Oh, December. You beautiful cozy lazy month. It is the month in which I delude that I can make 10000 different things, but, instead, I spend all my time reading and being with my family. Not a bad thing to do, don’t you agree?

December is also when winter begins. People see winter as a gloomy season, but I see it as the season of rest. If you look around, winter is when Nature goes to rest. Some animals go into hibernation, plants look dead, and sprouts and seeds lie sleeping under the snow. Winter is when Nature takes it slow.

This November has been weird. If I had to describe it, my first instinct would be to say that it felt like slipped time. After all, my emotional status has been all over the place, with moments of genuine excitement and moments of dread.

November is usually a bad month. It is always full of bad memories and events. Even this year, November hit again early in the month: once again, I had to attend a November funeral. So I was ready to accept another black month in which the best I could do was to collect the pieces.

It was an October that didn’t look like October: the maximum temperatures never went under 25 °C; it was almost always sunny, and everything looked more like spring than autumn.

This threw me off a bit. At the moment I am writing, it is Halloween, yet I do not really feel it. Well, I didn’t feel the October vibes for the other part of the month, either. So I will probably call this month September 2.0, hope for a more traditional November (or not; I am okay with mild temperatures this year), and move on.

September is the best month. It is the “back to school” month. The time when you sprint into a new season of life. Only that, this time, I think I forgot about that. I still have a task I put on my to-do list on September 1st. It is about my regular planning and organization for the new season. I usually need to do that in the first week of September. But it is still there at the time of writing (September 28th).

August was my summer vacation month. Therefore I had more time on my hand, some of which had been utterly wasted. In general, though, I think I had a good month of new activities, a weekend in Tuscany, friendly human interactions, and a good chunk of consumed media (I put a big dent in my extra-large-neverending watch/read/playlist).

I’ve also finally updated this blog with an extensive article. The funny thing is that it was not any of my “currently in draft” articles. Instead, I tried to intervene in a bit of drama between the artist community, the recent progress of Computational Creativity, and the state of the art in “AI-Generated Images.” So if you don’t know what I am talking about, but if you like AI, are an artist, or simply want a freakout-free guide to “AI Artists,” you are the perfect audience for my article.

Every time a new month begins, I start looking for something different to do. Something that would create a memorable milestone in the journey of life. Unfortunately, when I reach the end of the month, I realize that I often fail at this simple goal. It is not easy to break the routine and create something memorable every 30 days.

But July was not one of those months. In fact, when it started, I was sitting at a beach bar in Attica, Greece, looking at the moon reflecting on the nigh sea after the first day of the company retreat (to be precise, the first retreat after the pandemic pause).

Last year was an excellent year for reading. I’ve read 31 books, totaling almost 10,000 pages: 17 fiction books (way more than last year), 13 non-fiction (as a surprise, because I usually read non-fiction faster), and one graphic novel. Some books were unbelievable literary mistakes. Others were absolute gems that I’ll keep in my mind and heart (it is wise for the Chinese to have a single word for both: 心).