Studio F/ARTs from December

Fellow passengers,

We’ve reached the end of December, 2025. For years I have had a habit of looking backward and forward at this time of year; trying, somewhat earnestly, to be fair and balanced. Usually it turns into a slightly cringey note to self. Some symbolic invocation for where I am personally and professionally. And if I’m being honest, I’ve rarely met the goals I set. Ever.

This year came surprisingly close though.

At the start of 2025, I thought I would focus on building in public, especially around Baanar and The Thousand Arms, within the broader goals of monkeyverse. On a more personal level, consistency and health became unavoidable themes. They weren’t planned priorities, but they ended up shaping everything else.

I think I made some progress on both fronts, though not without friction. There were a lot of realisations this year, along with a series of health issues. Recurring fevers, body aches, and long stretches of low energy. I was sick more often than I’d like to admit, more than last year, maybe even the year before that. It slowed things down, but it also forced me to be more honest about limits. Which would inevitably the theme of next year.

That aside though…

This year, I made a conscious decision to put work out in the open. Even if it was inconsistent, the goal was to be consistently inconsistent. The point wasn’t perfection; it was accountability. At the very least, I wanted to update one project every month, just to prove to myself that things were moving.

In 2024, most of my work sat outside concept art, and my reach was modest, around 1.1K people on the website. This year it climbed to roughly 6K. Realistically, I know the meaningful number is closer to 2K once you strip out bot traffic. But even that is a 100% increase, and I’m choosing to accept that as progress. I guess!

You can tell how far I came through the blogs of 2025

I also posted more on social media than I ever have before, especially on Threads and Instagram. Though almost everything eventually pointed back to blogs. A lot of it revolved around Baanar. And unexpectedly, I ended up publishing three short stories as well.

One thing I’ve come to terms with is this: what I’m building right now looks more like an audience than a community. People read, watch, scroll. There are likes, a few meaningful conversations, but there’s a gap; and I think that gap exists because I’m not naturally an “engagement-first” person. I don’t live very digitally. I’m much better in rooms than on feeds.

So for now, this remains a showcase of work rather than a deeply interactive community space. It isn’t Discord. It isn’t constant conversation. And maybe that’s okay. I’ve always been more comfortable face to face. In this ever-speeding world, that seems wrong, but intuitively I am aware that, that is best for me. I am also not so hungry for digital connections. But what I do aspire to is that people find meaning in the work. Whatever that meaning might be for them.

Looking ahead, now that the year has landed close to where I hoped it would, I want to use these blogs more confidently as source material for social posts. There’s enough here — stories, illustrations, notes on building in public, Baanar conversations, for the content to travel further if I let it.

Confidence is still the missing piece. Social media overwhelms me in a way I can’t fully explain. It feels exposing. As if being seen is the point, and that makes me uneasy. But avoiding visibility is also at odds with trying to build something real. Maybe putting the work out there, imperfectly, is part of learning that confidence.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about video and the monkeyverse youtube. I consciously avoided it for many years. But 2026 feels like the right time to at least start. Nothing ambitious. Maybe one video a month. Even if it never gets published. Screen recordings, studio logs, fragments. Whatever.

For most of my life I have been writing, even more then I draw. And while there’s an audience for that, video might be a simpler way to meet people where they already are. I don’t know where it’ll lead yet, but I guess I’ll only find out if I try.

We wrapped up the year with a longer, more detailed reflection on Baanar, partly to make sense of what we’ve built so far, and partly to slow down and actually look at it. The post captures the behind-the-scenes work: the decisions, the missteps, the small wins, and the parts that are still very much unresolved.

Looking back, the year felt split between learning how to make products and learning how to sustain the process around them. There was a lot of trial and error with sourcing, packaging, pacing, and expectations. Some things worked better than expected, others revealed how much ground there still is to cover. But overall, it felt like laying foundations rather than chasing outcomes.

If you’re curious about how Baanar evolved over the year – Its all here on our internal landing page.

The Thousand Arms also quietly crossed an important threshold this year. What began as fragments, loose notes, images, and moods, started turning into something that feels anchored.

I spent a lot of time wrestling with the visual direction of the project. I knew I wanted it to feel chaotic, uncomfortable, and a little violent; not in a loud way, but in the way thoughts collide when you’re not fully in control of yourself. The colour palette finally started to emerge, along with a graphic language that feels closer to Satori’s internal mess. It’s still rough, but it finally feels like a beginning rather than a placeholder.

This year was also about putting small public markers down. The website was updated, a logo took shape; and though I have not published the chapters regularly, and the project finally found its way onto Instagram. None of it feels finished — but it feels real now. There’s a sense that the world exists outside my head, even if only partially.

If Baanar was about learning how to build something tangible, The Thousand Arms was about staying with a story long enough for it to talk back. This was less about progress in numbers, and more about trust. Trusting the process, the character, and the slow pace it seems to demand.

This year, Mind of My Mind, began as a loose question and slowly turned into a long walk. A very long walk. From a blank slate and an inquiry: how do we even begin to understand alcohol and its ripple effects inside a person and in society? This introduction lays out that intention clearly, not as a theory but as an open invitation to explore; how alcohol touches memory, emotion, gut instinct, decision-making, culture, and the intimate mechanics of human experience. 

At first, I was just trying to understand alcohol beyond the obvious moral arguments; beyond “good” or “bad,” “allowed” or “banned.” What followed was a series of essays, notes, and speculative fragments that look at alcohol as a system: cultural, economic, bodily, emotional, and political. Granted the project is still a work in progress, its heading in a direction I like.

Some pieces sit firmly in reality; how addiction works, how alcohol is regulated in India, why prohibition keeps failing despite good intentions. Others drift into speculation; imagining futures where drinking declines, where economies shift, where care replaces punishment, and where policy acknowledges human behaviour instead of denying it.

What ties all of it together is a refusal to simplify. Addiction isn’t just a personal failure. Prohibition isn’t just a policy mistake. Alcohol sits at the intersection of memory, gut, desire, shame, celebration, control, and escape. Any honest conversation has to live with those contradictions.

This research also quietly feeds into The Thousand Arms. Not as facts, but as texture; the fog, the cycles, the half-clarities, the way awareness doesn’t arrive all at once. Mind of My Mind is less about answers, and more about learning how to ask better questions, without flinching.

Rather than jumping to conclusions, the research is organised through a scoping review process, a method that allows the inquiry to evolve as knowledge becomes available, rather than forcing certainty too soon. This means looking at alcohol from multiple angles; how it becomes a habit, how it slips into addiction, how policies shape its availability, how memories fade or fracture with drinking, and how recovery really looks for a human being. 

The introductory piece also makes something else clear: this is not an academic exercise tucked away in an ivory tower. The aim is not just to know, but to feel and understand in a way that can inform both the narrative of The Thousand Arms and the real lived experience of people navigating addiction, culture, and self-perception. The investigation is intended to morph, grow and overlap with storytelling, and refuse tidy conclusions; much like the messy, imperfect nature of the human mind itself.

At some point, I realised I needed a clearer frame for what I was doing here, not to lock it down, but to stop it from drifting. The Mind of My Mind introduction was my attempt at that. It lays out the work as a slow, open-ended investigation into alcohol, not just as a substance, but as something that moves through the way we understand ourselves.

In that sense, this project is as much about how we think as what we think about. It’s ongoing, deliberately unfinished, and probably always will be. That feels honest, given the subject.