Other than the reelection of the orange turd, it has been a pretty good year. We’ve done some fun things this year. I suppose in a couple of days, when I’m not so tired, I’ll list all the concerts/shows we went to see. We have a lot lined up for 2025 as well, to which we look forward.
The second half of 2024 my reading habit kinda fell apart. We started a new D&D campaign that I am running, so I’ve been putting a lot of my reading time into that. Still, I will finish the year with 14 or 15 books read. Not too horrible when measured against the average inhabitant of The America.
Last weekend I earned my Nidan (2nd degree black belt) in Aikido. I’ve been practicing now for 18 years. I also turned 60 this year. I feel pretty good. Aikido is really good.
Our sweet dog, Riley, is now two years old, and just ridiculously sweet. Or 15-year old cat and my best boy Lefty is show no signs of slowing down other than that he’s getting to be a skinny old man.
Back in the summer I judges a freestyle skateboarding contest out in Lake Forest, California. The U.S. Opens. It was fun. A really good event, and clearly the judging was perfect.
I got to some good skateboarding in this year. Not as much as in some previous years, but still good. I’ve made real efforts to evaluate the way I use my time. I don’t really want to “practice” for contest level skating anymore. I just want to skate.
This blog is now about 18 years old. It is approaching 1000 posts. As I’ve written I am kinda tired of using WordPress for some reason. I mean, it works, but I’m bored with it. I’ve been doing some experimenting and learning with static site generators. If I can find a way to successfully export this blog’s content to a static site, I may change it. If not, well, I’ll just keep typing here.
A couple of years ago I did discover micro.blog, a very cool platform for really pure blogging. I love it. I have two blogs there (well, two main ones). bloftin2.blog – a skateboarding blog, and bloftin2speaks.micro.blog, which is kinda like this blog. So I’ve been posting a lot over there. I highly recommend micro.blog as a platform. It has nice, simple themes, is hand-built by an old coworker of mine who constantly improves it, and makes podcasting very, very easy.
As part of this blogging journey I’ve been doing a lot of reading and learning about IndieWeb principles and goals and Fediverse stuff. This has all been very reinvigorating. The web, thanks to social media, influencers, AI, scammers, spammers, scumbags, and douchbags has felt — NOT THAT FUN for a while All this stuff I’ve been digging on has brought back the excitement of the early web. It’s fucking cool.
I guess I’ll write about goals for 2025 soon.