2020

2020.

Hindsight.

Is this going to be the year of hindsight? Will this be a year we spend looking back trying to remember the lessons past?

That’s just what popped into my mind last night: 2020 hindsight.

One thing’s for sure, this year is going to be, to put it politely, “interesting.”

Keeping in mind this is MY blog, and these are MY thoughts and opinions…

The last year has been one that just seems to scream “HELP!” and “Get your facts straight!” Even now, people, news (and so-called news) outlets are showing they don’t have a clue right off the bat.

For one thing…this is NOT a new decade. Get it right, folks! The new decade doesn’t start until 2021.01.01. There is no year 0, so decade, century, millennium counts do not start at years ending in 0, they start with years ending in 1. Think about it clearly and without bias: The first year we start counting in AD is the year 1. So, when is ten years later? Year 10, of course! Years 1 through 10 are the first decade, years 11 through 20 the next and so on to now where this decade consists of the years 2011 through 2020 and the next decade will be 2021 through 2030.

Back to hindsight, the original topic of this post.

Every start of the new year we really should spend some time looking at the recent past and comparing it to pasts even older. What have we learned? What have we applied the lessons of history to? What have we failed to apply the lessons of history to?

Those and other questions are the reason why it struck me that 2020 Hindsight should be the name of this particular year. It fits the saying, ‘20-20 hindsight,’ after all.

Unfortunately, 20-20 hindsight refers to things being clearer after the fact and does not refer to actually learning from that clarity.

I have to admit that a lot of what I’ve witnessed this past year, especially in the last half of the year, scares me. Knee-jerk reactions without thinking. An increasing feeling of empowerment to attack anything different. Strident calls to clamp down on liberties in the name of safety. Refusals to take responsibility. A president and a public national appearance I’m ashamed of. Ignorance of scientific fact because they don’t match an agenda. Lack of care for the needs of future generations. Lots more like this.

Ah, but then once I get past my own knee-jerk reaction to all these things mentioned in the previous paragraph, I see a glimmering of hope.

Looking at known history, as best I know it to be true, humans as a whole have managed to survive this far. It’s not been a clean, trouble-free journey, that’s for sure. Our past is littered with carnage of our own design, and likely our future will be as well. At least for a while, relatively speaking. But the thing is, there is hope.

I see it in the Renaissance. I see it after most major wars. I even see it in the more recent past. I even see, faint though it be, hope from 2019.

And there, friends, is another thing that helps us humans survive despite the odds against us.

Optimism.

New Beginning

Perhaps.

Google Plus was taking up a lot of my “free” time, but now it’s going away as of 2 April 2019. Already, there are perhaps six or so people left of those that I was following. As people left, and left directions where they went, such as MeWe, Facebook, and so on, my thoughts turned more to my blog.

Thinking about the blog and the potential for writing more there, I was surprised to see that my last blog entry was apparently 2018-10-24 and here it’s already 2019-03-28.

As a result of Google+ shutting down, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the point of my G+ participation. Sure, for a while I was sharing pictures, but I’ve drifted from that activity as well. I blame the Idaho weather…whenever anything interesting was happening in the night sky, we usually had bad weather. Clouds, rain, snow, whatever. Enough that I’d use that as an excuse to not be able to post images.

I’m thinking how I used to enjoy writing here on my blog, sharing my stuff. Sure, I had enough followers to be able to count them on one hand, but what was I writing for, anyway? Like any human, I’d like more followers than that, sure. “Not going to get them if I don’t post,” I know that very well. Nor if I don’t put word out there about my posts, and there’s the conundrum. Originally, G+ was part of my method of putting word out, but it slowly became my blog replacement. Twitter was the other, and I’ve not been on there in years other than an automatic post when I blog.

So, what now?

Do I migrate to MeWe? Return to Twitter? Start hanging out in Pintrest? Somewhere else? Definitely NOT to Facebook, there’s no way I’ll ever have an account there. I could argue that moving to another social medium gives me the chance to study other people’s astrophotography and learn what settings and setups they’re using, but that doesn’t push me to get out and shoot my own images. Or to actually work on my own post processing.

Then there’s the site itself. I’m thinking of redoing it a little. Not drastically, I actually like this layout. Just remove old stuff, remove the Pa’adhe stories, the short stories, the poetry. Perhaps wipe out all my past posts and truly start over? Maybe just focus on writing about my explorations, photography, and ham radio. Outdoors and technology? Music? Long indeed has it been since I did anything with music.

I don’t know.

It all seems futile now. Well, maybe not futile, but pointless. Just something to do to toss away time. On the other hand, if I didn’t ramble so much in my posts, but kept them to just those three topics, maybe it’d be more focused, more useful to the wandering passers-by? People don’t seem to really care about any of my ham radio posts, so I could just focus on the other two, exploring and photography.

I feel like Scrooge early on: Bah, humbug.

So…what’s with this new beginning? Do I or do I not, that is the question.

Slowly, slowly

Still not in a writing mode, but working towards it. As far as that part of my life goes, I’ve been working on the Pa’adhe ebook. It’s been mostly proofing (found a couple of errors), layout, making sure things are in the right order. I’ve got three cover pictures left to do, still: one to replace an existing cover I don’t like and two for the stories that don’t have a cover yet. The designs are done, but now I have to figure out what pictures to take and combine for these covers.

Talking about pictures, I’ve also been working on three photography projects. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say two videos and one photograph.

The photograph is a three generation portrait that I’ve been thinking about for several months. Now that everyone’s present that needs to be in it, I can proceed with actually taking the photo. I’ll be using the DJI Phantom 4 for this due to the perspective needed and to avoid any part of the photographer being in it. It’s also necessary to use the drone to achieve the hidden geometric aspect I have in mind.

One of the videos I have mentioned before. I’ve a script written for it and have all the necessary gear to do the shot. What remains is to get the necessary actors together on location (herding cats would be easier) and get the video needed so I can get to work compiling the whole. This I need to get done within the next two months or it’ll be unlikely to ever get done.

The final video is one that I am not even sure is going to be anything more than an experiment. Fundamentally, it’s one of my granddaughter dancing, but it’s the perspective that makes the video what it is. Or breaks it. I can see in my head what I want to achieve, but until I actually start processing the video, I have no way to tell if it’ll work or not. In some ways, it’s abstract…but without being abstract. I’m trying to explain to some extent the problem with the visualization without giving too much away yet and that’s not easy to do. With everything else I can throw out teasers, but this one…any teaser is too revealing. Let’s just say that if I don’t get the angles right, it’s not going to work and since there’s nothing like it out there that I know of, I have no guidance to the right angle. If it’s off by even a little bit, the impact won’t be there. Even so, right angle or not it could still be a bust.

Both videos will utilize the GoPro Hero 4 Black and the DJI Phantom 4, though in different ways. I never did think I would be doing video, but there it goes. Never say never.

I’e been doing a bit of amateur radio, just PSK-31, since my last blog post. I have to admit I’m happy with the home station, but not so much with the mobile setup. I need to do some more playing with the mobile gear to figure out what’s not working, but it’s also quite possible that it’s simply there was no activity when I was using it. Or maybe it was a bad location. All I can do is keep trying different locations for a while before I start troubleshooting the gear.