Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Wednesday: Looking Back


Looking back over my deeds
I can see signs a wise man heeds
And if I just had the chance
I’d never make that same mistake again

— excerpt, Looking Back by Nat King Cole (c. 1958)
Sorry this is so late. Still have family here from out of town. Usual familial circus continues.
Today also happens to mark the fifth month I’ve been posting these Monday-Friday roundups. It’s time to take a look back at this effort. Have they been worthwhile? Are we getting anything out of them?
I started in part to force myself to write more every day, and I’ve achieved that. But it’s come at the expense of other writing; I need to do something different going forward to ensure I make my other personal writing goals.
I also started in part to return to political content, if not electoral politics. After five years away, it was time to come back; politics were why I started blogging fourteen years ago, after all, and the political is still a personal driver.
What I didn’t expect was how much more reading I would do every day. If I read 50K words a day before I started regular weekday posts, I read nearly 100K now, and across a breadth of subjects I might not have touched last year. This has been very helpful during discussions I’ve had with my young adult children, who are now starting and leaving college, and entering the workforce. What does the short- and long-term future look like based on current trends? But this much reading also exacts a price in terms of time.
These posts were also intended to offer an open thread for discussion. There’ve been a few choice nuggets along the way in the comments, like harpie’s research into the Flint Water Crisis.
When looking back again in another handful of months or a year or two, I wonder what the most important topic was out of these roundup posts so far? Plenty of food for thought and discussion.
Before I go back to taming lions and taking the occasional turn driving the clown car, I want to remind you there’s a backup site in case this one isn’t available. There’s some tinkering going on backend here; there’s a redesigned site coming in the very near future. Bookmark this: Emptywheel Alternate Site
Can’t promise comments there will be monitored as closely as they are here, but it’s an alternate place to catch our content if you have problems here at the main page. Catch you later!

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