Hello, 2026, Let’s Look Back at 2025
Saturday January 3, 2026 • Howard Tayler

I spent much of 2025 the way I spent 2023 and 2024: bulldozing speedbumps.

It’s a metaphor I’ve deployed before. It means “identify things that create extra work, or stress, or pain, and remove them.” The full metaphor goes something like this:

Before Long Covid¹, I was like a fast vehicle with a very robust suspension. Speedbumps, rough road, and even obstacles were things I hit at full speed, powering over them or through them. Sure, I tried to work smarter, but working HARDER was always an option.

Now, however, I’m disabled. I’m more like a late 1960’s station wagon with the original shock absorbers. Also, the back of the vehicle is full of boxes of glassware, none of which has been packed with proper padding. When I see a speedbump, I don’t just slow down. I stop.

I get out of the vehicle, measure the speedbump, then bring in a bulldozer to scrape it off my road. While the heavy equipment is out I check for potholes, and take care to repair all the pavement in sight.

This slows me down a lot, but it also prevents me from crashing, and the word “crashing” nicely links the metaphor to the lived experience. PEMS (Post Exertion Malaise Syndrome) is part of my life now. If I push too hard, I crash. I get weak, everything hurts, my mental state degrades, and if it’s a bad enough crash I will actually run a fever and end up in bed.

So… by 2023 I had internalized this process. I built systems to make my life easier. Very shortly into this process I decided to build systems to make building the systems easier, and that shaped 2023, 2024, and 2025. I designed, built, and refined the Technocane (I taught my cane to carry my phone so my phone would teach me to carry my cane) and the Gravistation (a zero-gravity recliner surrounded by every last tool I need to write and illustrate)².

2025 felt like mostly smooth road, but from that easy-riding perspective I was now able to see the roads I’d been avoiding. I decided to tackle some of those. There were some refinements to the Technocane and the Gravistation, but most of my effort went into the kitchen.

One corner of a very well-organized kitchen. Pots and pans hang on rails over the sink, and cooking utensils hang next to the stove. The cabinet faces are decorated with floral appliques, and colorful glassware is displayed on top.
The upgraded kitchen, as of January 2026.

There were two reasons for this: first, Sandra has some new nutritional requirements³ and I needed to up my cooking game to address those. Second, I like to cook, so I should to make that process as speedbump-free as possible. That way I can cook and still have the energy to do other things later in the day.

Another corner of the kitchen. A spice rack is magnetically mounted to the side of the refrigerator, with 28 uniformly labeled spice bottles. A drop-shelf is partially lowered from its position beneath the shelf supporting the microwave. The drop-shelf is for knives, all magnetically-docked where they can be hidden and secured from youngsters.
The spice rack, the drop-shelf for the knives, and other easy-to-reach, often-used things.

At Gen Con Indy we learned I can work a covention booth without being reclined the entire time, provided I have a comfortable kneeling chair. I did need to work on my posture and my core strength a bit, so in September we decided to rebuild my craft station (unused for almost five years) so that I could train for conventions while painting miniatures.

A well-lit crafting station with paints on racks on the wall, freeing up table space for the wet palette, water jars, and more. The table is bracketed by a pair of glass display cabinets full of tabletop miniatures. A kneeling chair sits in front.
The crafting station, totally cluttered, with the kneeling chair in front of it tempting me to go paint instead of finishing this blog post.

This was a huge success. I painted around 140 minis from September through the end of the year, and now I’m quite comfortable working from a kneeling chair.

Working… let’s talk about that. After all, if you’re reading this it’s probably because you’re most interested in the work I do. During 2025 we finished the last of the shippable bits for the MANDATORY FAILURE Kickstarter project (book sketches and marker-colored sketch cards) and I dove back into the core deliverables for FUNCTION OF FIREPOWER, starting with the Bonus Story, “Refulgence of Refuge.”

That story deserves its own blog post, because it’s a really cool story, and the story OF the story is still unfolding by virture of the fact that I’m still drawing the pictures. Until then, here’s a picture.

A work-in-progress page from a comic book. The narration and dialog tell the story of Earth 66 million years ago, and the feathered, raptor-oid dinosaurs who built a radio tower.
Page 1 of “Refulgence of Refuge.”

So… that’s my 2025 round-up, along with a bit of insight into what 2026 will hold. I have more to say about (and during) 2026, but this is running long, and I haven’t even added the footnotes yet⁴.

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¹ I’ve talked about this before. tl;dr—I got sick during Wave Zero in early 2020, and now I have Long Covid, which manifests mostly as chronic fatigue.
² In 2024 I promised that I’d publish all the details on the construction of these things. I still haven’t done that, but I have all my notes. We even filmed a video of me building a new Technocane in 2025. So… I’m working on it.
³ EOE, which we’re addressing with 6FED. Unpacking that would be a three-page footnote. But now you have the acronyms, so you can upack them on your own.
⁴ Okay, that was a half-truth. I’d already written and formatted the first three footnotes. I write those as I go. But I hadn’t added THIS one yet. I guess that means it was more like a ¼-truth?