A Year in Review
One of my favourite traditions from LiveJournal is the automatic year-in-review post. Here’s how it works: You go to each month, take the first post of the month, take the first sentence of that post and transcribe it. The result is a cut-up-technique overview of how your year went. It doesn’t get your best posts, or your most popular posts, or your most important ones. But it can offer unexpected glimpses and for that, I love it.
So in the waning days of 2009, as I take a break amongst the half-packed boxes I hope you’ll allow me this moment of self-indulgence with an automatic year-in-review (with commentary!) for Quiet Babylon.
January
Seth Godin argues that when it comes to transient or one-time transactions sometimes it’s better to let things go.
From: But Which Lesson?
Back in 2008 I had cut the tether to Quiet Babylon’s original subject matter: video games. I then spent the better part of a year trying to figure out what it was about. This post is typical of that period. Punditry about a celebrity’s punditry. Pointless.
February
No posts
How embarrassing! Let me take this opportunity to further embarrass myself by pointing out that the first subject matter of this site wasn’t really video games. It was whatever this is in 2002. The first incarnation of Quiet Babylon was lost when the registrar I was with folded, taking my domain with it. Squatters took it over and eventually abandoned it, whereupon I re-registered. The files you see are what I managed to preserve. Notice the early obsession with surveillance…
March
Built for the Montreal Expo, Habitat 67 is a wonderful grand-vision failure/success of architecture.
From: Pictures of Habitat 67
Now we’re getting somewhere. Original material, pictures of formerly futuristic architecture, an eye for the broken and leaking.
April
No posts
Quiet Babylon remains adrift.
May
Two stories appeared in rapid succession today on Wired’s excellent Threat Level.
From: Threat Level Context
A proto-post. Starting to synthesize instead of just reply. Too short and not far-ranging enough.
June
Check out this article on Ars Technica about law prof. Patricia Akester’s study examining the effects of DRM on the legal use of copyrighted works.
From: DRM: The Fight Against Posterity
I still hadn’t articulated what the site was about to myself, but this post feels very in-theme. Worth noting that these problems remain relevant.
July
As part of the Cultural Theory program, I took a university course called Cyborgs.
From: Adaptation: Cyborgs & Architects 1
And just like that, Quiet Babylon wakes up.
August
Here’s a Pair of Questions:
From: How deep do cities go?
The other thing I figured out this year was what Twitter was for. This post is a nice example of the interrelation.
September
Proceeding along the canal, you find a place where the path diverges to accommodate a weeping willow that dips its leaves into the gently flowing water.
From: Glimpses of a City 5
I consider these a failed experiment, but I’m going to try to revisit the idea of very short pieces in 2010.
October
This is kind of a weird post, but bear with me. It was my birthday yesterday and I spent the day buying and playing with plastic bricks, so Lego is on my mind.
From: There is no single-use Lego
Jason Kottke picked up this post beginning a grand tradition of my most-linked writing being the least Quiet Babylonian.
November
Will Wiles of Icon Magazine spent some time talking about augmented reality, Tron, and the fictional source of many design and technological innovations on his blog.
From: We can imagine it for you wholesale
I’m pleased that this is one of the posts picked up by the algorithm. I know Will exclusively through Twitter, blog comments, and Google Wave, which makes him representative of a lot of people who’s work I admire that I’ve met this year.
December
When I was working on the idea of the pocket-device model of augmented reality versus the lanyard model, I realized something about conference badges that didn’t really fit into the piece.
From: Conference Badges: Early Augmented Reality
Notable for the comments which are better than the post.
2009 has been an amazing year. In a very short period of time, Quiet Babylon has come to the attention of a lot of really intelligent people and I’m grateful for the comments, emails, and impromptu drinks that have come out of all of this. Aside from announcing the b-list grails contest results I’m not sure what the year has in store. I’ve got dozens of drafts in various stages of writing, a Twitter feed and RSS reader full of insightful articles, shelves of unread books, and some ideas on taking aspects of this project offline.
Stick around.
