fifteen

It feels odd to say this, but this past week marked the fifteenth birthday of this peculiar little website, which began back when blogs were the hot new thing, and I worried for some reason that I was already too late to properly hop on the bandwagon. Twitter didn't exist yet at that point, and Facebook was still limited to college students. Neither Android nor iOS existed yet. Not that it mattered to me because I didn't have a mobile phone of any kind and wasn't convinced I'd ever want one. I could continue on with this theme for a few more paragraphs, but I also have yet another birthday ending in a zero tomorrow and already feel quite old enough, thank you very much, so let's just agree that this corner of the interwebs is now exceedingly old in interweb years and leave it at that. Assuming interweb years are still a thing that exists; I haven't seen anyone talk about those in years now.

I wrote posts similar this one for this humble blog's fifth and tenth birthdays as well, and in both I said something about doing a big retrospective of all my favorite posts from over the years. I know I didn't follow through on that in 2015 and I don't think I did in 2010 either, and I have to say writing one in the immediate future to cover the last fifteen years doesn't feel very likely either. It's not that I don't think it's an interesting idea. I'd love to read that post; I just don't feel like writing it at the moment. And given the way 2020 has played out here, I imagine I'd find a way to make it vastly more work than necessary, like picking out a top 100 instead of a top 10 and 'celebrating' by rewriting and re-researching all of them, while telling myself that no part of this effort was in any way optional. I've learned over time that this is just how my brain likes to approach things, and the key to getting anything done (as in 100% done, not 80%) is to try to limit the number of simultaneous open cans of worms.

I made a prediction in the 2015 post that by 2025 either Blogger or Flickr or maybe both would not exist in their then-current form. Since then, Flickr has new non-Yahoo owners but is otherwise unchanged so far, and Blogger really hasn't changed at all except for giving the post editor a new look, but I still think the prediction holds and something's going to give by 2025. Either Google decides to sunset Blogger and I have to migrate somewhere else, or the new Flickr+Smugmug combo runs out of money and I have to migrate a few tens of thousands of photos somewhere else, which I imagine would be the much bigger hassle of the two. I guess a different possibility would be that I stop doing this for some nontechnical reason. Which, I dunno. On one hand, I've been doing this at least once a month for fifteen years -- which might be the only thing I've ever done regularly and voluntarily for that long -- and still basically enjoy it, so I would tend to bet on existing trends continuing, to the degree that's under my control. On the other hand, I'm also graduating into a brand new actuarial demographic tomorrow, and I haven't been to the gym in nearly a year thanks to the deadly global pandemic that's still going on, and it just sort of feels like there are more independent and unpredictable variables at work now than there were in 2005 or even 2010. I'm not sure why I'm even going on about this; I suppose it's just the sort of thing one spends a great deal of time thinking about during a plague year. Anyway, I'm going to go ahead & predict a hale and hearty 2025, if for no other reason than if you predict the opposite and turn out to be correct, you win absolutely nothing.

On a more cheerful note, I did end up with a ton of Instagram cat photos this year, so my traditional end-of-year post is going to be pretty solid this time. And assuming I can find one other thing to post that can conceivably be done this year, I will have at least tied my post total from 2005, and pulled it off without any 'keepalive' placeholder posts. Granted that just took a couple of weeks in 2005 and it's taken all year in 2020, so my Drafts situation hasn't fundamentally changed compared to last year. And the same goes for the pile of Flickr sets that don't even have draft posts yet. I like to think this is because my quality standards have gone up a bit since 2005. Which probably means next year will again see a few dozen posts at best, not hundreds like I was doing a few years ago. We may not see hundreds again in the next 5 years, or maybe ever. As of right now, I would be absolutely fine with that.