Gabriel L. Helman Gabriel L. Helman

Linkblog, 2024 Year In Review Edition

I was catching up with someone IRL recently and the blog came up, and they asked the very reasonable question, “what do you write about?” And I had to answer, “well, mostly I review movies and I’m rude about AI.” Sums the year up!

If you’ll indulge me, the Icecano tradition is to use the end of the year to do a little reflection and navel-gazing. First, some stats! The final score for the year was just a hair over 178,000 words across 177 posts. That was quite a bit more than last year, and it’s a funny coincidence for those two numbers to be so similar. This year feels like it’s going to end up being the historical high-water mark; I have some other things in mind next year to direct some of that energy towards.

The big project for the year was getting Software Forestry up off the ground. This was one of the projects I was kicking around a couple years ago before I realized I needed some more practice and lit off the blog. Of these 8 pieces, the last one was my favorite, but it kind of needs the series to built up to it. Software Forestry returns early next year.

I wrote a lot of movie reviews this year! They were fun, but also much, much harder than I was expecting, so I kept chewing on them hoping I’d learn how to do them and they would get easier. They never did, but they were still fun to do. I’ll let you be the judge if I actually got any better at it, but my absolutely favorite piece I wrote all year was this review of Legally Blonde. Of everything I wrote, this is one of the few that turned out exactly the way I was imagining ahead of time.

The tech side of the house was mostly split between making fun of Space Glasses and being mad about AI; my favorite piece I wrote on that front was the two parter of Crushed and Pianos, which weren’t technically inspired by either, but was extremely about both.

The nicest thing I can say about Squarespace’s analytics is that they have lots of room for improvement? The material from this year that got the most “organic” traffic (whatever that means with the decayed web of today) were the Software Forestry pieces and my reviews of the Tales of the Valiant core rules and Game Master’s Guide.

One of my highest-trafficked pieces continues to be last year’s What seems to be your boggle, citizen? 30 years of Demolition Man, which is extra funny because it has a 100% bounce rate after zero seconds. Somewhere, some search engine is turning up my review when people are searching for, presumably, animated gifs and that’s hilarious to me and I am so, so sorry, irritated visitors! Also still drawing traffic from last year was You call it the “AI Nexus”, we call it the “Torment Pin”, which people actually seemed to stick around and read.

I also got a real uptick in traffic the last month or so, mostly to seemingly random older pieces? Some SEO incantation somewhere must have sorted me a little higher. If you’re a new visitor, hit up the contact info in the Ahoy There! page and let me know where you’re coming in from!

With that all said, here are what I think were the year’s Greatest Hits; the pieces I wrote this year that I thought worked particularly well, or that I was extra pleased with, or that got a good reaction, in roughly chronological order:

Jan 7: I Had A Dream Last Night, And I’m Mad About It

Jan 19: Books I Read In ’23: Part 5—Planescape & Friends

Jan 26: X-Wing Linkblog Friday

Jan 31: 40 years of…

Feb 2: A construction site! We need that good feminine energy: Barbie (2023)

Feb 20: Playthings For The Alone

Mar 4: The Sky Above The Headset Was The Color Of Cyberpunk’s Dead Hand

Mar 7: “Hanging Out”

Mar 15: Nausicaä at 40

Mar 29: Getting Old

Apr 5: Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Wes Anderson 2023 Double Feature

Apr 10: Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Oppenheimer

Apr 12: Getting Less out of People

Apr 29: Movie Review Flashback: Zack Snyder’s Justice League

May 1: Movies from This Year I Finally Saw: Dune Part 2

The double feature of

May 20: Hey Boyos! The Phantom Menace at 25

Jul 3: No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021)

I wrote a “trilogy of philosophical blockusters” about Douglas Adams:

I wrote a quartet of reviews about “new kinds of D&D”, followed by what I’m playing instead

The “Why is this Happening” trilogy is the thing I worked the hardest on all year. The end result of two years of stewing on “AI”, and fundamentally the sequel to last year’s Fully Automated Insults to Life Itself. I used a bunch of the prototype ideas I’d been kicking around for what became Software Forestry, so while this isn’t formally part of that series, this acts as a kind of opening act throat clearing:

Oct 16: Ten Years of the Twelfth Doctor

Nov 25: Older Movies I Re-Watched Recently: Legally Blonde (2001)

The entire politics tag is a real rollercoaster of what I was thinking over the last several months, but the final wrap-up is as good a summary as any of them:

Dec 16: Video Game Replay: Portal/Portal 2

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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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