Tag: 2025

2025 has been a crappy year in some ways and a good year in others. On the crappy side, our president is undoing much of the good that has been in place since World War II. He and his collaborators in Iowa are changing society in a way that will have long-term negative effects. On the good side, I stepped back from society to get my own house in order so I can contribute effectively to driving Republicans out of power. The latter outweighs the former in importance.

I don’t know what happened to me during the coronavirus pandemic. I was diagnosed with diabetes mid-2019 and have been treating it by controlling diet. It is working. Things went well before and during the early part of the pandemic, but as I retired from paid work and stayed home more, maintaining my health became a challenge. In 2024, I tested positive for COVID-19 and literally felt like I was going to die. In 2025, I began to turn my health around. I started logging my meals, exercise, and weight on My Fitness Pal. My weight reduced by 12.2 percent and BMI went from 36.8 to 32.3 during the year. During a recent visit to the clinic my practitioner told me to keep doing what I am doing, so I will.

I wrote already about my writing. All I have to add on the last day of the year is I feel more confident than ever as a writer. 2026 should be a good year.

Mine is a world of ideas and reading is essential. I wrote about The Great Sort, which was the first major review of books I collected beginning when I was a grader. In the last year, I donated more than a thousand to Goodwill and the local public library used book sale. There is at least another thousand to go. The important thing about this year’s project is not the downsizing. It is development of a new way to acquire and read books.

Notably, a substantial percent of the 71 books I read this year were checked out from the public library. That was huge, and according to library data, I saved $821 by doing so. How do I get ideas for which books to read? I get newsletters from several large publishers yet a main part of it is by querying the library’s new arrivals on its website. There was more related to reading happening in 2025.

I have been on social media since about 2007. One of the uses is to find new ideas and books I should read. The contribution social media makes is I get real people’s ideas about what to read in the context of their social media account. It is a more solid recommendation than if I knew little about the referrer. Part of this is I take chances on authors with limited distribution of their work. It has been a positive experience.

The best thing about acquiring books to read this year began during the pandemic. The Haunted Bookshop is one of the few remaining used bookstores in the county. Its proprietor, Nialle Sylvan, has changed how I select books and helped improve the quality of writing I have been reading. During the pandemic, the shop’s business plummeted. I felt badly about the situation and asked her to pick $50 worth of books and I’d buy them. That worked out well enough that this year I gave her more information about what I was reading. The last batch of books she picked for me has been so engaging I had to put some of them down because I didn’t want the experience of reading an author to ever end. The writing was so good! That is rare. Long story short is if you can find a bookseller like Nialle Sylvan count yourself lucky.

I want to talk about menu planning in our household in 2025. We do it now, mostly a week in advance. This takes the stress out of daily questions about what’s for dinner. It created an environment where I could focus on developing new dishes, something for which I have ample creative energy. Who knew planning meals could be such a benefit?

In the entry box I asked, “When did I make my first message on ChatGPT?” The machine, which prefers pronouns you/it, didn’t know. More precisely, it replied, “I don’t have access to the exact timestamp of your very first message, but I do have a reliable estimate.” It was in late May this year, according to the machine’s best estimates. Sounds earlier than I thought, but what do I know. That’s why I asked.

I am figuring out how to use artificial intelligence effectively. The reason I use the words “artificial intelligence” is what I am learning on ChatGPT is applicable everywhere ai is used in my world. This includes Google, my bank account, this blog, and a host of other applications. They are not all the same artificial intelligence, but the kernel of getting information I need is a similar process in any of them. It is a helper, although I don’t usually mention I use it in the Twitch chat I frequent because millennials and Gen-Z folk are skeptical of ChatGPT specifically and ai in general. As content creators, there may be concerns about ai taking over the space and putting them out of business. The energy use is a concern as well.

People ask, “What about the energy artificial intelligence uses?” Hannah Ritchie, who I think is brilliant, posted the following around the time I started using ChatGPT:

My sense is that a lot of climate-conscious people feel guilty about using ChatGPT. In fact it goes further: I think many people judge others for using it, because of the perceived environmental impact.

If I’m being honest, for a while I also felt a bit guilty about using AI. The common rule-of-thumb is that ChatGPT uses 10 times as much energy as a Google search [I think this is probably now too high, but more on that later]. How, then, do I justify the far more energy-hungry option? Maybe I should limit myself to only using LLMs when I would really benefit from the more in-depth answer.

But after looking at the data on individual use of LLMs, I have stopped worrying about it and I think you should too. (Email from Hannah Ritchie on May 6, 2025).

For the time being, I will restrain myself by not mentioning ChatGPT on Twitch. That is, unless the chat is about ai, which it was yesterday. In those cases, I drop Ritchie’s name with a quote. Bread on the water.

Things I use ai for are related to living in the real world. How should I organize my workshop tools? How should I manage a photoshoot of a political rally? How can I improve my exercise regimen? Please explain this piece of legislation so I can understand it. Here is my schedule for starting garden seedlings, how can it be improved? How do I solve the problem of binders in a casserole that lacks eggs and cheese? Why does cornstarch get such a bad rap? The machine is quick, its access to information is broad. It uses the same language to answer that I used in my queries. I am convinced the machine has read the work of Dale Carnegie.

I asked about data privacy and the machine gave me good tips about how to use not only their service, but would apply to my internet traffic generally. Things like speak in generalities, be mindful of what you put out there, and how to use controls built into the app to minimize how much of me is out there. So far so good with this tool. I plan to continue.

The good in 2025 definitely outweighed the bad. Republicans are not going to go away, so I need to be ready for the 2026 Midterms. This cycle, I will likely use my new ai helper to be a more effective canvasser.