Time to put the year away, as it were. Back on Livejournal, I usually called these Year-end posts “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” but dropped that tradition once I decided to do away with my Lj and its sixteen-odd years of history back in 2020—I did keep backups of my journal entries because memories.
Anyway…
No “goods, bads, or uglies”—just thoughts about the past year. Abridged version: 2025 was ass, but still better than 2024.
Table of Contents
Blender: Rigging and Moving Away from Poser
Oof. This was the big one—and I’m still working on a series of posts documenting all of this work. The preliminary work can be seen in my Poser to Blender tutorial.
I started off this past spring after getting inspired by watching rigging videos from a YouTuber named Rakenval. I’d been porting over and re-rigging the Aiko3 and Hiro3 figures from Daz3D but one of the challenges in working with these figures is that automatic weight-mapping tends to fail due to the weird geometry.
Now, around eight months later, I have a better understanding of rigging. During my journey, one of my moves was to standardize how I create my rigs from the FBX rig—that turned into a single-click Blender add-on that’s still being developed. Of course, typical me not to be outdone, I figure out how to convert the FBX rig to CloudRig and Rigify, which left me with a dilemma—continue developing my add-on or switch over? I ended up switching over to CloudRig because the most time-consuming part of rig creation is the face rig itself.
So that’s how my adventures in rigging looks going into 2026. Tl’dr, my characters are getting converted to CloudRig, and that’s going to be the subject of another tutorial in the near future.
Fate Grand Order: NA’s Stall and JP’s Finish
On NA (I’m pretty much exclusively NA), the year started off with Lostbelt 7, which then followed the Ordeal Call (Cash Grab) Prologue. Honestly, I wasn’t feeling very enthusiastic about Ordeal Call when it was announced in JP almost three years ago. It’s reflected in how I’ve played the game this year—I haven’t felt bad about skipping events that didn’t look interesting, or checking out of events half-way through.
I did a speed-run of LB7 during my birthday, then played through Ordeal Call 1 when it was released. I’d already known in advance that I would skip Valentines :yawn:, so that brought me right to Lilim Harlot. I checked out after Lilim Harlot and didn’t come back until OC1, then played through Mystic Eyes Symphony and the summer event.
I ended up checking out of the World Tour event because the story quite frankly blew. Did play GUDAGUDA—I always play GUDAGUDA (well, except for the event that featured Chacha). Skipped CBC 2025, Illya’s Castle, and Grail Front—but I always skip Grail Front events. Finally, despite the lotto, I checked out of the Christmas event because I was probably too busy paying attention to the conclusion of the Lostbelt saga on JP.
Fate/GO NA in 2026
Looking over the next year, I don’t see any servants that I’d be interested in rolling for except maybe Takeru and Beast Ereshkigal. Valentine’s looks like a snoozer. New Servants for OC2? Nah, pass. The Charlemagne event looks cool so I’ll probably play through that one. Witch on the Holy Night collab, I haven’t decided if I’ll pass or not. May and June look like rerun events for Lilim Harlot and Summer 2023(?) Dancing Dragon Castle event? :shrug: However, Summer is a must for OC3.
After Summer and OC3, is Faerie Sugoroku—which eh? Maybe? Same feeling about the Halloween and Christmas events as well.
Looking beyond to 2027—sigh… we have gooner material (My Little Dragon), Valentine’s, and Summer—which both look like snoozers. Fitting for what looks to be the final year of FGO, but the only noteworthy content looks like Ordeal Call 4, and the Grand Servant quests (maybe NA will get those early?) before NA ends 2027 the way JP has ended 2025.
I have some additional thoughts on the JP finish, and we now know that there’s going to be a continuation, I’ll need to update that with some thoughts after watching “The Lostbelt After-party” prologue.
That’s it from this end. Later 😉