Okay, Here's One Thing

I did have one idea yesterday (while, yes, staring out the window). Illustrations.

That's one thing that happened while I was off on my seven-year-trek through the past: Illustrations. Back before the seven-year-trek (hereafter SYT) began, I was blogging regularly and I rarely, as in almost-never, added any photos or diagrams or any other kind of illustrations to my blog entries.

But as I neared earth while returning from my SYT, I've noticed that during those seven years, somehow we all decided that every blog, article, whatever on the web is illustrated. It's as if our attention spans are now so short that we need a rest-stop while we read, even if what we're reading is a thousand words of less. (For comparison, this piece is so far 122 words.)

But I gotta tell you, it's a pain in the ass, those illustrations. I've tried. As the space capsule got closer, for example, I decided to do some On That Date bits here at the blog, little nuggets of meat history. And I added images to almost all of them.

And finding the images, adding the images, and labeling the images took WAY more time than writing the nuggets themselves. Seriously Total pain in the butt.

Especially the labeling: I had a moral obligation to add a credit caption to any image I use, and finding the credit wasn't always as easy as it one might think because most people don't bother, so I'd find an image and then have to track down its provenance. Time-consuming. Really, really time-consuming.

And I'm embarrassed to say that toward the end, I blew off some of the credit captions because, well, see above.

Anyway, here's my new rule. I am happy to cater to our collective need to have rest stops every 200 words, but I'm gonna make it easy on myself and use photos that I took and thus own. Which means the images will be random and unrelated to the content.

Fair warning.