Plans for 2026

 So, 2025 was... album-heavy. By the end of it, I think I have listened to about 340 to 350 albums, most of them from 2025. I will make a blog post early in the year ranking them and talking about some of them in more detail.

I won't be doing that next year, the excessive album listening. Occasionally I like to dip my toes (or rather, ears) into what the rest of the world is listening and then I cringe and return to my own little bubble of awesome music. That's what this year was. I did find some new artists I liked, and I will talk about them in the blog post, but I'm ready to be a musical hermit again.

And otherwise in general, like... I want to be less online. Blogging doesn't count, but I mean... Less on social media, consuming less, hearing other people's opinions less. To not be sucked into twisted narratives and propaganda and culture wars. I want to isolate myself into my own headspace and not rush things. Give myself time to breathe and think and analyze and exist. That's how I function the best. Slowly but surely is how I produce my best work, I don't like pressure and rush. I hate competition, and rn, social media for me feels like a competition. Who listened to the most albums (~340 LPs and EPs), watched the most movies (Letterboxd says 86 since April when I joined, plus all the Black Mirror episodes), who read the most books (finished 94, probably won't finish a 95th one this year). Who has the most intellectual opinion about a certain topic and whose comment gets most likes. If I stop engaging with it, I won't feel the pressure to consume consume consume all the time, and I can really take my time and focus on the media I do consume. No 2nd screens, no multitasking, is the vibe I'm going for. I'm not there yet (ooooh I'm so not there yet, all I've been doing all week is binge watch YouTube for hours on end while playing mobile games), but that's the goal.

This blog rarely is a numbers game for me. Sometimes I do check my stats and get a rush of dopamine if someone has read a blog post of mine, but that's rare. 

Next year, you can expect to see less posts than this year, but more in-depth posts. If someone puts out a new song or an album and I listen to it, I might take days or weeks or months to think about it and write about it before posting anything. I might not post anything, if I don't feel like it. I've sorta moved into making notes about music on my own devices (Notion and LibreOffice Calc) anyway... 

But yeah, the stuff I will be posting, if anything, will be Deep Dives, proper album reviews, Lyrical Breakdowns and random think pieces / essays. And the album ranking list of these 2025 albums. In 2024, I was working on a Pyhimys Deep Dive and breaking down Ashnikko's older lyrics. We'll see if I get back into those or find something else to write about. I kinda also want to get back into Three Song Listens. It's such an effortless way of getting the gist of what someone's music is about and if I want to Deep Dive into it or not.