Blogging is a muscle and other observations

Tuesday, 24 September, Year 5 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

In honor of a new blogging venture of an older Bitcoiner, I translate below an old article of mine on blogging.

I was meaning to publish this text as the 200th article on Trilema. I failed, it's the 203rd. The ideea it covers came to me sometime in February, there were about 80 articles up at that time and I said to myself, let's make this the 100th. By the time I remembered time had flown in the blink of an eye and the count had reached 140 or something. Let it be 200 then, but looky that I missed that one too. Confronted with the quite real possibility of it ending up published cca 2012, as article #7000 exactlyi, 203 seems quite acceptable. 1-2% tolerance isn't the end of the world.

So let me tell you about how it's like to be a blogger, from my point of view. Using this method I find that 202 Trilema articles mean 107`530 words, which would be roughly enough for two books, or a serious doctoral thesis. Had someone picked me up, December 31st, and said to me "Mr, by mid April I want you to have written well over a hundred thousand words, essay format, and make it interesting ye hear ?!" I'd have felt overwhelmed. Luckily I am a manager somewhat more subtle than that, so I whispered in my own ear a much more palatable "Eh, write whenever you get some idea or something."

And as it happens, ideas come, depending on how much chocolate you eat, at the rate of about one or two a day. At least to me it so happens. In fact, because that's how this blog started in the first place, these ideas'd come to me, and I'd smile to myself or tell of it to some friendii that happened to be around at the time. And that was that, afterwards oblivion. Poor ideas. "Wouldn't it be better to write them down somewhere ?" I said to myself. "Let's try".

Trying I discovered that blogging is a muscle. The more you write, the better you write, and easier. The more you write, the more ideas you get. The more you write, the more the ideas you get are adequate to being written about. After enough practice, you can feel a qualitative jump. If you've ever trained for a marathon, you have perhaps run into that moment when you feel you could run forever, to the end of the Earth. If you swim, you perhaps felt at some point you could keep swimming endlessly, to Hawaii. Generally it follows right after the miserable quarter hour when every muscle, musclelet, bone, boneletiii and tendon screams and wails its impending death.

In the past two weeks I produced 54 (fifty four!) articles. I spend hours simply trying to manage an explosion of ideas, taking notes while taking notes, writing 2-3 articles at the same time, I came out of the shower three times to scribble whole paragraphs' worth of notes. I spent an hour once in a coffee shop, with a cup of coffee and a newspaper, hour during which I called my secretary four times to dictate article skeletons.

I have come to sincerely believe that blogging is a very useful method of training man's mind. The only problem being that intellectual tone, much like muscular tone, is addictive. Blogging, much like running, much like swimming, make you want to write, to run, to swim instead of sitting in front of the tv, or with a beer.

———
  1. I was throwing numbers around, but time has this beautiful property of rendering future looking statements easily verifiable in the past. Currently Trilema carries 6307 published articles, so I was a little off. []
  2. Strictly feminine. Romanian unlike English is a language, so therefore it distinguishes gender, and always has, for the past two-three millenia. As a result the convention developed that using the feminine in a general statement implies the members are strictly feminine, whereas using the masculine implies nothing about the gender mix, they could be all male but not necessarily. Convenient, huh. []
  3. English really has to do something about the diminutives. A language where you can't make at least two kinds of diminutives out of any noun is fucking broken by design. []
Category: Meta psihoza
Comments feed : RSS 2.0. Leave your own comment below, or send a trackback.

22 Responses

  1. I feel really honored to be featured on Trilema roughly 9 hours after my first post on the new blog. Last night I took an walk and though "It would be nice if trilema posted on more bitcoin happenings so I could link newbs to that stuff, but I understand MP is busy. The sports/drinking blog I made for some friends never took off, so I might as well write the stuff I want to link to myself even if I'm not MP."

    So I made sure the new blog did a decent job holding the stuff that Ident's me to the bitcoin community on the pages, and started posting. Given the honor of this mention and translation I imagine I will work out this blogging muscle and see what happens.

  2. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    2
    Mircea Popescu 
    Tuesday, 24 September 2013

    That's very healthy thought process. If I'm the only guy that writes stuff everyone links to it becomes exceedingly easy for a theoretical enemy to stop anything from being written. Not a healthy state of affairs.

  3. I'll admit that tiring of everyone linking CoinDesk while CoinDesk keeps sucking mindless VC cock was a motivation as well. Purely anti-bitcoin stuff like this from a "bitcoin site" needs addressed (thinking it will probably be the third post). I mean it seems they want to stay a niche publication whose articles illustrate the ways that VC newbs who flush money away on bitcoin the wrong way are still newbs making newb mistakes.

    With stupidity's infinite hitpoints another blog can't kill stupidity, but just maybe new blog might contribute to reducing the area under the curve when stupidity is graphed.

    Basically credit for inspiration goes to Trilema and anti-credit for making this feel necessary goes to CoinDesk and all of the spammy "Bitcoin Blogs" that consist of nothing but faucet links and affiliate spam.

  4. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    4
    Mircea Popescu 
    Tuesday, 24 September 2013

    It seems to me that's exactly what it is : VCs thinking that what I say is not mandatory, because they're special or something. They'll learn on their own dime and in their own time, just like everyone else. Course, we have a word for people that need to learn through experience as they've not mastered language, and that word isn't "VC".

    Anyway, take it the other way : the merit of Pythagoras' school is not in having had diminished mathematical illiteracy in its time, or having reduced the clueless headcount in pre-latin Greece, as nobody gives a shit about the illiterare or the clueless three thousand yeas ago (and for that matter, right now, either). The merit of the Flemmish school is having made great paintings, not having improved taste and appreciation of color among Orania's poor.

  5. Already have someone wanting me to take down a post. Must be doing something.

  6. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    6
    Mircea Popescu 
    Thursday, 26 September 2013

    Why, is it slandelibelous ? Did you asper upon characters ?

  7. It wasn't related to Gliph, which is disappointing. It was related to these aspersions which I gave the offending party the courtesy of detaching from whatever disposable nick they used to market their otherwise uninteresting pile of MLM and buzzwords.

  8. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    8
    Mircea Popescu 
    Friday, 27 September 2013

    You need a better formatting convention for conversations.

  9. Indeed.

  10. Prolly got one more imminent idea for a post before I go back and take time for things like conventions and formating before it gets out of control...

  11. So I think I improved the blog's aesthetics...

  12. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    12
    Mircea Popescu 
    Friday, 27 September 2013

    The colors are a clear improvement (you forgot to blue some places, you misblued some others tho). Don't do "Seems pretty conclusive doesn’t it." one link posts, they're unuseful.

  13. I think the bluing has been fixed.

    The one link post was of limited utility, and it isn't a format I plan to use much in the future. In this case though I think the format did exactly what I wanted. It captured that moment in time and attached the proposition in the title, that Ripple as OpenCoin imagines it is dead.

    I've disliked the Ripple model for an amount of time that predates TradeFortress's Ripplescam.org site and your RIPple post. I just found the discussion in the channel of Ripple's open sourcing itself to death notable and newsworthy. Something where I spotted "This is where OpenCoin's Coffin was sealed" and I could link to it 3 to 6 months from now when that OpenCoin's death the is old news.

    My math was that post had a low immediate cost and a high potential future value. A tweet for whatever tweets are worth probably would have been a better format. I swear I can sign with 1LvCuntsJyFFQsLuJhBXBPokbQa7SAyMr4 that nothing less than the arrest of BFL Sonny or GigaVPS would be occasion enough for a one link article in the next six months. This particular single link, single less than line of text post seemed at the moment to have tremendous future potential utility, as something I could link to and say "I told you so" and such.

    Btw, did you know Amir Taaki is working on a new wallet?

  14. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    14
    Mircea Popescu 
    Friday, 27 September 2013

    I didn't know, no. Did you know Panama went into an unannounced banking holiday ?

  15. I actually did read about that earlier. Sounds like AMAZING COUNTRY.

    Erik and the others are probably choosing it for a reason though.

    So, I've been digging for three things I was too negligent to bookmark before I needed the: instructions on getting an avatar here (where does .jpg go), the everybody is a tourist article, and the your insults github.

    Here's the link to a New Yorker piece on Amir's new venture. Digging through VC bullshit it seems he is talking to people doing other stuff though and hasn't learned to STFU. Learning this has tamped most of my RippleScamCoin death joy.

  16. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    16
    Mircea Popescu 
    Saturday, 28 September 2013

    I imagine they got kinda caught with their pants down over this move, but anyway.

    img alt='BingoBoingo`s avatar' src='http://www.thedrinkingrecord.com/avatar.png
    or whatever other url you use.

    http://trilema.com/2012/tara-ca-un-hotel-sau-o-schimbare-de-perspectiva/

    the github you'll have to ask thestringpuller for I don't remember where it was.

    VCs and assorted delusional "professionals" are full of fail and never get to do anything worthwhile for reasons, not because MP dislikes them. Among those reasons, poor idiot filtering.

  17. Thank you. I appreciate the information.

  1. [...] the day I started this blog Mircea Popescu honored it with the translation of an older Trilema Article and referred to myself as an “older bitcoiner” and followed a week later with continued praise “Best working of a Trilema point into a blog [...]

  2. [...] Two blog posts in a week, after more than a year of inactivity?! Well, the few readers that are left know this isn’t the first time. Perhaps blogging is a muscle. [...]

  3. [...] fear I have blundered in keeping too private, not working the blogging muscle or engaging with those I see as the leaders in the field, and other fields for that matter; namely, [...]

  4. [...] well as mine, of all sorts) could still not paper over the sinking feeling of atrophiating writing muscle that came with the situation. So I had no choice but to look for a new provider to host both [...]

  5. [...] that failure to excercise the blogging muscle and keep the brainspace clean is a fast track to a disorganizational cascade, I'm going to work on [...]

Add your cents! »
    If this is your first comment, it will wait to be approved. This usually takes a few hours. Subsequent comments are not delayed.