Happy New Year!

“I have nothing left to say, but I’m gonna say it anyway.” ~ Randy Newman

Time for a Flippist mic drop?

At the very least this blog is due for some serious stock-taking.

Lately I have seen articles online where the author waxes fondly on the blog explosion of 2001-2010, a “golden decade” of seemingly limitless creativity and the promise of a brighter future, with people coming together around the world in an expression of shared humanity. Remember that this was a phenomenon started before Facebook, before Twitter, even before Google went public! Well, we’ve now seen how those later developments have turned out. The blogging dream isn’t quite dead yet, but it smells funny.

From time to time I get spam email solicitations from semi-literate people eager to remodel this web site. If there is one thing I won’t change drastically in the coming year is the formatting of Flippism is the Key. More than just a site, it is a record of my life, and a portal to other worthwhile sites, each just two clicks away in the sidebar. No animation or pop-ups, FITK remains close to the original concept of HyperCard but much more efficient.

What may change here is the frequency of posting, perhaps twice a week—Mondays and Fridays? The Flippist Archives have been exploited, but not yet depleted. Since I’m not beholden to an audience, I can still cover almost anything except politics and religion (there are thousands of other very serious people to do that.) To review my tastes, check out the category “Dogma” in the sidebar. In 2024 my travel posts will be fewer… don’t get around much anymore… but there will still be plenty of photo-essays for the casual viewer, and more explorations in the art of photography.

Icelandic culture, perhaps the only real constant in FITK over the last 20 years, will still crop up from time to time but without the intensity of the last couple of years. I’ve over-indulged in their music scene and on the literary front I am waiting for a new crop of modern Icelandic fiction to be translated. Live theatre in Reykljavík is a shadow of its glorious past. As far as just visiting goes, the influx of tourists there (TEN times the amount when I first went in March of 2000) has created a whole new and possibly unsustainable paradigm—aesthetically at least. The old harbour and the city center has lost a lot of its charm, with funky stores and businesses replaced by soulless hotels, bars, and souvenir shops—with the signage always in English!

One mixed blessing is the rise of Airbnbs; at their best they open up rooms and flats in owner-occupied dwellings (the original concept) but on the flip side they have taken a large number of entire houses out of the domestic market, effectively diminishing Reykjavík’s small-town feel and reducing the amount of affordable housing for people who actually live and work there year-round. With the rise of simple but high-quality stabilized camcorders, there now are dozens, if not hundreds, of “Reykjavík City Walks” on YouTube, taking the surprise out of discovering the city for the first time:




Þetta reddast.

Image: Marta Ákadóttir of the punk rock band Groá, Iceland Airwaves, 2023