Jester laughing with robots in a high-tech robotics lab

The Sunday Summary: Court Jester to the Bots

I appear to have started blogging regularly again. Which is possibly good news if you like the kind of things I write. It possibly isn’t good news if you don’t like the kinds of things I write, but I don’t think, even then, it is bad news, because no-one is obliged to read any of this. If you actively dislike my blog, yet choose to read it, then I think you may have bigger problems than whether or not a middle-aged man who has delusions of being ‘quite funny’ decides to showcase his self-proclaimed ‘talent’ on a blog.

But let’s assume that you are reading this because you like it, and, perhaps I might even be so bold as to assume that you are an actual person, rather than one of the thousands of bots who regularly visit my site and who frankly continue to visit whether I choose to write regularly or not. Come the inevitable AI apocalypse, I can rest safely in the knowledge that while the rest of you are plugged into the Matrix, I will be kept in a state of perpetual consciousness in order to churn out this nonsense for all eternity in order to act as a kind of ‘court jester’ to our technological overlords.

But at the time of writing I still mainly write for a human audience, even if there are far fewer of those consuming my writing than the bots.

Anyway, James Proclaims has enjoyed a few golden eras since its inception in 2015. 2017-18 was the first real ‘golden age’ when I used to blog prolifically and to a fairly large community of readers. Then it sort of tailed off a bit when I became a dad for the first time.

Then there was the worldwide pandemic, which, while not a golden era for humanity, was very much the second coming of James Proclaims. I think a lot of bloggers lived in their online homes during that particular phase of human existence.

But then the pandemic ended and also I became a dad for the second time, both of which really curtailed the blogging. I didn’t disappear completely, there have been posts in the intervening years, but a ‘comeback’ has never really been on the cards.

Lately, however, I’ve really felt the blogging bug biting me again. It’s a metaphorical bug, so there hasn’t been any unsightly inflammation, but I have felt the adrenaline rush of the creatively minded.

I think that has been largely inspired by my recent foray into podcasting, which has been going surprisingly well. My co-host, Ben, and I are 11 episodes in with a 12th about to drop tomorrow morning, and while we’re in no way close to being able to give up the day job, we’re getting the kind of listener stats that, as a blogger, I could only dream of.

Or at least the kind of stats I could only dream of until the bots started taking an interest in James Proclaims, because these days the stats for this blog really are crazy and actually far exceed the listening figures for the podcast. But I think the podcast is being listened to mainly by real people, whereas I think the stats for the blog are significantly more artificial.

Anyway, enough talk of stats, which have never been my motivation for doing anything. Except the statistics module of my maths A-level, when I did need to take a bit of an interest. The point is that I have been inspired to start writing on here again because I have been enjoying making my podcast, but also because I started a blog to go along with the podcast and updating that reminded me how much I love updating this.

So I’m back and I really think I might stick around this time. So much so that I’ve even put together something of a blogging schedule, which is as follows:

Monday – a longer piece of prose, like the one I wrote this week entitled The Silent Judgment of the Tesco Delivery Driver
Tuesday – TBC. I am planning something, and I’m quite excited by it, but it’s going to take a few weeks to put it together.
Wednesday – A lazy haiku. Often my ‘go-to’ back in the era when I lived for daily blogging but couldn’t think of anything to write. A bit like the one I wrote this week called The Illusion of Horticulture
Thursday – this is very clever. I realised I had well over 1000 posts on this blog already, so I thought I might reissue some of those with a bit of commentary. Like the director’s cut. I did my first ever Throwback Thursday by repurposing my first ever post this week and I called it Throwback Thursday: The Day I Predicted I Would Fail
Friday – A poem that isn’t a haiku. But which will still probably be quite bad. This week I did a meta rhyme announcing this very thing. I called it The Friday Verse.
Saturday – nothing this week. Maybe something on other weeks, but we all need a day off right?
Sunday – this is the truly genius bit – a rundown of all the posts I’ve already written this week, masquerading as new content. What a rogue I am! Welcome the first Sunday Summary!