One Two Three One Two Three, that’s the date today. One Two Three One Two Two was last year, when I started this blog. I don’t believe I missed a day. There were one or two where I slept on it and did it the next day, or did it twice in a day, but those were few and far between. The fact that that means I was on my computer every single day of 2023 makes me kind of uncomfortable, I have to admit. 

This blog is functionally a journal. I’ve used it to look back at what I was doing or thinking on a particular day. Sometimes it’s helpful because I’ll recall a disagreement or an enlightenment, othertimes on an important day I’ll have written entirely about pasta or text based roleplaying games or differences in stitch length across Japanese Denim brands.

Knowing that your journal will be promptly left out at a busy train station for anybody to read changes what you write, just like writing it on the internet. Having an audience to the inner thoughts of this past year has inspired a clarity of thought and a truthfulness that I might not have expected. In a journal I believe we humans have a tendency to spiral, our internal-monologue and inside-thought devolving into something like a spiritual dialect. This dialect occludes real efforts at growth and discovery, at least it did for me. 

People I love read this pretty shortly after it’s published, but anybody can read it any time after. From new friends to future employers, and I’ve already been embarassed as I read back, but I think that’s good. I’ve been embarassed reading old journals, but it’s an embarassment without teeth, when I regard those old writings I cringe at how I was, but I don’t exactly take those lessons forward as I do when I’ve read an embarassing post here, on this website. 


I started this project out of a nearly desperate need to add a bit of structure and responsibility to my writing practice. Text based RPGs, my other most common form of writting felt utterly without impact, they float off into the aether to be cared about not at all. This feels different, weightier. It’s not competitive with anybody but myself from last year, and I look back at him with no small degree of pride.

This blog has improved me, and more than a journal might have, more than something on a shelf. That’s not to say journals aren’t good, if you write journals that’s good and you should keep doing that. Not everybody is so weak that they need an audience, even an imaginary one or one made up of loved ones to stay honest and interested/ing.
Apparently I do need that. 

The demarcation of a new year’s a fine, fine thing. Without it I suspect I might merely continue as things are here, writing very nearly stream-of-consciousness each night with a picture or two. Without last years celebration I might not have started this thing at all. In the new year I intend at least a story a week, even if it’s short, and by God a recording a week too, once I figure out what in the hell an audio controller is.

So if this blog is a thing you like, there’ll be more of it.

huzzah!

P.S.
For Old Lang Syne
Can we briefly reflect on how fantastic it is that Paul Thomas Anderson chose to clash the Phantom Thread soundtrack directly over that mid-century rendition of auld lang syne? Absolutely inspired, it’s the sort of over-dramatic conscious-carelessness I aspire to for 2024. That’s a man and a movie that knows itself.

P.P.S. finding a good version of that song to play at midnight is strangely difficult. Youtube is entirely garbage. Impressively bad.
Here’s a good one: Auld Lang Syne by Guy Lomardo.

Enjoy, and have a Happy, blessed New Year you Bozos.