More Life - January 2026 Update
Intro
Here were are again, January, my dear old friend. Many people hate the winter. I used to as well, but not anymore. The winter is a good time to be productive. It is also, potentially the most productive you may be throughout the year. What else is there to do but work, play in the snow, and drink hot chocolate?
So the question is, how has January been so far?
Work Stuff
This year started off at a much brisker pace than last year as I started a new commissioned project for a client. It’s a 1 minute short that is in the style of my usual content. Even though the look is the same, the subject matter is a bit more mature and not at all what I would do on my own.
At the time of this writing, I have just finished the animatic, designs, backgrounds and am setting up the files for animation. By the time this blog premieres, I would have hopefully started animation or in the best case, finished animating and moved on to another phase.
The initial phase of pre-production left me with a lot of anxiety about this project. Fortunately that despair has diminished after the progress I’ve made has been fairly brisk. The project should be finished before March of this year as well. Since it’s kind of a weird project for me, I haven’t decided if I would premiere it on my channel, or just have a space for it on my blog. Nevertheless, I am enjoying the process and it feels good to work on a commissioned project again.
Short Stuff
On the content front, I have released my first two shorts of 2026, and they have both done pretty well. Usually there is a big dip in viewership for my stuff in January, but so far viewership has held strong. The short “Fine Art Famoose” was also the first short to use a V5 puppet and was made way back in October. I’m very happy with how the short turned out and I think there’s a lot of potential with the format (I’ve got a lot to say about fine art). You can watch it here:
The other short, “Self Love Seat” was also produced with the V5 puppets, and it was a lot of fun to make. You can watch it here:
I’m excited to see how the rest of my shorts do this year. Thank you all for watching. It’s very encouraging so rest assured, I’m trying my best!
In other content news, back in December my views were all over the place. It was beginning to mess with me and I took some time to recollect. I spent some of that time upgrading my content strategy. This involved several new changes and adaptions:
Buying a printer to have physical production sheets to write my thoughts about shorts (and their performance), and to keep a daily reminder of best habits to practice when making them.
Updating my short making schedule and making better plans for their release.
Dedicating time each week to build a larger library of ideas for shorts.
Those three changes have made a major impact on things already, and as time frees up, I’ll be doing all that I can to refine and execute my strategy.
Lastly, I bought new monitor arms, and they were very expensive (I’m not crying). I bought the Ergotron LX, which I wrote about in a previous blog. They are also insanely cool, and now that I have them, the plan is to never get another monitor arm. It also helps that I can add a few more arms to the mount if I wanted to. The best part? I don’t hate drawing on my desk anymore (kind of strange for someone in my position). In fact, they were even more effective than what I assumed, and have made using my Cintiq 100x better. That’s partly due to my old set up being kind of poor, and partly to the arms being so cool.
Life
Here’s a rapid dash of some of the highlights in my life this month.
I spent a lot of time injured last year, so this year I decided to cut some of my exercise time. I think it’s what I needed, because now I feel way better and my body is not as consistently sore. Beware of overtraining!
One of my goals for 2026 was to also be more responsible with money. The past few years I have done awful at saving, but now it’s time to fix it. Actually, I guess next month will be time to fix it since I already dropped $500 on monitor arms. NEVERTHELESS!
I’m not terrified of eating cold cuts anymore. A few years ago they gave me food poisoning (my fault), but I’ve mustered up the gluttonous impulse to snack on salty pork.
I got invited to a dog’s birthday party. I didn’t go because the party was cancelled a week later. I also probably would not have gone if it wasn’t cancelled.
Outro
Overall January has been pretty good to me so far. It’s still early in the year but I’d like to keep up the momentum if possible. It’ll be interesting to see what else this year brings, but for now I’ll just dream about eating some more delicious soppressata.
-Until next time-