If 2026 has showed me anything, then it is the fact that handmade things are always more fun to own rather than manufactured things. I have plenty of mugs in my cabinet that looks nice, clean and are all from the factory. I never owned a handmade mug myself but I would think that if I had one, it'd be my most precious one in my collection.

The same way I feel about most of my things I own, they've been designed, written, crafted essentially, by people who wanted to make and say something. Be it something useful like a 3D printed shelf for my Super Nintendo Games or the games themselves that rest on them.

It all stands proudly in my handmade shelf assortment I designed and created with the help of my father and which we even extended from 2 shelves to 4 by now. Collecting stuff sadly always has inherently an aspect of hoarding and amassing things which need to be organized. The latter being the difference between collecting and hoarding.

My living room including the gigantic 4 part shelf setup that hosts all my physical games, manga and more that display essentially my hobbys, desires and past and future when it comes to my hobbies.

Every day I enter my living room, these shelves make up the central focus point before I turn to the left to my couch and gaming setup to play these games or turn to the right and have my dinner. But they're always in focus and always flood the room with a nice cozy light.

And these days there's not even just videogames on the shelves. I have added since rows for Manga I loved reading and want to display and show my friends when they come over what I recently added (if they care enough). There's pictures from my last trip to the amusement park's rollercoaster there and more memoribilia like a hand drawn painting my sister made for me of Nezuko and Tanjiro from the Demon Slayer series. So when I eventually die and someone else has to take care of selling my stuff, I have proof that I lived a life.

The Metal Gear altar of basically every metal gear item I own + some more like special collectors editions and some old time comic books.

Handcrafted is inherently beautiful

In late 2025 I started developing my own project to remove StreamElements. For those not in the know, that was a service people often used to have integration with streaming platforms like Twitch and Youtube to interact with the API and push forward notifications with visuals and sounds to inform about something like a new follower to your account and whatnot. StreamElements was about to shut down at that time and an alternative was quickly needed. Rather than going to a competitor, I decided it's time to try myself at it. Full control, I decide how it looks and sounds like and I can just host it on my own home server not worrying if the company behind it will go broke or be sold and shut down then anyway.

I started off with a baseline project that was simply there as a Nuxt Crash Course by CJ for the YouTube channel Syntax. (I don't expect y'all to watch it, but it may be a good video to link for someone who may want to get started with it).

It let me recreate a simple application that had me make a frontend to enter a task that I can pull through columns and in the end tick off as done. Beautiful. In the backend then that task gets saved to the database and I can retrieve it next time. Wonderful, Jira for home.

After having played around with it I decided hey why not track my upcoming streams like that with a calendar system and being able to pull that data with a web view into OBS to display. I can use the website on my private server and prepare upcoming streams that then later automatically get shown in the countdown before my actual stream starts to welcome viewers and give them time to sit down with me for what is to come for the next 2-3 hours.

A schedule view from the app i made starting with a card header saying "coming up" and 3 entries following. On Tuesday a Tekken 8 stream and on Wednesday and Thursday a Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain stream.

It took a really long time to make it all come together. Considering the data structure, how the visual aspects of the display should work and of course ideally integration to systems like Twitch, IGDB and steamgriddb to pull all sorts of assets and information.

But it did eventually come together in a very botched but effectively workin manner. I can plan my upcoming streams, a press of a button on my stream deck (stReam deck, not steam deck) lets me push the title and game to twitch automatically and it also loads a fitting game logo for my mobile view display to quickly tell people what stream they can swipe past in the streams feed.

And they beauty of it all is: I made it. I can recall every little decision i had to make during the journey, what worked and especially what didn't work (hello CORS error) and how I finally solved it. It was me - not AI that made it. And that matters in 2026.

Me - the author - sitting at my multi screen desktop setup, ready to write the next lines.

Rejection of Ownership

Because for all (non existing) value that AI supposedly has created, it made one thing entirely vanish: ownership and pride in ones own work - well... if you entirely use this tool that is.

I don't care how much time you spent on it, how much you supposedly say you understand now how it all works. It was made in the end with the help of stolen work of the entire human library of written text, code and ideas. None of that was inherently sucked up by yourself in the classic way of learning as you go, cooperating with others to enrich your own wealth of knowledge, it was the broke mindset of "I need to have it, I will own it and I won't ask how it comes together".

That careless acting is how within the span of a year still not a single developer was made obsolete by ai coding except for by the decision of executives that want to see their chart they're responsible for going up. Line goes up, all green, no problems to report.

While completely omitting both the responsibility we as humans have to take care of the only planet that we have in the best way we possibly can. Refusing to acknowledge the damage by simply pushing it aside as a factor of inevitability and a fact we "can't put the genie back in the bottle anymore". (Did you even see the Aladdin movie? The villain was literally put back into the bottle!)

It's this laziness that disappoints me. Simply giving up and refusing any kind of resistance for the fact that what's done is done. The coop mod has already been slopped together, a shame not to play it now? The recomp has been made to play that classic fighting game with rollback netcode on your PC natively without needing an emulator between. Really? That's the excuse to just be fine with the state of the world? Not being even more demanding from the powers that the factual need and desire to buy these things officially?

Sadly this is what people are proven to be very bad at - to consider costs beyond their own personal and direct affliction. We don't think of costs usually unless they're right in front of us. "I didn't need to spend the money on the tokens to generate the outcome, I just downloaded the zip from github and acquired a legal iso of the game I own myself." - Yeah you didn't see the billing on your monthly statement. You didn't see the server warehouses being built destroying forests or living spaces that nature and humans occupied in peace before are now worsend by lower air quality, noise pollution and water and electricity usage displacement. These people blind themself to the fact of destruction, the rejection of their ownership in all of it.

Boundless greed

And yet even that is not enough. The CEOs demand even more from you that you do actually see. Is it not enough that GPUs, the ones we proudly upgraded from every few years to enjoy our beloved games in even better fashion, are unobtainium these days?

Even the data storage mediums like HDDs, SSDs and simple Nand Flash is all overly expensive so only the already rich can still enjoy them. Do you enjoy the pain of not being able to own your own compute power? To outsource not just the thinking part, the responsibility part and the physical medium part, but also any and all future possibilites you could have to the furnace of the idea stealing machine, regurgitator and desperator for more to the oppressing system?

Sam Altman says DRAM in your computer is wasted as only being idle at 5% when it can be better utilized in the server farms around the world to make more profit. I say let him have none of it in the first place! This fool doesn't even know how to run his company at profit but only billions of dollars in debt.

We can make better things with precious drinkable water than let it cool server farms around the world. And I will keep my 128gb ram of DDR-4 in my closet until it's time to retire my old server. Repurpose an older system that I formerly used in the name of recycling, reusing and continued ownership.

The ultimative question to me these days has been what can I call my own, my pride, my reason to claim that I lived on this planet as an entitiy that has fullfilled my human duty to exist, to thrive and survive. To me it's the things that I created, that I own and that I can claim have been made by myself. Ultimate it accumulates to a benefit overall to me, my friends, my family and loved ones around the world that I hope I can enrich with my presence.

Why ownership matters

None of that can be said about anything AI generated. None of that was someone's individual work - to which the law agrees. It doesn't matter in the end, if the thing that was made was a shitty, ugly mug. It doesn't matter that I made my app in the most unstable, unsecure and botched state. It only matters that I created it.

Even after it originally started as a task board, what followed of the baseline was entirely made by my own hands and my human desires to make something useful in this world. Plus the original tasks app I started with is being licensed with the MIT license which gives unrestricted right:

without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge,
publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software

Something that AI generated code inherently can't be made subject to, licensing. That would require ownership in the first place.

I hope I can eventually make this something useful for more than myself. But I can live with the fact that sometimes I also just make things for myself and that's good enough. So long I own the things I desire I can also decide to share or not share with the world what I have. Speedrun history, speedrun strats and in general knowledge to me is sacred and ideally open for anyone. So of course I happily share how I made stuff without necessarily handing over the keys to my work. That is up to me in the end as the owner of my creation.

We should not stand in the way of the future to prevent our successors from accessing the same or even a better platform to get started with compared to what we had. Taking away any and all ownership in form of idea theft, creation theft and ownership loss is the ultimate opposition to that.

This article is a product of what has been on my mind for a while now and I needed an outlet to put it all into a post to establish my mind to paper connection. I hope you found it useful, dear reader. Maybe you'll read me next time again.

In the meantime I do also put videos on YouTube and shorter thoughts on BlueSky. Until then, farewell.