Instagram cat photos of 2017

Taz says hi #cat #neko #catsofinstagram

A post shared by brx0 (@brx0) on Jul 7, 2017 at 5:45pm PDT

A recent tradition I've come up with here is that the last post of the year is always a bunch of cat photos. This year I took a lot of cat photos but somehow only posted two to Instagram, so this is a shorter post than usual, but I think they make up for quantity with quality, especially the top one.

#catsofinstagram

A post shared by brx0 (@brx0) on May 20, 2017 at 8:38pm PDT

twelve

So it turns out that today is this humble blog's twelfth birthday. For good or ill, it's finally old enough to get shoved into a junior high locker by larger, cooler blogs. Ten years seemed like a milestone, and nine seemed sorta-milestonesque for some reason, but twelve just seems like it's been around forever. A couple of observations on yet another anniversary:

• I barely got anything done here this year. 2017 will have -- by far -- the fewest blog posts of any year so far, unless I go on an unprecedented binge in the next week and a half. I've done "keepalive" posts repeatedly just to keep the tradition of at least one post per month going. In those I usually lay out reasons why I don't seem to have any time for this stuff anymore, work responsibilities & an open source project usually being the leading culprits. I'm not sure that's entirely it, though. I've repeatedly found myself opening up Blogger, pulling up a draft post & poking at it for a while, and thinking "Ugh, this is too hard". I don't know if this counts as actual writer's block, or it's just that I did all the easy posts first and I'm left with a collection of posts that need a lot of research and wordsmithing. It's possible I may just start deleting stuff that doesn't look interesting enough to be worth finishing, I dunno.
• Another reason, certainly, is that 2017 was not a normal year. I spend far too much internet time staring at the latest horrors out of Washington DC. I usually grab my phone first thing every morning to check Twitter and see what Bigly Brother is ranting about now, and generally figure out what's gone from bad to worse while I was asleep. In the very first post here, I called then-president Dubya a "drooling idiot". Twelve years later, he's been replaced by someone far worse, which I would not have believed was even possible back then. I mean, 45 hasn't lied us into a war yet, or cratered the national economy, so Dubya's still the worse president of the two, at least so far. But 45 is likely the worst human being to ever hold the office, and he has plenty of time to pass Bush in the worst president category.

In any case, I have a couple of relevant todo items for next year, which I prefer not to jinx by calling them resolutions. The big one is to spend less time on social media, since it generally doesn't lead to increased happiness, and retweeting the latest awfulness does very little to stop it. Second item is to use at least some of that time here instead. A year ago or so I wrote down an item for 2017 to figure out what I wanted to do about this humble blog going forward. I thought about it for a while & realized I didn't want to stop doing this, but didn't manage to actually do much of it last year. So next year I'll try to make the time. I'd like to wake up on January 1st 2019 with an empty drafts folder, and never again complain about having a pile of unfinished posts, but based on how the last year went I'm only going to call that a stretch goal.

Anyway, happy blogoversary & assorted other holidays.