It's almost 2026!! Wahoo!! I don't know about you, but for me this year felt like it lasted 20 years, yet simultaneously every month was like 20 minutes long. Seriously, things I did this past January feel like a lifetime ago. So how was my 2025? To be honest, it was the worst year i've had in a while. I am generally a very positive person, but I took a lot of hits to my physical health this year that in turn impacted my mental health as well. I don't want to make it sound like my year was awful because it wasn't. It's difficult to pin down: the parts of this year that sucked really sucked, but the great parts were amazing!! I still had a lot of great experiences this year. On a scale of "apocalypse" to "I won the lottery and achieved world peace and married Ayo Edebiri", I think I would describe this year as "bittersweet".

Some highlights of my 2025:

1. I worked on 5 plays/musicals as a member of the stage management/crew team, and stage managed 2 workshops!
• - Two of the plays were equity, and one of them featured some really famous actors!! wow so cool!
• - And both workshops were equity too! and since I was the stage manager, that means that I signed an equity contract and am now eligible to join the union!! (i'm not going to yet but still cool regardless!)
• - Two of the musicals I worked on were for a children's program, and my actors were all either in middle or high school. I freaking love those kids and had a really great time working with them.
2. In addition to those plays, I also worked on the lighting crew for 20 shows!! Wow that's a lot!! Lots of plays, and also some dance shows too! Yaay!! Honestly I really love my job and I feel so fortunate to get to do something I enjoy for a living (even if I live in one of the most expensive cities in the country and it's freelance work oop). I think the times this year my mood felt the lowest were during the periods when I wasn't touching lighting fixtures lol.
3. I moved out of my shitty apartment with my shitty roommates who pretended I didn't exist and moved into a new house with really cool roommates. I am super close with my new roommates which I really missed.
4. I got to see The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals: Reprised, which was a really special experience (see blog entry to the right).
5. I read 50 books this year!!! My annual goal is always 30, so I almost doubled that!! I had such a great year in books, the grand majority were really good reads!!
6. I started learning the ukulele this year! I bought my shitty ukulele for $10 from a thrift store in September and she has changed my life, have never gelled with a musical instrument before like I have with the uke and I love learning how to play. Her name is Lola btw.
7. I added 16 new pages to my website! I did not realize it was that many until I counted for this list and I'm a little in shock, it was a really great year for me html-wise.
• - I made 2 new shrines: Daisy Jones & the Six and Julie and the Phantoms. The Daisy Jones wikipedia page is still one of my proudest html achievements.
• - I started working on my oc pages, which is a big project I hope to continue in 2026!
• - And of course, my halloween sub-site, which accounts for 7 of the 16 new pages this year. That project was a total beast that I started working on all the way back in August, and I am so proud of how it came out. I actually came up with the idea for the halloween project last year, but was too daunted and confused by the parallax effect that was crucial to my vision and gave up. I am so proud of myself and my progress in that I was able to achieve such a gigantic project that seemed impossible a year ago. I also left some of the halloween project unfinished so I have something to add next year and keep the project ongoing!!
• - And finally, I made a song of the week wrapped that looks at all of the songs of the week I picked this year! It's a little silly but I am proud that I've managed to keep up song of the week every single week for 143 weeks.
8. And I made a lot of new friends :)

So, what's next for Ollie Olliveen? This year I have 2 official new year's resolutions:

1. "Barbie Fashion Fairytale": a silly name for my goal to either wear or donate every single piece of clothing I own this year (INCLUDING special event pieces). If I don't wear it, I have to get rid of it! I own so many clothes because I love fashion but I never pass things on, so I want to downsize my closet and stop the hoarding already.
2. "Get in the Loop": a resolution that comes in 2 parts:
1. "Stop watching garbage": unfortunately I watch a lot of youtube as my main source of idle entertainment, and I am really starting to feel like it is really not a productive use of my time. I was incredibly humbled when a coworker was trying to make conversation about my favorite TV shows and I could not think of a single show to talk about, so my goal is to substitute youtube with TV shows that my peers know about and like so I can connect with them more and also just seem more normal socially. Plus, I do really think that it would be better for my brain to engage in long-form storytelling over youtube garbage tbh. I have already kicked this off with Veronica Mars, which is honestly an incredibly baffling show and I will write about it more later.
2. "Listen to more music": I have been feeling in a rut music-wise lately, and it's because I always gravitate towards listening to the same things I already like, and then get bored of them, and instead of seeking out new things I just stop listening to music for a while and listen to youtube garbage instead (see above). I also just feel like I have no clue about what's going on in the pop culture music scene these days and I want to be more in the know about what music my peers listen to. My goal is to play catch-up and listen to every artists that I hear my friends mention in passing who I do not know the discography of. I think I developed an instinctual aversion to Top 40 pop music as a teen that I need to squash asap because I am limiting myself from new experiences and sounds I might like! I might keep more of a diary of my music quest as the year progresses

In addition to these resolutions, I have a few things coming up in the new year that I'm really looking forward to.

1. My doctors have been wasting my fking time for months and months but I have an appointment on February 9th where they are finally going to do the final examination that will make me eligible for the procedure that will actually diagnose me. It's going to be invasive and suck but at least I'll know what's happening to me and have a path towards recovery.
2. I am going back to NYC to visit my friend!! Super exciting, keep an eye out for Ollie's NYC Adventure Part 2.
3. I have an upcoming job working as the script PA on a new play whose director has a wikipedia page, which is really cool (for my resume, that is :p).
4. Gonna keep working on my ukulele skills and get better!! I would absolutely love to upgrade to a nicer uke (sorry Lola I love you but you were $10 from the thrift store), and I also lowkey want to learn the banjo too.

And of course I have a lot of plans for my website next year! My to-do list for olliveen.neocities.org 2026 is:

1. A collection page for my physical music collection. I have a pretty big collection of vinyl and cds (a lot of which I got for free or hella cheap) that I think a lot of y'all would be really into, and I wanna make a page to show them all off & chronicle my reviews as I listen to them.
2. A page dedicated to my ukulele & tabs I like to play/write (don't have many yet, but getting better at writing my own tabs is something I'm working towards).
3. Restyle my fashion page - it's one of my oldest pages on the site and could use a refresh.
4. Spruce up this blog page and maybe retire my diary page/move the diary page to a column on the blog. Both the blog and diary are so dusty and underused because I generally am not a person who likes to post about my day-to-day life. I would like to consolidate the two and make this newspaper layout a little cooler in the process (plus maybe having less to manage will encourage me to actually use this page more often).
5. And some more shrines of course. I have that to-do list on my index with shrine ideas I've had forever, but my coding brain can never move in the direction I tell it to lol, so the shrine ideas will come as they come.
• - I have an Animal Crossing New Horizons shrine that's been in my WIPs for over a year that I would like to finally release, especially with the new game update coming out in January!
• - Also I've been kinda having visions of a FNAF shrine lately... that may be on my horizon...

Overall, I'm feeling very optimistic about 2026 and am looking forward to the new year!! Also I am turning 25 on the 1st and can definitely feel my frontal lobe developing, so all signs point to a good year incoming!