A personal blogging streak that will probably never be broken

You may recall -- though it's far more likely that you don't -- that at the start of 2020, I was having such a prolific period on The Audient that I posted on 41 consecutive days, accounting for the last 27 days of January and the first 14 of February. I wrote about the end of that streak here. 

In retrospect, it's funny that this was just before our world turned upside down with COVID. Since one ended before the other was really beginning, they are totally separated in my mind, and it took looking it up just now to remember that both things happened at the start of 2020.

Forty-one consecutive days seemed like an impressive thing at the time, especially after some really lean periods in the year immediately leading up to it.

Nonsense.

At the start of 2025, I've felt a similar sense of having a lot to say, and not always the space I need to say it, considering that I have a rule of never posting more than once in the same day. As it did in 2020, this led to certain periods when I had four, five completed posts backed up and waiting for their turn, which I would often need to juggle just so, to allow the time-sensitive ones to go live ahead of the evergreen ones that might have been written earlier.

Only this time it didn't go for 41 straight days. It went for 65. 

That being the last 29 days of January, all 28 days of February (the first complete month in the history of this blog), and the first eight days of March.

Sometimes when you break a record, you blow past it. Earlier this week, after a fish and chips dinner on the beach, my younger son and I threw around a frisbee, seeing how many catches in a row we could get. We worked our way up through various low records, like 7, then 9, then 11, then 17. But we were stuck on 17 for a really long time, and we were not even getting close to beating it. Then when we started getting tired and ready to wind down for the night, we said we'd make one more attempt, which would qualify as our last attempt if we completed at least five passes in a row. That time, we got 43 consecutive catches before we dropped it again. 

This is a bit like that. 

Of course, it could have gone a lot longer, if I'd forced it. But the thing I thought was impressive about this streak in 2020, and again in 2025, is that I did not need to. I never wrote some stupid observation just because I wanted to get something up on one particular day. Oh, I wrote stupid observations, don't get me wrong -- they were just organic in nature, not forced. In other words, I never wrote a post for any other reason than that it tickled that same place in me that tickles Jerry Seinfeld every time he writes a "Did you ever notice ..." joke.

The streak ended on a weekend out of town to go a water park with my kids. We alternate between the two big ones in Victoria, and we missed last year entirely, so it had been three years since we'd been to Adventure Park in Geelong. That itself wasn't the reason the streak ended, because I had plenty of time to do computer things in the hotel room. But maybe not watching a movie on either Friday or Saturday night -- it's hard to watch a movie when you're sharing a room with two kids who are going to bed by 10:30 -- meant that I didn't have any new material occurring to me organically.

Actually, I am writing this post on the 66th day -- though of course it doesn't count as the 66th straight post, because I can only post a post like this after the 66th day passes. I did wait for long enough to ensure I didn't have something else to write about. Nope, this is it.

Because I think it will really feel stupid to write yet another post on this blog to mark the end of a consecutive day streak of blogging, I'm really hoping this 65-day streak holds. However, what evidence do I really have that it won't happen again? The end of one year, start of the next is always a fruitful time for me. I know I'm going to get excited and write a lot of things about movies, whether you want to read them or not. Who's to say I won't start another one at the end of this year and it will run, I don't know, 79 days?

I suppose if that does happen, I will have to write about it again -- and think of yet a third variation on this subject, because another rule I have is never to repeat a subject.

It's a bit of a relief now that it's over. But the fruitfulness will likely continue. In fact, as I am now finishing this post on the actual day I'm posting it, I thought of two more things to write about while watching Scott Cooper's Antlers last night. I'm not sure if either of them really rises to the level of post-worthy, though -- even with the minimal standards I apply to that. 

Tune in tomorrow, I guess, to see what I decided. After all, I still have the record number of posts written in a calendar year -- 264 in 2010 -- to shoot for.