Monday, Debtember 02, 2024
Notes about a photo album found abandoned on the floor of a storage facility
Bunny and I went to the storage unit to pick up the Christmas decorations. I was grabbing a cart in the entrance to the unit when I saw a photo album lying on the ground. On the cover was a pictute of a teenaged girl riding a horse. Curious, I picked it up and flipped through the pages. There were you typical images of family but towards the middle of the book the theme of the pictures changed—lots of nude women at some form of festival during the day, surrounded by leering men. There were several pages like this and I can only guess that it was some form of contest for the women. Past that section, the pictures turned back into innocent family pictures again.
Family, family, family, nude women, nude women, more nude women, family, family then blank pages—nearly half the album was empty. There was no indication of ownership in the book at all.
Wierd.
But we were there to get Christmas decorations, not to page through a home-grown Hustler magzine, so I placed the book back down were I found it and we got busy gathering the decorations.
After we were done, the photo book was still on the floor. I picked it up again, intending to turn it into the “lost-and-found” pile at the office (if they had one), only the office was closed for the day. I then placed it, yet again, on the ground where I found it.
For all I know, it's still there.
NaNoGenMo seems … kind of silly to do these days
For the past few days just as I'm falling alseep, I think, yes, I could make a post about that, only to completely forget about the next day. I finally remembered what I wanted to post about—NaNoGenMo. Or rather, how I completely forgot about it this year (and kept forgetting to write about it—sheesh).
And last year.
And the year before.
And the year before that.
Has it really been five years since I last participated?
I think it fell off my radar once ChatGPT (which is “cat, I farted” in French) hit the scenes. Or rather, the current spate of software that was released into the world in 2020 and it became trivially easy to generate nonsensical text (and images, and music, and code, and …). It also looks like participation in NaNoGenMo has dropped significantly since 2020:
| year | # novels (roughly) |
|---|---|
| 2013 | 80 |
| 2014 | 145 |
| 2015 | 184 |
| 2016 | 138 |
| 2017 | 127 |
| 2018 | 105 |
| 2019 | 138 |
| 2020 | 78 |
| 2021 | 87 |
| 2022 | 50 |
| 2023 | 36 |
| 2024 | 30 |
There's just … no challenge anymore.
