It’s Been Quiet Here For A Bit
For reasons that are explicated if you just scroll down the page a bit. While the major upheavals of my life last year have largely settled, blogging is like a muscle that requires exercise and habit, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get back into that habit on a regular basis.
That being said, tomorrow marks the start of Year 18 at Fleen, and even if I don’t write anything new and substantive, the archives will always be up as long as there’s an internet to host them. Year 17 might have been a bust, but the first 15.5 years were pretty chock full of writing, some of which I’m very proud of. This marks the 4461st post at Fleen, of which 4107 went out under my name¹.
Some of those got written, received an edit pass, and posted in 15 minutes or so. Some took hours, occasionally over multiple days. Gladwell was completely wrong about the 10,000 hours to expertise thing, but I figure it’s somewhere in that neighborhood; I figure it’s about equivalent to five years at a full-time job.
According to a stats plugin (and forgive me if in the five minutes it takes me to do the math you find filler on this page), there are 3,039,883 total words on this blog, and I’m sure if I cared to dig around in the WordPress source tables, I could query exactly how many of those were on posts by me, not written by somebody else. But for a rough estimate: (4107 -78)/4461 * 3,039,883 = 2,745,503.
That’s somewhere between 2.02 and 3.14 Homestucks. Or about 0.17 Spurges.
In the Dumbrella Hosting² days, there were Project Wonderful³ ads that maybe brought in a hundo (USD) total, which offset some small fraction of the hosting costs. Otherwise, the hosting has been largely borne by Jon Rosenberg as a sideline of the other sites he owns. In the initial 40% or so of Fleen’s history, my pay was I got my beer bought for me at Pub Night, wherein webcomics types hung out at the Peculier Pub in Lower Manhattan on Thursday nights. Since then, it’s been me (and lately, FSFCPL) writing because we wanted to tell you what was on my (our) mind(s) because everybody has a desire to be heard.
Along the way I’ve made friends with some of the best people one could ever hope to meet.
If this is the last I ever write here — and I sincerely hope it is not — I figure it’s enough to say I Did A Thing. And you know what? For today, that’s enough.
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¹ Longtime readers may recall that there were other contributors as well as guest posts in the first couple of years of Fleen, and over the past 4.5 years more than 75 posts have been contributed by Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin, most of considerable length and detail, all of considerable quality.
² Ask your parents, kids.
³ Ibid.
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