NSDNY: Twenty to the Two-Six

Well, if you’re seeing this, you, too, have made it through. What does it mean when the introductions to New Year’s posts sound like the last surviving notes of long-gone pirates? It’s a format I expect we’ll be seeing more and more frequently, as the collected accumulation of stress and tragedy continue to shatter any sense of time… or shared reality. Still, as they say, the horrors persist, but so do we… even when there’s a cost. So if our New Year’s Resolutions seem smaller-scale this year, it’s because it’s all we can do to keep going - a feeling I’m sure you, too, know all too well. Furiously scratching at the walls in panic, we tumble into 2026… but at least we’re doing it together. - B

A: Before I sink into the state of what we’ve thrown this particular post entry into, I want to go over resolutions, past and present. Though, as noted last year, we can’t really dwell on what we didn’t accomplish, even if they're just bits of media we meant to attend to. My goals weren’t lofty for 2025, and perhaps even a bit amorphous. Both Bugsy and I did, however, finish Grand Theft Auto IV, as well as Episodes from Liberty City. We even fit in Wolfenstein: The Old Blood between them. I otherwise fit in gaming wherever I could, and started The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt once I found out Bugsy was making a run at it. I find that I run into the same issue with that game, though as I do with anything elsesandbox-style: completion. Will I miss out if I don’t do all the side quests? Perhaps. Is the fear of missing those side quests keeping me from progressing? Also... yes. It's something I imagine I’ll continue to struggle with as we move along the year, but I do hope to finish it before mid-year. Is that enough of a resolution? As far as other media, I continued listening to a few Stargate and Doctor Who audio dramas, and have managed to reach Volume 7 of the web serial I’ve been following. I believe, based on the conversions from traditional to audio and digital books, that's the equivalent to 1-2 books a month. Certainly not a staggering number, but still better than zero!. A tracker online predicts, if I’m able to keep my current reading speed, I’ll be caught up to the current Volume 10 chapters around August of this year. Do we count that as a second loose resolution? My real resolution though, if I'm going to make one, is closer to home. Sitting down to lunch the other day, my eldest asked for help - he’d like me to help him run his first D&D campaign. He’d been gifted a new Player’s Handbook for Christmas, and while I’m not a huge fan of the latest iteration of D&D, I can at least be glad he's showing an interest. If I can accomplish anything this year, hopefully it's that. 

It has been rough though, as Bugsy will attest to in his section. Things don’t seem to be getting any easier. Perhaps they'll continue to get worse, or maybe we’ll reach a breaking point and start an uphill climb once again. Maybe we’ll even end up with another pandemic event similar to the one that originally semi-spawned this blog, and if so, who knows what we’ll come up with... only time will tell. What I do know, though, is that we’ll continue involving ourselves in stories, be they written, digital, or a collaborative tabletop game. They aren’t just a form of escapism, although they're always good for that. They bring us together, teach us things about the world and about ourselves. We may see another pandemic, we may see domestic strife, wars, terror, but we still have stories. We must continue to immerse ourselves in them and write them, or we'll lose ourselves and our history. Whatever you do in 2026, make sure you hold on to that: your ability to learn from stories and make your own. 

B: It’s been a lot… for everyone. Every day a new something falling from above, and you still have to deal with everything in your own life. Everybody out there can fill in the blanks with their own specifics, so I don’t think I need to share my own. These days, I often find myself thinking of one of the best lines from one of the best shows ever made: “every day takes figuring out all over again how to fucking live."

So where does that leave us as creators, as audiences, as players, as gamemasters, as writers, as viewers… as  a couple goofs that started a blog about narrative and gaming during the darkest days of the pandemic? I really don’t know. If the New Year is the moment your fingers touch the mirror, when you can reflect on the past and imagine the future in perfect clarity… I still don’t know. I’m not sure how we made it this far, and I know that tomorrow will take figuring out all over again how to live. 

But the point is… we did make it this far. And that matters, especially when so many other people didn’t. So if we need a resolution to start with, it’s this: don’t take other people for granted. Their presence, their time, their energy - those are things you’re choosing to share with each other, and in an age when an ever-diminishing number of corporations have developed intricate, insidious systems to rob us of each one of those things… that matters. It matters a lot, more than we’re comfortable admitting. So cherish the time you get together, circumstances have always had a way of sneaking up on us, but there seem to be a lot more “circumstances” than there used to be… and they keep trying to invent more.

“Invention” is something we shouldn’t cede to the corporate, the cruel, the carceral. They may “invent” ever more ways to harm, imprison, and extract from the rest of us, but they can never create. At best they co-opt, they pervert and they twist, but they can never build… and they can never take away our ability to do so, not while we can draw breath and dream. (There was a whole movie about that we discussed recently.) If imagination is an act of rebellion, doing it together, however we can, is the formation of a resistance.  Sure, your tabletop RPG or book club or garage band or art group may not seem all that important, but it is. It’s almost too perfect that today’s fascists have coalesced around “generative” AI, technology that, by its very nature, can only steal from what’s already been made, arrange only within a set of existing patterns curated by the most venal of technoghouls. The fascist project has always been one of destruction, demolition, and extermination… so resolve to  create, whatever that means to you, and do it together. It won’t topple empires or end administrations, but it will be something they could never do. By making things of our own, we act in opposition. 

Finally, just as the fascist cannot create, they also cannot learn. They cannot discover. It’s fundamentally opposed to their ideology, their vision of the universe, where they and their leaders have already figured everything out, established the bounds of reality and eliminated the need for questions, for curiosities. There’s a reason their attacks on the sciences are so vicious - the very concept of discovery, of exploring and learning solely for the sake of expanding humanity’s understanding and awareness is anathema to them. Likewise their attacks on education at every level, especially when it comes to critical thought and anything that might lead to questioning their hegemonic mythology - which, in their “every accusation a concession” rhetoric, they describe as “indoctrination!” So resolve to learn. Doesn’t matter what. Learn for its own sake, not for a job or a sound investment or a fancier-sounding resume. Learn for you, and for those around you. I won’t say that nerds are going to save the world, but this is one place we can make a difference - your special interest, and we all have them, can be applied. If cars are cool, learn a little more about how to work on them (or at least diagnose) and maybe you can help a neighbor or family member save a little on a mechanics’ bill. Like zombie apocalypse stories? There will always be a need for street medics. And if all you have is an encyclopedic knowledge of Star Trek or comics or doorstopper fantasy novels, you can learn more about how all those things work, about what made them work for you, and help others tell their own stories… especially if they’re the kind of people the fascists want gone.

A lot of things can happen in 2026, but none of them are going to bring heroes to save us. We need to be those heroes ourselves. If you’re going to make a resolution, for the new year or for every day learning how to live… resolve to be the one you need, the one the people you care about need, the one we all need.

Happy new year, stay strong.

Send questions, comments, and your 1926 to-do lists to neversaydice20@gmail.com.