The SuperDQP Weekly - January 5, 2026

First newsletter of 2026! I survived ‘25!

The SuperDQP New Year’s Theme

A good friend of mine does this thing where instead of making a new year’s resolution, he chooses a theme to aim for with the incoming year. So, as a hypothetical example, rather than choosing a resolution like “I want to lose weight this year,” he’d choose a theme like “Improve” so that he could apply that to all facets of his activities of the year; not just diet and exercise.

For me, last year’s theme came after a difficult, but necessary trip to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, which I wrote about at the time, as well as disastrous federal policies for trans and gender-non-conforming people (myself included) introduced immediately after Donald Trump's second inauguration. I settled on the theme of Thrive, with the intent not just to survive the year, but to live my best life in spite of ongoing transphobic rhetoric and policy.

In many ways, I did abide by that theme. I had a trip to Chicago earlier in the summer that was packed to the brim with queer joy, and I also wrote and directed a personal and vulnerable radio drama adaptation of Dracula that, by what accounts I’ve heard, did well.

But in most other ways, I honestly didn’t abide by the theme as closely as I would have liked. I spent much of the year scraping funds together for mundane adult expenses like auto repairs and medical bills. I had to put up with a lot of nonbinary microaggressions; most commonly in the form of people misgendering me or using incorrect pronouns even with a pronoun pin on a beanie at eye level.

It reached a point where, after a comment someone made to me close to New Year’s about the singular “they” being difficult, the microaggressions boiled over and I spent the holiday in a depressed, gender dysphoria haze.

“Why am I even bothering advocating for myself?” was a thought I’d think often in 2025. “Am I crazy? Am I hysterical or unreasonable for being defensive about this?”

The thought of living as a man again genuinely sickens me, but that doesn’t help the fact that despite all of the explaining and educating I’ve tried to do since I came out, my gender identity still exists in this cultural void, where so few seem to even know about it, let alone care. Like it doesn’t exist.

This is the way that transphobes in power want me to think, and they’re partly succeeding. It’s taking its toll on me. And that, by itself, is sickening in its own way.

All of this is beside the point that I wanted to make when I set out to write this newsletter. The point I wanted to land on was the financial weirdness surrounding the automotive and medical troubles, because that’s what leads into the theme I chose for 2026. The gender hardships will likely continue. I will likely continue to be defensive about it. I will likely continue to find queer joy where I can in 2026.

To that end, 2026 will be an expensive year. I’ve wound up with four different vacation plans, and a hopeful fifth early in 2027, most of which will be among queer friends and found family. That, on top of those aforementioned mundane adult expenses last year, has left me in a bit of a financial bind.

I thought back to a recent Stop Skeletons from Fighting video (shout out to Uncle Derek, another Anchorage-ite who talks about video games) about gaming on a budget, and he mentions that it’s time to abandon FOMO; you don’t need to spend $70 on a new release that you want to play right now.

2026 is an admittedly convenient year to start living up to this. Grand Theft Auto VI is currently sucking up all the oxygen in the “AAA” video gaming space, and that’s not a game I’m particularly looking forward to. Elsewhere, big-name developers like Larian and Level-5 are going in on generative AI, a development practice that I abhor. It’s getting easier and easier to not want to spend $70 on a new video game.

And so, with that, I’ve settled on the new year’s theme of Rebuild. I’ll be trying to live this theme through vectors other than video games, but video games are a particularly easy budget item to remove.

I’ve often half-joked that another “great video game crash” would be good for me since it would give me time to finally play more stuff on my backlog, and while the incoming crash will be catastrophic for developers of all budgets – I do think we’re sailing right into an incoming crash, if we’re not in one already – it is admittedly good for my wallet right now, at a point in time when the economy’s not looking particularly rosy.

I’m honestly terrified of the current state of video games. The AI bubble isn’t just bad because publishers are pushing the tech on developers who don’t like it; it’s literally eating into RAM supplies that upcoming game consoles will desperately need. Current-gen video game hardware is becoming increasingly unaffordable. $500 for a game console was unthinkable not too long ago; it’s now a relief that the Switch 2 only costs that much, for now. It’s little wonder why people are sticking to forever games like Fortnite or Roblox that still run decently well on PS4s (again, for now).

Buying a PS6 in 2028? Forget about it. Whatever it ends up costing will be well out of range for all but the wealthiest consumers.

I think we’re running straight to the point where video game budgets become too big to succeed, and the video game hardware needed to play them is too expensive to afford, and the big-budget gaming space will need to either seriously rethink its approach, or die.

And as they do that, I think I’ll be perfectly content to spend 2026 playing the stuff I already have instead of the stuff that has yet to come out. Resident Evil Requiem and Control: Resonant look super cool, and I also don’t need to play them day one. I can focus on all the stuff I missed over the past decade or so instead.

I’m playing Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown at the behest of a friend. Have y’all played that game? It’s my first Ace Combat game and it’s so rad. It’s almost six years old and it holds up.

FOMO is out. Saving money and rebuilding is in.

Have a good 2026, y’all.