Alex R

Ahoy there! The bevy of this week's posts — including a few more abortive ones that I haven't fleshed out yet — will have to wait a bit, because we've reached a more important writing milestone around here. This is Statistics Day, my annual commemoration of the evening, now 21 years ago, that I sat down and coded up my first online journal post. We have been through a lot since then, yes? To the nearest integer age, half of my life's been documented here by now. Even the numerical accounting of exactly how much we've been through is turning into a hefty object in its own right. As usual it's below, with the new update for the past year way down at the bottom. Equally as usual, statistics don't include this post.

( Giant statistics table )

Our latest results come as quite a shock, I must admit: if Alan had been watching, he would have caught from across the room the notably surprised look on my face at the moment when the number "150" appeared on my on-screen calculator. I knew I was headed for a pretty big writing year, but not as big as all that! (My private guess beforehand, crystallized from "more than 2009-10 and 2019-20," was 100,000 words in 125 posts.) In fact, I pounded out more words during the past year than in all but this journal's second year, and I almost took down that record as well. Only the first three years come out ahead in terms of number of posts. The difference between now and then remains my run-on verbal-diarrhea average entry length, which at 755 words still represents about a 30 percent bonus over those early days.

I'm not sure if I would have made the connection on my own, but in retrospect my lifestyle during the past year does kind of correspond to how it used to be in 2005-06. They could both be categorized as relatively free-form — the round-the-clock chaotic social life of an undergrad-mad new master's student 19 years ago, and the choose-your-own-adventure pastimes of an unemployed middle-aged scientist now. Lack of a fixed schedule is a great excuse, apparently, to spend a lot of time typing out my random thoughts. I'd also suspect it leads to there being more interesting content to write about.

Statistics Day is my typical opportunity to solicit reader feedback (if any) on any desired or undesired topics of future posts, linguistic analyses to run on my accumulated text, etc. Feel free to drop a comment. While I'm no longer quite unemployed, I can't imagine that there's going to be any dearth of things to rant and/or rave about as time goes by in the medium term. I have another big road race coming up, Alan and I have a San Francisco trip booked for early December, and I'd sure love to go skiing somewhere exciting in the mid-winter. In a more abstract sense, though I've intentionally avoided politics in here for the past 11 months, it wouldn't be foreign to my interests to cook up an essay or two on some topical line.