all the old showstoppers

A new year means time for one of my six posts a year here, lol. I'm most active on Bluesky at the moment but 90% of it is reposting TKRB fanart and replying to friends.

2025 was weird in that I kept being like 'wait how is it [date] already???' but also there is stuff where I'm like 'wait that was this year????'. Time, man. Anyway!

* Big thing this year - top surgery! Was early June, and everything went smoothly, so all the initial healing has been done for a few months and it's now the long tail of like, nerve regrowth and scar remodeling. I was also extremely lucky in that my health insurance covered basically all of it!
* Related to the above, I did my first truly shirtless cosplay at Dragon*Con, which was also my first time trying to do fake facial hair - Goro Majima from Yazuka for an 'oops all Majima group with friends'. We also got badge ribbons made to hand out for the first time.
* After years of refusing to care about 2.5D stuff, I made new sword friends at Katsucon who convinced me to give it a go and two months later I had watched basically all the Musical Touken Ranbu back catalogue and I now own more blu-rays that I'm sure I want to admit. Half the songs are like 'these lyrics are so dumb but this melody line slaps so hard'
* I bought a kit to copperplate 3d prints - I've only done a few small things so far, so my technique still needs a lot of refinement, but it's very neat to be able to basically turn things into actual metal.
* I took an intro blacksmithing class! It was offered through the community education program at a localish vocational high school and was very resonably priced. It was really need and got me interested in learning more, even if most of my creations from the class are extremely janky-looking (no, we didn't get to make knives, being at a school meant no weapons)
* Went outside the US for the first time in... probably close to a decade? Only as far as Montreal to visit family for Christmas, but look, the world's been weird. Managed to forget cellphone roaming was a thing, but we spent most of the time inside watching movies and playing with cats anyway.
* Got around to setting up my lathe, and turned one extremely messy test piece out of some scrap pine I had, then realized I needed better safety gear before getting more into it. So more to come on that this year hopefully.
* Signed up for an e-learning course on sewing machine servicing and maintenence, in part because the place I used to take my machines to closed and in part because I want to Learn All The Things.
* I finally saw Labyrinth. Yes, the 1986 Jim Henson film. Yes, I somehow managed to have not seen it before. It was delightful, I want most of Jareth's clothes, and afterwards we watched the making-of featurette filmed at the same time as the movie and it was super-cool to see all the stuff that went into the puppets and effects.
* Bought a smart ring in September, which feels hopelessly tech-bougie of me, but I wanted some fitness/heartrate tracking and the one I have (Oura) is particularly good at tracking sleep as well as having good privacy policies. We'll see how useful it ends up being.