2026 January Retro

What Went Well

Projects

Finally decided to give a talk at Tokyo Rubyist and mentioned it to enough people that I can't back out now unless legal just tells me I can't do it. I have until sometime in April, so naturally I'll start working on it once I get back from the honeymoon in late March. Any earlier would be wasting valuable panic-energy.

Other than that the only thing keeping my Github graph green continues to be this blog; I'm pretty sure I'm just a date-filtering system & deploy away from the new spending tracker but never seem to find the motivation. I'm sure it's completely unrelated to realising my Macbook also plays games but doesn't annoy The Wife.

Games

Despite this amazing discovery I only played 4 of the 10 games reviewed this month on the ol' Macbook. I sank the first 16 hours of many more to come into Pillars of Eternity then discovered Jump Over the Age's knack for fascinating sci-fi worlds in Citizen Sleeper, which lead to me (literally) sinking into an alien ocean through In Other Waters. Citizen Sleeper 2 is already out and looks amazing, but I'll give it a rest for a while lest I go into JOtA withdrawal after finishing it. Finally (but actually first) I also finished Papers Please, allowing me to understand what all the fuss is about even if it didn't have quite the same impact on me.

In Steamed Egg land the Winter Sale lead to me loading up on shortish games I could knock out in ~10 hours, a runtime I ended up wishing Anno Mutationem was closer to despite its amazing 2.5D visuals. Sanabi's story ended up making a bigger impact on me than the (also great) gameplay much to my surprise, and its DLC was basically a whole new (short) game. Vindilis and Hank: Drowning on Dry Land were at the extreme end of short but still made an impression with their unique artstyle and zany characters respectively.

Books

I finished the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy and found it significantly less disappointing than most other books I read as a kid, though the ending definitely left a bad taste in my mouth by not making sense/leaving too many threads hanging.

Together We Will Go and Liberty's Daughter both tackled heavy subject matter but failed to stick the landing; each had some good moments despite the overall juvenile tone though.

General Life Stuff

January 24th, 2026 shall go down in history as the day The Fiance became The Wife. Since neither of us were too interested in having a big wedding and all the attendant hooplah the day itself was just going to city hall to fill out some paperwork. We did stop off at a nearby shrine for our own impromptu ring exchange ceremony though, much better than doing it in a local government office. Luckily I married a very special lady, so even seemingly mundane days like this are amazing in their own way).

Our honeymoon will be a far more extravagant affair; we're off to Italy for 9 days from March 14th to March 23rd! Flights, hotels and tickets for the busiest attractions are all booked and I'm very excited to see Europe for the first time after committing the cardinal sin of not doing an exchange semester in Europe as an Aussie uni student. So, so expensive, especially with the Yen being so weak at the moment, but it'll be worth it! And in a few years we won't be able to spend heaps of money on travel because we'll be busy spending it on raising children!

In other travel news we made the trek out to Chiba only to be rather disappointed by the German Village we visited, especially compared to the pretty great Hans Christian Andersen park we saw previously. Happily we rescued the day by leaving early and wandering around Chiba city, leading to a nice walk around a regular but much nicer city park and The Wife learning a whole new meaning of the word 'soap'.

Finally, my annual January ritual of ping ponging between Japanese bureacratic institutions is at an end! At least for a few years. After 3 years of seishain employment I finally graduated from 1 year visas to 3 years, and my Driver's License is valid for 5 (plus I only had to sit through a thirty minute lecture). Especially great news as the current government is riding a wave of anti-gaijin sentiment to jack up visa prices 10x, something I now don't need to worry about until 2029.

Work

Despite having actual features to work on we're still not exactly focused on them; it took half a week to discuss the design doc I wrote up in preparation for a meeting with another team and now we need to wait again for my Senior to write a final version. Some days it feels like I'm just making up tech debt so I have something to do, but I also can't really pick up something like adding passkeys when we theoretically have two big work streams (even if we're not working on either of them).

What Went Badly

Making mistakes you already know not to is not one of my favourite feelings; and I definitely know now to trust 'Sponsored' links on Google. Hopefully wasting an extra ~$200 on tickets to the Colosseum and Vatican will ensure I remember to check if something is actually the official site next time. At least it was a scalper not an outright scam; we did get genuine (I think) tickets. If they were fake they probably would've used the ridiculous price we paid, not the real one which made me realise I'd been had.

Action Items

Review

Make wedding rings together

Success! Well, I did break mine while hammering it into a circle but nothing a quick re-soldering by the staff member couldn't fix. I'm really happy with the way it turned out and The Wife did a great job giving it that beaten finish I was after despite her initial reluctance to whack my wedding ring with a hammer. Would highly recommend as a shared experience for anyone looking to get married; I feel much more attached to my ring than I would if I just picked it off a shelf.

Make The Fiance into The Wife

Also success! After only several hours of wrestling Japanese bureaucracy (EVERYTHING must be in katakana) we managed to submit the documents, and The Fiance is now officially The Wife.

Next Month