At the End of 2025 trying to make sense of the year's doings
Irreverent Blackmers with Reverend Blackmer behind
The last weeks of December are a good time for reckoning, reviewing what's transpired in the previous 12 months. The effort needs some sort of index so as to review and assess and project into the next year . It's also a time to clean up the curatorial act, make backups, seek for improved accessibility to the various Collections. All of which is in aid of the lifelong Project:
Informing Others Against Their Will:
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A lot of the year's digital activity has unfolded in
vast realms which have appropriated the /Conviv niche of yore.
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Attempting to bring order and accessibility to the Archives is an unceasing Project, with troves of digital and hand-written texts, music in various formats, images, and the realia of library shelves and drawers of file folders, not to speak of the instruments that deck the walls and stand around waiting to be picked up and appreciated. And everybody knows they must be documented carefully...from the Andaman Islands to the Rhenish Fan, as the song says.
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During 2025 I've sought to capture links to the Portentous and the Exemplary brought to my attention by my various feeds, under the rubrics of 'general links', 'AI links', and YouTube videos that seem especially ...resonant.
These seem to be my version of (arguably, 'badgersetts', but 'various nomnoms' to be sure)
By way of example, consider the incoming of 31xii25:
One never knows what the incoming will offer, what rabbit holes will manifest, and whither one's attention may be drawn. Going with the flow (and into the weeds) is simply more FUN than sticking to one's last. This morning's incoming seems typical in the range of its inspirations:
The hypnopompic waking thought was of the word otiose, and I found myself wondering if I had misheard Cora Du Bois ca. 1963 —had she said 'odious' (which the morning found me considering as the most apt adjective for Trump and his entourage of cronies)? So I did the google due diligence:
Otiose, which can be pronounced either with a t sound (OH-tee-ohs) or a sh sound (OH-she-ohs) [Cora Du Bois' version], comes from the Latin word otium "leisure," but its modern meaning is closer to "leisure suit," that is, useless and not very handsome.
(It was Cora Du Bois whom I heard describe somebody as "an egregious horse's ass", a phrase I adopted for my own use)
I listened to the last half of Heather Cox Richardson's Politics Chat for 30xii25, and its conclusion was so to-the-point and eloquent that I need to include it here.
Academia.edu offers me links to pdfs it imagines I might enjoy, and this morning's link was to a 2017 article by Olga Shevchenko from Slavic Review: Photographs and Their Many Lives
...the question of meaning and truth in photography is anything but simple. This is because the meaning of a photograph is shaped by a multitude of factors, both internal and external to the image itself, and because the photographic medium, more so than other visual practices, lends itself to expectations of verisimilitude that obscure the complex relationship that photographs have to reality that they purportedly record.
The term "vibecession" most strictly refers to a period 2023 - 2024 when economic indicators were up, but consumer sentiment ("vibes") was down. But on a broader level, the whole past decade has been a vibecession.
...Sometime in the 1990s, the Boomers ripped up the social contract where hard work leads to a pleasant middle-class life, replacing it with a hellworld where you will own nothing and numb the pain with algorithmic slop. The only live political question is whether to blame immigrants, blame billionaires, or just trade crypto in the hopes that some memecoin buys you a ticket out of the permanent underclass.
I expect that the day will continue to provide tempting rabbit holes of similar disparate calibre, and that I will succumb. So it goes.
Breakfast at Home Kitchen Cafe offered
(true Breakfast of Champions, but so is the Po' Boy)
In the digital realm, the problems of where to put and how to retrieve really should be systematic and consistent and kept up to date. I do not succeed in these desiderata, but have to renew the Efforts at the end of each year. A census and rectification of my various desktop drives (details at drive census) seeks to document this negentropic iteration, December 2025, though the links only work on my desktop, and so may best be onsidered as stuff.
