Aywren reflects on a rough year, family support, and an unexpected Christmas surprise: her sister gifting her a mint Steam Deck OLED 512GB with dock after Aywren talked herself out of buying one.
Tipa shares a retro-haul Christmas: a puzzle box that got gloriously mangled, plus Vectrex finds Clean Sweep and Cosmic Chasm, with some Viewpoint 2064 nostalgia on top.
CrazyKinux digs into ASTRA ARCANUM’s Kickstarter dev logs—stress as core pressure system, pre-dice combat stances, risky class identities, and cybernetics with social weight—all clearly still in flux.
Kimimi checks in on Power Dolls 3’s Windows-era glow-up—CG intro, voiced briefings, crisp 800×600, revamped team drag-and-drop setup—while side-eyeing clunkier ammo selection and smoother loader
Emily recounts a Christmas Eve nightmare inspired by A Plague Tale: Innocence: as Amicia she fights a Vitalis rat-abomination in a puzzle-y castle showdown, and calls it foreshadowing she’s enjoying
Tobold revisits the flip & write board game Tend with a fuller rules rundown (tending/fishing/chopping/mining, cards, goals) and a thoughtful riff on how “writing” components change game feel.
Stargrace captures the push-pull of Christmas—keeping the magic going for the kids while feeling the late-night loneliness—and gives heartfelt thanks to gaming friends for real connection.
Bhagpuss walks through making a cheesy Christmas video using NightCafe (Flux Schnell), ClipChamp, Suno, and MeloBytes—and vents about how image-to-image AI results feel weirdly worse lately.
Dave Winer links a Joni Mitchell Christmas song, shares an OPML subscription list of US student newspapers made with ChatGPT, and does a quick holiday check-in on his nightly email.
Tofutush offers a practical guide to naming Chinese OCs—surname-first basics, picking surnames, and a Wuxing-based method for given names using radicals and element-meaning character examples.
WCRobinson does an end-of-year check-in: gratitude for rising readership, a deliberate turn toward positivity and less social media, and a new “paragraph a day” habit for both blog posts and a fantasy
Blockade85 writes about a nonstop, noisy brain, the struggle to focus without constant devices, and a renewed push to create—especially as “convenience” and the “plagiarism machine” crowd out quiet.