Links: New Year Edition
I've cleared all my open tabs for a fresh January. Many of these have a new year theme.
Starting off with Adam Newbold's 2026 one-page calendar at Neatnik. I've printed off a couple.
In tabletop news, there's Press The Beast's Campaign 2026 getting lots of traction and I enjoyed Brackish Draught's Answering the Perpetual Questions of RPGs, also Orthopraxy's Year in Review, and Elmcat's 2025 in blog data building on the blogosphere map.
Victorian diary writers kicked off our age of self-optimisation from Aeon: 'Our cursed age of self-monitoring and optimisation didn’t start with big tech: as so often, the Victorians are to blame.' The Victorians are so often to blame.
We Will All Be Cool in 2026 by Sam Jennings made me laugh:
In 2026 people will get so tired of the term Romanticism, many will begin calling themselves Modernists. As a result, major Tiktok trends for the year will include purposefully contracting Spanish flu and getting really into bullfighting.
Here for this. I love me some Romanticism but I also love me some Modernists.
New year, new public domain stuff. Great roundups from Jxself's The 2026 Public Domain Freedom Jam and The Public Domain Review's Happy Public Domain Day 2026!
Some excellent vintage sea monster illustrations like this fine young lady in Sea Monsters Unmasked and Sea Fables Explained by Henry Lee from 1883, on the Public Domain Review.
The Guardian roundups of last year and coming up for 2026.
The Shit No One Tells You About Writing has a piece on critique partners which I agree with on how much it's about community as critique, as well as how to find people. Which seems to be a widespread issue.
No jokes about judging them but book covers are an absolute art form, look at these beauties collected by Lit Hub: The 173 Best Book Covers of 2025. Pan, Dengue Boy, The Salvage, Galapagos, Hellion, Moderation, and Loca are particular favourites.
The “hero’s journey” isn’t as universal as you think from Big Think. Every time I see this stuff it's like, yes, obviously, thank you, but also there's always some good new resources.
Arden put together a fun personal curriculum for the winter, which looks super interesting in itself but also great tips on how to structure a curriculum that I am definitely going to be using.
VH Belvadi's write-up of the December IndieWeb carnival on the IndieWeb in 2030 is great, and there are so many great posts, of which I especially enjoyed Z1NZ0L1N's They said the web was dead:
You have to understand that i thought the web was dead. They told us that after the great AI metastasis of 2028, it was impossible to clean up the mess, and they had to pretty much reboot the entire internet. Apart from a few fringe non-profits, everybody agreed that strict digital ID control would be necessary to prevent rogue agents from ever slopping the networks again.
Obviously we've all seen A website to destroy all websites which is beautiful and inspiring and also needs to be counterpointed with posts like Bix's Quite achievable for whom which references Coyote's Which Part of the Indie Web Ethos is the Bigger Priority?.
Also, I loved everyone's end-of-year and new year posts. I can't link them all but I really appreciated them.