So looking back, once again I see a sad dearth of long-form posts here in this little backwater part of the Internet. In fact, sadly, the last “real” post I wrote was my review for Circe back in late November!

Now, that’s not to say I haven’t written a fair bit. Most recently my blog has turned into a collection microfiction posts thanks to my discovering the MastoPrompt hashtag on Mastodon.

But, just like last year, I’m once again taking an extended break over Christmas–this time two weeks plus a week of skiing!–and I wanted to use some of that time to do a little writing. And given this is the second year in a row, I’m now formally declaring the yearly tradition of Blogmas around here!

Last year I wrote a whole series of posts around the various systems and institutions that we previously took for granted, and that COVID so seriously disrupted that we could no longer ignore them. This year I’m not going to claim to have quite the same thematic through-line, but I expect I’ll revisit some of those past topics a year later. In particular, going back to revisit topics like misinformation and inflation seem worth doing given the events of the past year.

In addition, recent news in the worlds of crypto and Twitter have me thinking more and more about Chesterton’s Fence and the dark sides of disrupting the status quo, and I’d like to explore that topic a bit.

Beyond that, I might finally dip my toe into writing a bit about my profession, an area I’ve traditionally stayed away from. This past year we’ve had to really lean into remote work, and that has significantly changed the way I do my job, particularly where people management is concerned, and that feels like fertile ground for exploration.

So that’s it. That’s the plan. And I have thirteen days to do it! We’ll see how far I get between naps, Christmas movies, and playing games on the Steam Deck…