fifty thousand words

and a roundup for the year

28 Dec. 2025 mood: proudmeta

not too long ago, i wrote a word-counting script. i was curious what my longest blogpost was – as of this writing, the truth about vpns – but very quickly realized it'd be easy to generalize to count the words across my whole blog.

that's when i discovered i had a hair over 46k words written in total, and i got very curious how many i'd written this year.

p.s., if you're curious, that word-counting script:

you can scrape my site and try it yourself, but you'll get a different number, lower because you won't count my unlisted work (like draft posts) and higher because you

#!/usr/bin/env python3

from dataclasses import dataclass
from datetime import datetime, timezone
from html.parser import HTMLParser
import os
from pathlib import Path
import sys
import typing as t

def words(text: str) -> int:
  # extremely complex and sophisticated word counting
  return sum(
    1 for chunk in text.split()
    if any(c.isalpha() for c in chunk)
  )

INLINE = {'a', 'strong', 'em', 'ins', 'del', 'span', 'code'}
TEXT_BLOCK = {'p', 'li', 'aside', 'h1', 'h2', 'details', 'summary'}
UNCLOSED = {'br', 'img', 'hr', 'link', 'meta'}

class WordCount(HTMLParser):
  def __init__(self):
    super().__init__(convert_charrefs=True)
    self.stack = []
    self.count = 0

  def close(self):
    super().close()
    if self.stack:
      raise ValueError(f'invalid XML: unmatched <{self.stack[-1]}>')

  @property
  def in_text(self):
    for ele in reversed(self.stack):
      if ele in INLINE:
        continue # hunt up the stack
      return ele in TEXT_BLOCK and 'blockquote' not in self.stack
    return True

  def handle_starttag(self, tag, _):
    if tag in UNCLOSED:
      return
    self.stack.append(tag)

  def handle_endtag(self, tag):
    top = self.stack.pop()
    if top != tag:
      raise ValueError(f'invalid XML: closing <{tag}> while in <{top}>')

  def handle_data(self, data):
    if self.in_text:
      self.count += words(data)

@dataclass
class FileStats:
  name: str
  words: int
  modified: datetime

def list_files(args: list[str]) -> t.Iterable[tuple[Path, Path]]:
  for arg in args:
    base = Path(arg).resolve()
    if base.is_file():
      yield base, base.relative_to(Path('.').resolve(strict=False))
      continue
    for dirpath, _, filenames in base.walk():
      for filename in filenames:
        if not filename.endswith('.html'):
          continue
        full = dirpath / filename
        rel = full.relative_to(base)
        yield full, rel

counts = []
for full, rel in list_files(sys.argv[1:]):
  with open(full) as f:
    meta = os.stat(f.fileno())
    # discard until we get to ---
    for line in f:
      if line.strip() == '---':
        break
    else:
      f.seek(0, os.SEEK_SET)
    try:
      wc = WordCount()
      for line in f:
        wc.feed(line)
      wc.close()
      counts.append(FileStats(
        name=str(rel),
        words=wc.count,
        modified=datetime.fromtimestamp(meta.st_mtime, tz=timezone.utc)
      ))
    except Exception as e:
      print(f"{rel}: ERROR: {e}")

counts.sort(key=lambda c: c.modified, reverse=True)

total = sum(c.words for c in counts)
countlen = max(len(str(total)), max(len(str(c.words)) for c in counts))
print(f" {total:<{countlen}}  (total across {', '.join(map(repr, sys.argv[1:]))})")
for c in counts:
  print(f" {c.words:<{countlen}}  {c.name}")

unfortunately, my current blog repo only goes back to march. back then i'd written 4k words, so that's a solid 42k words written over the course of the year! mind, that includes a lot of as-yet-unpublished stuff – my longest draft post is 2,300 words, for example – but… it's all still words i've written this year.

so i set a goal: i wanted to write 50k words by the end of the year. 8k more, in about 6 weeks, it sounded doable!

and as it turns out: it absolutely was. as of when this post goes live, and including this post, i've now written 56k words total – which means having written more than 50k this year!

secretly, this goal was part of why i started publishing my microblog: i realized i had written quite a few words – a bit under 4.5k, not counting drafts – in longform posts on my social medium. not up to the… manifold and varying… standard(s) of my blog, but still (tautologically) things i thought were worth writing and sharing, and still words i wrote this year.

but of course, words aren't the only things i've done this year! quick list:

wrote 50k words! i know i already said this but i'm really excited about it!
updated the logo to be way fancier (still without using any separate images – just text and filters)
began ~~obsessing over~~ post-self, for exploring the subtle side of posthuman scifi. and for functor.
started several projects – i've posted about todo, fatui, and fws – and finished one! wow!
i wrote a post every two weeks! even not counting microblogs! mostly!
i read fourteen books (expecting to hit sixteen by the new year) and uncountably many words of webfiction.

and there are things i wish i had done better on, too:

more welsh! i did translate a bunch of the blog, yes; there are maybe 2k more words in welsh. but obviously i am not keeping up with english.
writing and editing! likewise, my hope was that by dropping to biweekly, i'd gain the time to write better and edit old posts. that was somewhat true – but not universally.
keeping better track of whether my site was working. multiple times, i broke it, to varying degrees – by cert issues (which i keep thinking i've fixed), by ill-considered logo updates, by negligent code changes to the site generator, by just plain including broken links.

as usual, most of my problems with myself this year boil down to "i want to spend my time more intentionally". this got much easier when, partway through the year, i realized just how much time i was wasting – and i do not use that word lightly – on youtube shorts. i cut them out of my life and probably clawed back hundreds of hours.

but it's not the only thing. i'm certainly spending more time on things i find more valuable, but i need to carve out time to do the things i want to have done. i want to look back on next year and go: yeah. i nailed my goals.

so, to that end, like i did at the beginning of this year, let's set out some goals for next year:

publish at least one of my two big blogpost projects.
write another 50k words of insightful, meaningful writing.
finish fws, get fatui into a good spot, and finish b/rb 0.3.
read at least one book that's written entirely in welsh, in part as prep work to…
translate all of my pages and posts into welsh. this deliberately excludes my microblog, as well as…
publish at least one work of fiction to this site. which work? what format? as yet undetermined!

this sounds like a lot, to me, especially given my personal circumstances. but i'm in a fairly comfortable position for my blog, at least, and i think i'll make good progress rearranging my habits, so i'm hopeful.

see you again in 2026!