2023: The year in review – Part 2: Blogging

December 31, 2023 by Leave a comment

This year hasn’t been one of our more productive; we just about managed one post a month, and a fair number of those were fillers pushed out at the deadline to keep the streak going.

I hinted at the reason for this in one of my rare insightful pieces in the summer; the disconnect between the objectively terrible state of the world, and the largely carefree nature of my personal existence. Things have only gotten worse since then, both internationally, with genocide in Palestine, fascists coming to power in Latin America and Europe, and the abandonment of even the pretence of action on climate change, and domestically, as the rabble of spivs and fantasists that passes for our government fight amongst themselves while the country slides into oblivion. Still my life trundles on, more or less agreeably. Add in the fact that advancing age has deepened my predisposition towards existential rumination, and it is perhaps not too surprising that composing light-hearted missives on culture and politics sometimes seems more than a little pointless.

Despite the paucity of new content we still get a surprising amount of traffic; not so much that I could call myself an influencer, but enough to keep me from giving up altogether. Of course it’s more than likely that most of these readers are actually bots intent on scraping our archive to compile a training set for the next generation of Artificial Intelligence; if so, at least I can console myself with the thought that I have made some contribution to the education of our future robotic overlords.

Anyway, here are our top ten most-read posts of the year:

  1. There is no land beyond the Volga
  2. Change don’t come easy
  3. How ’bout them Cubs?
  4. Virtual alchemy
  5. Trumpocalypse now
  6. Guiding Light
  7. Tom Verlaine RIP
  8. Comfortably fungible
  9. They were defeated, we won the war
  10. Summer torpor

Of these only our brief note on the passing of Television frontman Tom Verlaine is from the last twelve months; the rest are essentially random picks from as long ago as 2010. My favourite post of the year, from a limited field, is this one about the crypto implosion.

One disappointment has been the contraction of our international appeal; 87% of our traffic now comes from either the UK or the US, with the remaining 13% split between another 25 nations, quite a change from the days when we had readers in over 100 countries. Here are the top ten:

  1. United Kingdom
  2. United States
  3. China
  4. Canada
  5. Hong Kong
  6. New Zealand
  7. Portugal
  8. Finland
  9. Singapore
  10. Germany

So that was 2023. This time last year I suggested that we might start posting more Second Life-related content, since I had just downloaded the SpeedLight app, which promised access to the grid via my iPhone, but sadly it turned out to be a bit rubbish, so I never really got into it, though I did renew my SL subscription when it fell due in October. An official Linden Lab mobile viewer is reportedly set for imminent release, so I guess it’s possible that we might have some more metaverse news to report in the coming months. Failing that I expect we will keep turning out infrequent dispatches of lightweight political and cultural commentary, to a more or less completely indifferent world.

I’m off to meet some friends and ring in the New Year, so all that remains is to wish our readers a happy and prosperous 2024.

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2023: The year in review – Part 1: Culture

December 31, 2023 by Leave a comment

Here we are at the end of December, time to look back on the year that has just passed. I’ll summarise our blogging output, such as it was, in the next post, but first up a run through of some of my personal cultural highlights of 2023.

Television – after a peak during the pandemic, my TV-watching has reverted back to being practically non-existent. The only new programme I took in was the third season of Only Murders in the Building, and even that I binge-watched over a couple of evenings. I do occasionally dip into back episodes of comedies like Arrested Development, or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but otherwise the medium is essentially dead to me. I’m not sure if that will change in the year ahead, though I’ll probably keep my various streaming-service subscriptions going just in case something good comes out.

Film – I did make much better use of my membership of our local art-house cinema this year, going more or less weekly for a spell, though that did tail off a bit more recently. Highlights included a Wes Anderson season ahead of the release of Asteroid City, anniversary revivals of classic films I just about remembered from the first time around, like Variety, Dazed and Confused, Gregory’s Girl, and Stop Making Sense, homage to the noughties NYC music scene Meet Me In The Bathroom, and of course summer blockbuster Barbie (though I skipped Oppenheimer, which I was not in the mood for at the time; I guess I should try to catch it before the Oscar nominations come out). My favourite film of the year was Anatomy of a Fall, an intriguingly ambiguous exploration of whether it is ever possible to really know another human being.

Books – My top read during 2023 was Richard Ford’s original Frank Bascombe trilogy, particularly The Sportswriter; the story of a middle-aged white guy navigating existential uncertainties unsurprisingly struck a chord at this point in my life. Other fiction I enjoyed included some more volumes of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, Nathanael West’s lurid LA nightmare The Day of the Locust, and a re-read of Sacher-Masoch’s classic Venus in Furs. In non-fiction there was Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation, various works by Bertrand Russell, and, balanced somewhere between philosophy and fiction, Benjamín Labatut’s meditation on the implications of Artificial Intelligence, The Maniac.

Music – I finally got with the times and signed up for a Spotify account this year, and I’ve been relying on their algorithm to supply my general background soundtrack. I’m still undecided on whether this is a good or a bad thing; it has introduced me to a few new artists, but mostly plays my old favourites. I do still read the music press, and listen to the radio, which I hope is enough to steer me towards some fresh albums; here are my top ten from 2023:

Compiling this annual retrospective, and comparing it with entries from previous years, I’m unable to escape the conclusion that the breadth of my cultural horizons is inexorably shrinking, in terms of the absolute number of books, movies and records that I consume (as enumerated in our Tumblr), but also in my willingness to look outside of my habitual preferences (which were probably always more fixed than I cared to admit). In my more pessimistic moments I consider this an inevitable consequence of advancing age, but every now and again I feel a spark of enthusiasm for some new experience, which is enough to reassure me that I’m not ready for the scrapyard just yet. Perhaps 2024 will be a year of personal renaissance, I guess we’ll see.

So much for my internal world; what of my engagement with external reality through the medium of this blog? Read our next post to find out…

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