January 2026

Mira here

We maybe expected the end of the holiday season to mark the easing up of things for us. That has not been true on a local or global level. Actually, January was a really rough month. Work deadlines that had seemed workable at the end of December turned out to not really be so, and a lot of evening work resulted from that. It isn't really the hours that make it difficult, though, but the pressure and anxiety of everything. We were quite fragile this month, probably because we never got much rest after the "holidays" and because January marked a large amount of snowfall, which triggers a looming anxiety in us. Getting up every morning has been difficult. We're fortunate to have the support of a lot of friends, but it's been easy to see that everyone else is also, separately, having a hard time these days. The worst seems to be past, now, and it's February, and all we have is hope for a better future going forward.

Streaming has kept us a lot more stable, mentally, giving us a social outlet. That's a great thing! It's really nice to be in this position, and we've had some especially long streams messing around with the PSP this month! There haven't been any really incredible games that we've found yet, though Tokobot is mega cute. Probably we'll try out the PS2 version of it some day. Daxter was a funny thing to play through but it's merely pretty good, not an all-time classic or anything. At least Bubble Bobble Evolution was awful in a really interesting way. We'll definitely be digging into it harder at some point. The game show games we've been playing on weekends, Jeopardy and Who Wants to Be A Millionaire stuff, have been a ton of fun, and while we might be putting the idea aside for a week or two, we'll definitely be back. It's a fun niche, and there's still plenty of it untouched. We might be the entity with the most opinions on different Jeopardy ports on earth right now.

On that note, and acknowledging that this is technically February content in our January post, we were on Enby's stream just yesterday playing some games for sickos! They were all a lot of fun, and extremely interesting, but I think Sentient stands out. It's not the kind of game we normally have any ability to get into, but it's just too strange and ambitious and goofy not to love the concept. Really, there are plenty of games where you get put into a complex situation with a lot of possible outcomes and you have to try over and over and explore the different possibilities to find the best outcome, even if these days there'd be an explicit time loop plot and a sense of metaprogression and things to make it more marketable. But what we have way less of these days is ridiculously simulationist games. Dwarf Fortress and a bunch of wild-ass survival games are probably the ones holding that concept up, and they're more of a sandbox than Sentient. Of course trying this often resulted in failures like Trespasser, and nowadays streamlining everything is going to be seen as "correct" and things like this will be referred to as being from "before they figured out the correct way to make this." All of that is garbage, of course. Completely disregards the beauty of the object. There's something relatable about being put into a social situation where everyone is hostile to you for not knowing things you had no way of gleaning, nobody's stance towards you or motivations are clear, and you have to be hyper-aware of every gesture you make and everything you say and how it will be interpreted. I feel like the name "Sentient" holds some clues as to where it all goes, but I really want to spend time learning more. Maybe we'll never beat the thing, but it's a lovely object to have been introduced to.

Art

We got a bunch of art this month. Mostly coincidentally but maybe we needed it for our nerves. Either way, here's the clean ones!

July getting TFed, a rare occurence. She gets mistaken for a mouse sometimes so, this is a good goof.

Twitch Teammate and extremely good bean Dark Overord did a little headshot of our dearest doll as part of raising some money to help with its move. She's looking cute as always!

Anothet Trinket commissioned from Thilinky in a gorgeous paper cutout style!

Got a ko-fi sketch from Sony-Shock that turned out absolutely stunning! Definitely the right person to bring out his monsterous nature.