I’m back from Scotland, now, and I suppose it’s a good time for a postmortem. My mistake was in not having a better agenda for last week’s posts. I should have thought through specific topics I wanted to address on each day. The Brexit and Islam posts are probably the only ones that really work to any degree. The one with the photos was fun, but not likely something I will do again unless I’m going to take the time to caption things and create an actual narrative around the images.

Yup, I’m in Scotland. Doesn’t mean the blog isn’t happening, though. One change I made over the past week is to add a progress bar and reading time indicator for all posts. I’ve liked those ever since I saw them on other sites. So, now there’s one here. Enjoy it. Or don’t. I’m not the boss of you. I also put a better backup solution in place, by which I mean I put one in place at all.

No real changes to speak of, just more self-indulgence. Something new did happen, however. A comment on a previous post, which corrected something I quoted there, will likely lead to a follow-up in the near future. Not sure if I will get to it this week but I plan to hit it soon. I would like to take this opportunity to encourage anyone who does have a correction, clarification, or other useful information for me to please post it as a comment.

In case you didn’t notice… Nothing dramatic altered, mind you, but the Archives and Categories sections in the sidebar have been simplified into dropdown menus. I don’t know if this works better for anyone, but I consider it a better use of space. I plan to change a few more things this week. For one, I want to add a slightly more clarified license to all pages. Everything I write here is Creative Commons licensed, requiring attribution, non-commercial use, and shares/derivatives must be shared under compatible terms.

I’ll try to actually talk about something this time! Looking back at the posts I’ve made on this blog since it started, a lot of them are about politics. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that, but as I wrote recently, political writing is kind of a copout. It’s not that there’s no such thing as good political writing, it’s just rare, and I am probably not doing much of it.

This will be my shortest post ever! Basically, I have nothing to report. Nothing about this site has changed in the past week. I had a terrible week otherwise, but at least this place remains constant! I also haven’t missed any posts. I’m still determined to make it to a year with this thing, and maybe beyond. We’ll see. Have you ever played Cookie Clicker? You should play Cookie Clicker. Although you don’t really play it.

Yup, this blog is still here, surprisingly! There’s no special number to this post. It is post number 142. There’s no anniversary or occasion to celebrate. But here I am, almost to the end of February, and this blog is still going. I continue to find myself fascinated by what posts people read and which ones they don’t. Whitesplaining Berniebros remains my most popular post, which I would not have expected at the time I wrote it.

You’re about to be subjected to stream-of-consciousness metacommentary. I’ve been thinking lately about what I want to accomplish with this blog and if I am actually doing that. To circle back to the start of all this, I am not new to writing persuasively online. I have blogged off and on since “blog” was even a word. I was making Internet commentary by 1998 or so. My blog updates were infrequent, to be sure, but I’ve spent almost that entire intervening time posting on various forms, and my favorite form of discussion on those has consisted of debates on contentious topics.

It’s rambling time. At this point it’s become clear that I’ve put a demanding workload on myself. I believe I have mentioned that I have a full-time job. Obviously, that sucks up a lot of time and energy. This past week was particularly difficult. Without being too specific, an issue arose where I was called on to completely reimplement a process that already existed, and which would have worked fine if those using it had been using it correctly.

I’m going to talk about a creativity-enhancing course I started today. It’s called _The Artist’s Way_, which styles itself “a spiritual path to higher creativity.” The spiritual part is not an exaggeration–there is a considerable focus on spiritual elements. The author uses these at a metaphor for reaching inside yourself and getting in touch with your inner artist. There are some religious overtones to the whole idea, though the author is clear that you don’t have to believe in God (or anything religious or spiritual) in order to use this book.