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4 months ago
4
1. Blogger? I hardly even know ’er
I’m bad at writing. I’m even worse at blogging. Nothing you can say will change my mind on that. When I sit down to write these posts I just word-vomit my thoughts onto the page with some hastily scrawled bullet points from a notepad as a loose guide. If you’re about to mentally tell me that I could get better with practice, well you’re probably right. But the other confession I have is that I don’t particularly enjoy writing.
My normal process for writing these posts is to sit down and hammer out some thoughts on a page. I let it be messy and rambly. Then I leave it alone for a few days. Up until that point I feel reasonably OK about the effort. I have created a thing! It’s the re-visiting part where the trouble begins. I start hacking away at the tangled mess of thought. I remove the tangents, most of the asides. If I read a paragraph and think “gross, I sound all preachy” then into the trash it goes!
Then, surrounded by the wreckage of my first attempt to say something interesting, I sort of try to tape the bits and pieces back together into something that resembles a coherent thought or two. I’ll leave judgement regarding how successful my attempts are to you, and simply say that it results in ample fuel for the machine nestled deep down next to my brain stem with all the other autonomic functions. The one that produces self-doubt and a general sense of anxiety about the quality of my work.
This machine will feed again on the subsequent three or four revisions where I try to clarify the writing, or further trim some of the fat. That machine is happily humming along with ample fuel in reserve on the utterly arbitrary day1 that I change draft to false and merge the branch that contains the latest post.
Did any of that resonate with you? I hope so, because otherwise I’m going to feel really awkward. There is at least some evidence that I’m not completely alone in this. There’s this wonderful clip from Ira Glass that has become one of my favorite things on the internet. And there’s this wonderful series from The Oatmeal that is also on that list.
2. Chronicles of ridiculous
Writing a regular-ish blog is not the obvious play here. I’ve never even been able to stick to writing a diary on a regular basis. I am aware that lots of people have said at great length how wonderful keeping a diary is. I have even given this at least two or three solid attempts.
The problem is that on each attempt I have sat down at the end of the day and wondered what I would even write down. Splattering my thoughts all over a page is….. fine? It kinda feels good to get whatever the thought is out. But most days aren’t that notable.
I don’t know if I’m just fundamentally missing something about the process, or if the timelines I operate on are just not friendly to single day increments. Maybe I’m lacking a third thing that I can’t even imagine. Whatever the reason is, I’ve concluded that I’m just not a diary guy.
So, I don’t particularly like writing. It would be fair to say that I don’t “get” diaries. Writing a blog about whatever I happen to be thinking about at the moment sounds like an incredibly stupid idea! Even if it was the sort of thing that I’d normally do, we’ve been hearing for years about the decline of reading2. It’s not even a given that an adult you meet can read at all anymore.
As someone that grew up loving books and reading, all of this is very sad. But that’s not exactly a good reason to do all of this. Or is it?
3. Ohh ‘member The Internet? Yeah, I ‘member
I’m big on voting with my wallet. I do my very best to not support things financially that work against me3. The simplest example of this is the smart TV. I don’t mind ads when they are restrained in frequency, duration, and content. I would rather live in a world where we did not need them, but I understand their role. That said, I refuse to buy a device that exists to sell me more advertisements and is priced extremely attractively to Trojan Horse its way into my life in order to do that.
I wrote previously about leaving social media. I think that quitting social media was the first time I started to think about voting with my eyeballs as a concept. I’m not sure if the term “attention economy” was in common use at that time or not. But I was very aware that my presence on/use of a platform was beneficial to it.
See, I remember The Internet. Not the 4 websites and 6 apps that we have now, but the old school Internet. Blogs used to be weird, and cool. People wrote about projects they were working on. People wrote about their lives, their struggles, their wins. People wrote contemplative things, and silly things. They wrote and illustrated some of the funniest things I have ever read. I wasn’t even that in to blogs and I still remember them fondly.
Blogs still exist to a certain degree, but they are different. Now they tend to be either more formal and journalist-ey, or a thinly veiled advertisement. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the former, and if the latter is cloaked in a genuinely useful tutorial on some particular tool/technology then I can’t really begrudge them their plug. But they both lack some of that old magic.
I remember the time before short form content ate the world. I actually hate it when my friends send me Tick Tock videos because I’m caught between my hatred of the platform/format and my (entirely self-imposed) obligation to look at the thing they wanted me to see enough to take the time to send it to me. The endless scroll machine trying its best to duplicate the addiction of the slot machine infuriates me just a little.
I remember the time before AI slop filled everything. If you’re reading this in the same year that it was published then most of you should also be able to remember that time if you try. I am invariably disappointed when I see someone who’s work I enjoyed or opinion I respected give in and start generating slop. Whether that be for “brainstorming,” or a thumbnail, or code. I lose some amount of respect for them instantly. I hate the hype bubble and the constant stream of shit flowing forth from it.
4. It really whips the llamas ass
That’s why the blog. I’ve now moved up to voting with my actions. I’m creating long form content. I’m writing blog posts. I’m bucking the short form AI slop trend. I sit here and I write things down, and then I try to trim them into something that I would want to read. I don’t hook this site up to any analytics, and I don’t use any fucking AI to make it. Because that’s important to me. This is a place for me. This is a little pocket where I try to contribute something in the old style back into the world that has forgotten it. I don’t worry if I’m writing for one, or one million4.
I’m going to keep writing about whatever thing seems interesting next. I’m gonna keep making dumb jokes in the titles, descriptions, and/or section names. That’s the only way this is going to work for me. So hopefully there are enough people that find me amusing enough to drag their eyes across the page for a few minutes in a row, and repeat that twice a month.
If you’re one of those, I’m genuinely grateful. And I’ll leave you with this:
Read shit.
Make shit, even if you aren’t good at it.
Hell, make shit especially if you aren’t good at it.
Be brave.
Be bold.
Stay rad.
