Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

At the start of this year I pushed up the pace of posting to this journal, hoping to say something every day about the year-representing episodes of anime I was was watching. After that I relaxed back to “hopefully within every seven days.” While I took a break during my first lengthy trip in years, that vacation wasn’t long enough to reduce this summary to eleven sentences. All in all, though, the sentences might continue to teeter on the edge between “elaborate” and “run-on.”
( A year in twelve sentences )
See you in the new year!

On the face of it I’m ending this year in pretty much the same circumstances as last year. However, I do have to acknowledge the good fortune of having been able to book a booster vaccination shot and receive it yesterday in the pharmacy of the downtown clinic where I got my first two doses in the spring and summer. It did mean aching around for the last day of this year, but I’ve done what I can.

So far as something more profound than the first sentence of the first post of each month might say, this was the year I became an uncle. I suppose it’s not as big a change for me as for the rest of my family, but I have had the chance to deliver two different presents already.
( A year in twelve sentences )

We’ve eked ourselves through another year at least (enlivened by discussion of whether we’ve also finished a decade or not), and I’ve eked my journal through that same year. One extra thing I did mange this year was to add more “smart quotes” to my text, although looking back at the first sentence of the first post for each month does exude a strong impression of “anime weblog.”
( A year in twelve sentences )
See you in the new year!

We've made it through another year, and I've eked this journal along through it to where I can once more quote the (I fear often lengthy) first sentence of the first post of each month, although I have stopped crossposting to the Livejournal it started as. I did manage to keep the queue filled up in my Tumblr, anyway; I'm getting just about to the point where the covers of Macintosh computer magazines should start appearing, even if this will coincide with the first magazines in a while dropping out of existence.
( A year in twelve sentences )
See you in the new year!

We've made it to the end of another year, and once again I'm looking back to quote the first sentence from the first post of each month of my journal. There were times this year I followed some discussions on Twitter (broken into chunks and always ephemeral), other times I looked at Tumblrs (although the sense of recycling pictures someone else has made up without being able to actually discuss them does seem strong there), and other times I just daydreamed about the "proper" environs of Wordpress and Typepad, but with all the years piled up here it's not always easy to think about relocating. In any case, some of my first sentences were more elaborate than others...
( A year in twelve sentences )
See you in the new year!

We've made it through another year, and once again I'm closing it out by taking the first sentence from the first post of each month. Where in years before I had tried to write a post in between each episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 commented on, this year I was trying to write a post every week, just to say I had. I managed to work the numbers assigned to each new post above two hundred thousand, which feels like sort of an accomplishment. Managing that much, though, does sometimes leave me thinking I've slugged away at this long enough and I can "retire," unnoticed yet without personal reproach. I can shake that thought off other times, though.
( A year in twelve sentences )
See you in the new year!

It's been a while since I had a survey to fill out, but after noticing selenak take this one I decided to try it as well. The actual list of science fiction and fantasy books came, so far as I've heard, from NPR, but already seems to have generated discussion about alternatives to go with the muttering about who and how was choosing and ordering. I suppose that's always going to happen.
( The rules and the list within )

As part of checking different journals this morning, I noticed several people (starting with selenak) analysing their writing, and thought I'd try it out too. The first thing I dropped into the input box was my most recent journal post, and it returned "Dan Brown." As with other people who got that, my instantaneous reaction was to feel a little mortified, for all that it seems one hundred percent an inherited-through-hearsay feeling... Then, I put in two somewhat longer posts, got "H.P. Lovecraft" both times, and felt a bit better. However, there does seem to be a bit of a "feed in bits of different writing, and get completely different results" feel to the analyser: working with various chunks of actual fiction I've written (if as a completely personal indulgence), I got "Isaac Asimov," "Stephen King," "H.G. Wells," and "Vladimir Nabokov" in succession.

Then, the thought of being really clever came to me. I have a text file of H.P. Lovecraft's writing (from Project Gutenberg Australia), and I dropped in the first four paragraphs of "The Call of Cthulhu"... and the analyser returned "Vladimir Nabokov." The opening paragraphs of "The Colour Out of Space" returned "Ernest Hemingway." A little worried by now, I tried the first paragraphs of "The Dunwich Horror" and finally got "H.P. Lovecraft." Of course, it's no doubt just meant as harmless fun, and I did happen to look at the link to the journalling software this is promoting, so it even seems to have accomplished its purpose.

Right when I was starting to wonder what I could post on this week, I managed to pick up on another book survey... the list seemed somehow familiar and yet not, so I started filling it out.
( The list )

Right when I was wondering what I could post about to go in between looks at Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, ladyaeryn came to the rescue. Of course, to some extent it does reveal my broad stretches of cultural illiteracy...

100 Top Grossing Movies (adjusted for inflation)
( The movies follow... )