Perish the thought
Its always hard to come up with good ideas about what to write; thinking about what to say mere moments before saying something because you think you have to say something is a classic. Unless you actually have something to say and are not starting on a blank page. Then comes QA. Whatever I'm saying is good enough to be heard? Perish the thought anyone has said something without thinking about it too much. Ctrl+w, lets try again tomorrow.
Part of the problem about "don't think about it too much" principle is that its not actionable unless you already know how to think less about something. In this case its actually easier to do the opposite in opposite direction after some introspection - what am I thinking about so much? Could I think more about the exact opposite? QA comes again, notice the presence of QA to begin with. Then think about the opposite of QA.
The opposite of the ideal "everyone will love it" isn't "everyone will hate it". Instead, "nobody will care". QA's efforts will be in vain because no one will actually read the rest of things they've edited and anyone who did didn't care enough to spare more than some minutes thinking about it. The real axis isn't helpfulness, its attention. Noticing, its not enough to inhabit your corner of the internet, but to make sure that your corner exists and its real - if only you saw the invisible/impalpable/intractable dragon in the garage, how would you go and say that there's a dragon in the garage? Its real only for me, sure.
Perish the thought anyone has ever had crazy personal beliefs. Maybe I am crazy for believing my invisible/impalpable/intractable corner of the internet exists.
Enough of this. It factually does. There is factually, a domain and a place where I can publish things and these things can be read. I cannot overestimate just how how important it is to be able to discover things here on bear. Its also the possibility of being discovered when writing things and shaping an environment. Enough chances of ensuring your corner of the internet actually exists outside of the realm of the hypothetical "actually, you do have a corner of the internet after getting this domain and following this wordpress tutorial". Yeah, no. You don't. I've had those before, and nothing felt as tangible as this corner does.
I've just come to realize that for writing here, I do need to care about what I write for someone else. I already write a ton, and most of it goes to the bin - scaffolding for better ideas. The writing that I actually like, I keep. I can't just "write whatever I want" because I already do that a ton, that (natural) necessity is already covered. I don't know how else to put it, I need to feel and organize my thoughts before writing here as I think I would when writing for a magazine. All1 magazines are written with the express intention of saying something to someone else. I cannot honestly think of writing here for the sake of it because its simple not true.
There's the verb for it, blogging. It still writing, yet the usage of a different word implies a different approach to the whole endeavor. There's no verb for "doing" other mediums like, I'm "radioing", "I've been a magaziner for two years now". This is of the modern medium. "I've been a tiktoker for a while", "I'm a podcaster, buy my merch", "I'm a influencer". The usage of the medium implies influencer. Different from using the occupation inside the medium "I'm a interviewer", "I'm a reporter", "I'm a camera guy". In which one resides, "blogging"?
I strongly feel like it enters in the first category of influencer-like terms yet is weird about it. Most other blogging platforms like medium or substack (or even most blogging guides if you search) are straight up about what they want. Blogging for money. This may or may not be a factor that drives people to bearblog, a sphere with a different opinion.
And here's the point weirdness about the influencer thing to me. Much of bearblog's discovery posts are about how nice it is to leave behind social media and to blog for blogs sake and, I agree. Its nice. Yet I also feel like this site echoes the rest of social media in many ways that are not acknowledged. Including influencers. There's clearly an influencer phenomena in bearblog and a culture of likes. Its nice to be able to disable these, true. Personally, I like it, yet I do think bearblog's sphere is weird about acknowledging the modern internet culture wrapped in the minimal old-school like medium.
This is not a call out for anyone, btw. I can't even mention really a singular post that does this, yet I remember and know that there are posts about this. Including mine sometime ago. Specially mine. Maybe I'm seeing dragons in my garage? Perish the thought anyone built a strawman to tear down with the materials they have in their own mind.
Where was I? Writing for someone else. QA comes to my door a ton because I can't hold on for the sake of it a single thought while writing. Popcorn, pop pop pop. Something gets out, the rest floods. QA has a point though, if you use the same method of writing for blogging and scaffolding ideas, how are your writings in blog any better than the ones that end up in the bin? They aren't. I still want to publish this. I do feel though that I need to write with a different system/process for these writings in blog to "feel" different.
Not all, obviously.↩