Carrying On

The strange thing about Nobody In Particular is that it is no longer what it started out as. It's not really a means of communication with anyone; it's simply another in a vast sea of other blogs, and so I don't really have much of an audience to speak to. It's not really writing (or typing) practice; I'm not sure that I've gotten any better at either in the time since I started this project. (On the other hand, my handwriting is nowhere near what it used to be.) And it's not really a hobby or a pastime; in the sense that it's not something that I do for the enjoyment of doing it.

Partly, it's a discipline, although it's one that's starting, I think, to shade into compulsion. I set this course for myself, and I'm seeing it... Well, "through" really isn't the right term. After all, there wasn't a genuine goal for Nobody In Particular that I set out to achieve... I was simply feeling that I wasn't keeping up with the latest trends. It took several years, but eventually I did find my way to buying a smartphone and a tablet computer, so I could claim to have kept up with things. More recently, I've dabbled in experimentation with generative "A.I.," and have learned the awesome power of a really sophisticated auto-complete system. And throughout it all, I have relatively frequently, if not regularly, updated the weblog with a meandering series of random thoughts.

One of the original rules that I set for myself when I started this was that I wouldn't write about myself, primarily out a conviction that I wasn't an interesting enough person to read about. And, to be sure, I'm still mostly convinced that's true. But I also suspect that it's beside the point, because I write this blog mostly for the sake of writing it, not simply for other people to read it.

2025 is a bit less than two months away, and at this point, I find myself starting to make plans for whatever random project I'm going to embark on come January. And I think that this time around, it will have something to do with this blog. Perhaps I'll try to make it more of a photoblog, at least for a year. I like to take pictures, but I've noticed that without a convenient place to post them, I take fewer of them. Maybe I'll be deliberate about revisiting old topics. Given that I've been at this for nearly eighteen years now, there are a lot of options, and surely some of them could do with an updated take.

The thing about projects like this, however, is that they take on lives of their own. I find my general tone to be too much in the vein of complaining about aspects of the world that irritate me, and I've attempted to change that, to no avail thus far. So maybe whatever happens will simply happen, without any real direction from me. In any event, I will do my best to make it interesting.