Reflections on 2024

Another eventful year has passed, and it’s been relaxing to have a couple of weeks with not a lot happening to recharge. I took the opportunity to build a summary of the year with the help of AI. It’s been fun to share with friends and family and review the main projects I’ve been involved with.

The major new addition to my digital life this year was a writing blog which I started in April. This diary has a specific structure and purpose, so it’s not the place for writing about random thoughts in my head. So my other blog is plain – no images, and optimised for reading. I’ve divided it into a number of sections and I write about money, digital living, mathematics and random topics.

In the latter part of the year, I restarted my reading habit. I hadn’t read a novel in quite a while, and although I’m still very slow, I am getting through books at a good pace. So reading and writing has been a good addition to my activities, and will just be incorporated into life going forward.

Sadly Wild Acres closed it’s doors towards the end of the year. I had been part of that project since 2021 and there’s now a big Tuesday shaped hole in my week. I’ll still be involved on an ad-hoc basis there with habitat management, but it won’t be a regular thing. Martin, Amanda and Vicky did an amazing and incredible job over the last few years to bring the community together over food, nature and art. It will be sadly missed.

I also organised my last Dursley Walking Festival this year. This was my fourth, and feel it’s time to move on. I will hand over my tasks to other team members and they will put on a fabulous 2025 festival.

This decision was partly driven by thinking much more intentionally about what and how much time I dedicate to volunteer projects. This was inspired by Volunteer Amnesty Day, which encourages you to reflect on your contributions.

My digital life has been inspired by the IndieWeb during the year. I don’t do social media, and I’m using my diary and blogs for my online presence. I also switched off google indexing. I want to be stumbled upon, not discovered.

So instead I installed an RSS reader and now follow 600+ blogs and news sources in a single feed. No algorithm deciding what I see and free to add or remove feeds as choose. I started to engage with blog authors – sometimes over email and sometimes with a reply post. This is a slower pace of digital life, but much more fulfilling.

This also inspired a reboot of The Artocalypse – a community of artists started in lockdown as a way to display art online. The home page of The Artocalypse is an aggregated feed of individual artist blogs. So they post on their site as normal, but it’s also syndicated to our site. This makes a great place for people who want to see a number of different artists in one place.

We finished the year with an Expo where we showcase over 20 artists in a single gallery. Kimberly does all the art curation side of things and I did all the technical bits to try and make the display as compelling as possible for the viewer. I’m really proud of how it turned out.

The conservation and community projects, which have been the backbone of my life over the last five years, continued with around 150 days spread across Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust, Stroud Valleys Projects, Glorious Grasslands, Dursley Green Drinks, Stroud Wildlife Survey Group and Uley Trees and Grasslands. Just too many days to summarise.

Now, onto 2025 ...