What's going on with this blog; its past and future and present

Apr 25, 2025

For logistical reasons, I've deliberately stranded myself in an airport for over 6 hours, which means it's a fine time to reflect on my life and blog. (Also a great time to get through hundreds of phone browser tabs I was saving for later.) Furthermore, wine is a wonderful thing.

I must have written this blog post like 2 times before. Not because it's hard to phrase or anything. Just because I keep jotting down drafts and losing them. This is probably related to the fact that the technological system I've chosen for publishing my blog is ok, but not great for just jotting things down. Honestly, maybe I should have a Twitter instead. This is, otherwise, the opposite of everything I want to do with my life, but it would let me poast boldly into the void. If running this blog has taught me anything, it's that I don't have it in me to write a “real” blog. I already think everyone else's blogs are typically too long, and possibly too frequent, but even in my own epigrammatic bar I often fall short. Ah, well. I should be spending that time enjoying IRL instead. Anyway, maybe I should change the file format of my blog so that the titles are on the first line of each file instead of in a manually-built index. LLM tools could probably help me make this change easily; I'm not inventing the next lambda calculus here; I'm trying to move text from one file to many other files on a system whose native expressiveness unfortunately looks more like `perl -pie s/foo/bar/gim` (whatever the hell that means). That's just to complain about computers. Rest assured that e’en tho’ I will use LLMs to write code (an activity I would avoid completely if I could otherwise achieve my goals), I will never use them to write a post of mine. There's simply no point. If I were to “write” a post using an LLM based on a prompt, I might as well just type the prompt into a file and make that the post. Expand it with the LLM in your own mind. I love the top-serif on the M in the font in the program in which I am drafting this. M. m looks a bit crap, though. Well, that's the end of this extremely diverse paragraph.

Much like implicit.computer (who said this in a blog post I am not bothering to dig up, but it's a similar type of post), I don't like blogs that are abandoned and return only sporadically with posts like “I promise to post more soon”. Well, to say I dislike them would be too strong; I recognize them as an inevitable consequence of the structure. Writing a blog is an unending amount of work (as there is, I suppose, no defined end) and rarely remunerative. If anything, I prefer to say to my readers: “I am probably going to stop blogging later, to enjoy the sweet fruits of life, which I have recently rediscovered and constantly clamor after”. And then later hit them with more blogposts. 

(I have only one reader at time of writing, and you know who you are. Speaking of that one reader, I should probably accommodate him by making every post I make also a release on GitHub, so that he can GitHub subscribe to releases here. I just gamed this out in my head before realizing that I was trying to spend LESS time on this blog, not more.)

I may later republish this blog, transforming it from “random text files” to “substack.com”, in which case I will probably acquire a moderate instead of non-existent audience. You may be reading this on substack. In which case: welcome! How does the future taste? Do they still drive cars on the ground over there or do they fly yet? Anyway, I keep thinking of this idea as an idea to gain a modicum of fortune and fame, but since it would only be a modicum I may continue to not bother.

Fame, now that's a curious thing. As I've gone through my life I have observed it, and the various ways it acts upon the world. I may have something further to say about it later. Idk if it really makes sense for me to say anything about it, not being famous myself. When I was young I was warned against the allure of becoming famous. And, indeed, in some sense, I have had to observe a lot of people who aren't famous at all (everyone I meet) and a lot of people who are famous (everyone I hear about) and compare their lives (what I can glean from them, although it's difficult in either case to know what someone's life is really like) to figure out if fame is good. There are many amusing features of this, which is that I have concluded that fame is wasted on the young but if you're going to be famous you might as well enjoy it. But it's most important to live a good life, famous or not. It's also amusing to me that actors are famous. They don't do anything important. They pretend to do important things. Still, since some people want to be famous (I suspect I am one of these people, deep down) and some don't, I suppose it makes a great deal or sense, or at least practicality, to sacrifice a fairly useless profession to be the one that “has” to be famous, so they can get that for people who want that and everyone else can get on in peace and quiet.

I think it's often seen as gauche to admit you want to be famous. Desperate, even. I don't think this any longer. There are many taboos against wanting obviously desirable things, but my philosophical training has beaten it out of me. I also find the snickering at good things boring and cringe. We've tried this kind of cool disregard for the good long enough, and it's just given us less good in the world. And less good in the hearts and lives of people who act that way.

Well, I ran out of time at the airport. I hope this post said everything I wanted it to, whatever the hell that was. So yeah I guess I'm going to refactor my blog software and then finish up a pile of blog posts I have half-finished (and probably start some new ones along the way) and then forget about my blog again until another obsession strikes me.