General

Blog Question Challenge, 2025 Edition

This apparently started on Bear blog, a minimalist blogging service, where people answer questions about…blogging!

I’m not going to tag anyone or anything, but I love lists and answering questions makes a list, so here are my answers to the Blog Question Challenge.

Why did you make the blog in the first place?

This blog, creolened.com, was started on February 2, 20025– nearly 20 years ago! The first post is here: Bloggity blog blog

That short post doesn’t explain why I started the blog, but does suggest blogging was a hot thing in 2005, and I wanted in on it. Also, I like writing and rambling, so a blog seemed like a good place to do this. Journals and diaries are fine (I keep a daily journal now and have kept journals in the past as well), but there’s something about having my thoughts hanging out in public that makes me write a bit differently. I have a voice and it comes through regardless of whether I am writing just for myself (diary) or not (blog), but there’s a little extra zestiness when I write on the blog. I know others can see what I’ve written. It adds pressure to at least check for typos. And maybe organize my thoughts and make them occasionally interesting.

Also, I find writing about something, then referencing back to it years later is just neat. And handy.

Mostly, I started the blog because I like to write and have things to say. Those things are not always serious or well-articulated, but that’s why this blog never had a particular angle. It’s just me rambling.

Why did you choose bear blog?

Sorry, bear, I tried you and liked you, but you are too minimalist for me, because I am a weirdo and spend too much time playing around with formatting and images and junk like that. It’s a fine service, though! Hopefully the person running it isn’t a monster. There is a weirdly large number of monsters on the internet these days.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

WordPress was my first blogging platform. Prior to it, I posted on various forums, and had a gaming website I updated by editing the HTML files, then seeing how things looked in Firefox 1.5 or something.

I have more recently dabbled/tested many different blogging platforms. Search this blog to find my thoughts on them!

Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another software?

It varies, but most of the time I write using the built-in WordPress editor. I occasionally use the Classic block editor when the block system, uh, blocks me from doing what I want.

Sometimes I write in other apps and then copy and paste over. For a time I thought of doing this permanently, so I’d always have a local copy of my stuff, but it just seemed like more work than I wanted. Other programs I’ve used to write for this blog:

  • Notepad
  • Notepad++
  • iA Writer
  • Ulysses
  • Obsidian
  • Maybe Microsoft Word at some point?
  • Probably a few others I’m forgetting

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Never! Inspiration comes and goes, and I have yet to observe any particular pattern to it. Sometimes I can get up and write a long, lovingly handcrafted post first thing in the morning, other times I scramble to find a cat pic to post at 11:30 p.m. It just depends.

I will note that when I am feeling down, I rarely feel inspired to write, so I reject the idea that one must suffer for one’s art (or writing). On the other hand, writing about weird or bad things that have happened to me is something I enjoy doing after the fact, when I’m at least one step removed (see my recent ER visit for an example).

Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I publish immediately, baby. Sometimes I will look over the post for typos or awkward phrasing just before hitting Publish or just after it goes live. If I come across the same in an old post, I fix these things.

If a post is especially long or complex, I will sometimes save it as a draft, then come back later to finish it, but most drafts tend to go to the place where drafts die. Then they die.

Your favourite post on your blog?

At the time of writing this, I have 5,462 posts, so trying to pick a favourite one is pretty much impossible. I used to maintain a small list of favourites, but tossed it aside at some point.

Rather than specific favourites, I’ll list a few general themes:

  • Some of the writing prompt posts are entertaining, and not bad when you consider they are written in the moment, without any editing afterwards.
  • Some of my own (silly) writing prompt lists still amuse me. Others don’t, so this is definitely “your mileage may vary” kind of thing.
  • Birding posts with actual photos are nice. I’ve fallen out of the habit of posting the photos, but I’ve still got some decent ones up for viewing.
  • Some of my art is okay! These are found under Creative.
  • I tried to learn how to swim in 2009. It didn’t go well, but was kind of funny.
  • And more. I have a billion tags because I am a chronic tag abuser, but some of the odder ones sometimes have cute/interesting posts to go with them.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?

I have redesigned my blog multiple times through the years and will no doubt do so again. Right now it is sporting a more minimal look, with little colour. I’ll probably change that again sometime.

The biggest upcoming change will be moving to a different platform. I am still thinking through this (and have documented the process here on this blog, to go all meta). I no longer have confidence in the WordPress platform, and it’s really more than I need. I am very used to it, though, so moving to something new is going to have a learning curve, accepting certain compromises and other stuff. But I feel I should, and the time to do so is pretty much now.

And that’s about it. Here are some other people who also took up this challenge:

Rockin’ New Year’s Eve, 2024 style

Which means going to bed before 11 p.m. Technically, I might still be up reading at midnight, so I might be awake for the calendar to flip from 2024 to 2025, the year in which flying cars and baby machines become reality.

I am surprised as I type this that I haven’t heard any fireworks. Maybe people are just quietly drinking heavily instead.

Happy new year.

UPDATE: It seems one person had a small cache of fireworks, and they set them off precisely at midnight. It lasted less than a minute, so my drinking heavily theory was probably correct.

The song most stuck in my head in 2024 is from 1976

And that song is “The Things We Do For Love” by 10cc, released as a single late in 1976. It was a big hit in Canada, peaking at #1, and I clearly remember it all over the radio at the time (I was about 13 years old, so just developing my taste–or lack thereof–in music). I found the song to be catchy, but schmaltzy, and declared it worthy of being mocked. I mocked it, with my friends, because we were extremely cool kids in our own minds.

The song resurfaced for me when I watched a few pop songs on YouTube from the late 70s/early 80s, which told the YouTube algorithm that I wanted to watch these videos to the exclusion of everything else, thus my home page became clogged with almost nothing but. One of the songs clogging things up was “The Things We Do For Love” and it made me reassess this now 48-year-old song. And it’s still schmaltzy, and still catchy, but there is more to it, that almost indefinable something that makes it more than just a tidy pop song.

I’m not a music-titian, so I can’t use the proper terminology to describe the things, but as a layperson, it comes down to these:

  • The song starts with lush background vocals that serve as an intro, swelling to the “start” of the song. It’s a welcome variation from the usual verse/chorus structure.
  • Piano and guitar are both featured and used well.
  • The lyrics, given the song title, are not as banal and mindless as one might expect. They’re not deep, either, but at least they’re not cringe-inducing.
  • Did I mention the background vocals?
  • The whole production is very lush and layered for a pop song.

The only down note (ho ho) is the way it fades at the end, as was the style at the time. It’s not terrible, but it still makes me think, “They didn’t know how to end the song.”

And they actually made a video for it, which is positively quaint. The two main band members appear to have just walked off the street and picked up their instruments, which is a fair bit better than having them wear matching sequinned jumpsuits.

I can’t say the song has made me want to check out the entire 10ccc oeuvre, but I did listen to “Not in Love” later and almost a half century later, I finally learned this is the song featuring the repeated, whispered vocal “Big boys don’t cry, big boys don’t cry”, which my friends and I mercilessly mocked at the time. It still comes across as just kind of weird in 2024, but at least I now know where the weirdness originated.

Anyway, that’s my Song of the Year 2024. I know I’ve heard contemporary music, too, but can’t think of a single song that stuck with me.

Clearing skies for 2025

Here’s hoping that 2025 will be better than 2024. I mean, maybe aliens will save us. FOR DINNER. Or maybe they’ll save us because they find us worth saving. It could happen.

And if it doesn’t, then maybe 2025 will be better in other ways. I can’t think of them right now, but I am optimistic that they will come to me in time. Presumably before 2025 concludes one year from today.

Clearing skies, as captured by me on my officially ancient iPhone 12, December 28, 2024

2024: The Year in Review (Spoiler: It kind of sucked)

I wasn’t sure how to summarize the year. It was not a good year. Bad things happened, and the stage is set for more bad things to happen in 2025. Global politics are a mess and fascism is on the rise.

I won’t even mention the U.S. election except to say that Americans have given themselves a generational black eye by putting Trump back in the White House when he belongs in jail. So much for accountability and consequences.

For me, the year was a series of health-related issues. I got sick twice for the first time in years, one minor illness, one that lingered a bit. I hurt my right knee again, but managed to bounce back and resumed running sooner than I had in 2023. I even posted some of my best run times in two years, which was nice. But health problems dogged me right to the end. I am only a day out from weeks of antibiotics to deal with a bacteria infection. This wiped out most of December, but I did manage to lose weight and keep most of it off as a result.

My return to running yesterday ended in disaster, as noted in an earlier post, when I tripped and fell hard on a sidewalk. A day later and I feel like I’m recovering from a car crash. Do not recommend.

Strata nonsense consumed much of my time. Too much. Stress was a constant companion. I don’t see light at the end of the tunnel, or dark. I just see the tunnel and it is very long.

Hopefully I’ll emerge from it in 2025.

May we all get through the next year intact.

Good riddance to 2024.

A cat trying, symbolically, to run from the year that was:

EDIT: Comics Outta Context had an apt choice to ring in the new year:

Trite or profound? Maybe both.

I saw this, uncredited, on Mastodon. On the one hand, it’s kind of trite. On the other, I like the actual colour and composition of the photograph and agree with the sentiment. It seems so much of our world is built around competition and while competition is not bad in itself, it perhaps shapes too much of what we do in our society, and encourages a kind of selfishness that isolates us from each other.

Anyway, that’s my deep thought for the morning!