Year in review, self-linkblog-edition
A long time ago (longer now than it seems,) I used to write a lot. Flash forward a few lifetimes, I sat down at the end of last year to try and do something a little more complex than normal, and realized that I’d basically forgotten how to write everything other than technical specs or slack messages.
I needed to get back into shape, and to do that I needed some practice. A lot of practice.
So, I triggered the Genesis Device on this URL and relit the blog as an explicit project to re-teach myself how to write. I had a vague goal of doing about two pieces a week, focused on covering tech and pop culture; maybe Tuesdays and Thursdays, respectively?
Well, it’s been a year. How’d it go?
Including this one, I ended up with 117 pieces, which is just over two a week, but a cursory glance at the archives reveals very very few times I ever hit exactly two a week, and certainly never Tech Tuesday / Pop Culture Thursday.
The schedule wasn’t the actual goal though, the goal was to just keep playing the scales and see where the wind took me. I ended up just north of 110,000 words for the year, which is a lot more than I would have done without the blog.
It really look a while to get going. I’m a much slower writer than I used to be (or at least, remember being,) so one of the hardest parts has been finding the time to actually do the writing, and then building a habit around it. The other big thing I had to re-learn was how to actually finish things.
By the end of the summer I was posting little things on a fairly regular basis, but a deep backlog of half-finished drafts. As a piece of self-deprecating humor, the tag for “the big ones” was for pieces that stayed stuck in draft form for more than a month. For example, the first draft of Fully Automated Insults to Life Itself had a file date in February, and the first draft of Fractals was at the start of July, and 2023’s strange box office was half-done before Barbenheimer even came out. (They all turned out pretty well, I think?)
But! The rust finally started to come off for real as I was recovering from COVID in October, I refocused on actually finishing things in the backlog at the start of November, and as of this post, the drafts folder is empty.
(And I’m not going to say there’s a direct correlation with the blog output hitting a groove and twitter imploding, but that’s not a total coincidence either, you know?)
My biggest surprise has been that I was expecting to do a lot more tech & software engineering writing, and that didn’t end up being where the inspiration flowed. Eyeing my tag stats, I have 66 pieces for pop culture, and 42 for tech, and so hey, thats a fun number to hit, but I was expecting the ratio to go the other way.
In roughly chronological order, here’s some of my favorite pieces I did this year.
On the tech side of the house:
- Space Glasses and Apple Vision Pro: New Ways to be Alone works as a solid pair, and was me washing a half-decade of work out of my hair, as it were
- Drobo Ragnarök
- Why didn’t you just use…
- What was happening: Twitter, 2006-2023
- Don't Guess When You Can Ask
- I spent most of the year steaming about AI, and finally wrangled a whole pile of drafts into Fully Automated Insults to Life Itself and its prologue, You call it the “AI Nexus”, we call it the “Torment Pin”, which ended up with a bunch of material that was originally going to go in the main piece, but worked better there.
- Layoff Season(s), which I originally wrote in March, didn’t publish because I thought it was too grumpy, and then by December I realized it wasn’t grumpy enough.
And on the pop culture side:
- Wild Things at 25
- Correct, Orcas are not our friends
- Wait, Which Hundred?
- What seems to be your boggle, citizen? 30 years of Demolition Man
- Apple Music vs(?) The Beatles
- Still out there: The X-Files at 30
- Fall ’23 Good TV Thursdays: “The real TVA was the friends we made along the way”
- Email Verification
- My four Doctor Who reviews:
- 2023’s strange box office
- Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
- Good Adaptations and the Lord of the Rings at 20 (and 68)
- It’ll Be Worth It
- “It’s accurate, Captain”; I’d been meaning to write something about Strange New Worlds all year, and finally found an excuse right at the end. It was also a nice example of why I was doing this blog in the first place; at the start of the year, that piece would have taken me weeks to put together, languishing through draft after partial draft; by the end of December I was able to go from “hey, that might be a funny post” to “scheduled for publication” in about 90 minutes. Practice really does pay off, y’all!
All that said, I don’t know if it was the best, but my absolutely favorite piece I did this year was Fractals.
A few other stray observations.
You can really spot the period in late summer/fall where I wasn’t getting enough sleep and the blog got extremely grouchy. Favorite Programming Language Features: Swift’s Exception handling with Optionals was the result me realizing I had written way too may grouchy posts in a row and telling myself, “go write about something you like! Anything!” I’m not sure it’s obvious that the blog has gotten less grouchy since then, but that’s the point where I started paying attention.
Meanwhile, my posts with the most traffic were:
- The Enshittification Curve
- What seems to be your boggle, citizen? 30 years of Demolition Man
- What the heck happened to Boing Boing?
All of which popped off on one search engine or another; I was Google’s number 2 hit for “enshittification curve” for a bit over the summer, so that was exciting.
Like many, many podcast listeners, I’ve been a (mostly?) happy Squarespace customer for many years. This project has really stretched what their platform is good at, though; it’s great for infrequently updated sites—restaurants, small businesses, portfolios, and the like—but daily blogs with complex formatting is outside their wheelhouse, to say the least. I spent the year slowly realizing I was trying to recreate wordpress inside squarespace’s editor, and “hmmmm”.
I have a few loose piecs queued up for the start of the year, but then I think I’m gonna pump the brakes a little. I’ve got a few longer-form things I want to try and do next year, so I’m going to see if I can redirect this habit I’ve built in a slightly different way.
So Happy New Year, everyone! This year was pretty good, all things considered. Let’s make the next one ever better.