Thursday 3 September 2015

Quitting time

For years I've had a large backlog of blog post drafts to draw on here. I wrote myself new software to deal with them all and make sure I was posting only the highest quality thoughts here, at least of the ones I'd written down.

Right now, as of this second, I have just one entry left in my backlog, and I think it's terrible. I haven't been writing much new for a while now. I've been posting more than I've been writing, anyway, so the number has been rapidly shrinking. I think I passed the threshold of actual quality a little while ago, and started deleting more posts unfinished than I found worthy of posting.

I've been scraping the bottom of the barrel for a couple of months, is what I'm saying, and I think it might be time to call it quits. Bye, guys. It's been ... well, it's been exhausting and, ultimately, pointless, in fact, but it's helped me sometimes.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I can't believe I've been doing this for ten years.
PPS - And over 3500 posts, too.

Wednesday 2 September 2015

Summarising

I don't summarise well. I always feel like anything I say needs a lot more context to make sense, so I try to add it, either starting a long way before the point I should, or rambling on a long time after the point is clear. When I try to summarise, I go to the end point I'm trying to make, but still feel the urge to fill in more details after the fact.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I feel like I should add more to this.
PPS - But that would demonstrate a stunning lack of self-awareness.

Tuesday 1 September 2015

Validation through memorisation

In primary school, I remember a kind of status indicator being the memorisation of song lyrics (at our age, mostly that meant Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer, if I recall). I placed great importance at that time on my memorisation abilities, and now I wonder if I have ever really grown out of that. I attend trivia competitions regularly, though my knowledge is narrow rather than broad. I still take pains to learn song lyrics, not just to be able to sing along, but to be able to impress people by singing along. The urge still happens to me to this day. So I'm really not sure I ever grew out of that need for external validation, and that idea that having an impressive memory is the way to get it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wish I didn't need external validation to feel good about myself.
PPS - It would simplify my life enormously.