First of, happy new years everyone (sorry Larry David). May this year be the end of our long-running crises. For this year's first post, I want to do a bit of a reset.
This website began as an amalgation of a few needs: I had ideas to write but wanted to flesh them out beyond my head, and tweets. I also wanted practice with web programming, especially after finding out github can host static sites. And I wanted some place to serve as a portfolio of sorts.
So my starting approach to posts was to be clever: solve problems, do breakdowns, deep dives, things of that nature. As you can see from my posts so far, that didn't really work. My main issue was momentum: as it turns out, I burn out of ideas really quickly. So anytime there was grunt work involved, my brain tunes out. It's easier to grin and bear it to the finish line for work, less so as a hobby. I'm still proud of the writing I did, especially the one on black box models. But the pace of writing to produce something like that again is not something I look forward to, for now. So moving on I'm making a change, inspired by Dan Davies' substack.
The idea for this blog is going to be the equivalent of lofi hip hop beats to relax/study to. Not so much giving takes regarding Great Debates with right and wrong answers, as funny little ideas that run in the background while you’re working on something else. The topic will be whatever that fancies me, anything is fair game whether recently or ages ago. If it manages to come out as a post, the central idea was strong enough to survive entropy.
Obviously I'm trying things out, but the goal is to loop myself into the creative process more often, and getting used to thinking during that loop. I've seen Adrian Chiles wring gold after gold out of sheer desperation, and I want that for me.