Internet time-wasting habit I need to get rid of: compulsively Googling things just because I don’t know what they are, even when I can infer from context that they are very likely to be uninteresting
According to a date calculator I just used, it’s been 280 days since TNC ended. In that time I’ve written a few short silly one-offs, like the Ulysses slash or the one about “the model,” but nothing long-form. Am I ever going to start again?
The answer is “yes, but not yet.” There is a novel I am planning to write; I have a bunch of notes, and part of a chapter written. If I were taking the same approach I did on the last two projects, I would start posting chapters publicly the moment I finish the first one, and wing it from there with no set schedule. This time, I want to plan the plot beforehand in more detail, and I want to have a buffer, so that I only post chapter X when I’ve finished chapter X+N, for some N. And some of the planning that I want to do involves going down some academic rabbit holes that I’m honestly not sure I’ll be up to traversing. (Greg Egan type stuff.)
This all means that this novel is going to trade off against real work more than the other two did. I have been pretty busy with real work this year – indeed, I did so much writing in 2015 partly as a way of avoiding real work, and I (roughly speaking) resolved at the start of this year to get more serious. My current plan has me staying busy at least through this October. So I can’t imagine anything will appear until this December at the earliest.
Part of me worries that I’m over-correcting and being overly cautious this time, and that this new “responsible” mode of writing is incompatible with my actual sources of inspiration (which include “seeing how people respond in real time” and “getting excited about how I’m adding something new to reality”). With this in mind, I might throw some content out to the public before “the time is right” and see if its very presence motivates me to keep going.
“Born and raised in South Detroit” sounds like it ought to be a meaningful characteristic, and for the longest time I assumed that if I were more culturally literate, I would hear the lyric and instantly picture an archetypical South Detroit boyhood, whatever that is
But it turns out that there is no such place as “South Detroit,” and the lyric was chosen by a writer who didn’t know that, just because it sounded good
I really like this because I feel like I’m always missing context and placing a lot of weight on immediate aesthetics – but sometimes that’s what the rest of the world is doing too
I often find horror stories relaxing. I mean, not jump scares or gore or anything that’s going for a physiological fear reaction. But creepypasta and stuff in that general area, say
I think it’s because the entertainment value of horror stories is especially robust to dips in my mood? Even in good time I am still always liable to have sudden feelings of inexplicable dread, intimations that “there’s something horribly wrong here and I just haven’t noticed yet.” With most kinds of entertainment such feelings would draw me out of the experience. With the right kinds of horror, those feelings can’t break the mood because they already are the mood. In the atmosphere of horror-storytelling my intrinsic feelings of horror may not be pleasant but they are not, at least, unwelcome.
Step 1: notice “this is a recreation activity, but I’m not enjoying it”
Step 2: acknowledge “I could stop doing this at any time”
Step 3: stop
I am getting to step 2 more often and I need to practice moving on to step 3
OK, new rule, I am not arguing about “rationalists” or their qualities or goodness/badness, period
The latest hot take seems to be “’rationalist tumblr’ doesn’t acknowledge the existence/experiences of autistic women” (here, more vitriolically here) and like. I could say things! I could say a lot of things! But my desire to say things is predicated on me liking the blog posts of individual people or caring about individual people and once the word “rationalist” gets involved the well is irreversibly poisoned, or more accurately there become two tracks to the conversation, one of which is about individual people and their qualities, and one of which is about “the rationalists,” whoever they are, and the two only meet in the dark of night in the most obscure and oblique ways
I guess some of my friends are “””rationalists,””” and some of my favorite blogs are by “””rationalists,””” and I myself may transform into a “””rationalist””” under certain phases of the discursive moon, but my god, I just do not care about this word and its strange glancing contact with actual human reality, and every time I am tempted to say anything involving the word “rationalists” I am going to put down the computer and read a book
I’m still holding to this rule and let me tell you, it feels good
I do not judge anyone else for arguing about the nature and boundaries of the concept “rationalist,” but I do recommend reflecting on whether these conversations are really worth having, for you personally
Really curious to what extent “frequently disagreeing with me” is a necessary condition for me to perceive someone (online) as standoffish, negative, and/or intimidating
Someone who constantly criticizes things I too dislike: “probably a friendly person who just has a hobby of writing negative things on the internet about certain subjects”
Someone who constantly criticizes things I like: “prickly, scary, and easy to imagine as being those ways in meatspace personal life as well”
This is kind of disorienting to think about
It’s funny how much the conventional tumblr attitude toward “tumblr” itself has changed
In 2010-12, before I had an account, I remember being very put off by the site. Some of this was the usual objection that it’s “focused on reblogging rather than saying anything yourself,” which is less true than it looks from the outside (on the dash one tends to scroll by a lot of reblogs and to read original posts more carefully). But also I was put off by how many tumblr users seemed so enthusiastic about the shared culture created by all those popular reshared posts, like it was some secret clique. Tumblr is great because we all like the same stuff and keep showing it to one another! “Tumblr is for wizards, Facebook is for muggles.” Like man I just want to use social media to ramble about my own shit and make a few new pals, I don’t want to join a patriotic collectivist society and join in mass public celebrations of last year’s record Cumberbatch Meme harvest
Anyway, the pendulum has long since swung the other way. Casually badmouthing “tumblr,” the collective thing, is almost de rigeur. “The blue website.” Everyone is in it, but not of it. The power of reblogging to connect everyone with everyone else is now talked of in largely negative terms: the pile-ons, the endless arguments with more and more new participants, the hundreds of messages from nosy or pedantic strangers when a post gets popular
It’s not that I like negativity per se, but this largely negative attitude toward specifically large-scale social dynamics is much more congenial to me
I keep trying to write these vague flowery metaphorical posts expressing just what it is that bothers me about the thing, but i’ve discarded two long posts by now and I should stop trying. I clearly can’t articulate it well now and if I want to articulate it later, I will