Two Decades of Bloggy!

Twenty years ago tonight, I guess I was bored.  You could maybe say the same thing about tonight, just in a radically different context.  There are all sorts of things I could do, but forcing myself to slow down and write a bit, even vaguer-than-usual drivel, isn't a half-bad exercise to engage in from time to time.

I usually save the long-term reflection for New Year's Eve (even if in practice I tend to actually do more of it on New Year's Day), but it's hard not to notice patterns.  With almost any focal distance I choose to look back with, I can see that my life has changed quite a bit recently.  In particular, I've noticed that I've tended to mark this middle part of recent decades with a higher degree of uncertainty and change.  And yet, I've also been reflecting on just how deceptively busy the month of May always seems to get, no matter what else might be happening on a macro level.  Is it something persistent about my social environment, or is it just everyone wanting to do stuff now that the weather's more consistently nicer?

Anyways, I've often complained at this time of year that it's been getting increasingly difficult to find the good-quality, free clipart which is of course the primary ingredient in bloggy cake.  In recent years, it feels like that difficulty curve has spiked.  And this year, it was damn near impossible.  Most anything new worth considering is well behind a paywall, or at least a login.  But I scrappily managed.

It had occurred to me in a textbook "shower thought" yesterday that, nowadays, a bloggy cake could theoretically be baked with a fairly straightforward prompt into a generative image diffusion model.  But there's just no way that the result would taste as good, and besides—all the detailed piping might not even end up being legible.

And yes, despite the em-dash in the last sentence, I've written all of this myself.  It's not at all a sign of outsourcing to a large language model, and if you've been here long enough, you'd know that.

Some things you've just gotta bake yourself.

Happy birthday, Bloggy!