Blog News

I believe I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve found in recent years that I don’t have the brainpower to write formal blog posts that I used to, often needing to load up on protein bars and chug caffeinated drinks to get anything done and even then being ambivalent towards the result. Places like Twitter and Reddit can be more conducive to firing something off on the spur of the moment, so I remain plenty active on those places, but writing an actual blog post can feel like a daunting task. It’s compounded by the fact that I rarely have time to focus on Da Blog, which is an odd thing to say when I rarely if ever do any actual “work” on anything, but I’ve found Twitter, Reddit, and various mobile games tend to take up all of my time, to say nothing of the sort of long-term projects I’ve hinted at in the past. Some of those mobile games aren’t even that fun – I seem to have a habit of getting really tired when I’m playing one particular game, which is a problem because the time that I’m playing it and the period immediately after would probably be the best time for me to get some writing done, but my sleep schedule hasn’t really allowed me to switch to the main alternative time I could go with – but I feel obligated to reach at least a certain point of accomplishment in it.

Speaking of my sleep schedule, I spent most of the time after the Olympics trying to fix it after staying up until the early morning watching some of the later events, but even before I came close to succeeding I started to see signs of how difficult it was to find time and energy to get writing in. I really did want to get a post written about recent news in college sports, but I could only even get started in the last 24 hours, despite running through much of what I wanted to say in my head before that. Sitting down and keeping everything straight, and getting it all organized in a cohesive order while trying to remember everything I want to say, feels like something I need some sort of ritual to get into the right mindset for, and much of what’s been suggested to me doesn’t seem to work.

I will still try to get that post in in the next couple of weeks, and I’ll definitely have a post getting ready for the new NFL season and the implications of the league’s new TV deals for flex scheduling, ideally before the season actually starts. I have one or two other ideas for posts I may try to work on as well, but who knows how or when.

It seems like this year I manage to get in a real post every other month, thanks to some big news items that came out, but it still takes me a long time to work on them and I ended up getting one of them in under the wire at the end of the month anyway. I’ve been doing a lot of work on a project that should produce a number of posts next year (and you might be able to find a hint of it if you look closely), but I wouldn’t be optimistic about next month even continuing that every-other-month trend, given what I tend to do when the Olympics start coming up, and then as we hit August my attention turns more towards the upcoming NFL season. (When’s the last time I had more than one post in a month outside football season?) As always I tend to be more active on Twitter, but I really need to find a way to get my writing juices really going soon.

I was going to do a whole post about my experiences being sick, probably not with COVID (I tested negative but I only got tested this past Wednesday when I was already well into recovering), over the past two weeks, but the NFL Draft hit on Thursday and the way I watch it I basically can’t do anything else while it’s on, and I didn’t get any sleep entering Thursday so I basically ended up sleeping from just after midnight until it was almost time for the draft to start up again. I may yet still make that post, as well as a very delayed post about the NFL deals and maybe even Turner sneaking in to take the other half of NHL rights, but this was a month that ended up being wasted for, for once, understandable reasons.

For pretty much the entire time since the start of the Trump era I’ve been meaning to get back to talking about the state of American politics and how to fix it. I wanted to do it before the election, the assault on the Capitol would have been prime time to do it, and the impeachment was probably the last best chance to do it and still have it be remotely timely. I’ve actually started work several times – I have a bunch of unfinished drafts where I would return to the topic that I never finished before they stopped being timely, and there are a bunch of posts that have actually gone up that would have started a return to the topic, but I never manage to stitch together more than one or two nights at a time where I can bring myself to do the sort of deep thinking needed to work on it. Part of that’s a function of my weird sleep schedule where I’m not sure how often or for how long I’m ever really fully awake, but part of it may be that I get scared of getting out of the rut I’m in where I spend most of my time on Reddit, Twitter, mobile games, and various web sites and have to do actual hard thinking and write “canonical” blog posts. Put the two together, and what becomes far more common is that I go through several-day-long stretches where writing about politics is the furthest thing from my mind, even though I keep telling myself I need to get back to it sooner or later.

I’ve been thinking that I might still write up something in March and figure out some way to tie it in with current events later, but writing up that last paragraph may have pulled into focus how much I may be kidding myself. I may still write some things that could be useful later, but I may just shift my focus towards other means of being productive and making something of Da Blog and my life that I can spend my time on more sustainably. Or I could spend the next several weeks working on more frivolous projects. That might be more likely.

I wasn’t intending to push off writing the annual blog-day post to New Year’s Eve again, and while I can’t totally explain let alone excuse it, I can say I spent the last week-plus catching up on some things for reasons indirectly related to the impending end of Flash, after a particularly complex and unknowable set of SNF Week 17 scenarios took up a good bit of brain power for the previous couple weeks. But it is certainly appropriate in other ways: this is only the 25th post since last year’s blog-day post, when I suggested that year’s record low of 27 posts was unlikely to even be possible to break.

On some level, you would think the ongoing pandemic would be great for posting with everything being shut down, but the reality is the circumstances of my life didn’t actually change that much (I mostly just had to add a mask to my usual ensemble when leaving the apartment) and I spent a lot of the year flitting from all-consuming project to all-consuming project. The election certainly took up a lot of my attention; having announced the poll average project in a post I didn’t really mention it again outside of the obligatory monthly posts, announced any changes to the methodology or what kinds of averages were available on Twitter (or as part of the aforementioned monthly posts) instead of in their own posts, and ended up getting distracted in early October and didn’t even get the spreadsheet up to date before the election. I suspect I won’t be making the project publicly available again and only work on it in private during the primaries, which are more interesting to me anyway. I also wanted to return to the topic of what the Trump era means for the country and how to heal its divides, and I still hope to get to that before the inauguration, but as in 2016 I kept putting it off, and never really even got started outside of my own head. I had a project I intended to unveil on Da Blog this year but the election (especially with the added obligation of the poll averages) and pandemic distracted me from that, and many of the same things I wrote in last year’s blog-day post still apply as well.

I feel like my ability to actually accomplish things has just gotten worse and worse since I finished the book in 2015, and I don’t know if my brain is at a place where it’s even possible for me to recover the level of activity I had back in Da Blog’s halcyon years. Then again, many of the frivolous projects I work on instead of anything that might actually become a thing outside my own head involve considerable effort as well, and even before launching Da Blog I rarely was able to focus on a project long enough to bring it to completion. So yeah, Year Fourteen was another wasted year in the history of Da Blog, and I’m not sure I can really bring myself to proclaim Year Fifteen is going to be some great comeback (frankly I may need a change of medication to get even close to back to old levels of productivity), but I really don’t think it can get much worse than this year, I do hope to complete at least some projects that should translate to Da Blog posts, and if all else fails I can try to pursue other avenues of making money that can help me get out of the rut I’ve been in for the past five or so years.

Unless the NFL season gets completely wiped out, this should be the last monthly check-in post until next year. Even then I do have posts I want to get in before the election, and possibly after. That isn’t even to speak of the poll averages, where as promised, I made some substantial changes to the main landing page, though I’m no longer sure how measuring how prognosticators see each race is going to work. Right now, however, Steven Universe is the furthest thing from my mind, and under the circumstances I’m no longer sure if I’ll ever get back to it again. It hasn’t helped that I’ve gotten caught up in more pointless personal projects that won’t mean anything…