Welcoming 2026 - Our brave resolutions for the coming year

Ah, here we go, folks. By the time you're reading this, the new year will have begun!

For us, 2025 has been a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, we've grown a bit more as a person (or people?) and found new ways to b our best selves. Generally the year went well for us on a personal level, but on the other hand of course, just a couple of months ago, Michael's father passed away.

So it's been.... an experience.

In terms of our music, in 2025 we reminded ourselves that yes, we are in fact just doing this as a hobby, and trying to release a song every month does nothing but stress us out unnecessarily.

It doesn't really help your listener numbers, it actually stifled our creativity and at times, it even turned making music into a chore. So earlier this year, we dropped that schedule and instead started to just work on tunes as and when we're feeling inspired. Been going pretty decently, too! Our listener numbers may still be tiny, but we're thoroughly enjoying it again, and ultimately, that's why we do this stuff in the first place.

This blog has been a source of joy, too! We both quite enjoy writing, and it's great to have an outlet to put out whatever we want to share. And while our reader numbers aren't huge, it's nice to know that at least a couple of you folks are actually interested in our thoughts.😊

But ultimately, the purpose of this post is not to dwell on '25, but to look forward, towards 2026! Because you see, we've had some ideas and learned some lessons, especially in the latter part of 2025, and we've resolved to implement some of those ideas in the new year!

And here, we're going to share some of those ideas with you, just as an object of interest.😉

Idea Nr. 1: Building better habits by implementing a system for ourselves!

So, if you've been reading our bi-weekly reports, you might have noticed that we spend a fair bit of time thinking about self-improvement, and figuring out how to hold ourselves to good, decent standards.

Well, we've implemented a funky little system to do just that.

The setup is saved on our PC as an image project file, and it looks like this:

Ours doesn't have example text, but there's some private and/or naughty stuff on there, so we won't be sharing our actual version.😉

See, on the right, we've got a sort of bingo card with the various habits and tasks we're demanding of ourselves. As you can see, a number of them have a tick box for every day. That might be things like getting to bed by a certain time, doing our daily morning Yoga or indeed, -not- doing certain things, too. Like not watching too much YouTube or the like.

Then, some of them only have boxes every other day. In our case, that's workout sessions and musical practise.

Some other things have elongated boxes, indicating that we'd be satisfied with doing that activity once a weekend, or even just once a week.

There's also a few boxes for "extra punishments", which we put there in case we do something really terrible and feel bad about it. Like say, breaking a new year's resolution?😜

Meanwhile, the punishments on the left are normally hidden layers in the image project file. We'll get to that part.

So, halfway through a week the setup might look like this:

We've got our system set up so that the project file automatically pops up in our image editor at certain times. So, at our first convenience, we just simply tick the boxes, or indeed, put a cross if we missed something or screwed something up.

The yellow lightning bolt is for special dispensation, when we didn't do the thing, but had good reasons for it. Appointments, illness and the like.

So, on Friday morning (just suits our routine that way), we look over the full, filled-out file, and we count how many red crosses we made. In other words, how good, or bad, we've been this week.

Let's say we have 6 crosses at the end of the week. Now, that would actually be a -really- bad week for us, but for the sake of our example, let's go with it. So now, we now get this boy rollin':

The D20 of ultimate punishment!

For each red cross, thou must roll the die once.

If you roll a number already taken, thou shalt reroll until you have as many punishments as red crosses.

And thus, meet thy doom.

So, in this example we had 4 red crosses through the week, and we also saw fit to give ourselves 2 extra punishment crosses for one reason or another.

Thus, we rolled the die 6 times, and for each number we revealed, we uncovered one of the punishments.

In fact, in this example we got quite lucky and rolled a 20, which means we got away with just 5 punishments. Had we rolled a 1, that would mean two extra rolls, so two punishments for the price of one.

So with the card filled out and the punishments set, we save the file as an image (Which opens up every time we start our PC), then blank the ticks and crosses and save the project file to start the next week. 

Of course, all those punishments we rolled are active throughout the new week, until next Friday, when we see if we did any better.

So what might those punishments look like?

Well, some real examples from our list:

• Absolute ban on online videos (So basically, no YouTube)!
• We're not allowed to put milk in our morning tea!
• We only get crisp bread with basic toppings for dinner!
• We have to go for a brisk walk around town every evening!
• We don't get to play video games all week!
• Hot-cold showers all week!

So it's a mixed bag. Some aren't so bad, some are diabolical, and some only get really bad in combination with others. Though to be fair, we tried coming up with punishments that have a silver lining. No video games might seem harsh, but it -does- free up time for other stuff, for example. Hot-Cold showers are terrifying, but quite good for our overall health. Things like that.

The real kicker with this system is the randomness of the dice rolls. See, we thought about going down a fixed list for the punishments, activating them from top to bottom as we count the crosses, but that would mean we'd always know what punishment would be next, and we'd likely have settled into a rhythm where we always "take a few hits" and then stop before getting to the really bad punishments.

Instead, with it being random, "taking a hit" isn't advisable, because even with just we might just roll a one and end up with two punishments that could even combine in nasty ways. Though of course, that'd require quite some bad luck.

Yet at the same time, none of the punishments are bad enough to ruin a week by themselves, so we're not tempted to cheat and let ourselves "get away" with stuff.

So yeah. It might be a bit freaky, and some of you are probably thinking we're OCD-ing. In fact, you're probably right, but as good old Bob Ross said, us creative types are supposed to be a little crazy, anyway.😉

And so far, the system's been working, too! We're spending our time much more wisely, only procrastinating when we can genuinely afford it, and generally getting much more out of our life. And no, we're not suffering horribly because of all the punishments.

Keep in mind: The point of punishments isn't just simply to punish, but to be a threat of what happens when you break the rules. And they work in that way. We're quite unlikely to break those rules we've set, simply because we want to avoid the consequences of doing so. Sure, it'll happen here and there, but so far, the most we've gotten is 3 punishments in one week.

Which was totally Amalia's fault, by the way. Bet you can't guess which one of us is writing this part.😜

Anywho, you'll probably hear us mention this little system every now and then in our bi-weekly reports. But for now, let us tell you about....

Idea Nr. 2: Learn to better deal with that one iffy neighbour!

Can't put a picture of the neighbour, so here's a reference.
Image credit to Ulleo on Pixabay.

Not sure if we've mentioned this before, but we have some..... dubious neighbours. You see, some of the apartments in the building are used as "Workers accomodation". Which sounds nice an professional, but realistically means it's a sort of potentially longer-term Airbnb for men with completely unstable lives that consist entirely of working, drinking and bragging about what a "real man" they are. Not quite chavvy types, but just kinda daft and bovine.

And one of them stands out a bit. He's relatively young, which might work as an excuse, but this guy really is just straight-up mindless. He's a full-on east German stereotype, complete with the arrogant Deutschrap-ACAB-mindset. And possibly hooked on some illegal substances. Or just too many legal ones. Half the building has to listen to him regurgitating his own lungs every morning.

Point is, just a couple of days before we started writing this post, it's happened again. He decided to "Hurr durr partay" until the middle of the night again, and we were left laying awake in bed for hours, hoping it would end at some point.

After a while, we even decided to go over and ring the doorbell. Bad idea. That's never worked out for us. No matter how nicely you might ask, dude just straight-up tells you he doesn't care, which is -really- not something you wanna hear after he's already kept you awake for a few hours.

That's just gonna get you even more worked up. We had tried that a few times before and really, really shouldn't have tried again. Contact with people like that just isn't healthy. Gotta learn to just avoid them and their nonsense.

And, because we, unlike that dude, have thoughts in our noggin, we've decided to make some changes in order to do just that. The first is a very tragic one:

We're breaking up the 9-to-4 sleeping schedule that we've been following for a good few years now.

Not during the week, mind you. We do actually need to get up at 4 if we wanna get our morning routine done before work.

But on the weekends, holidays etc., we're gonna shift that time around, going to bed at 11 and getting up at 6. Honestly, we preferred getting up at 4. Feels like you get more out of your days, that way. But simply put, unless you live in some kind of utopia, going to bed at 9 on the weekend is always a risk, because society is very much still going at full swing around that time, and even without that neighbour, there might just be a bunch of noise going on around us, making sleep difficult.

It's happened many times, and we've now come to accept that yeah, it would just be smarter to go to bed later on the weekends, to give society a couple more hours to simmer down before we try and get to sleep.🤷

So fair enough, our overzealous sleep schedule was partially at fault in this matter. But it's hardly like the neighbours' behaviour is innocent and appropriate.

Which is why there's also a second, more drastic part to this idea. Because what happens when the neighbour decides to share some nightly noise pollution during the week? Or past 11 on the weekends?

Like until midnight?

Or even 3 in the morning or something?

Well, for those cases, we came to a conclusion. There's basically 3 options:

Option 1: Lay in bed and stubbornly try and fall asleep. We've been there many times, and it simply doesn't work. Even with earplugs, melatonin capsules and whatnot. You just lay there awake, getting more and more frustrated as the hours tick by.

Option 2: Try and counteract it. Go over and ring the doorbell. This option is by far the worst idea you can have, because people like that do not, and will not care that their behaviour is ruining everyone else's night. It'll just be a nasty, upsetting confrontation.

So we came up with Option 3: Just simply accept that you'll lose some hours of sleep and do some stuff with that time.

It might seem quite fatalistic, but it's simple pragmatism. If those neighbours decide that you'll lose 3 hours of sleep tonight because they need to drink and yell, then that's simply what will happen. You'll simply lose those 3 hours of sleep. It sucks, but rather than laying there awake in bed, waiting for the torment to stop, you might as well just...... work out. Or play some video games. Heck, maybe start up your DAW and get to work on a cool new tune!

That's right! Neighbour annoying you with his music? Just make your own!😛

Just slip off the headphones every 30 minutes or so to check if the noise as stopped. If it has, off to bed with you. And if it hasn't, just keep on going.

You'll be tired and low-energy the next day, either way. At least this way, you won't be nearly as frustrated with yourself, because at least you did something productive and/or enjoyable with that time.

This even has the bonus effect that since you're just doing your own stuff without the frustration of laying awake in bed, you'll likely end up at least sleeping pretty decently in those few hours you get.

It's just a much more pragmatic and healthy solution than just laying awake in bed and being tormented. Or worse, going over and getting into a fruitless confrontation with the arrogant fool.

After those upsetting experiences, we often found ourselves a bundle of nerves, and sleep would be off the table until we calmed down, even if the music stopped right there and then.

So the combination of later bedtime hours and our new, more pragmatic way to approach night time disturbances should hopefully help us find a bit more peace.

Along with a little Email we wrote to the landlord, of course. But honestly, with that calibre of neighbour, we're guessing that'll only dampen his bad behaviour for a few weeks, at which point he'll probably think everyone's forgotten and he can get away with it, again.

...... or he'll simply forget it himself. That seems more likely, come to think of it.😉

But yeah, those are general ideas that just happened to occur to us towards the end of 2025, which is why we're considering them as new ideas for '26. But! We do have an actual, real new year's resolution, too! And it's a quite a daring one:

Idea 3: Don't. Buy. Anything. New.

Specifically, no new games, books or even musical tools.

Okay, we know what you're thinking: We either don't mean that literally, or this is simply not going to work.

But well, we do mean it -fairly- literally. And while it does indeed sound daunting, we're actually feeling cautiously optimistic.

Here's why: See, during 2025's Black Friday season, we got a bit.... spendy. Now, that's not to say we came up with this resolution out of guilt. We made some good, worthwhile, even practical purchases, actually.

But!

In doing so, we sort of found ourselves face to face with the undeniable fact that we, in quite a few areas of our life, are living in completely unnecessary excess.

Arguably, that's true for large parts of society, but let's not delve into political philosophy and keep things on a personal level, here.

See, musical equipment and software is a good example. Since we started producing our own stuff, we amassed a pretty decent collection of gear, considering that we're just running a little home studio and making next to no money doing it.

Okay, much of this stuff shown here is for flight simming, but the image nicely illustrates the point.

(Also, no, our desk doesn't always look like that. All the flight simming gear lives on a shelf until we actually need it.😉)

Now, for physical equipment, space is indeed a factor by now. We simply can't buy much more stuff without totally cluttering up our apartment. But even with software, we're faced with the fact that we have untold numbers of plugins, programs, tools and MIDI instruments. Many of them are great, but that's just the point:

We have a ton of really awesome tools. Sooooo why do we keep buying more?

Look at all those plugins! And that's just all the ones that fit on the screen!

No, seriously. This point is especially important with musical tools, because every time we buy something new, it's another thing we have to learn before we can really use it effectively. So why not just have a year where we actually do that? A year to simply use the stuff we already have. No need to keep piling on new stuff.

And once that thought had solidified, it sort of grew: Soon, we realized that the same thing applies to video games, for instance. 

We have a list, you see. A list of currently -and this isn't a joke- 45 games that we want to get around to playing at some point. Not all of them are new games, some of them are old games that we want to dig up and finally finish (and probably blog about), but new games or old, it'll take us ages to go through 45 of them!

Sure, some of them are smaller indie games that you can finish in a few sessions and be done with 'em, but there's some heavyweight RPGs on there too, like Kingdom Come and Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader.

Also, not to mention, some of these games are actually parts of franchises. For example, Yakuza 4 is currently on the list. And yep, when we eventually get done with that, Yakuza 5 and 6 are already on our Steam account, ready to go. And so is the first "Like a Dragon" game. And the Isshin spinoff. And the sequel to Judgement, too. So that one entry on the list actually has half a franchise behind it that we've not played, yet.

Much like Kingdom Come has a sequel now, too. And we're sitting here having done half a playthrough of the first one, wanting to start over and properly finish the game at some point. Oh dear.

So, looking over all that, it could realistically be said that we could probably not buy any new games for the next 10 years and still not be finished with everything that's currently on that list.

...... which is why we quickly expanded this new year's resolution to video games as well, with two exceptions: For one, there's 3 games on the list that we didn't actually have, yet, so we got those during the '25 Steam winter sale. Not technically an exception since it's not a purchase in '26, but loading up on a Steam sale just before the new year might seem a bit like cheating.

 But hey, it doesn't seem too unreasonable to get 3 games we're looking to play anyway if we're resolving to spend a whole year without buying anymore. And you know, this way we don't have to single out a handful of games as "On the list, but we'd have to break our resolution and buy them to play them."😛

And the other exception: Expansions. If a game on the list has/gets expansions that we want (Like real expansions. Not talking about skinpacks and stuff), then we'll allow that as an exception, because hey, by the time we finally get around to any of these games, we might as well enjoy the full package.

But yeah, beyond expansions, we're gonna be brave and aim for zero game purchases throughout 2026, because seriously, with such a long list, what's the point? Games are so incredibly plentiful now that we simply will never have the time to play everything interesting that pops up on our radar, so..... yeah.

And even if we definitely want to play something eventually, there's no need to buy it right there and then. Barring a rare publishing rights kerfuffle, it'll be available for many years to come, and by the time we get around to it, it'll likely be much cheaper to get, anyways.

And then there's this lot:

The emperor is pleased, but our wallet is not!

Weirdly enough, it's the same thing with books. Even though we find some time to read every single day (Which isn't the case for video games).

And yet, we also have a few dozen unread books. The picture above shows a good chunk, but that's just our Warhammer 40k collection.

(And Battletech in the upper left corner.😉)

There's a lot more out of frame, from Tom Clancy over Agatha Christie all the way to the Strugatsky brothers. Many, many, maaaany books. Many of them we've read, but yet many more remain fresh and untouched.

So again, why get more? We don't have much shelf-space left anyway.

So, similar story, we pre-ordered one more 40k book (Because we found out they're finally doing a Vaults of Terra omnibus!), and that's that. Unless they maybe reprint the 2nd and 3rd Ciaphas Cain omnibuses, Defender and Saviour of the Imperium.

...... no amount of discipline in the world would stop us from getting those. But y'know, that's a big if, anyway.😜

Oh, there's also DCS modules, where we've resolved to buy exactly 2 things this year, assuming they become available:

The Panavia Tornado by AviaStorm, because well, that's Michael's childhood jet fighter! And they're still in service in the Luftwaffe, too! Obvious purchase for us.

Mmmh, Tornado. Image credit to Onkelglocke on Pixabay.

And, assuming it's any good, the upcoming Balkans map, because that's a region we've actually been to. In fact, Michael was there early enough to still see traces of the war, so that's the closest we've got to a personal connection to a map.

No shopping around for other modules though, we've got plenty to keep us busy.

..... actually, that line nicely sums up this whole section.

"We've realized we've got plenty of stuff to keep us busy, and buying anything new at this point would just add to the pile."

A few little exceptions here and there as we pointed out, but in the grand scheme of things, those couple of DCS modules and expansion packs won't make much of a dent in our wallet compared to all the spending we're gonna cut this year.

 Not to mention, neither of the Modules are guaranteed to even come out in '26, and we're not currently eyeing any game expansions, so who knows if those exceptions will even apply. (Well okay, they probably will.😉)

So yeah, that's our brave resolution for the new year. Generally, the motto is: "Stop frivolous and needless spending."

We've set it as a rule for musical equipment, games, books and DCS modules, but we'll try and go with it in other areas of life, too. Sure, if something breaks, we can get a replacement, and if we see a purchase as truly worthwhile, so be it. But generally, we'll do our best to hold back and just..... be less excessive.

Saving money is nice of course, but honestly, it's not even primarily about that. It's more that things are really getting to feel pretty bloated and oversaturated. Too much of everything, too little time for anything.

So we're closing the valve for a while, cutting off the flow of new stuff and taking time to just enjoy what we already have.

Maybe it'll work out great and we'll learn to appreciate the things we -have-, rather than the things we -could- have. Who knows, perhaps it'll even become part of our lifestyle beyond 2026!

..... or perhaps we'll last a couple of months before our capitalism-conditioned minds get weak and break the resolution.

Well, if that happens, at least we can now punish ourselves effectively for it, by crossing out all of those extra boxes on our calendar of punishments.😜

But let's not go there just yet.

All in all, we look forward to 2026. Should be interesting to attempt this resolution, and it might inspire a new outlook on things, just working with what we've got.

Not to mention those new systems and approaches to things we've mentioned. Those should help us in being our best selves. (Or self?😜)

But yeah. For now, dear readers, we wish you a very happy new year. May your resolutions (if any) work out well, and may you never find yourself buying too much stuff you don't need!😉