Gabriel L. Helman Gabriel L. Helman

Year in review, self-linkblog-edition

A long time ago (longer now than it seems,) I used to write a lot. Flash forward a few lifetimes, I sat down at the end of last year to try and do something a little more complex than normal, and realized that I’d basically forgotten how to write everything other than technical specs or slack messages.

I needed to get back into shape, and to do that I needed some practice. A lot of practice.

So, I triggered the Genesis Device on this URL and relit the blog as an explicit project to re-teach myself how to write. I had a vague goal of doing about two pieces a week, focused on covering tech and pop culture; maybe Tuesdays and Thursdays, respectively?

Well, it’s been a year. How’d it go?

Including this one, I ended up with 117 pieces, which is just over two a week, but a cursory glance at the archives reveals very very few times I ever hit exactly two a week, and certainly never Tech Tuesday / Pop Culture Thursday.

The schedule wasn’t the actual goal though, the goal was to just keep playing the scales and see where the wind took me. I ended up just north of 110,000 words for the year, which is a lot more than I would have done without the blog.

It really look a while to get going. I’m a much slower writer than I used to be (or at least, remember being,) so one of the hardest parts has been finding the time to actually do the writing, and then building a habit around it. The other big thing I had to re-learn was how to actually finish things.

By the end of the summer I was posting little things on a fairly regular basis, but a deep backlog of half-finished drafts. As a piece of self-deprecating humor, the tag for “the big ones” was for pieces that stayed stuck in draft form for more than a month. For example, the first draft of Fully Automated Insults to Life Itself had a file date in February, and the first draft of Fractals was at the start of July, and 2023’s strange box office was half-done before Barbenheimer even came out. (They all turned out pretty well, I think?)

But! The rust finally started to come off for real as I was recovering from COVID in October, I refocused on actually finishing things in the backlog at the start of November, and as of this post, the drafts folder is empty.

(And I’m not going to say there’s a direct correlation with the blog output hitting a groove and twitter imploding, but that’s not a total coincidence either, you know?)

My biggest surprise has been that I was expecting to do a lot more tech & software engineering writing, and that didn’t end up being where the inspiration flowed. Eyeing my tag stats, I have 66 pieces for pop culture, and 42 for tech, and so hey, thats a fun number to hit, but I was expecting the ratio to go the other way.

In roughly chronological order, here’s some of my favorite pieces I did this year.

On the tech side of the house:

And on the pop culture side:

All that said, I don’t know if it was the best, but my absolutely favorite piece I did this year was Fractals.

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A few other stray observations.

You can really spot the period in late summer/fall where I wasn’t getting enough sleep and the blog got extremely grouchy. Favorite Programming Language Features: Swift’s Exception handling with Optionals was the result me realizing I had written way too may grouchy posts in a row and telling myself, “go write about something you like! Anything!” I’m not sure it’s obvious that the blog has gotten less grouchy since then, but that’s the point where I started paying attention.

Meanwhile, my posts with the most traffic were:

All of which popped off on one search engine or another; I was Google’s number 2 hit for “enshittification curve” for a bit over the summer, so that was exciting.

Like many, many podcast listeners, I’ve been a (mostly?) happy Squarespace customer for many years. This project has really stretched what their platform is good at, though; it’s great for infrequently updated sites—restaurants, small businesses, portfolios, and the like—but daily blogs with complex formatting is outside their wheelhouse, to say the least. I spent the year slowly realizing I was trying to recreate wordpress inside squarespace’s editor, and “hmmmm”.

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I have a few loose piecs queued up for the start of the year, but then I think I’m gonna pump the brakes a little. I’ve got a few longer-form things I want to try and do next year, so I’m going to see if I can redirect this habit I’ve built in a slightly different way.

So Happy New Year, everyone! This year was pretty good, all things considered. Let’s make the next one ever better.

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Gabriel L. Helman Gabriel L. Helman

Sunday Linkblog, Nightmare before Christmas edition

Noted science fiction author and unrepentant Burrito Criminal John Scalzi has spent every day of December reviewing various “Comfort Watches”, movies you can, as he says, enjoy every time and watch with your brain turned off.

So far, every movie on this list has caused me to ho “heck yes! Love that movie!” when the title pops up in me feed reader. I’ve been meaning to link to this series for a while, so let me gesture towards two fo them for you.

Today’s was The December Comfort Watches, Day Seventeen: The Nightmare Before Christmas. I fully endorse everything he has to say about it, but especially that Danny Elfman’s work was and continues to be the main attraction.

He’s about a decade older than I am so I didn’t come on board with Oingo Boingo like he did; my entry point was Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, which was just about the greatest movie my then 7-year old mind could imagine. (Well, greatest movie with Luke Skywalker in it, obviously.). Even then, the music was incredible. I spent hours designing breakfast-making Rube Goldberg machines on paper, and that wasn’t just because Abe Lincoln’s expression was funny.

I can’t now recall when I saw Edward Scissorhands or Beetlejuice, so instead flash forward with me to Batman ’89. Recall how the movie opens: the camera is moving though some kind of strange.. Tunnels? Canyons? It’s not clear. Meanwhile, what’s immediately one of the greatest movie themes of all time is playing over the credits. It’s perfect music for Batman, a little spooky, a little exciting, has a kind of haunted church organ thing happening. The music kicks up a gear, and the camera pulls out of the whatever-the-ares, and it turns out we’ve been flying along inside the Batman logo; and as the logo fills the frame and the music starts going “BUM BUM BUM BUM BUMMM”, 11-year old me thought that was the single coolest thing he had ever seen. Even today, when I occasionally rewatch the movie, that shot sends me right back to being 11 and thinking “holy smokes, they really made a Batman movie!”

Anyway, after that, I was on-board for whatever those guys did.

When Nightmare came out— checks notes huh, also thirty years ago, would you look at that, what the heck was in the water in ’93—I was pumped for it.

It did not disappoint. All three of the major creatives—Henry Selick, Tim Burton, Danny Elfman—have done great work since, but nothing better than this. The absolute peak for everyone involved, and considering their other work, that’s saying something.

However! As long as I have you here, I wish to also call your attention to the Special Edition re-release of the soundtrack from some years ago. This had Patrick Stewart re-record the opening narration, which is as you would expect excellent, but also record the original unused closing narration.

Reader, Nightmare is an almost perfect movie, but I think that ending would have been even better.

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As an addendum, let me also direct you to: The December Comfort Watches, Day Six: Down With Love. Down With Love isn’t so much under-rated as under-acknowledged, there are days I think maybe I dreamed it since no one else ever seems to remember this movie exists. It’s phenomenally good, a movie where absolutely everyone is doing career-best work and knows exactly what the job is. Other than general relief that someone else has seen it, I also mention this because my kids are both at an arts-heavy school, and they’re talking about what pieces from movies they could use as an audition piece. And there a… thing? Towards the end of the movie? Which even obliquely mentioning is too much of a spoiler, but 1) after they shot that they should have directly handed Rene Zellweger the Oscar for that year, and 2) would be an incredible audition monologue. So I’m trying to figure out how to trick my teenagers into watching a 20-year old spoof of a 50-year old movie series.

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