Tag Archives: Home & Family

Crossposted, Food, Journal, Miniatures

Hello, 2026, Let’s Look Back at 2025

I spent much of 2025 the way I spent 2023 and 2024: bulldozing speedbumps.

It’s a metaphor I’ve deployed before. It means “identify things that create extra work, or stress, or pain, and remove them.” The full metaphor goes something like this:

Before Long Covid¹, I was like a fast vehicle with a very robust suspension. Speedbumps, rough road, and even obstacles were things I hit at full speed, powering over them or through them. Sure, I tried to work smarter, but working HARDER was always an option.

Now, however, I’m disabled. I’m more like a late 1960’s station wagon with the original shock absorbers. Also, the back of the vehicle is full of boxes of glassware, none of which has been packed with proper padding. When I see a speedbump, I don’t just slow down. I stop.

I get out of the vehicle, measure the speedbump, then bring in a bulldozer to scrape it off my road. While the heavy equipment is out I check for potholes, and take care to repair all the pavement in sight.

This slows me down a lot, but it also prevents me from crashing, and the word “crashing” nicely links the metaphor to the lived experience. PEMS (Post Exertion Malaise Syndrome) is part of my life now. If I push too hard, I crash. I get weak, everything hurts, my mental state degrades, and if it’s a bad enough crash I will actually run a fever and end up in bed.

So… by 2023 I had internalized this process. I built systems to make my life easier. Very shortly into this process I decided to build systems to make building the systems easier, and that shaped 2023, 2024, and 2025. I designed, built, and refined the Technocane (I taught my cane to carry my phone so my phone would teach me to carry my cane) and the Gravistation (a zero-gravity recliner surrounded by every last tool I need to write and illustrate)².

2025 felt like mostly smooth road, but from that easy-riding perspective I was now able to see the roads I’d been avoiding. I decided to tackle some of those. There were some refinements to the Technocane and the Gravistation, but most of my effort went into the kitchen.

One corner of a very well-organized kitchen. Pots and pans hang on rails over the sink, and cooking utensils hang next to the stove. The cabinet faces are decorated with floral appliques, and colorful glassware is displayed on top.
The upgraded kitchen, as of January 2026.

There were two reasons for this: first, Sandra has some new nutritional requirements³ and I needed to up my cooking game to address those. Second, I like to cook, so I should to make that process as speedbump-free as possible. That way I can cook and still have the energy to do other things later in the day.

Another corner of the kitchen. A spice rack is magnetically mounted to the side of the refrigerator, with 28 uniformly labeled spice bottles. A drop-shelf is partially lowered from its position beneath the shelf supporting the microwave. The drop-shelf is for knives, all magnetically-docked where they can be hidden and secured from youngsters.
The spice rack, the drop-shelf for the knives, and other easy-to-reach, often-used things.

At Gen Con Indy we learned I can work a covention booth without being reclined the entire time, provided I have a comfortable kneeling chair. I did need to work on my posture and my core strength a bit, so in September we decided to rebuild my craft station (unused for almost five years) so that I could train for conventions while painting miniatures.

A well-lit crafting station with paints on racks on the wall, freeing up table space for the wet palette, water jars, and more. The table is bracketed by a pair of glass display cabinets full of tabletop miniatures. A kneeling chair sits in front.
The crafting station, totally cluttered, with the kneeling chair in front of it tempting me to go paint instead of finishing this blog post.

This was a huge success. I painted around 140 minis from September through the end of the year, and now I’m quite comfortable working from a kneeling chair.

Working… let’s talk about that. After all, if you’re reading this it’s probably because you’re most interested in the work I do. During 2025 we finished the last of the shippable bits for the MANDATORY FAILURE Kickstarter project (book sketches and marker-colored sketch cards) and I dove back into the core deliverables for FUNCTION OF FIREPOWER, starting with the Bonus Story, “Refulgence of Refuge.”

That story deserves its own blog post, because it’s a really cool story, and the story OF the story is still unfolding by virture of the fact that I’m still drawing the pictures. Until then, here’s a picture.

A work-in-progress page from a comic book. The narration and dialog tell the story of Earth 66 million years ago, and the feathered, raptor-oid dinosaurs who built a radio tower.
Page 1 of “Refulgence of Refuge.”

So… that’s my 2025 round-up, along with a bit of insight into what 2026 will hold. I have more to say about (and during) 2026, but this is running long, and I haven’t even added the footnotes yet⁴.

———

¹ I’ve talked about this before. tl;dr—I got sick during Wave Zero in early 2020, and now I have Long Covid, which manifests mostly as chronic fatigue.
² In 2024 I promised that I’d publish all the details on the construction of these things. I still haven’t done that, but I have all my notes. We even filmed a video of me building a new Technocane in 2025. So… I’m working on it.
³ EOE, which we’re addressing with 6FED. Unpacking that would be a three-page footnote. But now you have the acronyms, so you can upack them on your own.
⁴ Okay, that was a half-truth. I’d already written and formatted the first three footnotes. I write those as I go. But I hadn’t added THIS one yet. I guess that means it was more like a ¼-truth?

Announcements, Crossposted, Journal

Long Covid And Me

It took way too long for us to figure it out, and that figuring is a story unto itself that is too long for this post, but I have Long Covid. The impact can best be summed up thusly: it is a disability, not a disease.

Disease suggests that I might get better. I wouldn’t mind getting better, of course, but as of this writing there’s not only no cure, there’s no consistent treatment, and many medical professionals will mis-diagnose Long Covid, or even deny that it exists.

So, disability. The “disabled” demographic is perhaps the only marginalized minority group that everyone who lives long enough will eventually join. My own disability presents itself much like chronic fatigue (ME/CFS). On some days I’m fine. On others I may find myself light-headed and struggling for breath as if I’d just run a mile when all I’ve done is stand around in the kitchen talking to to the kids.

Please don’t send us your medical advice. That “too long for this post” story begins with two years of visits to specialists wherein we ruled out all of the usual suspects. You may have heard the old aphorism “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” We’ve ruled out the horses, and looking around at the (metaphorical) scenery, we’re not in Kansas anymore, this is the Serengeti.

But I’m not here to ask for help, or to garner sympathy. I’m here by way of explanation: the things I used to do, the things I still WANT to do? I can’t do all of them anymore. I’d love to be creating a daily comic strip and reviewing 1st-run movies on the day they arrive in my local cinema, but those aren’t options for me anymore. The point of this post, which I’ll admit I’ve taken my time getting around to, is to explain what I can do, and what you can expect.

First and foremost: Schlock books in print! This is taking longer than we wanted it to, but we have a plan and we have the ability, and we hope to get books 18, 19, and 20 in print over the course of the next 12 to 18 months.

Seventy Maxims Reprint! This coming Tuesday we’re launching a Backerkit project to reprint the Seventy Maxims books, and as part of that we’ll be doing an all-on-one-page Seventy Maxims poster. Click either of the links above for the pre-launch page.

Using My Powers for Good: I’ll be posting parts lists and instructions for some of the mobility and workplace aids we’ve custom-built for me. Long Covid affects millions of people worldwide, probably tens of millions, and this little platform of mine can be used to make their lives easier.

Reviews of Movies, Games, and More: I can’t offer reviews of new-release cinematic things because I don’t go to the theater anymore, but I do still consume a lot of media, and it’s quite easy for me to write reviews. In fact, the fancy zero-gravity chair I use to keep my heart rate manageable is the same one I’m sitting in while I write this AND while I watch TV, listen to music, and read.

I’m Not Letting This Stop Me: Yes, I’m disabled. I can’t do all the things I used to do, and I can’t do them as quickly, but I can still do quite a bit. So I shall do quite a bit. And this place is where you’ll always be able to find me doing it.

I hope you’ll come back and find me again soon.

Announcements, Crossposted

Over-Reaction is the Best Reaction

We’re self-quarantining here at Chez Tayler, but the State of Utah and the LDS Church are helping things along immensely by canceling school and church for us. We’re extremely fortunate that we already work from home, and are able to steer clear of public places without seriously impacting the family finances.

Rewinding a bit—my asthma is still on overdrive, but we’re otherwise healthy, and free from any COVID-19 symptoms. We’re doing fine. This social distancing thing is something we’re going to take seriously, though, because the best possible outcome is for us to look back on this and say “maybe we over-reacted.”

You see, the next-best outcome is a terrible one. That’s the one where we look back on this and say “It’s a good thing we did all that, but we should have done more, and sooner.” We don’t get that outcome unless neighbors¹ are dying.

The worst outcome, at least for us, is the one where we discover just how sick this coronavirus can make a 52-year-old asthma sufferer, and exactly how deadly it can be to run out of beds and respirators in the ICU. And if we can get through the next few weeks without that happening, perhaps without that ever happening, we might feel like all our precautions were over-reactions.

And the luxury of being alive to whine about over-reacting is one I plan to cherish.

¹ Maybe next-door neighbors, maybe folks from Samaria. We try to define “neighbor” in broad, New Testament terms when it comes to things like this².
² We narrow the definition quite a bit when it’s time to visit a neighbor to ask whether we might borrow a cup of sugar.

Crossposted, Faith, Journal

Achievement Unlocked: Married with Married Children

The wedding was beautiful. The reception was lovely. The day was exhausting, but only because it’s hard work packing that much joy, delight, and awesome into one contiguous sequence of waking hours.

There’s a thread of photos on my Twitter feed, and if you follow Sandra_Tayler on Instagram there are plenty more.

Thank you, everyone, for the congratulatory wishes, and support, and for your patience with us as we rescheduled all our business deliverables in order to have some make-the-family-bigger¹ family time.

¹ That may have sounded a little lewd, but I footnoted it, so it’s totally okay.