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Saturday, May 1, 2021

Holy Unround Number Anniversary: 12 Years of Spewing

FB was kind enough to remind me yesterday:


Happy spew-versary!  The question is how long will I continue as the trend is suggestive:

Whether one looks at yearly output or monthly (so that the first and last partial years are comparable), the decline is quite clear.  I still like to blog, but I am writing less.  Why?  I must result to the classic blog trick--the listicle.

  • Exhaustion of ideas.  I often find myself thinking about writing and then not and instead summoning an old post that covers the idea.  Why re-write an old idea when I can just re-post?
  • Exhaustion of Steve.  If I was able to chart the accumulation of grading, supervisees and administration responsibilities, I would guess that the line is inverse to these.
  • I am probably developing attention deficit syndrome, so that might be part of it.  I am so easily distracted (this post was written over two days because I stopped and then forgot about it).
  • Twitter takes over.  While I joined twitter in 2009, just a couple of months after starting the blog, I think I have increasingly found threads or even a quick tweet to suffice, when I used to write something here.  
  • Podcasts--others and mine.  I started the blog at a time where I wasn't teaching and wanted to unload my ideas.  Now, twice a month, I get to do that on three topics in conversation with Stéfanie von Hlatky on #BattleRhythm.  Plus I spend my spare time listening to other podcasts rather than noodling away in blogger.
  • Not as much common culture to discuss.  Some flurries of posts were due to the end of TV shows like Mad Men, Lost (yes, that long ago), Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones.  Not sure if there is anything like that now.  Indeed, I post much less frequently about the tv I watch, the movies I see (a year sans movie theatres and counting), and the books I read.  I am still reading and watching, but not writing so much about it. 
  • Reversion to the mean?   Well, we don't know what the mean is yet, I guess. 

I still enjoy blogging when I do it.  It feels good to get a good rant off my chest like this take on the Ontario murder clowns.  Will I resolve to blog more in the future?  No, as I have found I enjoy it most when I feel like it, not like when I feel I should. I don't think this line will continue to decline so much that I stop blogging.  When the idea strikes me, I will blog.  I just have fewer ideas that I have not written about, I guess.

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