Posted by This year, I am loving the idea of December, as we head into winter and the long dark nights in which to hibernate. This is such a change to me from a few years ago when I used to dread the dark nights. It might be because I have strung up all the fairy lights I own and am now living in a mini-twinkling wonderland.
As I look back across 2025, like a 00s web designer who wants to know where I have been, where I am and, where I want to go, I see that I am deciding where to focus my energies next. When the sun returns after the longest night of the winter solstice, its light will grow and expand. Where will my light grow and expand?… is a question I’m asking myself as I wish to create a how to-be list rather than to-do for 2026.
As is custom, I begin by looking at my most popular web posts of this year. These are not always the ones I have written this year but the ones which have been most read. Only two of the blogs I wrote this year make the list, which is not surprising giving how long the others have had time to circulate around the Internet.
A decade of divining the stats
This is the 10th year I’ve written a top 10 blog, which I find amazing – a whole decade of me divining the stats. Other social media has come and gone for me: LinkedIn, Instagram, X, but blogging draws me in, even though I question it, stop and start all over again. And, I am thrilled when people take the time to read what I write.
Some years, when doing the round up such as 2024, I get right into blogging about blogs. I write thousands of words speculatively interpreting the statistics, to get to that story in the stats as I did in 2019 with a two-part series. This year, I’m going to save the majority speculation for another blogpost which I’m tentatively calling Blog Gazing. I’ve been learning all sorts of digital humanities techniques, exciting ways to consider my complete works so that I can perform a deep dive. But that is for another day, when this head cold I’ve currently got goes away and my brain no longer feels fuzzy.
So without further ado, drumroll please…
My top 10 blogs of 2025
This year, I used a WordPress plugin called WP Popular Posts. A few years ago I had a fab one, the name of which I forget, which pinpointed on a map exactly where people were in the world as they were reading a blogpost. This was so exciting. However, with GDPR regulations I had to put up a This website collects your data which made my website grind to a halt so I uninstalled the plugin along with the data. This year it’s the comments which have made my site slow right down. I had to temporarily disable them until I do a brand new install as this one is getting a bit rickety after 19 years. Thankfully, that’s a 2026 problem. Right now let’s dive into the list of my most-read top 10 blogs in 2025:
1. Maslow’s hierarchy for women?, March 30, 2020
I wrote this five years ago after I realised when blogging about female superheroes and self-actualisation that my usual quoting Maslow’s hierarchy of needs wasn’t going to work, given that Maslow had only used two women. It has appeared in my top ten a couple of times (2022, 2024) since and got a boost again this year after it was shared on the WI Learning Hub’s weekly email for International Women’s Day in March. Lovely Dominique recommended it as a good dose of feminism.
2. Mindfulness: The love within your love, July 21, 2013
Back when my girls were just one and two-years-old, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and had treatment over two years. Thank God, for the NHS. Please governments past, present and future, look after our NHS.
During this very scary time, I thought that people would cut me some slack and treat me tenderly, but no! Ask anyone who is undergoing cancer treatment. I wrote this is blog inspired by a quote from Rumi which made accepting the present moment, people behaving badly and, the full catastrophe of life, easier to do with mindfulness which for me means that moment when I suspend all thinking and drop into being. It’s a blog I still read myself on those days when I get my knickers in a big old twist and need to remember to take a big deep breath, especially before speaking. As my mam used to say: Count to 10, and start again.
3. Three years of Bikram yoga, March 20, 2019 and 4. Yoga Lessons: Bikram wisdom, March 19, 2016
I love yoga. My auntie gave my dad a pile of yoga magazines back when I was about eight-years old. My brother and I read the magazines, copied all the shapes and, I’ve loved and done yoga ever since. I even trained as a yoga teacher with the British Wheel of Yoga. I started practising Bikram in 2015 and faithfully did it four or five times a week until lockdown when I went back to my familiar 70s weird yoga ways of doing yoga on the carpet, without heat, yoga pants, mats, blocks, bricks, and all the rest of the paraphernalia that seems to happen in modern day yoga. I loved it. Later on. I tried to go back to the hot room but sadly hated feeling like a boiled beetroot. I never say never and hope one day I will return. However, the wisdom from the yoga mat covers all of life, yoga is life as one of my teachers used to say, so I am not surprised these blogs are popular.
5. Westworld and the ghosts of AI March 6, 2019
I loved writing this blog. For me, AI has always been the foil for asking what is thinking, what is consciousness, what is life and what does it all mean? These days, trendy generative AI is a brute force numbers game, which though simple at a subsymbolic level, is still cool and interesting at the complexity size brings it especially with the unreasonable effectiveness of data, a term first applied to mathematics, back in the 60s by Eugene Wigner. But, the stories we tell about it, with the ghost in the machine, still persists hence our fears and hopes. I wrote this blog after watching Westworld, which I loved, though it got a super gruesome and when I began preparing the first talks I gave to demystify AI, I started by reading this blog and its companion: The ghosts of AI, (February 2018). The human body is a very inefficient design for a robot, as demonstrated by how often robots fall over, yet we persist, mainly because of the stories we tell ourselves.
6. Backing up gmail without Takeout or Thunderbird, July 10, 2023
This was a quick note mainly to myself of what I did to back up Gmail, after a project which took up 1GB of data on my account was over. Oh my, all that research into computer-supported collaborative workspaces, and we still send endless email back and forward, as creating spaces for people to work in successfully is much harder than it looks. I wanted to get all that data off Google into something else to free up the space. But I needed to keep it, just in case and I created, by accident, a method that works which is: Download Outlook and keep a local copy of the emails which are in one directory in Outlook – don’t sync your inbox, just copy the directory of emails you wish to keep!
7. Conclusions: The limits of the social animal on social media (9), July 19, 2016
I wrote a series of blogposts in 2016, about how we behave on social media, and this was the conclusion blog post. My theory then and now remains: Social media, like all technology including AI, reflects us and the way we behave, because we are human. Social media not only lights up the nucleus accumbens, the part of our brain which deals with rewards, but does so randomly keeping us on standby. However, in the 10 intervening years since I wrote this, owners and advertisers have stuffed every last space in our desperation to grab people’s attention to the point that we use AI to generate our content to feed that machine.
It is not a brave new world, it the same old world on a small screen, and because we are hard wired for connection, we never stood a chance.
8. Human-computer interaction, cyberpsychology and core disciplines, February 12, 2018
I refer to this blogpost on the online human-computer interaction (HCI) course which I created on Udemy in 2020. It was, the first blog I read when I decided to create a course because HCI is a tricky business. It has no core competencies which is why it can be difficult to define. In the blog I say: For me, human-computer interaction was and still remains Gestaltian which is the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. By this I mean, that the collaboration of a human and a computer is more than a human typing numbers into a computer and then waiting for the solution. Alas, we are still there now with everyone loving a bit of generative AI aka typing stuff in and waiting for the solution which is never quite what we want. We are wasting so much potential, I believe that more than ever.
9. Retiring my HCI course, June 16, 2025
This blog is me reflecting on my course about human-computer interaction (HCI) on Udemy which I created back in 2020. It was fun and fresh and two hours long. I kept adding materials and by June 2025, it had turned into a monster, a Frankenstein with no core competencies, and now comes in at five-and-a-half hours long. I tried to reorganise it. However, it is still not working too well for me. When I get a minute, I will do more to it as there’s a load of great lectures and resources in there, even if I do say so myself.
10. Ruth’s talks: Dates, times and places, November 11, 2025
I gave nine public talks in 2025. I love demystifying AI and reminding us all that the first computers were women. I love each and every one of them, especially digital anthropology, as people and their computers are the most fascinating aspect of all which underpins the rest. V exciting, I have two booked in 2026, and more proposed. Each time I have an upcoming talk I either pin or change the date on the Ruth’s talks blogs so that it’s the first page people see, so it’s not surprising that it has made my top 10 list.
TL:DR; Takeaway: Finding mijn mening
I wrote 24 blogs in total, 25 counting this one, two from this year made it into my top 10 and, this is my takeaway:
The top 10 blogs of 2025 reflect what I write blog about the most:
Ruth Stalker-Fascinating
1) Human connection gives our life meaning with ourselves, in yoga and meditation, and with other people in real life or online.
2) Technology, and lately AI, reflect society’s stories, as my site tagline says: how people use technology and vice-versa.
I love blogging and wrangling my thoughts into something resembling my opinion.
I am now on day 809 of Duolingo Dutch and yesterday, I learnt that mening means opinion in Dutch, it is pronounced like meaning. I love that! In french mon avis means my opinion, which sounds like my advice. Either way, making meaning, coming to some advice for oneself, to get an opinion on a topic, is exactly what I do when I write and it is a lovely thing on which to spend my time, and even better that people come and read what I have to say.
So! There you go, and where are you, as my dad used to say. Another year in blogs. Thank you so much for reading. I wish you love and light as this year draws to a close and a new one begins.
A decade of Ruth’s top 10 blogs