Check it out! Link is in the sidebar.
An ANNOUNCEMENT.
Yes, that’s right! An ANNOUNCEMENT!
I’ve joined the ranks of people with newsletters.
Why?
Well, this is strictly a case of me being a follower: it seems like everybody is doing newsletters, so I needed to join the bandwagon.
You can find mine, Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars, right here, and I hope you’ll subscribe!
What will I be writing there? Well, there are a few issues up already, so you can sample them. It won’t be too different than what appears here, really, although since each issue is a self-contained thing, it will read somewhat differently. I don’t plan to echo content from the newsletter on this site, nor do I have current plans to monetize the newsletter content, though I certainly won’t turn away shekels or quatloos that people want to throw my way.
I haven’t totally settled on a publishing schedule for it yet, since I’m still getting my feet wet, but I’m gravitating toward an issue twice monthly (with occasional extra issues as I see fit). The newsletter will be a marketing tool as I hopefully produce more books moving forward, but I also want to provide something that’s not a waste of time to read. I will probably diversify the newsletter’s content as I get more used to it–one idea I like a lot is serializing a story there–so I hope you’ll come aboard!
It’s been rather strange the last few years, as I’ve watched once-prolific bloggers mainly shift toward Twitter and let their blogs kind of wither on the vine…and then, finding they want to write long-form content again, instead of returning to the blogs they instead go to newsletter platforms like Substack and Medium. And that works out great for them, as those sites are monetized. (It also results in some of my favorite commentators producing more and more content that’s paywalled, which is a development I am not in love with–but I’m also not in love with the idea that talented folks not getting paid for their work, either, so obviously I’d rather err on the side of the former.) I’m kind of pigheaded in my refusal to abandon this blog (which is itself a successor to the eternally-appreciated Byzantium’s Shores), but a newsletter that can double as an email marketing list for my books sounds quite useful, potentially.
Anyway, please do check it out and subscribe!
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Shorter posting ahead….
Twenty years a blogger….
Last week a local person graciously cited me as a creative person worth following online, which was a compliment I greatly appreciated! But what really took me back was the description:
https://twitter.com/MeyersMusings/status/1498029014023352322
Two decades? Really?
That’s when it hit me: Last month marked twenty years of me blogging.
I launched Byzantium’s Shores on BlogSpot back in February of 2002. I almost made it to twenty years of maintaining that same exact blog, but last year I went ahead and pulled the trigger on migrating to this space, because owning one’s own space online is really the way to go as corporate interests become more and more vested in controlling the content that is posted in the spaces that they own (and then, oddly, entrust the moderation of said content to badly-programmed AI bots that confuse tone and do things like require a certain popular commenter to take down a post the AI had labeled as “hate speech”, when all it did was post verbatim an official statement by the 45th President).
Looking back at 2002 and my road to blogging, some of it seems pretty clear and some of it is kind of foggy, like anything would be when viewed from so long a distance. I’d been a prolific poster on a few Usenet newsgroups at the time, but I was already chafing at wanting to write about stuff that wasn’t really on topic for those few newsgroups where I was a regular. Then a Google search for an old friend’s name turned up an interesting-looking website of his, which looked like basically an online journal, and shortly after that, I remember reading an article in an issue of TIME or NEWSWEEK about this new thing: “blogs”, short for “web log”, which are exactly what my friend was doing. He was maintaining an online journal and writing his occasional thoughts about…things.
I started looking around for blogs–
(OK, an aside here: I have ALWAYS hated the word ‘blog’. Can’t stand it. It’s the word we’ve settled on, but I really wish we’d called them e-journals instead. That would fit better with e-mail and e-books, and connotatively, ‘e-journaling’ sounds a bit less nerdy than ‘blogging’.)
–and after I figured out how to set one up, using Blogger and its hosting site BlogSpot, off I went.
Functionality back then was really bare-bones. Permanent links to posts were a total crapshoot as to whether they’d work or not. There was no photo hosting of any kind, and back then “hotlinking” photos on other sites was a big no-no. Google was still several years away from buying Blogger, so the service didn’t have very deep pockets. Unless you knew at least a little about HTML, you were locked into a few basic templates and you couldn’t even change your typeface on your blog. Unless you paid Blogger for the “pro” version, every blog had a toolbar with ads splashed across the top.
Here’s one of the first blogs I ever followed, back in the day. This one closed up shop a year and a half after I started blogging, and I’m honestly a bit surprised that it still exists online at all. I found that one, if memory serves, via a “Randomly Featured Blogs” sidebar that would show up on the main Blogger site. Blogs at the time were so new that you pretty much found new ones by following links back and forth and bookmarking the ones you wanted to keep reading when you found them. If you really liked another blog, you’d put it on your “blogroll”, the list of links to other blogs that you maintained on yours. The more times you got listed on others’ blogrolls, and the more times popular blogs linked yours, the more traffic you’d get. There was a “process” to “going viral” back then.
I didn’t post under my real name initially, as this was still the era–a waning era, to be sure, but it was still the thinking–that you shouldn’t share your real name online. Gradually this became less and less workable and less and less of a big deal, so the old screen name “Jaquandor” is now pretty much of a personal anachronism that dates back to my AOL days of posting on Usenet.
The tone of blogging back then was wild and wooly. When I started, 9-11 was less than six months in the past; I’m not even sure that the dust had even stopped settling, literally, at the World Trade Center site. As the nation reeled from that attack and as other powers started pushing for a war that was cast as a response to that attack (but I think we all know by now had almost nothing to do with it, along with another war that was a response but instead led to twenty years of bungling), so the online discussion turned mainly to matters of politics and war. Even then the general political tone polarized quite a bit, with bloggers skeptical of the war on one side, and bloggers vociferously for the war on the other.
I read a lot on both sides back then, and when I say that the folks for the war were for the war, I mean, they were FOR that war. They wanted it badly. There were times when I could almost sense their glee when the first bombs started falling. My own feelings on the war were mixed at first, but I quickly soured on the whole idea as it became clear that the whole thing was an exercise in chest-thumping triumphalism (“Mission Accomplished!”, the banner read, after just weeks of combat in a large independent country) and masculinity-run-amok.
The “blogosphere” at the time was an eerie forerunner of what we see in a lot of social media today, in a more prolix era, a time when people weren’t limited to 280 characters, or even 280 words. Anyone who remembers a blogger named Steven Den Beste will remember some really wordy screeds cheerleading the war. Den Beste was a strange dude whom I found weirdly compelling, kind of an intellectual tire-fire from which I couldn’t divert attention. He was a former engineer who retired to a blogging-from-his-apartment lifestyle, and he would often start his very long posts in an interesting fashion, describing some issue in science or from his old engineering life or whatever. This was always kind of interesting, until he’d inevitably reveal how the thing he was talking about was really a metaphor to support yet another argument of his for why bombing Iraq back to the days of Nebuchadnezzar was really the best thing for the region. Den Beste would later abandon politics on his own site and recast his blog as an anime-fandom blog, though he contributed more and more political screeds to other sites. He often insisted that he didn’t like labels and that he had no real political “home”, but as the years went by, it was increasingly clear that he was a mainstream right-winger. I eventually stopped reading Den Beste entirely when he expressed feelings of schadenfreude toward those who felt that George Zimmerman’s acquittal in killing Trayvon Martin was a travesty. A year or two ago I suddenly remember Steven Den Beste and searched his name, wondering if he was still out there cranking out anime reviews. Turns out he died in 2016.
I don’t mention him now to throw rocks at him, but Steven Den Beste is one of my main memories of the tone of the “early” blogosphere (which I preferred to call “Blogistan”), at least on the national or worldwide scale. He even linked me a couple of times, once with bemusement when I responded with what I hoped was obviously fake outrage at his negative review of Attack of the Clones. I think he got it: his link to my response was something like “Kelly Sedinger comments here, and he might want to calm down a little!” If nothing else, Den Beste was more than willing to engage people who thought he was full of crap. Again, I don’t intend to single him out negatively, but I mention him at length precisely because he was a memorable voice back then, in a time when even then there were a lot of voices, many of which were saying the same things in the same ways.
Blogging had a more local focus as well, and once we resettled in the Buffalo area after our brief stay in the Syracuse region in 2002-2003, I started connecting with local bloggers, some of whom focused on politics and others who focused on other things. A small but fun community arose, and we even had several meet-ups out in the “real world”, the first of which was at a brewery-bar in downtown Buffalo. The local blogs brought up local issues, and national issues, and not just politics as well: I remember debates about the merits of various styles of pizza, which of the Democratic candidates in 2008 might be able to win, what the Bass Pro plaza in downtown Buffalo should be like (what a hoot!), and so on. If that sounds like all the kinds of things you see now on Facebook and Twitter, well…there’s a reason for that, isn’t there? But the Buffalo blogging community was a cool one, and though many of those folks have long since abandoned their blogs, they’re still online in social media and I still follow many of them.
People like to scoff at the idea of an online “community” being any kind of community at all, but…when Little Quinn died, a bunch of people I only knew online showed up at his wake to pay respects. I will always remember that.
Blogging now, in 2022, has changed and has remained the same, in a lot of strange ways. Facebook and Twitter have taken over many of its main functions, and for people who still want to do long-form work that is ill-suited to those platforms, there are paid platforms for monetization like Patreon, Substack, and others. The essence of blogging is still out there but is largely decentralized. Maybe that’s a good thing, as blogs never really seemed to break through into the general awareness in the way that Facebook and Twitter and others later would, even if a lot of that functionality still exists. Locally I remember that a few times a year the Buffalo News would report on blogs, and each time the tone was pretty much the same: “Hey, there are these things called ‘blogs’! What are they? Let’s find out!” And the article would feature a few local bloggers. I was never one of them. Yes, this annoyed me.
It is interesting to see the “essence” of blogging come back, albeit in the form of paywalled newsletters and content-aggregators like Substack and the rest. I’m of mixed mind on this, to be honest. People should be able to get paid for their work, but I do miss the wild-and-wooly nature of the “early Blogosphere”, which was kind of a free-for-fall. And I continue to be irritated that the paid-content model is almost entirely subscription based. There are many times when I’ll find something I’m interested in reading…but I am not interested in signing up for a year of access for a single article in which I may be interested. This is not just a problem with paywalled news sites; I’m now seeing it on sites that are basically all but blogs in name. Just this week there’s been an in-depth article making the local rounds about the now-infamous “13 seconds” in the recent Bills-Chiefs playoff game; this morning I went to check that article, only to find that after reading ten paragraphs, the rest is cut off by a “This article is for paid subscribers only” notice. Look, content-creators of the world, I have to be honest: never say “never” and all that, but I have not once, to this point in my life, found a paywalled article online that I wanted to read so badly that I upped for a subscription to a site. The solution here is some kind of pay-by-the-article micropayment system, which is often suggested but so far never created. One waits and hopes.
Blogging also cemented overalls as a major piece of my online identity, as it were! Blogger finally added photo-hosting services sometime in the mid-aughts, so I added a profile pic, in which I had happened to be wearing overalls. The photo was a terrible one (no, I don’t think I still have it, and no, if I find it I won’t share it), which I took using an old Polaroid Instamatic camera and then scanned in using our old flatbed scanner (geez, just typing that description of the process makes my eyes glaze over!), and someone joked about me resembling an axe-murderer! (It was a terrible picture! But it was my first attempt at such a thing, and if anyone knows how much I hated having my picture taken as a kid, that was a really big corner to turn.)
So anyway, here I am, still blogging away, now on ForgottenStars.net, still holding forth on many of the same topics as always, along hopefully with some new ones. When I started blogging, I was still eight or nine years away from really starting work on Stardancer, after a few “trunk” novels (one of which I posted online as a blog itself before taking it down a while back). It was four living spaces ago, The Daughter was still in her “terrible twos”, The Wife and I were only approaching five years of marriage, and a whole lot of friends and life and stuff ago.
A lot of people have come, gone, and come again in the time I’ve been blogging. Some I discovered at some point and have followed ever since (her, her, him, him) Many bloggers have given up the habit but are still friends online; many more have vanished completely. Some I have sadly outlived (Messrs. Mannion and Teachout, for example). I remember regular readers who fell away over time–I hope this was a function of life and not a shift in my writing!–like a woman who lived in Winnipeg and another named Michelle who was a fellow candle in the dark in a time when the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy was still deeply unappreciated. And if my blog has never been widely read, at least I also have never much had to deal with obnoxious trolls.
And to think, when I started Byzantium’s Shores in February 2002, I figured that maybe, maybe!, I’d have about a year’s worth of things to say before I wrapped that little sub-hobby up and moved on. Little did I know. As ever, I continue marching on, for however long I feel like doing this.
…and if you’ve been reading (or have read me at any point along the way), I thank you!
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Sigh
So, there’s a Person A, who is a writer and a blogger whose life and writings I’ve been following for a number of years now.
And there’s a Person B, who for some reason hates Person A and has been waging an Internet feud against Person A for years, to the point that Person B actually runs a blog devoted to attacking Person A. It’s some really creepy shit: the posts are filled with “anonymous” comments of support for Person B, each and every one of which is almost certainly written by Person B who is posing as their own crowd of supporters. The whole thing is just bizarre, and Person B is in serious need of help.
So, recently Person A posted something on social media about a particular challenge they were facing in their daily life, and I posted a reply along the lines of “Good luck, I hope it all works out!” Well, Person A’s stalker, Person B, saw my response and decided to come to my site to try to stir up whatever weird Internet feud shit is Person B’s thing. I have squashed this, but this also gives me reason to revise and update the comment settings here. For details, see the Site Disclaimer and Comments Policy page in the sidebar, over on the right. The short version is that as I did on Byzantium’s Shores, I have turned on comment moderation for all comments, all commenters here are now required to be logged in to a WordPress account, and comments close out on all posts after seven days.
I’m not in love with this policy, and I’m looking into ways of streamlining all this with a plugin or two, but for now, that’s the lay of the land.
And Person B, if you see this? Seek the help of a mental health professional. You’ve got issues, yo.
Comments are closed on this post.
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A Very Public Service Message
Make sure to check out my Year’s End post just below this one…and then, note that after today, I’m taking a brief breather from posting in this space. Posting will resume here on January 10. I’m going to recharge the blogging batteries, read, clean my library, and…sigh…get back to work on Forgotten Stars V. I’ll still be tweeting and posting to Instagram, so check me out there!
And now, really. Exeunt. I mean it. Exeunt! EXEUNT!!!
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2021. I didn’t love you, but I loved parts of you.
It’s time for my annual look back at the year that was. I did this every year on Byzantium’s Shores, and now I do it here. Generally, 2021 wasn’t terrible for me personally, even though it was not a fantastic year for many. I try to maintain my occasional optimism, but it is hard sometimes.
Time for the annual quiz! As always, many of my answers stay the same from year to year. But some don’t! Let’s see!
Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Heh! Aside from “Read a lot, write a lot, eat healthier, listen to more music”, I don’t do much in terms of resolutions. I made a decent dent in the stack of books that I wanted to read in 2021, and some of those titles are shifted to my “Hopefully in 2022” List. (I tend to deviate from planned reading lists when I see a book somewhere, be it a bookstore or a library or my own shelves, and I say, “Oooh! I wanna read that NOW!”)
And I did write a lot. I’ve blogged more this year than in the last several years, and I’ve been toiling away on the first draft of Forgotten Stars V: A Fifth of Space Princesses (not the actual title) pretty much since January 1. I took a break from that book for Hawaii, which was a good thing anyway as I bogged down on the book’s story a bit. After doing some plotting, I plan to return to it on January 1. Again.
I have also started doing a round of edits on my supernatural thriller Into the Jaws of Cerberus (the actual title!), with an eye on publishing it in 2022.
As for reading, it was a great year! According to Goodreads I read 57 books this year. (It’s probably give or take one or two. Goodreads’s accounting of stats can be a bit of a mess as sometimes it credits you for two editions of the same book, and other quibbles. Goodreads is actually a pretty frustrating tool to use–I’m not sure why Amazon bought it, if they’re not going to do anything with it–but as I use it exclusively to track my reading, I don’t feel like bailing yet.) I usually set a challenge of 52 books on GR each year, so I made it again. Yay!
Here are my ten favorite books from 2021 (links to posts in which I wrote about those books specifically in this space):
- Spoon River Anthology, Edgar Lee Masters
- Why We Swim, Bonnie Tsui [post]
- This Will All Be Over Soon, Cecily Strong [post]
- So Many Ways To Lose, Devin Gordon [post]
- Pychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Lester Bangs
- The Last Stargazers, Emily M. Levesque
- Mary Astor’s Purple Diary, Edward Sorel
- The Smallest Lights in the Universe, Sara Seager
- The Deficit Myth, Stephanie Kelton
- World of Wonders, Aimee Nezhukumatathil [post]
You can see my complete 2021 Reading List on Goodreads here. I liked almost everything I read this year; my biggest reservations were Light of the Jedi by Charles Soule (the first book in the Star Wars: The High Republic publishing venture; based on other reactions to this book I saw online, I feel I may owe this a re-read), The Ultimate James Bond Fan Book by Deborah Lipp (enormously frustrating because here’s a Bond fan who loves Bond as much as I do and yet our opinions throughout the series vary wildly), and A Thousand Country Roads by Robert James Waller (which I read out of curiosity after a Bridges of Madison County re-read and…well, it’s not great).
Some titles I hope to read in 2022:
- The Expanse, complete, James SA Corey
- Winter’s Tale and In Sunlight and In Shadow, Mark Helprin
- Jade City, Fonda Lee
- Victories Greater Than Death, Charlie Jane Anders
- The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
- A Promised Land, Barack Obama
- Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris
- Alice in Sunderland, Bryan Talbot
And more!
Living healthier? I did that! I recorded weight losses at each doctor’s visit this year, and my numbers rock across the board. And I listened to a ton of new music. Onward and upward!
Did anyone close to you give birth?
There’s a nice young couple down the street who welcomed their second child this year, but that’s about it.
Did anyone close to you die?
No, but several people I know passed away.
What countries did you visit?
Again, I never left the United States. But I did leave the continent! Hooray for Hawaii!
What would you like to have in 2022 that you lacked in 2021?
An end to the pandemic, and a feeling that my country is moving toward rationality and a renewed commitment to thinking collectively and valuing democracy.
What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Frankly, having as good a year as I had amidst all of this [waves at everything] was quite an accomplishment, I think. I kept living, kept writing, kept reading, kept learning. That’s an achievement, I think.
What was your biggest failure?
Not sure I’d call it a failure, but I’m disappointed that once again my plans for drafting a novel proved very unrealistic. Every time I’ve written one of these things I’ve bogged down and taken longer to get it done than I expected, and yet, every time it happens again, I go through several days of panic–“OMG, I’m losing it, my writing is deserting me, I’m doomed! DOOOOOOMED!”–before the clouds start to part and the dust cloud starts to spin and slowly become an accretion disc which then becomes a celestial body all its own.
And then I write.
I also spent too much time noodling about on social media. One approach I’ve taken thereof is to always have at least one e-book in progress, so I can pull up my Kindle app instead of Twitter or Facebook.
What was the best thing you bought?
My new phone: A Samsung Galaxy s21 Ultra! With 512GB internal storage! [look for post, if not, write about it here]
I bought a lot of nifty stuff here and there, with some cool book hauls along the way, but for sheer amusement, nothing beats this necklace for The Wife:
In Waikiki there is an alley that has been converted into a marketplace of stall and tent vendors, hawking t-shirts and jewelry and knick-knacks, gewgaws, and tchotchkes of all kinds. None of it is high-end stuff, but it’s generally fun souvenir stuff. One woman was selling pretty jewelry, and in such situations The Wife and I have developed a routine: she notes that I’m lingering over jewelry and wanders off for a few minutes, so I can buy something as a surprise. Except this time, she stuck right by me, just as the woman operating the booth–an Asian lady–starts into her spiel, which she delivered stream-of-consciousness without stopping for breath:
“Ooooh, you’re looking at this set? It comes with earrings! Isn’t it pretty? It’s the color of the sea, note the blue and the green, like the waves here. It would look lovely on your wife! Ohhh, is this your wife? [to The Wife] Wouldn’t this look pretty on you? Yes! In fact, let’s see how pretty it is on you! [swoops behind The Wife and in seconds the necklace is on her neck] Ooooh, this is so pretty! [to me] You see how pretty she is? She loves it! Look how happy she is! And it comes with the matching earrings! They’d be so pretty on her….”
This goes on, even though I’ve already got my wallet open.
The set was about $30, so again, this wasn’t a back-breaking purchase, and it wasn’t even the only jewelry I bought for her on this trip! But it was the most memorable sale that I was a part of all year, I think.
Whose behavior merited celebration?
Anyone who kept masking, got their vaccinations and boosters, and behaved like members of a functioning society without bleating about “liberty” and “freedoms” and all of that crap. Also, anyone who continued to stand up for democracy. We’re gonna miss that when it’s gone, folks.
Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, and Republicans of just about every kind. Anyone who acted like “Critical Race Theory” was the most important thing under the sun…until the November elections, after which nary a word was heard of it. And our Supreme Court, whose conservative majority is in the process of installing every policy for which it was bought, paid for, and stolen.
Moving on to more positive stuff:
Where did most of your money go?
Same as always: Books, booze, food, gifts, and vintage overalls. And I paid down some debt, which was nice. Oh, and a Big Trip!
What did you get really excited about?
The afore-mentioned Big Trip! That was huge. A part of me didn’t believe we were actually going there until the Captain on the last plane (our route was BUF-ATL-LAX-HNL) came on the speaker and said, “We’re beginning our final descent into Honolulu.”
Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?
I’m really trying to concede as little ground as humanly possible to the idea that as we get older, life gets sadder.
Thinner or fatter?
See above: thinner! Though I will admit that my eating habits the last three weeks or so have slammed the brakes on things in that regard. It shouldn’t be too hard getting back in the swing of things, though.
Richer or poorer?
I paid down a lot more debt this year, and I am getting more and more aggressive with my 401K with each year, so I guess the end result of that is “richer”.
What do you wish you’d done more of?
Besides the usual stuff, well…more cooking! I need to rekindle my enjoyment of cooking.
What do you wish you’d done less of?
Eating crap. I can’t give up all of my vices, but I would like to indulge them in higher-quality items.
How did you spend Christmas?
Eating, opening gifts, worrying about our luggage, and generally being jet-lagged. It took until just this past Wednesday before I really felt like I’d acclimated back to Eastern Time.
My sister was here in person this year–no Facetime on Mom’s iPad this year, yay!–and we ate pretty well. But as Christmases go, it was pretty lethargic.
Did you fall in love in 2021?
Well, there was this really pretty woman I spotted at a bus stop in Waikiki….
How many one-night stands?
A gentleman doesn’t answer such questions. Besides, it’s zero. Married, y’all!
What was your favorite TV program?
Shows we found and enjoyed this year include Leverage (a heist show about a younger, hipper, edgier kind of “A-Team” group who go around doing “rob from the rich” type stuff), Good Girls (a comedy-drama about three women who have been best friends since grade school who decide, in their financial stress, to commit robbery to pay their bills–and thus get embroiled in a life of crime), and my favorite, The Repair Shop. This show will be getting its very own post at some time soon. I love it to death.
I haven’t tried any new network shows of late, after we had terrible luck last year with show’s we’d discovered and loved being canceled after one or two seasons.
Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
I really try to avoid hate. I am not always successful, but I’d rather not name names.
What was the best book you read?
See above!
What was your greatest musical discovery?
I focused a lot on the music of Jean Sibelius this year (and I still need to work through his larger works). I had always struggled to love his work in the past, but there’s something in his austere heat and chill that appeals to me at this point.
And this year I listened to a lot of Taylor Swift. I think she’s an amazingly talented person and I’ll entertain no debate on this point.
What did you want and get?
A new President and a Democratic Congress.
What did you want and not get?
An end to the filibuster.
What were your favorite films of this year?
I saw exactly one movie in a theater this year: No Time To Die, which has a post of its own forthcoming at some point in January. We also watched all of the Ocean’s movies, the heist flicks with George Clooney and company, as well as the one with Sandra Bullock and company. We enjoyed these greatly, though at times I wonder why a team with the financial resources it apparently has really needs to be stealing money at all.
What did you do on your birthday?
As usual, we journeyed to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes. This year’s trip was shorter and we missed the Ithaca Apple Festival by a week (they didn’t finalize dates for the Festival until after we had to commit to booking a hotel room), but it was still a lovely time.
How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2021?
It didn’t really change much, did it? Though I’ve diversified in the shirt department, though. As I neared fifty, I finally embraced flannel. Also, I added “Renaissance Faire” shirts to my repertoire.
What kept you sane?
Books and music and dogs and cats and overalls. Walks in the woods and by the water. I cope best when I’m allowed to focus my energies inward.
Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
The afore-mentioned show Good Girls is loaded with terrific acting, but my favorites were the duo of Christina Hendricks and Manny Montana, whose chemistry is utterly scorching onscreen. I loved their scenes together so much that I decided that when the show ended I wanted them to go off and do a gender-bent Indiana Jones movie, with Hendricks as Dr. Jones and Montana as Dr. Jones’s occasional lover and occasional sidekick, Mario Ravenwood. (Sadly, I have since learned that Hendricks and Montana may not have gotten along terribly well on the Good Girls set, so my fantasies of Hendricks in khakis and a leather coat and a hat and brandishing a whip, and Montana in a tux with white jacket and a rose in the lapel, remain just that.)
What political issue stirred you the most?
We live in a terrible era, politically. But what’s bothering the most is the Republican Party’s ongoing efforts to subvert democracy and lock themselves into power, at a time when their policy positions are entirely based on nonsense, irrationality, and error.
Who did you miss?
Once again, I miss the local geek community. I hope we can have cons again soon.
Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2021:
Leaving last year’s answer intact:
Read a lot, write a lot. Listen to music. Go for walks and look at sunsets. Take all the pictures you want. Learn new things and try new stuff. If you have a dog, take him for walks. Buy books for your daughter, even when she complains that she likes to pick her own books (let her do that, too). Nothing fits your hand so well as your lover’s hand. Eating out is fine, but learn to cook things, too. Have a place to go where they know you and what you order. Don’t be afraid to revisit your childhood passions now and again; you weren’t always wrong back then. Overalls are awesome, it’s OK to wear double denim, and a pie in the face is a wonderful thing!
To this I’d add: The United States of America desperately needs to re-embrace rational and collective thinking, and ditch its mythologies about rugged individualism and the eternal wisdom of “the Founders”.
I’d sum it up with a quote from the afore-mentioned Enola Holmes: “Our future is up to us.”
If you take selfies, post your six favorite ones:
If you have a blog or other online writing forum, share some of your favorite work from this year:
This is a new question that I’ve just added! I don’t really want to have an entirely separate post for Favorite Posts anymore; all of my yearly sum-up will be in a single post. That said, here’s some stuff I’ve liked from the year gone by. (Format might be a bit screwy on some of these since I’m linking the versions that were imported to this site from Byzantium’s Shores.)
On Fandom, Personal Attachments, and the Buffalo Bills
I raise a glass to you, Dr. Vishniac
What Happened Was: Thoughts on the Film
On Ned Beatty and Hear My Song
“I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go”: Forty Years of Indiana Jones
“Well I’ll tell you this and I’ll tell you that, I’m very very scared of a very big hat!”
“I’d rather die living” (Thoughts on anti-vaxxers)
Round-about we go (On Roundabouts)
WNY Love Letter: The Dumas Bridge
How many coffee-brewing methods does one geek need, anyway?
Recent adventures in Overalls Nation
Gap, with stripes: new to the overalls collection
Sir Cottagecore meets Monsieur Village Cooper: Realizing My New Aesthetic
Speaking of Made-Up Holidays: Celebrating “Pie in the Face Day”
My Official and Correct James Bond Movie Rankings: You Only Rank Once, Rank Another Day, Live and Let Rank, A View to a Ranking, Licence to Rank, “I never joke about my ranking!”
Finally, while I won’t link them all, my posts from Hawaii can all be found here. I will be adding to this later on!
That’s just a smattering of everything I did in this space this year, so I do encourage you all to look through the archives. I’m still a blogger at heart!
Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
Most years this one is really super-easy. This year, I had to struggle a bit…until I realized there’s really only one choice. In fact, it was so obvious, given my interests and the feeling this year of time either standing still or running out…and the role this song plays in one of my favorite movies of all time and in a movie that just came out this year.
With music by John Barry and lyrics by Hal David, here is Louis Armstrong.
We have all the time in the world
Time enough for life
To unfold all the precious things
Love has in storeWe have all the love in the world
If that’s all we have you will find
We need nothing moreEvery step of the way
Will find us
With the cares of the world
Far behind usWe have all the time in the world
Just for love
Nothing more, nothing less
Only loveEvery step of the way
Will find us
With the cares of the world
Far behind us, yesWe have all the time in the world
Just for love
Nothing more, nothing less
Only loveOnly love
And with that I bring my year of blogging to another end. This year began on Byzantium’s Shores, and now it ends here on ForgottenStars.net. A brief word about that: I’ve known for a number of years that this was a move that I should make–even though I don’t have any idea how many readers have come along for the ride–but I hesitated for various reasons. Finally, though, I really couldn’t wait any longer. I do rather miss the heyday of blogging, and I do rather miss my “old stomping ground” that I set up in a bit of haste way back in February of 2002. Some people have turned blogging into a career, or they’ve managed to parlay their blogging into new careers. I haven’t been so lucky, but that was never the point…and who knows what the future holds as I move forward with this format. Anyway, I hope you’ll stick around and tell all your friends. I like to think I produce decent content here!
With that, I bid 2021 a farewell. Not really a fond farewell, but I will say this: for me, 2021 was better than 2020. I realize that we’re not exactly setting the bar very high there, but every improvement starts somewhere. I seem to remember a certain Starfleet captain advising a war-addicted planet to give up its ways one day at a time: “We’re not going to kill, today.” A lot of wisdom there.
Thank you, readers! See you in 2022!
Exit, pursued by a greyhound who wants a cookie.
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Oh, and by the way…
…I will write a few more posts about our Hawaiian adventure, but first I want to get all my photos from that trip organized into albums on Flickr, while the adventure is fresh on my mind. I don’t want to dig into photos in another week or two and start saying, “Now where was this? What were we doing? Huh? Wazzat?!” So, bear with me. (Plus, I don’t want this site to become All-Hawaii-All-The-Time, thus becoming the cyber-version of That Guy Who Won’t Shut Up About The Place He Went That You Didn’t.)
Carry on, folks!
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A test! (And a picture)
Nothing really to say here! I’m just trying out WordPress’s mobile app, for those moments when I am away from the computer but am also just DYING to post something.
Also, here’s a photo of my street, taken using the Night mode on my Galaxy S21. I liked the mood of it! LED streetlights make a lovely noir-esque pool of light, don’t they?
(Tone Poem Tuesday will appear as usual, but later.)
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“All right, Mr. Sulu. Let’s see what she’s got!”
Well, here we are! As noted the other day, I’ve been thinking about permanently moving my blogging operations to this site, and retiring Byzantium’s Shores after nearly twenty years of service. As you might surmise…I’m generally the type of person who, when I get around to stating openly that “I’m thinking about doing [something]”, is just about ninety-five percent of the way to actually proceeding with the [something] in mind. Now, this is something I’ve been kicking around for quite a while–it has, honestly, never made much sense for me to have what amounted to two “Official Sites”–but the idea has been growing, and a particular recent impetus was when Jim Wright, the brilliant mind behind Stonekettle.com, decided to do much the same thing:
I can’t work this way.
It’s just not possible. Literally. Even if I wanted to, Facebook won’t let me.
So here’s what we’re going to do:
I’m going to move political commentary back to my own website, here.
No. No. Stop screaming. This is a good thing for me and for you.
Why me? I’m hoping that becomes self evident by and by.
Why for you? Well, for starters, you keep telling me how much you miss long form. Okay. Here it is.
So, starting today, ForgottenStars.net will host all of my new blogging content. Yes, I could have waited until February to make Byzantium’s Shores a cool twenty-year blog, but…well, that’s all pretty arbitrary, and as Hugh Laurie has said:
It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now.
I am not deleting Byzantium’s Shores, because even though I’ve imported all of its content here, I know that there will be broken links and busted images a-plenty in all those archives, and there is no way that I have time to go through and fix all of that. Plus, Byzantium’s Shores has all that long-established search-engine mojo, which I am loathe to lose. What I’m going to do with the old digs is pin a post explaining what’s going on, and then I will post a weekly or bi-weekly “digest” of links to the new content here.
When importing the Byzantium Shores content, it did so under a different “author” name for each post, and while it did not create new categories the way the Blogger site did, it imported the categories as tags, so you can see a lot of those posts via the ‘tag cloud’ over there in the sidebar. Yes, that’s kind of a mess. A “kludge”, in computer geek and engineering terms.
Blogger and BlogSpot suited my needs for a long time, and I’m grateful to all the people who have been running things over there all this time, even back before they were a part of the Google-plex. I’m such an old hand with blogging that I remember when Blogger was pretty much the only game in town unless you knew HTML on your own. Other blogging platforms have come and gone–Movable Type was an early one to compete with Blogger (and I believe it’s still going strong), and there was LiveJournal and Tumblr in its heyday (it’s still kicking too) and I remember the brief run of AOL Journals.
Blogging was at its height in the last half of the Aughts, but that’s when social media began its inexorable rise, and the likes of Facebook and Twitter peeled off bloggers left and right with ease of use, content in short punches, and utility geared toward the concurrent rise in mobile devices. Let’s be honest, blogging is not something you really want to do much on a cell phone. But after a decade of social media dominance, the deficiencies of those services are getting more and more obvious, and now many are returning to long-form content creation, either through newsletter services, or essay hosts like Medium and Substack, or…by blogs.
I never came close to stopping blogging, even though my frequency dropped to an all-time low a couple years ago. I’ve been keeping those fires burning though, and I don’t expect to stop any time soon, even if I never get back to those levels of 2003 when I’d post five or six times a day. Oh, those were fun times! And vexing times. The best of times, the worst of times…well, somebody might have said something like that.
There will probably be some more tinkering “under the hood” over the next while as I regain my WordPress sea-legs. I’m told, for one thing, that this site as currently designed is not well optimized for mobile devices, and that may be an issue. (Or I may decide it’s not and y’all can just lump it. I’m quixotic, I am.) Also, types of content that I have previously striven to keep off ForgottenStars will start appearing here. In the past I’ve kept this site’s infrequent posts focused pretty much exclusively on updates about my writing, and thoughts about writing and storytelling in general, and that’s it. Now? Well, my occasional political thoughts will show up here. Geeky meanderings. My music-related posts…photo posts from my daily existence…it’ll all be here.
Including, dare I say it…pies. It’s all fair game, now!
So, here we go! I’m hoping to have fun with this. I hope you’ll join in!
And now, as John Oliver would say, this.
