Exactly one year ago, I made this post, and started this blog. Yes, not only is it a new year, it's also The Beautiful Hypothesis's 1st birthday! To be honest, I never really expected it to last this long - posting every week (summer break aside) probably makes this the longest-running regular project that I've ever done. So what's happened since I began? Let us see...
Things That Have Happened Or Changed Since The Beautiful Hypothesis Began
On this blog (before this post went online)
- I've published 144 posts, making up a total of 67,970 words (including titles but not including any words inside pictures). That's an average of just over 472 words per post; when it's imported into Word in single-spaced 12pt Times New Roman it takes up 104 A4 pages.
- 52 Pictures of the Week have been posted, most of them created in the correct week. And if you jam them all together into just over 2 and a half minutes, they look like this. (Might take a while to load...I really don't believe Photobucket when they say it's less than 50kb.)
- The site's been through one major redesign...
- ...and a bunch of little ones.
- Since starting visitor logging, I've recorded over 1200 hits.
- Visitors have seen this blog in the US, Canada, Germany, France, Sweden, Romania, India, the Netherlands, Israel, the Philippines, Brazil, Belgium and at least 24 other countries.
In my life
- I've got one year older.
- I've ended my university career and made my first steps towards my "career" career.
- I've attended four weddings and a funeral. (No, not those ones.)
- I've said goodbye to a lot of friends, caught up with others and met several new ones.
In the world (selected highlights and lowlights, obviously...)
- The Democrats took office in the US Congress.
- The Iraq troop surge was announced and took place.
- 15 British sailors were captured, imprisoned and released by Iran.
- Windows Vista was released. As of the date of writing, it has entirely fulfilled the description "hilarious disaster".
- Alan Johnston disappeared in Palestine...and was later released.
- Al Gore achieved a hitherto unknown Triple Crown of awards by winning an Oscar, a Emmy and a Nobel Prize. He then went on to prove that he is remarkably intelligent by not running for President.
- 63 countries underwent a change of leader of some sort, including Australia, France, Russia and the UK.
- Australia took back the Ashes. Whatever that means.
- Some silly boys failed to kick a ball around a field well enough.
- Some fine upstanding gentlemen also failed to carry a ball around a field well enough. However, they did it with style.
- Apparently, the Nordic World Ski Championships took place. Look, I don't write the Wikipedia articles off which all this stuff is unceremoniously nicked!
- Northern Rock collapsed spectacularly as part of an impending financial doom, news of which was mitigated slightly by the fact that no-one had a clue what the doomsayers were talking about.
- Zimbabwe continued its own spectacular collapse, leading to golfers in the country buying drinks before they went out on the course - the prices would rise before they got back.
- Someone in a post office somewhere is having great fun finding out 25 million people's personal data.
Things That Will Change This Year
Variety being the spice of life, I'm altering a few things on this blog for the New Year. The general tone of the blog will not change, and hopefully neither will the overall update schedule. However...
- The Picture of the Week will no longer be a regular feature. Although I liked having a consistent record of the year, I don't like posting photos for the sake of posting photos. From now on, any time I take a photo I particularly like, I'll simply post it then and there. Same goes for Photoshop jobs. In the same vein, I'll try to include more pictures in otherwise text-heavy posts.
- Because the PotW slot effectively meant that I was fulfilling my "1 post per week" target without really trying, the post rate is now going up to 2 a week. That's still going to be flexible, obviously - this is not my job and I'm not going to treat it like one.
- I'm going to start posting fiction here. By that, I don't mean that I'm going to start making up the facts I use (more than I already do, anyway...). Instead, I'm going to try to improve my fiction writing and get into a habit of doing more of it - and putting it up here should help with that.
- Audio and video posts may begin to make their presence known. This won't be a regular feature or a podcast, but sometimes I have rejected post ideas on the grounds that they would only really work well in audio or video. That's not going to be an excuse any more.
- Now that quite a lot of my visitors are finding this blog through the pictures - and will probably find it by any other media I put up - I'm slightly tightening up the copyright licensing to a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence. You can see the changes in the "Copyright" box in the sidebar.
It's a new year, and hopefully a new start in a number of ways. I hope you enjoy it - I know I will.
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