OOC: 2025 Roundup

WELL, it’s the end of 2025, and here I am with only a couple of the things I wanted done this year finished.

I decided to take a short break from writing everything from the perspective of an insane future version of myself for a couple of reasons. Number one, 2025 was a big year that had a lot of things happen, but I didn’t write on the blog much because it’s not always easy to figure out a way to port meaningful updates into character. Number two, 2026 is going to have some changes for the better, and I figured that a better way to apprise my readership of those changes was to just come out and say them. To whit:

I am abandoning Bluesky as a place to post my art. Twitter already heavily soured me on micro-blogging social media and I never really recovered the wide-eyed hopefulness of my early days. That, plus the proliferation of generative AI and corporate pivots towards its use make me uncomfortable putting my art up there, where the wims of cash-mad CEOs might one day feed it into the slop engine without my knowledge or consent.

Aside: I know I use GitHub as a backend for the site, and GitHub is owned by Microsoft, who is at time of writing one of the prime movers in the AI grift (among other unsavoury deeds). Figuring out how to stay afloat in a way that doesn’t kill my soul is an ongoing project and I’m taking it one step at a time.

This is as good a time as any to be clear that no part of this website- backend, frontend, or content- has been or ever will be created with generative AI. But for the Jekyll infrastructure that builds the site, the code and content was made by me. Mistakes are my own, fuck the grift.

Regardless, the Flyknife Comics Bluesky will remain open but only as an avenue for syndicating blog posts (and boosting my friends’ art).

This means that there are changes coming down the road for the website as well.

In 2026 (as early as possible) I’m going to implement an RSS feed on the site so that anyone who hates social media as much as I do can stay apprised of blog posts and comic updates without needing to get on Bluesky.
I’ve started an overhaul to the gallery pages to make the reading experience more pleasant. In the short term this will manifest as a more robust Librarium page with book summaries and better formatting, but in the long term I hope to redo the gallery functionality altogether to something that makes the online reading experience smoother.
In distancing myself from Bluesky, I’m aware that I’m setting myself up to have to post more here, so I’m going to implement an actual posting schedule to attempt to keep myself on the rails. You’ll get a new post at the end of every month- quarterly updates (March, June, September, and December) will be out-of-character round-ups like these that call attention to the important news items, while the other eight months of the year will be the typical in-character Flyknife Comics posts to which you’ve become accustomed. My hope in so segregating the content is that I’ll remove the need to translate important information into goofy sci-fi folderol, and so remove the biggest barrier to me writing more posts.
I alluded to the Starbreakers 3 publishing schedule being more of an as-it’s-done series of shorter batch drops than the whole thing being published at once, and that is probably going to be my strategy with all of my work going forward. As much as I hate to admit it, I think the days of me being able to sustain focus and energy on a single 300-page book are behind me. The COVID years took a lot from a lot of people and I made out luckier than most with only one mild infection, but some combination of living through the putative end times, being too stressed to draw for almost four years, growing older, getting medicated for my chronic anxiety, and lacking regular conventions around which to build my publishing schedule has torpedoed the manic energy of my twenties. This is probably a good thing for me in the long run- strictly speaking I don’t need to have another book cycle that ends with me eating surplus military rations in lieu of cooking to save time- and my hope is that it’ll be a good thing for you as readers too. My goal for 2026 is shorter comics, done faster, uploaded more often. Once Starbreakers 3 is done I’ll be moving on to Jet Generation, which rather than its original goal of 3 Starbreakers-sized books will be composed of smaller floppy-sized chapters. Don’t think for a minute that I’m out of steam or running down, I’m just trying to work smarter rather than burn my wick at both ends all year.

And in general that means I’ll be making more places on the site to hold my art. The Character Index is obviously one, and I’ll try to put more time behind expanding that through 2026 and beyond. There are also shorter comics that used to go on Bluesky that’ll now get raked together in a new heading in the new gallery page. Lots of big stuff coming down the pipe, as always, and hopefully you’ll hear more about it now that I’ve committed to not pretending to be an insane sci-fi pirate just to tell you about it (although you will still get a roughly 2:1 ratio of me pretending to be an insane sci-fi pirate. Let’s not get crazy here).

Hopefully that gets you up to speed on the latest happenings at the Flyknife Comics HQ. I gotta get back to drawing for now. So until next time-

Stay Vigilant, Stay Valiant
Bruce