365

In 1964, in response to the New York World's Fair, Isaac Asimov made some predictions about 2014.

• Your kitchen will automatically make breakfast.
• Underground houses will be commonplace.
• No electric cords on appliances, since radioisotope batteries will take care of power needs.
• Short-range travel will include moving sidewalks and compressed air tubes
• High school students will all be experts in computer languages and binary arithmetic.

He does better in some areas, such as where he predicts "wall screen" TVs, phones that make video calls, and using those same screens to read books and view photographs.

As someone who is trying to make predictions as well - and not nearly as far ahead as Asimov-  it is humbling to see how far off some of them could be. We haven't colonized the continental shelf, we don't have moon colonies - there wasn't even a World's Fair this year.

Still, I thought it a good one to round out the year, sort of a bookend to the earlier post.

A year ago, I made a new year’s resolution, to write a blog post a day. My intention was to get this blog going, as there’s no point in having a blog that isn’t updated regularly. There are a couple of problems with this idea, though, as noted at the 30, 100, and 300 day marks: A post requires research, identifying a topic, drafting the post, editing the post, and deciding that it is good enough to post. The only real adjustment that can be made is the length of the post, which can reduce some of the time on parts of the process.

Adding to the difficulty in this case was the subject of the blog, This Current Crisis. In effect, this was a daily history essay, requiring a relevant daily topic, a draft that had some connection to the goal of the blog, and references to other texts that supported any allusions noted and predictions made. Plus some occasional explanation of the terms behind the analysis and predictions.

Or, to summarize: It was not easily done.

But I did it, with a post every day, almost always before midnight, and generally relevant to the blog, as described.

What else was learned:

• There aren’t that many big stories. Probably the only topics that are returned to - mentioned, that is, more than once - are the Russia / Ukraine conflict and the Sony hack. Most items of interest stay interesting for only a couple of days. 
• It’s not easy to go viral - or to be more general, it’s not easy to get a critical mass of people interested in a creative product. A blog, a song, a video, an app - in any case, you need something appealing to a  large enough group, a way to get it in front of them, and a value proposition when trading their time or money for your product. As of the last day of 2014, this blog has had 3250 views - less than 10 a day, The page with the most views has 48.
• Having an achievable daily goal can help to get a process or project started.
• Achievable, however, has to incorporate “what you have time to do.” Two hours a day - minimum - for this has taken up most of my free time - indeed, it has been fully ten percent of all my time over the last year. 
• Having a backlog of "articles" is only temporarily helpful: If you don't set aside enough time to do what you plan to do, you will eventually work through that backlog.
• I was able to complete the Grid project I had initially thought of five or six years back. Having a goal to do writing every day - no matter what - helped

I plan to continue with this blog. It won’t get guaranteed daily updates any more, although I’ll keep them going for at least a couple more days. It turned out that searching for Crisis in the news - along with Collapse, catastrophe, apocalypse,  or Cloverfield - can lead to interesting results that support the letter and spirit of its title, so this will move in that direction. As many posts analyzed entertainment - movies, literature, music - from a generational perspective, that will get spun off into its own separate site.

It's been worthwhile, though, and it has helped me be aware of what sort of activities I enjoy. Which is a worthwhile result on its own. Happy New Year.