2014: The Year in Review – Part 2: Blogging

December 31, 2014 by Leave a comment

This has been the year that I’ve had to face up to the fact that this blog is all but dead, and I can no longer honestly call myself a blogger. Gone are the days when, on hearing an interesting piece of news, or reading an intriguing article, my mind would immediately start working on a post for this space. I am still occasionally inspired by events to turn out a few lines, but, more often than not, I let the thought slip away. Consequently I’ve managed a mere 20 posts over the last 12 months, including this one. I’m happy with most of the individual pieces, but there are not enough of them to fully record where my head was at this year, which is the whole point of having a personal blog. I’ve completely ignored some momentous events, in my internal and external worlds, and while I have noted my reactions to these in other places, it would have been nice to have them collected here for posterity.

Anyway, on with the review. We do still get a steady stream of traffic, though I suspect a lot of it must be robotic; certainly all the comments we get are spam. Here are our top ten posts for the last year:

  1. Second Life demographics – a brief review
  2. On Second Life and addiction
  3. Free Pussy Riot!
  4. Ferrisburg, Vermont
  5. Like Pompeii (or Herculaneum)
  6. Second Life, with graphics, on the iPhone?
  7. Win some, lose some, it’s all the same to me
  8. A Radical Game
  9. What’s up
  10. Bastille Day 1989

All of these are years old. The posts on demographics and addiction have been at the top for a while; they got linked to quite a bit back in the day, which must still be drawing in some hits. I have no idea why the other posts should be more popular than the rest of the stuff in our archive though. I suppose I could study our referral patterns to glean some clues, but that seems significantly more trouble than it would be worth.

Of this year’s posts, these are my favourites:

We still get traffic from all over the world, 95 countries in all, including China, which I’m sure used to block us. Here’s the top 10:

  1. United States
  2. Brazil
  3. United Kingdom
  4. Canada
  5. France
  6. Germany
  7. Australia
  8. Italy
  9. Mexico
  10. Netherlands

Topic-wise it’s been mainly history, politics, culture and nostalgia. Only one post this year directly concerned Second Life (though another one alluded to it), and my total time spent on the grid has probably added up to a couple of hours at most. Despite this I did renew my premium membership in October, but I can’t for the life of me think why, since my interest in the virtual world is practically nonexistent these days. Perhaps the original spark will reignite.

So what of the future? Every year around this time I resolve to be more productive, and it never happens; maybe it’s time to admit that this project is finished, and to move on to something else. We’ve been going close on eight years now though, and I do look back fondly on my past scribblings. Even this year hasn’t been a complete write-off – I think my New York nostalgia post from July is up there with our best – so I guess I’ll manage to keep plugging away…

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2014: The Year in Review – Part 1: Culture

December 31, 2014 by Leave a comment

Back in January I took the momentous decision to stop buying CDs, and start downloading music instead. (I am aware that downloading is passé, and streaming is where it’s at, but give me some credit for finally leaving the 1980s and catching up with the 21st century.) I’ve also been listening to the radio a lot more, mostly BBC 6, and the combined result has been that I’ve got into a lot of new artists, rediscovered some old favourites, and acquired loads of records this year. Far too many to list here (they’re all on my Culture Tumblr if you’re interested), so I’ll just feature the best tracks from my ten favourite albums, in no particular order:

Moaning Lisa Smile – Wolf Alice (Creature Songs)
An Ocean In Between The Waves – The War On Drugs (Lost In The Dream)
Your Love is Killing Me – Sharon Van Etten (Are We There)
We Are Coming Back – Marissa Nadler (July)
Can’t Be Too Responsible – Avi Buffalo (At Best Cuckold)
Woke Up In My Future – Haley Bonar (Last War)
Love Song – Dawn Landes (Bluebird)
Different Days – The Men (Tomorrow’s Hits)
White Fire – Angel Olsen (Burn Your Fire For No Witness)
Forgiveness – Bob Mould (Beauty & Ruin)

I managed to get out to see more live music this year too, from the relatively new (Speedy Ortiz) to the somewhat older (Television) but my favourite show was living legend Bob Mould, still as electrifying (and as loud) as when I first saw him in Hüsker Dü back in my student days.

Book-wise, I’ve been reading a lot of history, specifically 18th and 19th century military history, from the Seven Years War to the Franco-Prussian War. I was fairly familiar with the political history of this period already, but it’s always good to remind oneself that outcomes that seem inevitable in retrospect are often contingent on the actions of fallible individuals.

On the fiction front my main project was another attempt at Proust’s In Search of Lost Time – I managed two volumes, which is twice as far as I’ve got in the past, and I’m going to dive back into The Guermantes Way next month. I read a few more contemporary novels too, but nothing terribly memorable.

My favourite book of the year however was a piece of non-fiction from 1984; Janet Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives, a masterful and darkly humorous deconstruction of narcissism in the world of psychoanalysis.

I’m still not going to the cinema much. I seem to have completely fallen out of love with the whole medium; I hardly ever read the movie reviews these days, so I can’t even fake opinions on what’s been showing. I did see one great film this year though; Inside Llewyn Davis by the Coen brothers, who can always be relied upon to spin a slender narrative into something deeper. I found the title character particularly affecting, perhaps because I can identify with a man who can’t quite give up on his dreams, even though he knows that to compromise would make him happier, or at least unhappy in a more bearable way.

So there you have it, my year of culture, such as it was. I have, of course, skirted around the mass of low culture I consumed, in the form of YouTube binges (Russian dashcam videos a particular favourite), listicles, and other mindless internet ephemera, which wasted countless hours of my life that I’m never going to get back. It’s the general trajectory of our information-overload society I guess. I will try to be a little more highbrow next year…

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Turn The Season

December 25, 2014 by Leave a comment

Well, that’s midwinter past (though, interestingly, the mornings will keep getting darker for a while yet), and Christmas is upon us, so I guess it’s time to come out of hibernation and start thinking about reviewing the year gone by. Though there’s surely time for a few beers and a mince pie or two before I get down to work…

(Here’s a song link, something we haven’t had for ages.)

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