Fine china.
Oh, hey, twenty years. Happy anniversary. —I’m not sure if Gordon Sinclair kept flinging haggises—hagi?—across the Bow River; cursory internet searches suggest his patented flinger wasn’t so much a success—but then, we’re none of us doing too well. If you’d come to me, then, to tell me that twenty years on we’d be entering the third year of a global pandemic, determined to forget any lessons we might accidentally have learned; that the Objectivists who’d taken over Silicon Valley would be cheerfully conspiring to break every utopian promise the internet had ever made for the sake of an energy-guzzling money-laundering bookkeeping trick; that we’d be staring down the barrel of an inevitably impending Christofascist takeover, and the only thing the Democrats could think of to fight it was to lionize Dick “Torture” Cheney, I mean, honestly: in the list of what-the-fuckeries piled up over the past twenty years, the fact that Donald freaking Trump is an odds-on favorite to win a second term as president barely cracks the top five.
Then again, I always was a pessimistic curmudgeon.
If you’d like to look back, to when blogging was a thing, and we weren’t yet rocketing up the hockey stick, there’s the previous retrospectives: the ten-year argosy (posted 3,635 days ago) and the 2019 update; to which from the past couple of years I’d add maybe this one, and this one, and let’s not read too much into the fact they’re both needling George R.R. Martin?
So, yes, it’s been quiet hereabouts. I did write five novelettes last year, which might help to explain some of it, maybe? —The epic’s up to 586,000 words, which is 34% of a Song of Ice and Fire, and I said we weren’t going to read too much into this.
Anyway. See you when I see you.
