It's 2026! I know I'm about a week late, but better late than never really. The turn of the year is just another day, but I do love New Year's Resolutions for the symbolism of it. It's an arbitrary deadline, but then again so are all deadlines. I got pretty close to my New Year's goals for 2025, not exactly on the dot but I'm proud of my progress. So it's time to set some new goals for 2026.
I'm narrowing in on my production of Shrinepunk this year. My main goal is to publish three chapters of Shrinepunk. Up until now, I've struggled to put out one chapter a year, but I'm charging full steam ahead now. My schedule is a lot more regular now, and with my new job I can work on Shrinepunk at work (don't tell my boss, hehe). Chapter 5 is in the draft stage right now. It might end up being a quite a bit longer than the previous chapter, since there's a lot of dialogue that I don't think I can cut out without removing vital context. It's another Marisa-focused chapter, which I didn't think I would do as much as I have so far. Reimu was intended to be the main character of Deep City Archives, but I keep having really fun ideas for Marisa. My author's bias is showing, I suppose. Chapter 5 is also going to focus on some of the aspects of the world that I haven't really dipped that deep into. Mainly sex. There won't be any explicit sex scenes in this chapter (and probably not in the future either), but sex is an important part of life in Deep City, and I want to showcase some of that. I also have some opinions on the sex industry that I want to work into the story. Chapter 5 will also feature some drug usage, which has been hinted at but never outright shown yet. I'll put proper warnings in the chapter notes before the chapter so readers know what they're getting into. I'm riding a fine line, but Shrinepunk is an adult series, and I don't want to shy away from adult content when it benefits the narrative.
I'm also working on the website a lot. Sorry for how long it has been "under construction", but I've been slamming my head against my desk trying to figure out why background images are so hard to do in Gantry. Turns out that the default theme I installed, Hydrogen, doesn't support background images for particles! Took me way too long to figure that out. So now I'm doing it the old-fashioned way: custom CSS. And I gotta figure out a way that I can make some pages readable with the background, since it has a wide value range and can wash out some of the foreground text. I am by no means a programmer and can only barely be called a web dev, so this is new stuff for me. But I'm gonna figure it out. I'll also be updating the wiki with new characters and cyberware when chapter 5 comes out. I might also tag some content as being either RPG content or story content to distinguish the parts of the wiki that actually show up in Shrinepunk from the parts that only show up in my private Shadowrun games. I use the same worldbuilding for both, but I don't want to confuse the readers too much with random NPCs that never show up in the fanfiction series.
Anyways, thanks for reading, and I hope to update you soon with chapter 5! Thanks for reading.