If you were paying attention over the past 48 hours or so, you probably noticed a whole bunch of new entries appearing in and around ones that were already published days or even weeks ago. I probably ought to explain what’s going on, and highlight the newly published stuff in case you didn’t notice something you might want to read.

Basically, between the bustle of the holiday break, the server outage that kept Simple Tricks offline for several days, and the shock of my coworker Julie’s death, I ended up with several entries that never got finished, or at least didn’t get finished while they were still relevant. Unfinished entries have been a growing problem for me over the past several years; the Simple Tricks archive is filled with them, and each one of them scratches at me like slivers caught in my jeans. Not a big pain, but a maddening itch that I can’t rid myself of. It bothers me that there are all these half-formed pieces of my mind floating around in cyber-limbo, never to see the light of the electronic day. It’s largely my own fault, of course… I have more topics I want to write about than time to write them, and in case you haven’t noticed, I tend to get long-winded when I’m on about something I really care about. Which means that I usually run out of time on longer pieces… their sell-by date passes, or I get diverted by something that I figure I can dash off quickly before returning to the earlier item, only I never get around to returning… you get the picture. One of the worst things about blogging as a medium is this sense that it’s constantly in motion, like you’re rolling down a neverending highway with new sights forever appearing on the horizon in front of you; if you don’t manage to make note of something while it’s still ahead of you — or at least alongside you — it passes behind you and it’s gone.

Well, I’m tired of abandoning topics that I think are interesting or important or well-written or whatever. So I just decided, “Screw it, all these entries from the past couple weeks are going to have their day.” And so I finished them and published them. They may be out of date, but they’re out there.

And just in case anyone but me gives a darn, here they are, all these back-dated but fresh-to-the-world bits of blatheration that I worked on all weekend long:

• A Real Christmas Story
• Good Riddance, 2010
• The Longest Day
• And Then There’s This
• Doctor Who Series 6… Now with More Utah!
• Rumors Confirmed

(As an aside, isn’t this the height of narcissism? “Here, let me show you the stuff you might have missed, because every word that drips from my keyboard is a precious treasure that you must not miss.” I know, I know, totally lame, but there’s not much sense in actually finishing and publishing a bunch of posts if nobody realizes they’re there.)

As long as I have your attention, let me note that I’m going to try turning the comments back on and hope the damn spammers have gone off to pester fatter targets. It’s gotten very lonely around here, so if anyone is still reading, please say hi and let me know…