2026
Emerge
WOW. It has been a long time. As the new year is about to start, it seemed like a good time to emerge from this hole I’ve been hiding in. Thank you for joining me even though I’ve been AWOL for a minute now.
If you were following along in this saga known as ‘mclepke’s life’ you saw that I decided to try some pot again for the first time in ~310 days. That was like mid November.
One thing led to another and I essentially just took the end of the year off. It was nice in some ways. I chilled, played a bunch of video games, chilled, smoked pot, chilled, pet my dog, meditated on life, chilled, remembered how enraging and pathetic I find 99% of modern life to be, chilled, and now we’re here.
I’ve been off of pot since Christmas, so we’re around a week back off of pot. I threw the ID card I use to buy pot with away, so the drug-fueled end of the year vacation is over, and I’m back to being sober. It’s a far cry from when I quit pot around this time last year. Then, I was ending a many-year streak of 24/7 pot smoking, and it was a lot to handle. This time, it’s been easy. I already feel like I’m totally back to normal.
I’m not sure that the whole month and a half end of the year drug-fueled vacation thing was ‘good’ necessarily. It was probably neither good nor bad. In some ways it makes me feel like I reset and am ready for the new year, and in some ways it feels like it was just me getting really high and wasting time. I’ll probably have more reflections on it as the days roll by and it gets further into the rear-view mirror.
I could see some version of this becoming an annual tradition. Allowing myself time to be irresponsible and do drugs was nostalgic. It probably didn’t need to go on quite as long as it did, but I could see myself smoking pot again next December. I definitely want to avoid it until then, though…moderation is still impossible. I think once a year is the max I’ll be able to handle without spiraling back into the daily-use that used to partially define me.
Home Alone
Part of what influenced my rationalization to vacation hard the way I have been is that Erika is on a 16 day trip to Hawaii. Her trip runs from December 24 - January 9. Once the party reached early December, I was like, WELL, if I’m going to be home alone for the whole end of the year, I might as well keep this going. My initial plan was actually to smoke pot until January 8th, which coincidentally is the same day I stopped using pot last year. By Christmas I was so tired of it I stopped early.
So, now I’m in the tail-end of this Erika trip, home alone, and contemplating the start of a new year. I’m extremely good at contemplating. The complete lack of action involved in contemplation is what I excel at. Doing things you were contemplating doing is another matter, though.
A few days ago marked my 10th wedding anniversary with Erika. Wild eh? 2006 I graduated high school, 2016 I was married, 2026 is now the present. Holy fuck.
I am grateful that I have Erika to navigate life with. She has been my partner through thick and thin, and I feel ready to re-up this marriage for another 10 years.
Last week we officially signed our wills. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this on here before, but in PA, the law is that if you die, half of your money goes to your spouse, and half goes to your parents. Can you believe that? If that doesn’t make you want to get up and get a will drafted I don’t know what will. Our plan is to divide our vast fortune between three people - Erika’s BFF, Erika’s brother, and my brother. I have no BFF. If all three of them are dead after the second of me and Erika dies, all the money simply goes to the ACLU. I am an adult.
Lowering Consumption
One of the north-stars of my life is lowering consumption. Consumption of what? Of literally everything. Capitalism relies on you being a consumer, so one of the most powerful things you can do is to consume as little as possible. Paradoxically, lowering your consumption will make you progressively happier and happier.
Honestly, maybe it’s not a paradox. Video games are increasingly filled with in-game monetization, shattering the illusion that these games are anything but a desperate, soulless cash-grab. Watching a football game requires you to watch 30 insurance advertisements and 30 commercials begging you to gamble your life savings on this very football game you’re attempting to watch. Once you’ve waded through the ads, you have to then suppress uncomfortable feelings around people inflicting brain damage on each other for your entertainment. Processed food companies are slowly poisoning everyone, and destroying the world’s food supply, as farms convert their output to crops usable by ultra-processed food companies. Your favorite actor eventually got cancelled for being a pedophile or some other brand of shit head.
Being a consumer has the end goal of subtly enslaving you. “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled, was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” And if you’re wondering who said that, yes, it was notable pedophile Kevin Spacey (who still walks free, to this day).
This is the world we somehow have to eek out a life in. One of the biggest drains on my time is being frustrated, despondent, depressed, and enraged about how utterly shit the world is. In fact, having time to be despondent about how utterly shit the world is, is itself a privilege. When I was walking the tightrope of survival without a safety net in my early 20’s, I simply didn’t have the luxury to get upset about this stuff. I had to, like, get out of crushing debt. Poking your head above water for even 5 minutes can ruin your day.
Poking my head above water is what the present feels like to me. During the drug-fueled end of the year vacation, I was able to just hide under water. Me, drugs, video games, other distractions. No real world. With each rip from the bong I slid back beneath the surface intro the strange modern mix of faux-tranquility, numbness, and YouTube videos.
Now that the party is over and the new year is just about to begin, I naturally start thinking about what can be better about this next year. How can I be happier? How can I live a better life? Is there anything I can do? Taking in the scene that is my life with fresh eyes, I see an attempt to live a life of purpose. I see attempts at kindness and empathy and to support good and not support evil. I also catch a glimpse of the real world outside my window, and it’s been reduced to such flaming garbage that it’s no wonder I always feel like I am in search of more answers on how to just LIVE here. I see a 37 year old trying to work on meaningful projects and create art while knowing that everything is fucked, and suspecting that it isn’t getting better anytime soon. Authoritarianism is sweeping the globe, capitalism is killing the planet, and humans are well on their way to causing the sixth or seventh mass extinction in Earth’s history.
So, what is there to do? What am I actually going to do to make 2026 a livable experience for myself? The first thing I see, is that even though I consume extremely little and engage with capitalism as little as I can, I need to keep pushing further in that direction. I cannot innocently enjoy watching a football game. It’s kind of like moderating my drug use. It just doesn’t work. You can mute the commercials or try to read a book during them, but this exposure to raw capitalism will still destroy you. If you can watch commercial after commercial begging you to gamble all of your money (in today’s world where no one HAS any fucking money) and NOT eventually get dragged into depression, power to you. I can’t, and I suspect you can’t either.
I cannot innocently enjoy watching videos on YouTube. Even wholesome content, of which there genuinely is a lot of on YouTube, is surrounded by an assault on your senses by the algorithm. Once you start noticing the algorithm in action, you start thinking about AI. Now you’re well on your way to getting dragged into depression, when you were just trying to watch a cat video.
I cannot walk to my pharmacy’s counter to pick up anti-depressants without walking by over 100 processed food products with cartoon characters on them begging me to buy them while ready to literally poison me. By design, of course, the pharmacy counter is always in the back of the store, mandating this assault on the senses.
I cannot buy sweet potatoes without walking by these same brands that belong to corporations that are burning the world down and contaminating our water supply.
I cannot buy clothes NOT made by slaves. The wardrobe of EVERY single person reading this consists partially of clothes made by children and/or slaves. For the vast majority of people, it’s probably the vast majority of your wardrobe.
I cannot own a telephone without getting solicited by text, spam calls and voicemails as capitalism relentlessly and systematically knocks down every door it can to reach you. I cannot have an email address without the same issue. I cannot live in a residence that has an address without the same issue via old school mail. I cannot stream myself playing a video game in my living room for my friends to see without bots programmed to trick me into buying something from them appearing in my chat. The assault is endless.
If I want to change this, and try to devote my attention to fighting it, I have no chance. A clothing brand will start out being made by consenting adults, and then slowly and quietly transition into being made by slaves. Brands will hire scientists to publish studies trying to fool the public into believing their processed bull shit is healthy for you, when every scientist NOT being paid by said brand unanimously agrees it’s terrible for you. Processed food brands will create entire non profit groups who say their mission is improve public health, when really they exist to make lies about processed food seem more believable.
By necessity, we have to push all this stuff out of our minds. There’s no way to live carrying the weight of how awful everything is. The problem is, EVERY SINGLE THING has become that awful. The entire set of systems that govern life on Earth is that awful. Therefore, no matter where you look or what you do, capitalism, corruption, the destruction of the planet and the exploitation of living beings will be right there looking back at you. Even if you don’t go looking for it, it will find your phone, your Twitch account, your home address, or your email address. The awful world is relentlessly pursuing you.
So yeah…good luck in 2026. Go into extreme denial and pretend none of it is happening, or foster a mental game so strong that you can live life in this embarrassment of a society. My strategy for implementing the latter is trying to spend the highest percentage of my money that I can on food grown by farmers, and on art created for the sake of art. The second part of the strategy is spending the highest percentage of my attention span that I can on things that leave me balanced and whole, and not on things that expose me to ads and other capitalist bull shit. It’s impossible to actually do this perfectly, but I’ll do the best I can.
In 2026, I vow to consume as little of the pathetic poison our world specializes in producing. Join me.
Game Development in 2026
The single hardest thing about trying to make a video game is applying an anti-capitalist and wholesome mindset to the task of creating an inherently commercial product. You can try to think of it as art, and it can be art, but all art is inevitably also a product at this point. That’s part of what creates all the suffering I talked about above - we live IN this system. It permeates our life. It is our life.
But, we’re still here. I’m still alive, and I’ve got to do something with my life, even if that something is sitting and doing nothing. Put this way, I do feel like I’d rather do something, rather than nothing. So, what do you want to do, Robbie?
For as long as I can remember, the answer has always been to make art, and my art form of choice has always been video games, with the music included in the video game as sort of a second discipline of interest.
This part of the thought experiment always plays out the same. While some of my interests have waxed and waned over the years, this never has. So, get ready for another year of hearing about game development. I want this to be the year that I actually produce something that people can play.
The struggle is real though. I won’t lie - making a game is very hard to do. It’s such a massive project. Thank you to everyone who continues to check in on this blog and the game dev updates I have to share. In 2026, I vow to give game development everything I’ve got.
Speedrunning in 2026
2025 was an interesting year in speedrunning for me. Speedrunning definitely experienced some growing pains. To refresh everyone’s memory, I dedicated the second half of 2024 to speedrunning entirely - taking a break from working on game development. After finding my footing with speedrunning, in 2025 I worked on both speedrunning and game development in parallel, with game development intentionally being prioritized a little bit higher than speedrunning.
I do think that speedrunning doesn’t have quite as clear a vision as game development does. With game dev, I am trying to make a fun video game. Obviously there’s a lot to it, but in some ways, it really is as simple as that.
Speedrunning’s mission statement to date has been “For each project I undertake, I am trying to place as highly on the leaderboards as my sanity, and general well-being will allow me to.”
I think the aspect of speedrunning that has made that mission statement feel more malleable than game dev’s mission statement is that in speedrunning, I interact with other people. In game development, I don’t. People are not watching me work on game development. I have not made new friends in the world of game development. I do not have peers whose game development projects I am looking at and am influenced by.
In speedrunning, competing for spots on the leaderboards leads to you meeting people. You do develop peers, and you do get invested in projects other people are working on. People do watch what you’re doing, and eventually you do make friends.
That complicates things. If I sit in my house practicing a game by myself, it gets lonely. I am pretty skilled at enduring loneliness, but game development is already a lonely project. Working on two lonely projects seems to be too much for me. If I go too long without going live on Twitch and reconnecting with the larger Twitch community, I lose motivation.
This loss of motivation also happens in game development, but there, I really don’t know what to do about it. In speedrunning I do see some options, namely, sharing my progress (i.e., going live) more often than I am now.
You know the old design thing people talk about that’s like, you can build a sophisticated car piece by piece by piece by piece and eventually end up with a sophisticated car, or you can build a tricycle and then upgrade it into a bicycle and then upgrade it into a junk car and then upgrade it into a medium car and so on. That’s kind of what is happening here. I build a very sophisticated car piece by piece by piece, and the whole thing is useless until the final piece slots in and it becomes a car.
The more social approach would be to build a tricycle first. Then, I can go online and show everyone that I built a tricycle. Then, I could upgrade it (a second period of isolation). Then I could go online again once it’s been upgraded into a bicycle. Then I could upgrade it again. Etc.
But, if your goal is to get as high up on the leaderboards as possible, I actually think the first approach kind of works better. Checking in online after you’ve learned part of a game is time you could just spend learning the next part of the project.
Having lived 2025 though, I think I need to veer a little bit more towards the second approach - especially given that speedrunning is my #2 priority. If speedrunning was my entire life and all I wanted to do and I wanted to become the Michael Jordan of speedrunning, I’d probably stick with the sophisticated car approach. In the real life I’m living though where I chip away at speedrun projects with the energy I have left after working on game dev, I think the tricycle system might lead me to a better outcome.
In 2026, I vow to keep streaming. Dedicating time to setting video game world records no one cares about on 35 year old games is an act of rebellion, even if you need to live stream it on Amazon’s servers.
Ending on a positive note
This blog is not that far-removed from being a journal. I don’t share every single minute struggle of my life here, but by-and-large, these are the real things I spend my time thinking about and struggling with and doing. I would understand if a more happy-go-lucky type of person found this site to be too negative to read consistently. But, look around. There’s no ads here. This isn’t rage bait. There’s no endgame here. This is simply the account of a real person trying to survive the hellscape that is life on Earth in 2025.
Regardless, I do thank each of you from the bottom of my heart for checking in and reading these posts in 2025. I am consistently shocked by how much traffic this site actually gets, so it seems like my story does resonate with many of you. It means a lot to be able to share my story with someone. So, sincerely, thank you for being here.
I believe we can survive 2026. I believe we can find pockets of happiness in it. I believe we can steel ourselves from all the negative influences, and roast sweet potatoes and cook chicken and buy second-hand clothes and direct our attention to meaningful causes and benevolent artistic pursuits. While I don’t believe in the world at large, I believe in each one of us here. I believe in you.