As I write these words the final month of the first year of this blog has arrived.
It’s December.
And after a mind-numbing and depressing 2020 I’ve been penning my thoughts and opinions here throughout 2021 to the tune of one hundred and seven thousand, three hundred and eighty three previously published words into two hundred and fifty three posts inside this digital space.
It’s been exactly eleven months as of today.
Deep breath.
Describe your 2021
in tech or tools.
I’ve been blogging for over twenty years.
Unless you’ve cracked through my obfuscation of identity curtained across these words (hidden mostly because I work in an industry and culture where Google search results for my real name are akin to a business card and I like to keep my personal and professional selves separated) you are unlikely to know that while I’ve only been writing here for eleven months, I’ve previously managed a string of previous personal, creative, and niche websites over the past twenty-ish years. I’ve got a bit of secret tech cred. But just a bit.
In almost all those websites, December uniformly has become a time of self-refection and mindset adjustment for the upcoming year.
So, after eleven months of scattershot posting here about cooking, adventure, firepits, travel, sketching and all those other little analog and outdoor enjoyments, I’ve once again set December aside for a string of thirty one posts about … well … cooking, adventure, firepits, travel, sketching, and all similar sort of those things, but in the context of the past, present and future.
Call it a quasi-resolution-twist to wrap up the year with a bit of grace and style.
Because routine and tradition can be a good thing, even in technology where we seem to think we want fresh and innovative turned on like a firehose.
My 2021 was a technology reset year.
This year I came back to a pattern of regular writing in (and this is important) a space I fully control. We take that for granted because so many of us cede that control to the social media algorithms of big private media platforms, offloading the decision-making to money-generating, click-baiting software systems that slurp up our creative effort and spill it out to the rest of the world in a way that usually makes other people rich and famous. I was tired of shipping my photographs and art and writing off to the likes of Facebook and Reddit and crossing my fingers that an invisible software system saw fit to give it some daylight online before it disappeared into a vast, bottomless pit of old posts.
I may not have yet obtained the same quantity of folks reading what I choose to put online, but I think the quality of what I choose to curate here has elevated the whole experience for me … and hopefully anyone who chooses to join me here.
I’ve all but vacated those controversial social platforms, maintaining a minimal presence, and definitely not a preferential one.
This blog was my 2021 experiment, and the experiment was a success. Dozens of you read it and check in. And tho my daughter would scoff at that number saying “dad, such and such a youtube streamer has six million subscribers and makes more money that you do at your real job!” I would retort that I’m giddily loving entertaining any size of small crowd with genuine content that makes me as happy writing it as I hope it makes others reading it.
In other words, the experiment will most definitely continue into 2022 and beyond.
Thirty one topics. Thirty one posts. Not exactly a list… but close. In December I like to look back on the year that was. My daily posts in December-ish are themed-ish and may contain spoilers set against the backdrop of some year-end-ish personal exposition.