* * * * *
                                        
                NaNoGenMo seems … kind of silly to do these days
                                        
For the past few days just as I'm falling alseep, I think, yes, I could make
a post about that, only to completely forget about the next day. I finally
remembered what I wanted to post about—NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation
Month) [1]. Or rather, how I completely forgot about it this year (and kept
forgetting to write about it—sheesh).

And last year.

And the year before.

And the year before that.

Has it really been five years since I last participated?

Yeah, I guess so [2].

I think it fell off my radar once ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained
Transformer) (which is “cat, I farted [3]” in French) hit the scenes. Or
rather, the current spate of software that was released into the world in
2020 and it became trivially easy to generate nonsensical text (and images,
and music, and code, and …). It also looks like participation in NaNoGenMo
has dropped significantly since 2020:

Table: NaNoGenMo participants per year
year	# novels (roughly)
------------------------------
2013	80
2014	145
2015	184
2016	138
2017	127
2018	105
2019	138
2020	78
2021	87
2022	50
2023	36
2024	30

There's just … no challenge anymore.

[1] https://nanogenmo.github.io/
[2] https://github.com/spc476/NaNoGenMo-2019
[3] https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=fr&text=Cat%20I%20farted&op=translate

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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