Showing posts for Writing
-
Blogs not about anything
I like blogs. I don’t think I’ve written that down before — at least not in public. I suppose I have a lot of opinions that I haven’t written down in public.
Anyway, I like blogs that are about something, which is fortunate because most blogs are about something. There are a lot of blogs about “rationalism”, for example. These are pretty good, not least because they give numpties like me a handful of talking points that I can bring up in conversation to demonstrate how Clever I am.
But I’m slowly going off blogs that are about something in favour of blogs that are just journals of regular folks’ idle thoughts. The latest orthodoxy mutates so quickly that I can't keep up, and feels unimportant and consequencelessly culture-war-ey. And I feel increasingly estranged from the only-lightly-filtered daily experience of other people’s lives: maybe this is because writing on the web is micro-optimised to sell me things or make me think a certain way; or maybe this is because I work from home and so opinions aren't buffered by having to face other people's judgment.
So a blog about e.g. a guy who keeps getting his stuff stolen resonates with me, because it’s not about anything: it’s just the way he feels.
-
The Pingu
Here's a wonderful take on Poe's "The Raven", recasting the titular bird with everyone's favourite claymation penguin. There's not a ton to say here except to comment Adam Roberts on the masterful way he retains the musicality and internal rhyme of the original, though he only writes three of the original eighteen stanzas—the first of which is:
Once upon a night Antarctic, whilst I pondered the cathartic
Power of many quaint and tragic volumes of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a clapping,
As of flippers briskly slapping, slapping on my igloo floor.
“’Tis some penguin feet,” I muttered, “slapping on my igloo floor —
Only this and nothing more.”Go and, if you can, read it aloud, and see if it doesn't put a smile back on your face.
-
Writing about writing
Lots of writing about writing on the RSS feed, lately! I have written almost nothing over the past month, for reasons that will become clear in a few days when I publish my July monthnotes. In the meantime:
Jim Nielsen only posts writing that passes a certain threshold for quality:
So if you’re writing because you want other people to read your writing, some bar can be useful. As King says, writing is refined thinking and hard writing makes for easy reading. Writing is hard for you so that reading can be easy for others.
While Chris Coyier thinks there's no threshold at all:
I’d like to write better individual blog posts, but something has always compelled me to punt out a thought early rather than wait until I have some perfect way to present it. And for the record, I don’t mind reading your posts like that either. We’re not shootin’ for the Pulitzer over here mmkay.
Matthias Ott advocates just putting stuff out there:
Here is a thought. Maybe, we are overthinking it. Maybe, the one thing we should care most about is just putting stuff out there. At least, this is the primary reason we have a personal website, right? We have it to document and share random thoughts, things we learned, and nuggets we found. If we don’t put stuff out there, why have a website in the first place?
I like the distinction between writing for yourself and writing for other people. On this website, I'm writing squarely for myself. Anything I could teach you, you could learn better from someone else—but in an ideal world, this website would be one of those fabled Second Brains you hear about from tech influencers on Twitter: comprehensive, indexable, easily written to. I'm probably only like 30% of the way there on any of those—but I'm getting better all the time.