March 23, 2021 will mark the 25th anniversary of this website. I’ve been doing this for a quarter of a century. If it tells you anything about how long I’ve been doing this, Schumin Web has been around longer than Blogger, Etsy, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Reddit, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, and a whole host of other online properties. And in that time, things here have kind of gone on and on, as we’ve all grown older and matured together.
I suppose that nothing is a better indication of the leng th of time that Schumin Web has been around, and the amount of growth that has occurred during that time than the recent Journal entry about the new scooter. I like to think of that as “Schumin criticizes Schumin,” as I discussed things that I had written in the site’s fifth year in light of more modern developments in the site’s 25th year. The whole thing felt a bit strange, because it felt as though I was criticizing what someone else had written. I know that it was me, because I still remember the events and remember writing that page, but that look back really reminded me of how much I have changed in the past twenty years. My writing style is completely different now compared to then. My writing from back then looks and feels like the work of a much younger man. My attitudes about things are different now, too, as back then, I clearly felt that I was invincible, throwing caution to the wind and riding my scooter on a wheel that I knew was faulty, just because I needed to get two more days out of it, and nothing bad had happened in the past. Nowadays, I would never have done that, because I know that I’m not in invincible, and that getting hurt and not being able to go to work has real-life ramifications that affect more people than just me. All of that said, I’m not the same person that I was back in the early days of this website. That’s not a bad thing by any means, and I like the person that I’ve become.
Meanwhile, I feel like the 25th anniversary of Schumin Web should be a quiet celebration. There is no big compilation photo set celebrating the anniversary waiting in the wings like I did in 2016 with the “Twenty Years” set in Life and Times. Truth be told, the site’s 25th year was a relatively quiet one. This was the first time in the site’s history where no new photo sets were released in the span of a year. The last new photo set to be released was “Planespotting at BWI“, which came out on January 31, 2020 as a 2019 set. I’ve mentioned before that it’s not that I’m not producing new material, but rather, it’s that other projects have hindered my getting things out of the door. There will be 2020 photo sets, but don’t expect them for a while, because they will span longer time periods, and those require more work to assemble than ones that are shot in a single event. Therefore, it makes sense to tackle them along with the backlog of photos from the past year.
There will, however, be two photo sets from 2021 that will come out before any 2020 sets. I think that will be a first for me, putting out a photo set ahead of such a large backlog. Normally, I try to publish things in the order in which they were shot, but clearly, that’s not happening in this case. These will be two relatively small sets of 21 and 28 photos that were shot in the same week. They were each done in a single session, and are fairly simple sets. One of these will be my first drone photo set, which got me a lot more access than I might have gotten using more conventional methods, as well as some new angles. I’m looking forward to seeing how that one in particular comes out.
All in all, happy 25th anniversary, I suppose. I don’t have a lot more to say about it, except that good things will be coming in the months to come as I work through my backlog, and if I continue writing, I’ll just be blathering on to achieve some appearance of fullness. So, everything willing, here’s to another 25 years.