Wednesday, 2 January 2013

Looking back – a short evaluation of 2012

This blog has been for nearly a year (the first posts were published the 18th of April 2012), but since it is a new calendar year now, and I have had a taste of a little bit of most things that I think await in the near future, I might as well do some reflection over this blog so far. This will only be a quick, superficial review, since many of the texts have been quite sporadic and spontaneous (not to say arbitrary) in nature, so there is little sense in doing some sort of in-depth scrutiny of values and limitations (and, frankly, because that seems pretty dull to do on a blog…).

The fieldtrips dominated the early months, and they were great fun and useful to write about. There will be a few more fieldtrips in the future, including one in late March to early April, so if you enjoyed these posts, more are to come, rest assured. Next came more of a mix between random factual texts, stories from my voluntary work as the museum and picture galleries from my forest ‘self-trips’. The sporadic factual texts were partly to fill some spaces, and also to allow me to write on whims and urges, so I will definitely keep those up. I do not work a the museum any longer, but I am intending to search for some part-time work the next term, and hope to have some interesting insights to bring from there too!

Then there was the fell hiking trip. Epic. I truly hope there will be another this summer.  Finally, was the time when I moved to Bristol, and there was a lot of things going on, not all related to paleontology and/or worth writing about, so I had to fill the vacuum with some old texts and stuff… I hope that has not been disturbing or devaluating – I just wanted to keep you entertained while I could not produce new, fresh material. Although, one unusual discussion did come up: the one about the dragonsand hippogriffs! I am sure more of those odd, on-the-verge-of-silly things will come in the future.

The January exams are only multiple choice, as I explained in an earlier post, so there has not been any ‘point’ in thinking outside and about the box; this is what I need to do for the end-of-year exams, though, and I find it good practice to write down your musings in a blog or blog-like fashion, since it makes you really think about your idea, and to check that you have thought carefully about it, from as many angles as possible, and, finally taking the essences out and explaining it to people less familiar with the subject. Hopefully, you will see some original posts in short. Also, I hope this could spark some discussions with fantastic ideas from your side!

Overall, it has been really great to run this blog, which has encouraged me not only to keep this going, but also to start the new blog The Bluest Ice about global issues. Something I might add is that I was pleasantly surprised by how (arbitrarily) well the content managed to relate to the title of the blog!

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