”, I still have a love for the medium. Yet I haven’t, even at my job, created anything in a long time. Time to fix that.

The following is a dump, loosely organized by topic, of a large percentage of the tabs I had hoarded. They are closed now. Some are read, some are unread, all languished in a tab so tiny only the favicon was visible. Somehow there’s more Atlantic articles than I’d prefer. And other neoliberal rags. Not sure where those came from. I guess it’s good to know what the neoliberalists think, the enablers, as much as the fascists.

Before I get into the dump, I want to highlight this piece because it satirizes the biggest honest to goodness actual secret theme of 2025: I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (November 2025).

Anyway,

Is the AI Bubble About to Burst? (Verso, June 2025), AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity (HBR, September 2025), Armed police handcuff teen after AI mistakes crisp packet for gun in US (BBC, October 2025), The guru of the AI apocalypse (New Statesman, October 2025), Why AI Breaks Bad (Wired via archive, October 2025), Executives Are Adopting AI at Higher Rates Than Employees, Study Says (Business Insider, October 2025), 

Meet CoreWeave, the AI industry’s ticking time bomb | The Verge (The Verge via archive, November 2025), Why A.I. Didn’t Transform Our Lives in 2025 | The New Yorker (December 2025)

Hmm, I wonder what 2025’s biggest topic of takes and opinion pieces was? For something that is the doom of writing, it’s promoting a lot of writing.

Pentagon Unveils New GenAI Platform, It Immediately Starts Flagging Pete Hegseth's War Crimes (Above the law, December 2025.) 

The Pentagon’s Preferred Propaganda Model - The Atlantic (October 2025), Criminal complaint against facial recognition company Clearview AI (Noyb, October 2025), ICE is out of control and beyond repair - by Paul Waldman (Oct 2025), Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves (404, December 2025), Watched, Tracked, Targeted: Life Under Surveillance in Gaza (December 2025), Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State | The New Republic (December 2025.)

The group chats that changed America | Semafor (April 2025), #29: Poison, Poison Everywhere - by John Loeber (October 2025), A Confederacy of Toddlers - The Atlantic (November 2025), The Longest Suicide Note in American History - The Atlantic (December 2025), Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich (December 2025.)

Clickhole: Awesome: Substack Will Now Include The Estimated Time It’ll Take For You To Skim Through An Essay And Find The Bit That Confirms Your Miserable Excuse For A Worldview

Another tab had this old clickhole joke open for too long. 90% of my CPU is spent keeping YouTube videos hidden in background tabs in Chrome.

I also had this Trump response from a rally, posted on Twitter, open in a tab for a long time, because it truly was a preview of this era of bullshit and incompetence.

When Is It Time to Flee? | The New Republic (November 2025): if you’re asking then the time has passed. The Doom Spenders - Macleans (October 2025): not to get into financials but were I to be laid off in 2026, a very real possibility, our very real possible solution to some of our debt is “now is the time to flee”.

RSF massacres left Sudanese city ‘a slaughterhouse’, satellite images show | Global development | The Guardian (December 2025), I did not understand I grew up in a concentration camp until I left Gaza – Mondoweiss (December 2025), It was lethal to be in Gaza this year, and deadly for those who tried to tell the world | Jane Martinson | The Guardian (December 2025.)

And that is where the real soul shredding starts. The media failure. The real bloodshed that makes me worry for what’s to come. There are already signs of escalation with Somalia, and Yemen, proxy wars, war crimes. I fear the silence. I feel powerless against it.

2025 was the year I finally deleted my twitter account. I know, it should have been sooner. It was a cesspool, yet it still had some people reporting the on-the-ground reality in Gaza and the rest of occupied Palestine. Short videos, reports, posts, all recording horrendous crimes that the other `social` sites immediately silence and ban.

I still have drop site news, and some others, in my mailbox. I see some long-form reporting bubble out sometimes. Rarely. Maybe it’s better for my mental health long term to not see those horrors in their raw form. I don’t deny that. Though I also feel guilty about it. I feel sad. Entire populations on this earth are dehumanized, creativity is dehumanized, accountability destroyed, with emotion and empathy abased. 

We’ve had a few encounters with people recently, in supposed progressive downtown Toronto, in-person, away from the internet, who were truly mask-off. Vile opinions voiced openly. Power has been granted to the sociopaths and everything is crumbling in their wake. 

This is where I left this last night, and this morning I woke to the news of the illegal raid on Venezuela with the kidnapping of President Maduro. I don’t know what to do with this news, with this rage.

Welcome to 2026. The worse sequel to 2025. Happy New Year.

Corrections and Addendums

In the last email I attributed the fantastic Nept Polarization album by Xenia Reaper to XENOPLEX, but that’s just Xenia’s Bandcamp name. It was released on Delsin Records, which had some good stuff this year.

Listen to this

Skyline 4 / Someone To Call My Lover (Hustle Cry Edit)

Facta with the holiday banger. Yeah, maybe it’s tone deaf  gesticulates wildly but it has been my jam to start the new year. Released for Christmas, it’s a fun, poppy, Janet Jackson edit at a “name your price” cost.