Just wanted to jot off a quick note for some updates on the blog/newsletter/whatever this is, as well as some non-identifying details about what’s going on with me which might impact things going forward. Or not, the world is a strange place.
Biggest piece of housekeeping is the new comment moderation policy. Short summary is “don’t be deliberately unpleasant, and you’re fine”. I do have a strong commitment to free speech, but I also have eyes and a brain, so if you post stuff that’s clearly a direct personal attack or spam or just insane conspiracy theories, I will remove it, with a note explaining why. Otherwise I anticipate leaving things along. Think of it more as a description of what I’d like my particular comment garden to be like, and less of a set of excuses for me to ban-hammer you to feed my power fantasies. If I didn’t want people disagreeing with me, I wouldn’t be writing this blog, or I’d have comments turned off.
I have had to enact it once so far. I am sincerely asking you, please don’t make me have to do it again, it was deeply unpleasant in every possible sense for everyone involved.
In more background information, my new job continues to eat up a disturbing large proportion of my energy and time, to the point where if anything weird happens in any other part of my life it is going to be a large proportion of my spare time. In addition, my sleep lately has been absolute garbage, so what time I do have my focus is absolutely shot and I have even less energy. Add in my research work, the upcoming studies I want to do, (one of which is through this blog with you all), and my other stuff and… yeah, I’m well below scraping the bottom of the barrel. I anticipate this changing in the next few weeks, however.
Now, I know it doesn’t seem that hard, and clearly for a lot of people it isn’t, but I’m finding this one-post-a-week schedule to be far more demanding and brutal than expected.
at manages to hold down a full time job as a psychiatrist and still put out multiple posts a week which are between a few hundred to a few thousand words each. puts out at least one post a day, rarely shorter than a 500 words and sometimes several thousand. puts out two or three posts a week at , of comparable length to Scott. To be blunt, I don’t know how they do it, and while I always respected their intellectual acumen (even if I disagreed with them), now I find myself wondering exactly how much meth they’re on, and where I can get some. The research etc alone for each of my posts takes up days of my time, and I’m always painfully aware I’m having to cut it short, sometimes to the point of doing the topic a disservice.(Just for my own neurosis, I want to be explicit that I do not link you to those works or recommend them out of a pathetic attempt to get recommended or noticed by them, but purely because I genuinely think they’re good work and people should read them.)
For now, my plan is to keep to the one-post-a-week schedule, mostly out of stubbornness, but partially because I do enjoy the strict deadline and find it motivating. However, since this blog is, at the end of the day, something I do for 1) fun and 2) to help me round out my knowledge, the possibility exists that I might have to change it to once a fortnight. If that happens, I’ll try to give you plenty of notice, but the idea has been floated.
That’s all for now. Your regularly scheduled post should go up later today. It’s a fun one, I enjoyed researching it and thinking about it thoroughly, and in so doing I had some legitimate breakthroughs in my other work I probably wouldn’t have had otherwise. Also I think it shines a light on what we even mean when we talk about “privacy” in a way that I honestly think has serious, practical implications for how we approach the question and how we conduct ourselves.