Addenda – First year

I’ve been doing this blog thing for almost a year now, and I’ve written some things that I think require further explanation. I’ve also changed my opinions on some of what I’ve written about, and just outright said things I wish I hadn’t. So I’m going to try and go over as much of that as I can. I don’t know if this’ll be comprehensive, there might be things I forget to cover just like how there are things I forgot to include in other posts (which btw I will also try to put in this one if I remember), but I’ll try my best. I’m not going to go in chronological order, or any other order either, I’ll just be talking about things as I’m reminded of them. If I’m still writing in a year, I’ll probably have a whole load more things like this bugging me so there may some day be a part 2 to this as well.

Ok so first I want to talk about this particular post which I wrote in February, it was kind of about this book Travels In Nihilon, but I got pretty distracted so it’s about a whole lot more than the actual content of the book itself. In particular there are two things about it that bug me, and I want to talk about here. Firstly I just said a lot about things that I know very little about, and that’s fine but I feel like maybe the way I wrote that post was in an authoritative tone which is undeserved. Not the stuff about nihilism, I think I made it clear that I know I’m uneducated on the subject and I was giving an outsider’s perspective on it. I’m more talking about what I said about Plato and his ideas. I’m not a philosophy student, I’ve read a couple of philosophical works including a translated copy of one of Plato’s dialogues but that’s it. I just feel like I didn’t make it clear enough that I understand that I don’t really know what I’m talking about when it comes to this stuff.

Which is important, I am fully aware that to anyone who actually knows about this stuff I look like a moron. I know this maybe seems like a small thing to worry about, but I worry about small things what can I say. I’m also planning on starting to read more philosophy in the near future, and I expect I’ll maybe realise how much I’ve misunderstood some major philosophical concepts. Which kind of leads me into the second thing, something that I’ve talked about in loads of posts but I know that I definitely did in this one. Which is the distinction I’ve noticed between more official definitions of words and the way they’re actually used by “normal people”. In fact it came up in the last post I wrote, only a week or so ago.

I don’t actually think I’ve changed my mind about any of what I’ve already said on this subject, though I do have some more to say, the only problem is that I naïvely implied that this was some unique insight or perspective of mine. To give myself some credit, in that very post I did say that I think this idea is probably not something only I notice, but even that is stupidly short sighted. Of course people must have noticed this, it’s not in any way a profound or undocumented thing. I think it’s just a cope, and any long term readers of this blog will be aware of my crusade against “copes”. I think that it’s so easy to become convinced that any kind of slightly interesting thing we think of is “new”, but realistically there’s thousands of years of scientific/ philosophical/ anthropological and linguistic literature.

I don’t believe that we’ve reached a point where there’s no new ideas, of course not, but we’ve reached a point where the random epiphanies of the man of the street have all been documented, chronicled and expanded upon enough. The new knowledge will come from response and research, it will build upon the work of others or on complex observations, there will be no more philosophers in one sense of how that term is used. This archetypal image we have of a figure who is completely out of the loop and yet has these world changing ideas, is a thing of the long gone past. There isn’t going to be another Heraclitus or Thales of Miletus, you or I are not going to be someone like that.

Just look at the increasingly complicated language of philosophical writings over the centuries, a lot of people use the term obscurantism to describe it and say that philosophy today is all just word salad jacking off with no real purpose. I was even convinced of this for a while, but now I just realise that there’s so much that has been said that needs to be reconciled and I kind of understand. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to grasp any of it, or if I’m too much of a low IQ brainlet, but I’ll give it a go. This isn’t some kind of defence of ivory tower academia either, I never went to university. In fact I didn’t even really have a formal education after the age of 15, I stayed in education after that for a couple years but I wasn’t really there. I dropped out before I actually dropped out. I’m just saying how it seems to me that the pursuit of knowledge has evolved.

Now speaking of this language problem, I think in talking and thinking about it in the past I didn’t realise quite the extent of the situation. See in my mind there was simply this distinction between the official or “true” definition of a word and then it’s devolved or degenerated usage as I viewed this change at the time. Thinking about it more though, it goes so much further than that. In a way almost everyone has a slightly different definition for most words, for a number of reasons. I mean take the context in which we learn a new word, we learn it in relation to other words. Words come in sentences after all, not as standalone items. This, you could say, colours how we view this particular word and it’s meaning. You’ll always have this personal baggage attached to certain words that no one else will.

I said in that same post that it seems to me there are two kinds of word, those that describe purely material things, like table, tree, foot, etc. and those that describe less tangible things like fear, essence, even a word like home. Now I know that it’s like a pseud calling card to dichotomise things like that (in my view there’s two kinds of X) but there is a distinction here. When two people meet, like when the European settlers first went to sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas, they point to these objective things as the starting point for trying to understand one another. In fact there’s even an African country (I think Senegal) today which means “boat” in the native tongue, because that was the first word learned by the visitors. You have to learn a new language with these sorts of words, and then when you can communicate that way and you have a foundation you can learn more abstract or conceptual terms from there using these words as the context.

Again I’m not a linguist, nor have I even been able to even learn another language, but I don’t see how it could be any other way. You have to have a basis, how can a word like “fear”, for example, be explained without some reference to those things which make one feel fearful. Yes those things also might be abstract, the distinction isn’t perfect it’s more like the colours on a rainbow, and I’ve used this metaphor before talking about something else and probably will again as it’s very applicable. There is clearly a distinction between any two colours on the spectrum that lie next to one another, but at the meeting point you don’t find a hard line you find a blurry inbetween stage.

One of the words I chose for my example, “table”, is a good example of this. It’s a man-made object, it’s not something that just exists to be described with a sound. Even though it does seem there is a universal understanding of table-ness, tied up in the word is this mental image of the building of a table and the idea of the purpose of this thing that we made. An apple doesn’t require a defence, it doesn’t need to have a purpose it simply is. We built a table though, and that must be justified. Still I would consider it in the first category because you could simply look at a table, make a sound and we could all agree that that sound means “table”. It doesn’t need anything else, so the closest I can get to a hard distinction is to say there are words that require other words and there are those that do not.

Anyway I mention this distinction (which I admit is imperfect) because words that are solidly inside the “simple object” box are impossible to have this change in definition happen to them that I’ve talked about before, and translation is something I’ve been thinking about lately. An apple will always be an apple, and not only that but that makes it far easier to translate as well. There is a perfect substitute word for apple in every language except for one spoken by people who have never seen an apple before. It’s this second category that is vulnerable to this misuse, but there lies the problem in my thinking up until this point. See why assume that the older definition is the right one? Let’s say that a word’s original academic usage is completely forgotten, and the newer colloquial usage becomes universal rather than just widespread. Dictionaries describe it in this new way, and so on. Is everyone using the word wrong? What about if one person finds an old dictionary which does have this older definition, now that there does exist one example still of the older meaning of the word, now is everyone wrong? I don’t know.

Most words we have today are derived from other words, or have older definitions that are lost. Many words derive from other words in entirely different and older languages. So it seems that as long as an older definition exists somewhere, there will be people who hold it in higher regard. I’ve been doing this, but why? It clearly doesn’t stand the test of time, the public at large is modifying it for a reason surely. These same people like me will say that the language is being dumbed down, but maybe that’s just a cope. Maybe the word is made more effective, more useful, through this evolution. I imagine that this process has probably sped up considerably in tandem with the increase in literacy/ education among the general population that has happened over the last 150 years or so.

I suppose it doesn’t matter though, because like I said to a much lesser degree the meaning held by any two people using this word is also going to be different. Words carry certain connotations for some people that they don’t for others, because of the context in which we learn them and hear them used later. Sure you’ll get these people to agree on a standard definition, or at least the definition they hold in their minds is incredibly similar, but it’s not a perfect match. It never can be, we will always be talking past one another to some degree. The more abstract a conversation is, the more this will be the case. It seems like all words are in a state of flux, there are these larger definitional changes that take place on a societal level but this happens because of the constant but very minor changes that happen every time someone new learns a word. Perhaps this broader change is in fact just the result of this smaller process, after enough time has passed.

There’s a lot of other stuff to get to though, so let’s move on now. I think the next thing I want to quickly go back to is a post from the very early days. From the very first month of writing actually, a period which when compared to the later stuff just bugs me. See that first month has more posts than any other, but I didn’t even start the blog until half way through the month almost. I was writing constantly, I was trying to distract myself by writing about what I was trying to distract myself from. Which seems counter-intuitive when I say it like that, but it made a sort of sense at the time. I kind of regret that entire period, but at the same time it’s was very honest and it’s what kicked this entire blog off so I’m also glad for it.

The post I linked is the second to last post from that month, and the entire idea behind that post was that I would “ride a train of thought” as the title says and so I didn’t really talk about anything in particular detail but rather breezed through various things I was thinking about at the time. I started it though by talking about one of the things I had been talking about all month, which was this possibly accidental message from someone I hardly knew and expected never to hear from ever again. There has actually been some update to that situation, which was that it was made clear that it was definitely still her using the same number, but I didn’t mention it in another post because frankly I’m very embarrassed that I ever cared so much about this. I really am kind of mortified every time I have to go back and read one of the posts from this month that were about this (other than the first, which on it’s own I’m quite happy with), I don’t like that it’s recorded and potentially someone I know could find it and see how pathetic I was being.

That’s why I haven’t talked about anything to do with any of that stuff since, other than to express a kind of regret. Again though only a kind, because I understand that if I hadn’t have written those posts I wouldn’t have then gone on to do what I’ve done since with this blog. Which is nothing special, but I’m happy with it. I’ve been thinking a lot about what the point is to any of this, what is the value to me writing any of what I’ve written rather than keeping it to myself, and I think right now my position is that it is a good insight into the life and mind of someone like me. After all there are quite a lot of people out there like me, and sure I’m an individual and I talk about my individual experiences and thoughts but I definitely fit a type.

Since I’ve started spending more time on /lit/ and less time on /r9k/ I’ve come across the posts of this minor board celebrity generally known on there as London Frog. The name is given because every thread he makes uses a picture of le sad facebook frog (like the one in my profile for this blog) and because he lives in London and often talks about his aimless walks through the city. He’s supposedly been posting since 2015 or possibly earlier than that even, and every post follows a very similar format. Some speculate that he is performing an elaborate multi year long troll job, but I think he’s actually presenting an accurate depiction of his day to day life. He has a sense of humour sure, the long running gag that every binge he engages is in will be his last being the best example of this. I was actually thinking about writing a whole post about him, and I may still at some point, but recently someone decided to start compiling all his posts.

Here’s the link to the first two volumes, the guy doing this says he has enough to make two more and maybe he’ll go back through the archive for the older posts as well, so I will either come back to this post and edit in the links to those when they’re available or I’ll include the links to everything when I write my full post about the least famous frog in London. Here’s volume 1, and volume 2, they’re definitely worth a read even if reading them all together like this isn’t quite the same experience as encountering his newest post as it comes out. I’m not sure if he is happy about this collection, I’ve not seen a single new post from him since the first volume was posted a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully he’s still around, and will post more, he’s an interesting character.

Anyway my point is that whatever the value there is in reading London Frog’s collected posts, or My Twisted World for that matter, that exists here as well. I expect that my writings will only ever be seen by a small group of people, but hopefully some of them will gain an insight into what life was like for a certain subset of people in the early 21st century. I think in particular from my posts, the one common theme that you get that you don’t get in the other mentioned projects or writings is the constant confusion or uncertainty. At least it’s not as prominent a theme, there are other more prominent themes in those other works in turn that aren’t so well presented here.

I’d say that feelings of anger and resentment are what you get from MTW, not just because of his actions but you get that feeling throughout the work itself. The killings are part of the work though, as I’ve talked about before. MTW is one single document, and in part it exists to justify this act of rage. LondonFrog makes short posts n an anonymous imageboard, and he deliberately seems to not just repeat himself in action but he literally reuses stock phrases over and over and has done for years. It’s a perfect way of expressing the feeling we all have that life is going nowhere. See I talk about my feeling of resentment sometimes, and I talk about my fears about how I’m wasting my life frequently, but those things are much better presented by these other works.

When I try to read my posts as they would appear to someone else, I think what stands out most is doubt. There’s the self doubt of course, and there’s the constant second guessing and suspicion about what other people are doing or “what they really meant” and so on, I often talk about how I’m not sure my own feelings are reliable. In reading back through my own writing I’ve noticed this is present throughout, whatever the subject I talk about I find it impossible to say anything with conviction. I had to make this very post because in one case my qualifying statements about my lack of trust in my own point of view were still not enough for me to feel comfortable.

So that post, “Riding a train of thought”, is notable because it’s the last time I spoke about that situation. However, I said in that post that I didn’t regret sending the second message I sent. The one where I asked why she messaged me in the first place. I feel quite differently about that now, I do regret it. I never should have sent that, it actually led to a pretty awkward situation and even if it hadn’t it was just such a stupid thing to do. I should have moved on and stopped thinking about it as soon as my first reply got no response. I just don’t understand why I cared so much, of course it’s easy to look back in hindsight and be more detached, but I’m just disappointed in myself for being so weak.

Ok, now I want to talk about this post from a few months ago. In this case I actually do have some new information/ experience that has changed my perspective, but even before that I had regrets about my wording. I’m talking specifically about calling my co-worker a thot, I just feel mean about it and also I was wrong. Now that word is used quite differently by different people, as are all of them I know I was just talking about this, but the personal definitions seem to diverge particularly for this and other “internet-era” slang terms. So I gave a description of what I mean when I use it in that post, if you need to know.

Now recently there’s been some changes at work, and now a few days a week because it’s getting busier two of us have to work the same shift. Which means that instead of spending a few minutes with my co-workers at a time I now sometimes have to spend several hours with them. I mean I’ve only been given this shift twice, and once was not planned, but I will probably have to do it again. Is it because I make everyone else uncomfortable that I’m put there less than everyone else, and they don’t want to work with me? I don’t know, but I’ve certainly considered that. Anyway one of the two shifts I had was with this girl, and naturally we were chatting to pass the time, and I just remember thinking that I was probably unfairly harsh in my judgement of her.

I don’t remember the specific moment, or even what we were talking about, but I just remember that at some point I was reminded of that post and I felt kind of bad about it. See there was something I was going to say in that post but I forgot to include it. Which was that I probably would come across very similarly to how she came across to me, if I could see my interactions with my co-workers from a third person perspective. Of course the smalltalk I have with them is boring, it’s fucking smalltalk. I can’t realistically expect to get a good impression of how interesting or thoughtful someone is from the kind of very brief interactions I was having with all of them until this change. So I’m saying that now, I should have said it then. Unfortunately this happens a lot because of the way I write these posts. I don’t really draft or plan them out it’s more of a thought dump, in fact it was an anon who first described them that way. I have bullet points in my head that I want to cover, but often as in this case I forget some of them.

Ok moving on again I will now be talking about a very recent post, Blackpill nights. Before I say anything about it I’ll just say that I did edit this the other day. I didn’t change or remove anything already there, I wouldn’t ever do that, I just added an image halfway through and an explanatory line about it. Now the problem I have with this post is that it kind of comes across like I’m trying to brag or boast. I’m not, but I am looking for affirmation as I even said in the post itself. See the point of that post was, well what I was just talking about, an expression of this doubt that is everywhere in my life. Because if on the one hand I have all these examples of women/ girls who were definitely interested in me, but yet I reached the age of 21 (soon to be 22) without ever even having kissed a girl, then clearly something doesn’t add up.

So I have all these anecdotes, these memories, but I start to second guess myself. Maybe I’m remembering completely wrongly, maybe these memories I think I have are false. My thinking was that by writing them down, and alongside a more current memory that I know for certain isn’t misremembered, I can stop this growing doubt. Because I’m willing to admit it, I do get an esteem boost from reminding myself of these things that happened. Because they did happen and I don’t want to lose them to this false doubt, and I know it’s a false doubt because I had this more recent memory. By having it recorded, and knowing that other people will see it, it feels more real and less like it’s all in my head. The funny thing is I actually decided not to include quite a few more anecdotes because I was starting to feel like I was being excessive or I was bragging. I’m aware that most people in my situation don’t have similar experiences, I even had someone tell me that they lost interest in reading my posts after that one. Which I understand, as unfortunate as that is.

In fact last sunday at work I was possibly “hit on”, or whatever you want to call it, again. This woman, who seemed quite a bit older than me got off the bus and came into the shop. She was wearing all this gym gear (she was a “personal trainer” I found out later) and she was asking me loads of questions and kept smirking and muttering things to herself. Now customers ask questions and try to chat often so I didn’t think anything of it, but then she asked when I close the shop. I answered normally, and she followed up with “so then you can go home?” and I said that after that I have to clean and stock up so not quite, at which point her demeanour changed slightly and she seemed colder. Now I can’t say for sure whether she was implying she wanted to “hang out” after I finished, but she did seem to have a similar demeanour and body language that I’ve noticed in cases where women were more overt about their interest.

The original title I had in mind for that post was “Blackpill’s a lie” (like the Ariel Pink song, Revolution’s a lie) and I think I should have stuck with it because that much better reflects what should be the real main take away from that entry. Yes I wanted a reason to share those memories as I said, but I wanted the stuff I ended the post on where I talked about my doubts about “blackpill ideology” to be the real point. After all that’s why I ended it on that, so it would be the last thing on your mind. Maybe you disagree, but I think that a slight change in the title while keeping the rest of the post exactly the same would have made quite the difference. I might not have even felt the need to bring it up again in this post.

I don’t think there’s anything else for me to say, I can’t think of anything right now anyway and this post is nearly 5000 words long already. I’m sure that as soon as I upload it I’ll realise there was something else I wanted to cover, that’d be just my luck, but it can’t be that important. Everything that has been really bugging me is dealt with now, I think. Oh, that’s right. I was messing around with the settings the other day and I found out that I could remove the e-mail address requirement for posting a comment. So now people can just comment anonymously without having to put their e-mail address in, not sure why that requirement was set in the first place but it’s gone now. Hopefully I might start to get some comments now, or not. Thanks for reading to the end anyway.

The rise and fall and rise again of Anon

I’m struggling to think of anything interesting to talk about lately, and I’m also finding it hard to write the next part of the series going through my old books, but I do have something I’ve been thinking about maybe writing for a while. That is an update on what I’m trying to do here with this blog. See when I started I wasn’t quite sure what I had planned but whatever it was things have slightly changed. You can see for yourself the difference if you care to look through the posts from the first couple months. See in the beginning it was more autobiographical, I was talking about myself a lot more and even when I wasn’t I was still being more personal. So I would talk about what music I was listening to and the few actual things that were happening in my life, the kind of stuff you associate with the term “blog” funnily enough, but I stopped all of that because it felt kind of cringy and forced.

So when I first started I had a few entries that were basically just “my diary desu”, and they were all pretty awful other than the first one. I actually started off that post by saying that I was going to be using this blog as a diary, which is pretty embarrassing looking back. I’m not a 12 year old girl, I don’t need a diary, and the fact that I was so conceited as to presume anyone in the world would give a shit also makes me cringe a little. However in my defence, as you can tell if you’ve read that post I was clearly in a weakened state of mind at the time. Also that first entry, despite being a little self indulgent, was a pretty good one I think. It served it’s purpose, it was really helpful for me to get it all out, and I think I did a good job of finding the right balance between being impassioned and intelligible. I feel a bit weird wanking myself off so much about it, but people did seem to like that post so I think it’s fair to say it was a good one.

In fact if it hadn’t got such a good response from other anons for that initial main post I might have just ended it there (the blog I mean), but on the other hand because people did like it I perhaps tried to recreate it when I shouldn’t have. Like I said all the other entries like that were pretty bad, just as narcissistic but far less interesting and insightful. In fact I kind of had a feeling that would be the case before it happened, in the third post I wrote (which is a perfect example of one of the bad ones) pretty soon after that one linked above I was already planning to try and do something else with this blog, which is why I then went on to write that post about school shootings which was the fourth post and the one that has basically set the tone for this entire “project” from that point forward. However I still wrote quite a few more shitty “diary entry” style posts after that which were all bad and I’m only keeping them because I like being able to see how this thing has evolved.

So speaking of that fourth post, that’s a perfect example of what I was talking about in the opening paragraph to this one in that I kind of feel like it’s crucially flawed because I felt the need to keep that personal/ friendly vibe even though it doesn’t really fit. In fact if anything it takes away from what I’m trying to get across. The joke at the end about the song I was listening to feels out of place, especially without the context of the other posts I’d made so far. As a standalone piece of writing it doesn’t work because of that sort of thing. I guess I thought that I was putting a bit more personality in there, and in the specific case of mentioning a song helping to explain the kind of mood/ vibe I was trying to get across. I worry sometimes that people might miss that, I talk about things that are serious bidniss but it’s funny too. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying I’m funny, I’m saying I find things funny.

Now talking about myself or trying to be kind of tongue in cheek isn’t necessarily a bad thing in every case, but it has to be done right. I just don’t think I had found the right balance yet, maybe I still haven’t and I’ll feel the same about what I’m writing at the moment in half a year, but again I’ll keep all my posts up because I like seeing how this thing has evolved. Both in regard to the actual subjects I talk about, because of course I reference back to things in older posts a lot, and in terms of the structure and style of writing. I don’t know if I’m improving “objectively” because I don’t get any feedback, I’ve had two comments in my entire time writing, but I just feel like as time has gone on my posts have only become better examples of how I actually think and want to come across to people. Well not exactly, there was a slump for a few months where I kind of hit a wall and I was feeling like my best work was behind me, but I think since last January I’ve having a pretty good run.

Now I will almost certainly still talk about events in my life, both current and in the past, but only really as a means to talk about something more interesting I think. It’s nice to have the option to vent and just have someone in the world to hear (or read) what problems I’m going through, and so hypothetically there’ll be a post like that down the line, but I have a pretty fucking boring life so it’s not that likely. Speaking of using an experience as a jumping off point I have an idea for a post about a certain film that came out at the end of 2017 and I’d probably have to talk about my specific experience watching it (twice, and at the cinema alone one of those times) in that post. I know I said at the beginning of this that I didn’t have ideas, I started writing this yesterday and this idea came to me today.

Now looking back at my initial introductory post it seems like it still works just fine, but again it kind of has that kind forced friendliness/ jokiness and that just sets the wrong tone. I also notice looking back at it that I was maybe a bit too optimistic about the potential audience I could get for this. See I’ve already talked about this all before but I am a little disappointed that so few people want to stick around, and that I never get any comments. I mean it’s weird because most of what small audience I do have are people from r9k so it’s not like they don’t have opinions of their own on the things I tend to talk about. I was kind of hoping that there would be interesting discussions in the comments, that I could recreate a sort of microcosm of the few interesting and thoughtful threads that used to be more frequent years ago. Those threads used to feel like a good discussion between friends, and the experience with this blog instead of being like that as I hoped is more just like me sending a series of long e-mails about my opinions.

I know that people are hearing me, and I know that if they’re coming back they at least think my takes are interesting. The few times I’ve just openly shilled and tried to tell people about this elsewhere I’ve been given a positive response. In the thread I was talking about last time I not only got a really positive response in the thread itself, I also got the most views in a single day I’ve ever had. Maybe I should just shill more frequently, I’ve only actually done so maybe four or five times, and every time I get someone who sticks around for a while at least. It just feels a bit slimy and gross trying to advertise or openly beg people for attention. Because I do this for free, I don’t own the domain and so I cannot (and do not wish to) make money off of this, it doesn’t feel that bad but it’s still not something I feel comfortable doing.

In a way it’s kind of analogous to that thing normalfags always say about how “you don’t ever approach women, so why do you expect a relationship?”, I’ve noticed they really like to do this when Elliot Rodger is brought up. Well we all know how ridiculous that kind of point of view is if you look at the implication behind that statement, that all or most relationships start from a cold approach, of course they fucking don’t almost none do. So perhaps I’ve unconsciously recognised that parallel and that’s why I have this very prideful attitude regarding trying to “promote” or ask people to visit my blog. You’ve probably heard the expression “the cream rises to the top”, the idea being that things of value will just be recognised by people through some kind of force of nature. I guess I’m stupidly holding on to that, and because I’ve been here writing and have found so few who are interested in what I have to say maybe it really does mean what I’m doing isn’t very good.

I hope that’s not the case, there’s nothing more pathetic than someone with no talent or ability throwing themselves against a brick wall week after week deluding themselves that their brilliance is just unrecognised right now. I really never want to be that person, it’s why I can never really commit to anything. I really struggle to stick to anything without positive reinforcement and even then I usually doubt the nice words I receive. I’m surprised I’ve continued with this for so long, it’s quite fun I suppose and I have a lot of free time with nothing else to do. Nevertheless part of me does think that perhaps I am doing something valuable or at least interesting because as I said whenever I do ask people to check the blog out there are always some new people who think so. In fact I’ve only ever done so on 4chan, where almost everything gets shat on and torn apart and I’ve never actually had a single bad thing said about what I’m doing. Not even something mild like that it’s a waste of time, as I often fear myself. I’m not sure what to think.

A change of pace

I haven’t been on the ball at all lately, I’ve really fallen behind and I’m not quite sure why. Nothing has really happened, in fact I’m actually quite motivated at the moment, but I’m just not doing anything about it. I started my last post, thinking it was something novel and interesting, but while working on it I lost faith in the whole idea. Now this is only a part of it, because I also just became less engaged because the idea was not as good as I originally thought, but I’d say that not having a single visitor for around two weeks might have affected my losing interest. I don’t like that it bothers me so much, and that it’s becoming something I seem to whine about so often, but it certainly is interesting that when my posts are well received (or actually more importantly, just often received) I find it easier to write and I write better. Not that I’m saying I ever write well, I don’t think I do, but what I write is better I mean.

So that post was one of the longest to finish of all of the ones I’ve uploaded, and partly this was because I took a break for about three or four days and didn’t even look at the blog at all. Instead, I’ve been trying to read more, for those few days I read for a good few hours each. The book I was reading was Herodotus’ The Histories, which I bought a copy of (Translated by Robin Waterfield) a long while ago, but dropped it about half of the way in and I didn’t pick it back up until last week. Funnily enough, the second half is quite different and much more focused than the first. So I’ve found it a lot easier to stick with it. The winding first half which follows the first three Persian kings as they build their empire, veering off into various fantastical stories from the many places they conquered, is interesting sure but it also drags in places. I’ve just found, surprisingly, that the story of the invasions of Greece by Darius and later Xerxes was much more engaging.

Anyway, I’ve also been spending a lot of time on /lit/, which is not my usual board at all. I’ve spent more time there this last week than the sum total of time spent during all my other visits. I did originally just go to check the sticky, because I know they have that start with the greeks chart and reading what I was and the fact that I’ve been reminded of when I read The Republic (and probably barely understood it) a few times over the last couple of months I thought maybe now is the time. I ended up just sticking around though, and enjoying it quite a lot. It might sound strange, but I quite liked that there were conversations that I felt unqualified to join in with. Feeling out of my depth almost, it inspires me to read and learn so that I will be able to keep up with the discussion some time in the future. So, over this week I said to myself I would do exactly that.

I’ve mostly stuck to it so far, I’ve definitely spent at least some time reading (even if only half an hour some days) every day since that period of a few days where I finished The Histories. I’ve had to make do with this book I got as a present years ago and never gave a read, The Crying Of Lot 49, it’s awful if I’m being honest but pretty short and it’s something to read until my copy of Thucydides’ History of The Peloponnesian War arrives. That’s the next book I’ve ordered, and I’m not listing all these off just to flex on whoever is reading this so I hope it doesn’t seem that way. Honestly it might sound rather impressive hearing all these ancient greek names, but the books I’m reading are famously written in simple language. Herodotus’ writing is a common choice for people trying to learn to read ancient greek because it’s so clear and easy to grasp, and I’m just reading a translation into English. I do have a MEGA link to all the works attributed to Plato though, which actually is pretty fucking intimidating, and if I get through all of that and actually understand it well then I think I’d have a reason to be somewhat impressed with myself.

So because of all of this, and because I’ve kind of been finding it harder and harder to consistently write a good post every single week, I’ve decided to upload more irregularly. I’ll still try to consistently be writing, so at any one time there’ll be a post I’m working on, but I just don’t want to have this deadline hanging over my head. Instead of feeling I need to rush to finish a post that I’ve been having more trouble with, I’ll just keep working on it longer. It seems to me, that I’ve established myself now on here, I don’t really see anything changing where I’ll suddenly experience any kind of significant audience growth. I might gain a new regular reader every couple months, but I also lose one as well. What I’ve realised, after this most recent long gap without any visitors, is that those few of you who have stuck around this far don’t even want to read a new post of mine every single week, but you probably will check back in eventually. There should be something new, most of the time. In fact it’s already been a week since the mess I uploaded last week, and I doubt I’ll be able to finish this today as I’m working until 22:30 tonight and going in soon.

Another good thing that should result from this is there’ll be no more of these shitty update/ filler posts, like this one. It’s hard to really tell what you few regular long term readers like, but I know that the only “likes” I get from one off visitors are on the posts where I talk about ideas rather than whining about my own life. I mean, I talk about my life and things that happen to me in those posts also sometimes, but it’s a case of me using observations, memories, or dreams as a jumping off point to talk about something more… cerebral I suppose (is that a pretentious thing to say) rather than writing a post about those things themselves. I also prefer those, as even though it is sometimes satisfying to just use this blog as a diary none of the posts I’m really proud of are those kind. There’s this kind of non-story of my life which one might pick up if they were to read through everything I’ve uploaded here, and there’s these one off vignettes which while they also build on one another could be understood without any context.

Well that’s not entirely true, I do write my posts with some kind of prior assumptions about the world settled already. The problem is, I hate talking about something that has been done to death, for the same reason I very rarely watch a film more than once. It’s easy to forget that what a lot of the ideas that I talk about here are built on top of isn’t actually accepted by most normalfags. I’ve spent so many years of my adolescence on 4chan and so on that I forget how different my perspective was before, and how differently I see the world. I’m not the only one who does this, nowadays (and ironically I’m about to state something that is exactly what I hate, an opinion we’ve all heard hundreds of times that is always presented as a new or fresh perspective) it is true that a lot of people, at least online, are stuck in echo chambers. So because of only talking to likeminded people all the time, all the assumptions and nuances of their underlying worldview don’t even come up when they start expressing ideas of their own.

Not that that means anything, even if the whole world is doing things the wrong way it doesn’t mean you should too. I’m not sure that it is “the wrong thing to do” though, in this case. I mean maybe it’s another factor preventing me from gaining more readers, and that’s a shame, but what can I do about it? I’m not making any money or getting anything out of this, other than the very enjoyment of writing and expressing my ideas. If you just want to hear people express ideas you already hold there’s thousands of blogs, and youtube channels and online magazines that will cater to that demand. This ties back into the main point of this post, why I’m going to drop the weekly schedule thing. I’m doing this for fun, I don’t see the point in holding myself to this arbitrary standard that only adds stress to my life when the whole point of the blog is to wind down and/ or vent about things in order to lessen some of the stress I have. So, I’ll be uploading less often but not a great deal less. Other than that, not much else should change.