Ten Years

It’s hard to believe I made it to ten years. But my interest has waned, no thanks to data-scrapers vacuuming up writing to train their large language models. My number of blog posts has dropped by twenty percent the last two years and I expect it to dip further. Today is the day I will give myself permission to no longer feel obligated to keep up. I will probably write occasionally when the fancy strikes me, but I have other interests to take up my time.

 

Looking back at my mid-decade post, I would agree with past self. My writing in this format has gotten a little stagnant; that’s the diminishing returns part. I do still write primarily for myself, and to some extent my students. I have a few links as optional reading for students who are interested to get a slightly different perspective on some of the topics they see in class. My sense is that students who’ve read these optional posts found them helpful or at least amusing.

 

Have the things I write about changed?

·      Book reviews are now at 49%, up from 43%. I don’t think I’m reading more. I’m just blogging less about other things.

·      Teaching is at 33%, a slight drop, but not by much. I love thinking about teaching and learning. That won’t change – even when I retire from my full-time job as a professor.

·      Research dipped a little from 8 to 6%, although origin-of-life posts maintained steady at 11%.

·      Magic also dipped from 12 to 10%. I certainly think less about magic these days. And it’s been a while since I re-read Harry Potter or any other magic-related fiction. I’ve been reading sci-fi a little more; I suppose technology is a sort of magic but I haven’t labeled the posts as such.

 

Halloween does make me think of magic. Today, I read an article about the history of how Halloween is celebrated in the United States and how that has changed over time. It was both thoughtful and interesting. I have gotten into retro-gaming (computer games from the ‘80s) and some of the fantasy-themed role-playing-ish games feature magical systems. I haven’t written about them much, and the latest one I played hardly used it. [LINK] But I’ve started thinking about whether I could create a game and what a suitable magic system might look like. Maybe some of those thoughts will make it to future blog posts.

 

In any case, Happy Halloween, and to my readers, I hope at least some of the past blog posts have delighted or amused you, or even better – you learned something from them!