How is 2026 going anyway?

| Life Kevin Work Open Source

Back in January, not long after I moved this blog, I wrote up my post about my intentions for 2026. I was thinking about it this morning, and since it's almost June and that means we're almost halfway through the year, I figured it was about time to check in and see how it's going.

  • The song is still appropriate. Every branch of the federal government is still racing to see which of their sins: incompetence, corruption or misplaced loyalties, will kill us all first. I'm betting on incompetence. My state isn't the worst of the southern states, but it's not great. The brutality hasn't abated at all, and I'm angry about all of it. I feel helpless, and that's not great. But, I will make it through this year if it kills me.
  • I have definitely fully embraced my cringe. I am wearing right-past-my-knee khaki cargo shorts right now and there's fuck all you can do about it!
  • It's still hard to be productive and do more than keep up with work and family things - because being angry all the time is exhausting.
  • The others, I've done OK on some and poorly on others. I started strong on the books, but have tailed off.

This part deserves its own section: I am doing great on using eccentric services and building my own web things! I built my dream to-do app / journal app. It's still mostly just for me as I iron out some kinks and decide if anyone will want to use it but me, but I love tinkering with it. I also started an experiment in the TechSAV Slack where we're slowly collaborating on a public domain Meetup replacement that will hopefully be able to serve as a community calendar for organizations or even towns. More details coming soon - it's still very early and moving a lot slower than I expected.

On the eccentric services side, I've done a great job ejecting myself from legacy social media. I'm completely off of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn & Twitter. No algorithms for me (I have a whole post in my head I need to write down on why you should eject yourself from legacy social media too that I'll write up eventually)! I'm still in love with Mastodon, and have recently joined Crucial Tracks, where I've been documenting my project of picking an artist to listen to every day instead of defaulting to just listening to the same playlists over and over again.

I hope you're well and taking care of yourself. I hope you're doing something fun that takes your mind off of things and that brings you joy.