2023 is a new year of contrasts for me. While I am feeling positive about my own personal life, I am also very disturbed by the war in Ukraine, the oppression and murder of people in Iran and China. The general state of geopolitics is very concerning and I believe we are heading towards years of cold and hot conflict between the West and the illiberal order. This make me thankful for my good fortune and also sensitive to those less fortunate.
Looking back at 2022, I updated my passion project at Heropath by releasing a couple of small incremental demos. I also refocused my attention by closing down some projects and by doing so have made some progress on some ideas that have been percolating with me for decades. I will be slowing down my posts to Journals of Doc Surge to every 3-4 months as I get busy with those projects.
Which brings me to some news of what I’ve been working on the past few months and will continue to work on in 2023. These two projects, about Music and Sport respectively. are related in an obvious and a personal way for me, Both are forms of entertainment but also can be related to through statistics and sharing those statistics through websites. I see this as a kind of meta-play, a game layered over another layer of play. Its something I’ve done this before when I focused on the sporting part of politics.
The Stats of Music
I love music and have been listening to it all of my life. When I realized I could combine my love of music with statistics I was very happy. Years ago I had conceived of creating a website so that people can share their listening habits and I finally accomplished this over a year ago. Yertunes.com is a passion project that is monetized with ads on the website and allows for registered users to see the statistics of their listening habits. The website is in a beta state of release and anyone can register for free. You can see more about my love for iTunes stats in my forum post.
The Stats of Sports
When I was in my teens I used to pore over the annual sports calendars of the various leagues at the public library. I was surprised that there was this devotion to recording something as fleeting as a sporting match so the idea of combining my interest in watching sports (particularly hockey) with statistics being shared through a website was a natural fit. I experimented with this with my Jets stats.
I had actually creating a cross-sport, cross-league statistics website back in 2016 but kept running into roadblocks with developers leaving and running into design dead-ends. By resettling my priorities in 2022, I was able to get the project relaunched and now the FanSeeStats.com suite of websites and the backend database is in an Alpha stage of development. I intend to monetize the suite of websites under that banner with ads when I have more content posted.
I’m adopting a pen-name for this project, writing as Al Young (my pet name for my spouse and the street I lived on when I met her) who will be doing the research and writing and design and statistical collection of the sports stats.
FanSeeStats.com
I am very fortunate and privileged to be able to work on these projects given all of the war, torture, and oppression there is in the world. Hopefully these projects will give people some entertainment and enjoyment as a way to celebrating how fortunate we are living in the West.
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