As its nearly two years since I last posted here, it feels like I should acknowledge the passage of time with some sort of summary. If this was a film, I'm imagining a shot of me hitting post, closing my laptop, and then a short montage that includes a couple of Christmases, a 40th birthday, some haircuts, some marking off of my childrens' height against a doorframe, a few shots of the woods near my house as the autumn leaves fall, turn brown, get covered in snow, then the leaves on the trees grow back and the bright sunshine shines through them onto my back garden... except it isn't a film, I'm not measuring my kids heights, and this isn't really a blog about my life so much as meandering run-on sentences about things that have caught my attention or imagination. So that whole effort will end up incomplete; a combination of footage and animatic storyboards on the cutting room floor, set to a classic soundtrack that never got copyright clearance.

So, passage of time duly acknowledged, lets move on. What did I miss?

Well, there was a kind of meme/trope in conference presentations for a while where people talked about how "last year, we didn't think Brexit would happen, or that Trump was a credible presidential candidate" and so on. Now we're oddly past the point where that covers "what happened since we last got together to look at Powerpoint slides in a large hotel room", but at the same time still talking about whether Brexit is going to happen and whether Trump was a credible (read: legal) presidential candidate.

But thats far too much for me to tackle- one of the reasons I started "unordered" was to stop myself trying to write comprehensive, everything-important-about-this-one-thing posts that ended up in a collection of terribly long and boring drafts, so I'm not going to walk that path today. Suffice to say that I've pretty much fallen off Twitter, reduced my Facebook activity to occasionally flicking through my news feed (but keeping on top of a couple of Groups that I like), and generally withdrawn from the worst of the filter-bubble data-scraping websites. (That said, I have rediscovered Reddit, which somehow feels less bad, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on - I think because you're following topics - subreddits - rather than people.)

So, I'm kicking this off again. Probably with a bit more "real life" stuff, because one thing I miss from reading old posts is being able to pinpoint what was going on in my life while I was thinking about whatever it was that drove me to write something. (I particularly like the way Dan Hon structures his excellent newsletters with a "sitrep" at the beginning, so I'm probably going to steal that). Possibly with a bit more structure around a posting schedule - if I can balance how much I like having a maintained blog that I can send links to people who might be interested in what I'm thinking without having to listen while I talk at length about something for far longer than their polite attention against all the other things I'd like to be spending my time doing. Which right now is dominated by;

The latest Zelda game on the Nintendo Switch, which I just got for my birthday,
Fortnite (everyone - especially kids - are obsessed with the free Battle Royale game, but I've been enjoying the "Save the World" fort-building PVE version of the game),
The Warhammer 40k hobby, which I've been getting back into after something like a 25 year break. Mainly for the painting, but also the occasional game with my son (although as I'm still struggling with the rules, its still a bit complicated for him.) So the computer/work related clutter on my desk has now been joined by model-related clutter, paint-related clutter, and needs clearing/tidying/cleaning more frequently than ever before,
Reading Reddit on my phone.

So, nothing that can't make way for a slightly more productive way of spending my free time.

I hope.

Some Random Nerd