Forward into the new year (2026)

January 12, 2026

I went into 2025 with the goal of taking time off to work on Table Slayer, a digital tabletop for running in-person RPG games on a TV. I ended up launching it in March and have steadily improved it each month since release. I also wanted to hit pause on working in a formal work environment and get back to my roots of building products from scratch, largely unassisted. Mission accomplished.

This meant that my routine in 2025 was much closer to that of a stay-at-home dad, where I spent mornings and afternoons with the kids as they got to and from school. While they were gone I tinkered on Table Slayer, or with other small projects around the house and nearby. I also coached two seasons of little league Baseball and did the majority of shopping and cooking for meals at night.

The other benefit was that I could enjoy longer periods to travel with the family. My wife is a school teacher with Summers off, which meant we were able to log over seven weeks of time in the RV visiting Maine, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Previously I’d only ever taken a week or two off a year, so it was a big change.

This was our second year with the larger RV, and the biggest benefit outside of the space was the ability to bring our dogs with us wherever we went. Our puppy Banjo went with me nearly everywhere, and I hit the trails and rivers of the Chesapeake as much as I could with him during the warm months. Overall, my vibe and demeanor mellowed into “chill dad” mode.

Table Slayer continues to grow, and though it has a loyal following of paying users, I’m still cautious about thinking of it as anything other than a hobby business. I’m pretty amazed that after a year I’m still really pumped to commit code every day. Playing so much Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder certainly helped — both with my adult group of dads, and with my 10 year-old son Duke and his friends. Each game netted a new feature for the next session. It’s the level of experience-led iteration I had craved to get back to.

2026 hopefully should be a continuation of trends, since I had so much fun this past year. Although I did have a few old friends reach out to try and pull me back into the workforce, most could see I was enjoying my mad scientist dad lifestyle. I do miss working and teaching young designers, and I certainly can’t predict the future, but right now I’m happy with the choice to step back.

Anyways, I find the process of writing down goals for the year helpful, and as I retreat more and more into hermithood something like this helps old friends keep abreast of what I’m up to. In no particular order I’m going to…

Continue to improve Table Slayer

I’m happy with how Table Slayer is evolving. I’m currently experimenting with adding touchscreen support to make a unique product for those bananas enough to dedicate a room of their house to such a goofy piece of furniture. Every day I flip-flop on whether I should try and build out a true hardware project, but the realities of American tariffs and the price point of such a device (likely $1000) always scare me off. Either way, I’ll continue supporting that kind of interaction, even if it’s just for myself.

Specifically I’d like to say I did this by the end of the year:

• Complete a new physical gaming table with a dockable touchscreen map case.
• Make the self-hosting setup simple with a Docker based build script. I know there are several who self-host now, but it could be much easier.
• Create a way for users to share pre-made campaigns in a central hub.
• Provide some tutorial systems and video to help others learn its quirks. This leads to my next goal.

Learn to make great video content

I’ve spent almost two decades publishing videos in some form or another to the Internet. The truth is that I’ve always been lazy about it, at most setting up a nice camera to record in real time without much editing. When we moved to Annapolis I had big dreams of starting a small channel around teaching Linux to folks and bought some nice lights and mics that don’t get much use. Those videos surprisingly did well, and I get requests for more.

In 2026 I’d like to spend the time to learn video editing software and put together multi-camera, well-cut videos with some light transitions. I don’t want to become a full-time YouTube creator, but I do want the skillset to produce nice video content around my other hobbies.

I’d like to make content around the following subjects:

• How to run in-person games with tools like Table Slayer.
• Board game playthroughs and organization.
• More Linux customization stuff.

I don’t know how I’m going to organize it though. I doubt people who are interested in Linux are interested in Table Slayer and board games. I’ll likely keep the computer stuff over in my current snide channel, and use the Table Slayer channel to host all the board game / RPG stuff.

Find a regular group of board gamers

Last year my son Duke and I fell HARD into a Marvel Champions obsession. I’d had the game sitting around for a couple of years and it was too early to introduce it to him. On a whim, we pulled it out over the Spring and his brain was finally ready for its deep combo mechanics and game state. It was good timing too, because the makers of the game, Fantasy Flight, stopped printing most of the previous content, so I spent the Summer building out a collection of all the heroes. We even took the game with us on vacations in the RV, and logged a couple hundred plays over the past year.

Playing games together was a great way to bond outside of baseball. Duke, like his dad, loves tactical combat, and we quickly found other board games to enjoy like Fate of the Fellowship, Jaws of the Lion, Radlands, SpaceCorp and Kinfire Delve. Lately we’ve been running day-long Star Wars: Rebellion sessions where every battle seems to come to the last turn. Although we enjoy playing video games together as well, board games have been a great way to take a break from screens.

This year I’d like to find a regular group of adults to play with too. I find myself drawn to deep, esoteric war games and I’m guessing there’s a group of retired graybeards excited to read history novels alongside their plays of RAF, D-Day at Omaha Beach and Wolfpack.

Get better at 3D modeling

I know the basics of modeling, and every couple of years I learn enough to produce something cool, but I never keep a steady enough stream of projects to retain what I learn. This year I’d like to learn CAD software or Blender enough to build stuff from scratch for my 3D printing needs. I upgraded at the end of last year to one of the new Bambu printers and have somehow logged nearly 200 hours of print time in a month. Mostly this has been in support of my recent board game hobbies, as I’ve been printing out inserts to keep everything organized.

Last week I started a new project in Svelte, JSCad and Three.js to automatically model inserts for wargames, which tend to have a lot of tokens. This is a cheat, since I’ve been using Claude to automate the modeling, but I know that eventually I’m going to want to learn proper CAD tools to do more involved, less programmatic designs.

Fully archive my DVD collection

Last year I upgraded my home lab equipment and tooling with the goal of being able to stream my media collections outside of my house. I set up and grew a horde of MP3s I’ve carried with me since the 90s, loaded them on a NAS, and pushed them all into Plex. I now want to do the same thing for my collection of DVDs and Blu-rays. This will be a little harder, as I have over a thousand discs that have been collecting dust. About a week ago I started manually ripping them to raw MKVs and loading them into Plex. Even though I’ve automated it to simply dropping a disk into the drive, I know this will take months to complete.

Rebuild this website, or at least write more often

I’m still happy with this website, and it’s served me well, but at this point Svelte is my frontend of choice, and Astro isn’t a good fit for the types of projects I want to do. The Museum is already built on a Svelte island within Astro, and most of the projects I have planned (like catalog my movies, games, and photos) aren’t a good fit for Astro, which excels at content. I’d rather build a full Svelte site similar to Table Slayer with a SQLite DB and dynamic content. That will give me full flexibility to experiment.

Barring a new site, at the very least I should start writing more. I’d like to get one post up a month with updates on whatever I’m working on.

Be available to my friends and family

It’s corny, but this is my only job these days. Everything else I wrote above is just the stuff I do in the cracks. I’m lucky to have a lot of flexibility with my time and that means I’ll continue coaching teams, driving to bluegrass gigs, helping my parents out with small chores and just saying “yes” to anyone who needs help with something. If there’s a project you need help with and don’t mind a lazy schedule for completion, feel free to hit me up with your ideas.