Forecasts

I’m hesitant to make forecasts this year because I don’t have a positive outlook on 2026. Starting the year refining a list of negative outcomes feels antithetical to this exercise… but my ego enjoys getting things right so here are a few anyway.

The US job market will get worse
The day I finalized this post my employer conducted layoffs. I don’t think we’re unique in this regard. I expect cost cutting measures to happen at a variety of businesses and since job openings have been low, a lot of people will continue to have difficulty finding employment.

“AI” branded products are going to get weird(er)
Models will continue to become more useful for average folks, agentic workflows will become more mainstream, the first “consumer” humanoid robots may ship, smart glasses with multi-modal models will be sold by more companies, etc etc. More people are going to be using these products and what that means in terms of societal and cultural impact is impossible for me to guess. I do know it’s going to make us weirder, and by that I mean norms will form that would have been frowned upon just a year or two ago (ex: bespoke entertainment, digital romantic partners, human curators that sift through the AI creations, etc.). “AI” will start to change us, whether or not we like or want it to.

The US stock market isn’t going to crash
The market seems to have detached wholesale from the health and state of the Union. The first wave of major IPOs from our favorite private AI companies (ex: OpenAI, Anthropic) could happen. An OpenAI IPO could be one of the biggest in history, for example. If we see a few of these in 2026 they will likely help buoy the market.

Overall, it’s going to be a rough year for the Western world
I hope better days are on the horizon.

Commitments

Draft Tales From Around The System anthology
I want to have the entire collection of shorts/flash fics in enough of a state of readability so I can think about the anthology as a singular work. As of this writing, I have 15 – 20 pieces in various states that could make it in—from already written and edited to just a few sentences summarizing the core concept. Some of them will be standalone, some will be broken into parts spread across the anthology. Aside from that, I’m not putting any other expectations on it. However many words it ends up being is what it’ll be. Same for page count.

Create more things
More specifically, I’d like to post to WBS more frequently, design something from scratch that I can 3d print, and make music of some kind. For WBS, 3ish posts a week seems reasonable, especially now that the home page allows readers to filter post types. My first ever yearly Big Thing was to post regularly to an older iteration of WBS once a week. Time is indeed a flat circle.

Find more users for reproze
Shipping a product is one thing. Getting people to use it is another. I’ve shipped lots of side projects but I’ve never shipped one that has a user base. My alpha testers have given positive feedback but either the experience isn’t sticky enough or my users (friends) are not the right audience. Likely a bit of both. I’d like to find a small group of users that get me closer to its product-market fit.

If you’re reading this, clicked that link, and thought “that looks like fun,” give me a holler and I can make you an account.

Finish setting up home server
There’s still a handful of services I need to re-set up on my home server (VPN, centralized logging, services dashboard, local dev environment, local DNS, all the Arr apps, etc etc).

Resume fitness routine
I haven’t exercised in five months. The last time I fell off the wagon for this long was over five years ago. There’s no excuse for this one; I got lazy. The older I get the more I’ve noticed the effects of good fitness in my every day life. I want that to remain true for several more decades. Also, vainly, I miss my four-pack. Hey, you gotta take what you can get.

Non-committal honorable mentions

I’ve been thinking about these but I’m not interested in overburdening myself this year. There’s a voice in my head that’s whispering “do less” and I don’t think it’s wrong. I always sneak a few extra somethings into my year that I didn’t have on my committed list. Maybe it’ll be one of these.

Get bundle to MVP product status
It’s already close. The rest I could knock out with my buddy Claude in a reasonable amount of time. It still needs a proxy service to fetch metadata consistently and open sign ups. It also needs a lot of UI and UX polish.

Capture more of my life
I’ve noticed a growing interest in photography and videography brewing over the last year. I already have a(n old) micro four thirds camera I barely use and a Pro iPhone. Focusing on documenting my life for myself could be the forcing function.

Renovate my parent’s basement; turn it into a small maker space
I’d really like access to woodworking tools and they have a basement that is underutilized. Aside from a washer and dryer, it’s mostly filled with junk no one uses. It could easily house a workbench, a few saws, and a sander. I’d just have to clear everything out of it. “Just” is doing a lot of work in that last sentence.

Consumption

I almost omitted this category but I really need to save face with a couple pieces of media here.

Finish The Wire
Third time’s a charm, right? We got it this year.

Play through Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Last year’s game of the year by strong consensus. With its hype cycle in the rear view, it’s time for me to see what the noise was about.