Now that the new year is officially underway, it's time for my annual recap of the past year and confirmation of plans for the upcoming twelve months. 2025 saw a grand total of thirty-one blog posts, the first of them presenting a trio of ticket stubs for the former Capri Theatre in Dallas, and the final one picturing the ascent of the Bank of America building in downtown Dallas ascending into the morning fog. My original plan for the year was to publish blog updates weekly, a goal which was definitely attainable, but one which I ultimately fell short of meeting. The reasons for this are varied, but in short they had to do with time requirements involved for multiple deeply researched posts, outside commitments, and, by the latter part of the year, personal considerations outside the scope of this blog. I stopped work almost entirely for over a month late in 2025, and between October and December, only three blog posts were made, two of them being very low effort. I started off the year stronger than I finished it.
Tag: Website
bookmark_borderAI-composed spam in my blog’s comments
So-called "Artificial Intelligence," or AI, is insinuating itself into every aspect of our lives these days. This increasing proliferation of computer generated content (i.e., slop) is largely at the behest of huge corporations who have spent billions gathering personal data via online tracking, social media, cell phones, and an increasing number of so-called "smart" devices. Much of the data used to train AI models has been taken without permission from creatives and put toward the aim of generating an avalanche of artificially created content. This content then finds its way into advertisements, apps, services marketed to replace human creators, and, naturally, various types of spam. And that spam is increasingly finding its way onto online blog posts.
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bookmark_border2024 recap and looking ahead to 2025
2024 was a bit of a mixed bag as far as this site is concerned. I started out pretty strong, lost focus somewhat, and worked to bring things back together at the end. All told, a total of twenty-eight blog posts made it to publication, along with thirteen album comparisons and (barely) four road trip galleries. I'm going to reflect a bit on what I was able to accomplish and on the areas in which I was lacking.
bookmark_borderUpdate concerning future and ongoing projects
I tend to always have multiple things going on creatively, with as many as five or six projects in progress at one time in various stages of completeness. As a result, new material on this site tends to go up in spurts, with large amounts of content being added all at once as a project is completed. Even this blog is usually updated in spurts, which several entries being edited simultaneously and ultimately posted in groups of two or three, all of them post-dated to go live at a later date. This entry here is no exception. But there's a lot of other work going on in the background for which these semi-regular blog posts are biding time.
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bookmark_borderOriginal shout outs
One of the main goals of the recent site revamp was to bring the site's purpose and philosophy into clearer focus, both in the site's reason for being and in its actual under the hood design and organization. A huge mess of code was tamed, with a lot of redundancy being eliminated. One of the casualties of this process was the original "Shout Outs" page, which I made the decision to axe after failing to find a way to integrate it into the new design philosophy. However, as these comments represent the earliest feedback and encouragement I received, I didn't want them to end up lost to history. So here they are, as a historical record of the early days of P.A.O. Productions.
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