2024: The year in review – Part 2: Blogging

December 31, 2024 by Leave a comment

Our very first post of 2024 set out a number of predictions for the year ahead; I tried to keep them vague enough to encompass a range of possible outcomes, but even with that precaution I still mostly ended up being well wide of the mark. My hopes that the conflicts in Palestine, Ukraine, and Sudan might wind down proved to be naively optimistic, with the genocide in Gaza in particular expanding to a horrific scale. I did foresee the demise of the Conservative government in the UK, but perhaps overestimated how much would change under Labour. I thought Joe Biden would be reelected, and backed the 49ers for the Superbowl.

Given that unpromising start, it was perhaps inevitable that my blogging output over the following twelve months would be less than stellar. I did manage more than twice as many posts as in 2023, and our traffic was up a bit too, but the quality could charitably be described as uneven. This is reflected in the statistics; our top ten most read are an essentially random selection from the archive:

  1. Eve of destruction
  2. Indefinite article
  3. Futurama
  4. That gum you like is going to come back in style
  5. Working for the Linden Dollar
  6. The Linden Principle
  7. Leap of imagination
  8. Change don’t come easy
  9. How ‘bout them Cubs?
  10. Seriously?

My favourite posts of the year mostly came in a rare burst of energy in the spring, with another flurry around the November election; some are upbeat, though a slightly disturbing number of them concern the death of well-known figures:

One trend that has definitely accelerated over the past three or four years is a reduction in our geographical reach; there was a time when we had readers in over 100 nations, but now just about all our traffic comes from the UK, with even the US and other anglophone countries dropping off sharply this year. We still have a few visitors from foreign lands though; here are the top ten:

  1. United Kingdom
  2. United States
  3. China
  4. Germany
  5. Canada
  6. Portugal
  7. India
  8. Netherlands
  9. Singapore
  10. Vietnam

There are many topics I should have written more about; the aforementioned wars, political and economic developments in Europe and the US, the rising influence of AI and other technological novelties, to name but a few. Even if I give myself a pass for avoiding such gloomy fare, I could still have posted a bit more frequently on cultural issues.

A particularly glaring omission is the complete lack of commentary on Second Life, despite it ostensibly being the prime subject of this whole project. The new owners of the platform finally got around to releasing a mobile viewer earlier in the year, and, since I still pay nearly $100 annually to maintain my premium membership, I was actually given advance access, and thus had the opportunity to be among the first to review it. I did get as far as logging in, and wandered around the grid for a while, but I wasn’t really inspired to write anything. I found the interface as hard to master as I had when I first tried the PC version back in 2007, and once I did get the hang of it there was still the same old SL problem; nobody is there, and there’s nothing to do. To be fair, I was using an old iPhone with a tiny screen, so I probably didn’t get the best visual results; I might give it another look if I upgrade my phone next year.

Thinking about the twelve months ahead it’s hard to know what to expect. If there’s one thing I’m sure of after the last few years it’s that I’m inching ever closer to Socratic Wisdom; perhaps 2025 will be the year when I can finally proclaim that all I know is that I know nothing. That said, I will resolve to try a little harder on the blogging front, if for no other reason than to give me something to look back on next December.

On that hopeful note I’ll wish all our readers a happy New Year, and may it find you healthy and prosperous.

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2024: The year in review – Part 1: Culture

December 30, 2024 by Leave a comment

Looking at my Tumblr I’m reassured to see that I did consume at least a little culture during the last twelve months; I’ll try to distill each category down to a top three.

Television

Despite subscribing to Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime I almost never have time for TV shows. Only Murders in the Building: Season 4 was the sole series I watched all the way through, so I guess it takes gold by default, though it was pretty funny, so it would probably have won even with competition.

Film

My favourite movie by a mile this year was ultra-violent live-action Looney Tune Hundreds of Beavers, with Perfect Days and I Saw the TV Glow also making the podium, and Werner Herzog biopic Radical Dreamer just missing out. The 50th anniversary reissue of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation was essential; his latest work Megalopolis rather less so, though it certainly had its moments.

Books

Paul Auster’s passing in April prompted me to catch up with his New York Trilogy, which turned out to be the highlight of a year when I mostly avoided more recent fiction; Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel was the exception and takes the silver. Bronze goes to non-fiction; Zeke Faux’s exposé of the crypto industry Number Go Up.

Music

I’ve listened to a lot of radio this year, mainly US college stations, which inspired me to compile a long list of new albums to get hold of, very few of which I actually got around to purchasing. Of those I did buy my top three are probably Fairweather Friend by The Umbrellas, News of the Universe by La Luz, and Manning Fireworks by MJ Lenderman, though on another day I might include Sierra Ferrell’s Trail Of Flowers, Rooting for Love by Laetitia Sadier, or This Is How Tomorrow Moves by beabadoobee. The best live shows I saw featured the aforementioned Umbrellas, Belle and Sebastian, and Jane Weaver. I even had a favourite opera – Marx in London!

That’s a brief run through the culture of 2024 as seen through my very limited lens; come back tomorrow for a look at the year in blogging.

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Trumpocalypse two

December 23, 2024 by Leave a comment

I have to admit that, around this point eight years ago, I was relatively relaxed about the prospect of Donald Trump ascending to the office of President of the United States. The fact that I was an old white guy living an ocean away helped of course, but I was also calmed by a residual faith in the essential immutability of government institutions; short of burning everything to the ground it is actually very difficult to effect significant change to the political landscape of an advanced society like the US or UK. This is usually immensely frustrating for those of us of a more progressive nature, but it is sometimes reassuring to know that not everything is lost just because the crazy people have temporarily taken charge.

Did my lack of concern turn out to be justified? I guess that I personally didn’t do too badly, but Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, hundreds of thousands of excess Covid deaths, and families separated at the border, were only a few of the reasons that those less privileged than I might beg to differ.

That said, the US government remained robust enough to see off the laughably incompetent coup attempt, and had Joe Biden directed his DoJ to be a bit more forceful in going after Trump for the many crimes he committed during his time in office then we might have seen the back of him. Alas, with typical liberal timidity, Joe let Donald off the hook, and now we are where we are.

I am thus somewhat less sanguine about how the next four years will work out, especially since the people Trump is recruiting suggests that his second administration will be a veritable carnival of reaction.

Are there any reasons to be hopeful? The fact that the congressional GOP couldn’t quite stomach Trump’s demand to shut down the government just before the holidays may be a sign that they won’t go along with all his insanity, though whether he will actually need their cooperation may well be a moot point. Putting obviously unqualified people in charge of big departments will make it easier for the career bureaucrats who know how everything works to maintain business as usual. And perhaps Trump himself will recall that being President is a pretty sweet gig, even with the checks and balances, and that wrecking the joint may be considerably more trouble than it is worth.

Or am I just whistling in the dark? Is this really the time that we go to hell in a handcart? I’m not quite ready to succumb to despair just yet; I’m still enough of a dialectical materialist to believe that human progress is a historical inevitability, and that any current difficulties are merely a bump in the road towards fully realised communism. I’ll stay as involved as I can in resisting the spread of Trumpism on these shores, and I’m sure it won’t be too long before my American comrades see it off as well.

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