2021: The year in review – Part 2: Blogging

December 31, 2021 by Leave a comment

After a relatively productive 2020 our posting rate fell off a bit this year, but we did manage to at least touch upon a few of the main political and cultural developments of the last twelve months.

Foremost among these was the continuing dislocation of the seemingly-endless covid-19 pandemic. Any optimism generated by the production of a vaccine has started to ebb away, as viral mutation has brought us to the brink of another dispiriting winter lockdown, sorely testing the population’s willingness to endure further restrictions. The government’s typically confused response has done little to inspire confidence that the situation will be under control any time soon. I guess at some point in the future we’re all going to be either immune or dead; perhaps we’ll get back to normality then.

For a while at the start of the year it looked like US politics might get quite interesting, but, once the smoke had cleared after the Capitol riot, things settled into a familiar routine; the competent but dull centerism of Joe Biden being frustrated by the characteristic obstructionism of an ever rightward-shifting GOP. Meanwhile the momentum for progressive change that had built up under the Trump administration has all but disappeared, as the left shifts its attention to looming defensive struggles around voting rights and reproductive autonomy.

Here in the UK, the last couple of months have seen problems mounting for Boris Johnson, as various scandals and electoral setbacks have given the lie to the notion that he was able to defy the normal rules of politics with his trademark bluster and charm. Bourgeois liberals, who had been in a state of demoralisation since the Brexit catastrophe, have greeted this development with joy, declaring confidently that it signifies a return to sensible moderation, and discouraging any talk of left alternatives, lest the electorate is frightened back into the arms of the Tories. I think this is exactly the wrong lesson to learn from the recent history of British politics; the reason Johnson has been able to make inroads into traditionally Labour-supporting areas is because the left has been too tentative in promoting a progressive vision, rather than over-confident. Pursuing a supposed centre ground just allows the right to set the agenda, dragging the country further into reaction. There are some signs of a left revival, especially in the devolved nations, but hope is still a scarce commodity.

Anyway, here are our top ten posts of 2021, by traffic:

  1. Red star shines on
  2. World Cup predictions revisited
  3. The Linden Principle
  4. Euro predictions
  5. Euro 2016 forecast
  6. Premature relaxation
  7. Fly me to the moon
  8. L’Italia è vittoriosa
  9. 02022020
  10. There is no land beyond the Volga

I’ve given up trying to analyse why some old posts suddenly become popular again, and I’m a bit disappointed that only one from this year made the cut, but at least a few of the vintage pieces are good ones.

Here are my favourite posts of the year:

Our global reach shrank a little this year, but we still managed to attract visitors from 40 countries; here are the top ten:

  1. United Kingdom
  2. United States
  3. China
  4. Japan
  5. Canada
  6. India
  7. Malaysia
  8. New Zealand
  9. Vietnam
  10. Germany

After a year when it sometimes seemed we were stuck in some sort of temporal loop, I have a feeling that 2022 might deliver some significant change, so there should be plenty of topics to comment upon; we’ll see if I manage to be a bit more productive. Whatever happens, I hope all our readers have a happy, safe, and prosperous New Year.

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2021: The year in review – Part 1: Culture

December 31, 2021 by Leave a comment

According to the meticulous record I keep on our Tumblr, my consumption of Serious Cultural Experiences was up 17.46% over the course of 2021. This may or may not be related to a loosening of my criteria for what constitutes a Serious Cultural Experience; I’ll let you be the judge…

Television – This year saw me watch a lot more TV than I had for ages, partly because other entertainment options were somewhat limited, but mostly because I had signed up for several streaming services, and was determined to get my money’s worth. I have to admit that I sat through a lot of late-night junk, but I did follow a few of the series that received more positive critical attention, like The Queen’s Gambit, and WandaVision. My favourite was Pretend It’s a City, in which Fran Lebowitz and Martin Scorsese trade anecdotes about life in New York, evoking the kind of classy intellectual milieu that I can only dream of being part of.

Film – I enjoyed WandaVision, but for about 90% of the time I had no idea what was going on, so, since I had already shelled out for the Disney+ subscription, I set out to fill the gap in my pop-culture knowledge by watching all the Marvel movies in timeline order, starting with Captain America: The First Avenger in May, and wrapping up with Avengers: Endgame just a few days ago. I’d hesitate to say that it was the most productive use I could have made of my time, but it was diverting, and there were some interesting themes explored, though personally I preferred the entries that stuck to the comic-book spirit over those that aimed for a more serious tone. I thought the best of the bunch was Captain Marvel, but that might just have been due to the grungy 90s soundtrack. I did go back to the cinema once it reopened, but I stuck to fairly undemanding entertainment rather than anything more heavyweight. I expect that The French Dispatch would have been my movie of the year if I had been organised enough to buy a ticket while it was still playing; since I wasn’t my vote goes to Last Night in Soho, with honourable mentions for Dune and House of Gucci.

Books – I didn’t read much fiction this year, or much non-fiction, or much of anything longer than a magazine article to be honest; too much TV I guess. Of the books I did manage, mostly old ones, I liked Balthazar, the second volume of the Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Nixonland, Rick Perlstein’s biography of Richard Nixon (obviously), Will Self’s thinly-fictionalised autobiography Will, and, my favourite, John Updike’s The Centaur.

Music – I bought a lot of records in 2021; music is the one area of culture where I try hardest to keep up the pretence that I am somewhat in touch with the zeitgeist, albeit within the narrow parameters of my long-established taste. Here are ten albums I particularly liked:

  • The Shadow I Remember – Cloud Nothings
  • Flock – Jane Weaver
  • Electrically Possessed [Switched On Volume 4] – Stereolab
  • epic Ten – Sharon Van Etten
  • Bodies of Water – Moontype
  • Chaise Longue / Wet Dream – Wet Leg
  • Long Time Coming – Sierra Ferrell
  • Astral Spectra – Piney Gir
  • The Umbrellas – The Umbrellas
  • Sympathy for Life – Parquet Courts

I didn’t go to any concerts, even though the music scene did start to tentatively open up towards the end of year. I have tickets for a couple of shows next month, here’s hoping they go ahead.

So that was 2021 in culture; no big surprises, which is only to be expected at my age I suppose. Next up: the year in blogging.

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Sæll Jól

December 21, 2021 by Leave a comment

So the great Cosmic Wheel keeps trundling along, and we find ourselves once again at the Winter Solstice, poised on the edge of the bitter deep winter, but with the promise of lengthening days, and eventually Spring, if we can just hold on for another few months…

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Viral déjà vu revisited

December 15, 2021 by Leave a comment

I may find the unchanging nature of Second Life strangely comforting, but the fact that events in the real world seem to be stuck on infinite repeat is rather more unsettling. Almost exactly a year ago we were dealing with the disappointment of Christmas being cancelled due to the emergence of a new strain of coronavirus, and, well, here we are again.

Of course the outlook is not quite as gloomy as it was last December; the reasonably high rate of vaccination in the UK population does give some cause for optimism. Set against that however is the ever more obvious incompetence of the government, presided over by the increasingly ridiculous figure of Boris Johnson, lurching from scandal to scandal, his authority so diminished that he struggles to win the support of his own party for the measures necessary to head off the resurgent pandemic. In another echo of the recent past, a hazardous by-election this week, in what should be a safe Tory seat, seems likely to precipitate a fresh crisis for Johnson, potentially rendering him powerless at just the time the country needs decisive leadership.

It could be worse I guess; Brexit might be going badly…

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Rediscovered life

December 8, 2021 by Leave a comment

Around now is the time every year when I look at my credit card statement and realise that I have once again forgotten to cancel my Second Life premium membership plan. The annual cost went up to $99 a few years ago, though I do get the equivalent of a buck a week back in the form of a Linden dollar allowance, so it works out at a little under $4 a month, which I guess isn’t too bad compared with what I spend on other forms of entertainment.

Anyway, this inspired me to dig out the old android tablet I have that still has a copy of the now-unobtainable Lumiya viewer installed. I hadn’t tried to use this for ages, so I wasn’t really expecting it to work, but, rather surprisingly, it did, and I found myself back in the familiar surroundings of my virtual alpine cabin.

It’s been two years at least since I was last on the grid, so I was thinking that things might have changed a little, but everything looked just the same. Of course I was using an ancient viewer, which was never graphically pretty even when it was new, and certainly won’t support whatever upgrades might have been engineered in the interim, but the sense of sameness came from more than just the rather dated visuals. Wandering around, there was that old feeling of emptiness that I remembered from when I used to visit more regularly. The land surrounding my cabin, once heavily developed, is now completely abandoned, and there didn’t seem to be another living soul in the whole region.

The post-apocalyptic ambience was always part of the charm of SL for me, but the apparent lack of paying customers does make me wonder how it is still a sustainable business model. Perhaps there are just enough people like me who are prepared to maintain their subscriptions, for reasons they can’t quite articulate, to keep the show on the road. Linden Lab was bought over by a private investment group last year, which suggests that someone believes there is still money to be made from the virtual world, though Tilia, the money services part of the business, may have been more attractive than SL itself. They might be looking to profit from some crypto/NFT-related plan, which seems to be the way the broader video game industry is going.

I did think the new owners might prioritise the release of an official mobile client, but the plan to develop such a thing was apparently abandoned earlier this year. This mystifies me, since the need to buy the sort of computer that can run the desktop viewer must be a major barrier to growing the user base. Monetising those new residents would probably be a big challenge though; perhaps venture capitalists do know more about running tech companies than amateur bloggers.

Whatever; I’ve been in SL for nearly 15 years now, so I expect I’ll preserve my little patch there until the bitter end, even if my visits are few and far between.

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