2025: The year in review – Part 2: Blogging

December 31, 2025 by Leave a comment

2025 was a shade less than spectacular on the blogging front; our post frequency fell to around two per month, and the average post was a mere 168.1 words long. As for content, politics, sport, and culture have remained broadly our main themes, though I’d hesitate to claim that we’d covered anything in particular depth.

Anyway, here are our top ten posts by traffic in the last 12 months; as has been the pattern for the last few years most of them are from the archive:

  1. That gum you like is going to come back in style
  2. Superbowl LIX prediction
  3. Pascal’s new wager
  4. Leap of imagination
  5. Change don’t come easy
  6. How ’bout them Cubs?
  7. Eve of destruction
  8. World Series 2025 prediction
  9. Futurama
  10. Premature insurrection

My personal favourites of this year’s output:

In a rather surprising development, the US has overtaken the UK as the source of most of our traffic, and our general global appeal seems to have expanded a little too, though it’s still well below the 100+ tally of nations we used to reach around a decade ago. Here are the top ten for this year:

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

Interestingly, ChatGPT has come from nowhere to be, by a large margin, our number one source of referrals; the fact that the preeminent AI agent seems to regard this blog as a reliable source of information only intensifies my suspicion that the technology is ludicrously over-hyped.

I usually conclude my last post of the year by lamenting my poor productivity, and promising to do better in the months ahead, but this time around I’m going to cut myself a little slack. With the world the way it is I feel I’m doing well to maintain an old-school, flesh-and-blood human presence in the sea of AI slop.

So I’ll raise a glass to wish a happy New Year to all our readers, and may it bring you good health and good fortune.

Filed under Blogging Tagged with

2025: The year in review – Part 1: Culture

December 30, 2025 by Leave a comment

It’s not been a vintage year on the cultural front; I have just about kept up a steady pace of consumption, but my appetite for seeking out novel experience is definitely not what it was. That said, there were some highlights I feel are worth noting; they are listed below.

Television

For various reasons I have completely given up on watching TV in recent times, but I made one exception this year; an old favourite, Twin Peaks. Inspired by the sad news of the passing of David Lynch in January I acquired the box set of all three seasons, and proceeded to view it in a properly nostalgic style; one episode at a time, at more or less weekly intervals. I threw in Fire Walk with Me after finishing season two, then left a gap (though not 25 years) before starting season three, which I haven’t quite completed yet, though I should wrap it up sometime next month. I hadn’t revisited Twin Peaks since it originally aired, so I was a little worried that it might not be as good as I remembered, but I’m glad to report that it did not disappoint in any way, retaining its capacity to intrigue and shock in equal measure. Even if I had caught some other shows this year I’m pretty sure that none of them would have topped Lynch’s beguiling masterpiece.

Film

I did quite well with cinema-going in the first half of the year, then fell off a bit after the summer; I’ll have to catch up ahead of the Oscars. Of the movies I saw this year I particularly liked Nickel Boys, A Real Pain, A Complete Unknown, The Phoenician Scheme, and Die My Love. For my favourite I’m oscillating between One Battle After Another and Nouvelle Vague, with the latter just winning out.

Books

I didn’t get through much new fiction this year; far too much of my reading time was taken up by staying current with the news, though I can’t say much of that left me feeling particularly informed. Of the books I did read the most memorable were Death Valley by Melissa Broder, The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits, and my favourite, the dreamlike and unsettling An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth by Anna Moschovakis.

Music

I bought a respectable number of new records this year; here are my top five:

  • Uncollected Noise New York ’88-’90 – Galaxie 500
  • Instant Holograms On Metal Film – Stereolab
  • Tunnel Vision – Beach Bunny
  • Double Infinity – Big Thief
  • Snocaps – Snocaps

I didn’t see much live music, but the shows I caught were pretty good; the best was courtesy of the reliably energetic Beach Bunny.

Come back tomorrow for our review of the year in blogging…

Filed under Culture Tagged with , , , ,