This was gonna be kind of a copout blog just to score one more post before the month ends, for reasons that will be explained at the end. However, the usual happened, so I have time to turn it into a bigger retrospective of how blogging's going. Ambience, if you wish for one: Publishing on an actual blog rather than posting through it on fedi/bluesky is a completely different feeling. I heard somewhere that you shouldn't tell others you're planning to do something difficult, because your brain will get instant gratification, as though you've made actual progress on the difficult thing. It's kinda like this: no reactions, unless someone writes you. You just send out your message onto a big bold beautiful journey, and if there's gratification, it's more internal, from having completed a piece of writing. The greater side effect of it is I get snobby about topics and try to pick more sophisticated ones, that should in theory outlast the present moment, unlike disposable jokes I post on the social network sites. However, that drastically limits how much I write. In February I challenged my pen pal1 Vaida to a race of who can finish their blog post sooner. I needed about 2 days more than him, but hey, the deal was "any of us two who finishes their blog, wins", and I did. I hoped to turn blog writing into at least a monthly habit. Obviously, that didn't happen, but it's been in the back of my mind since that I would like to get to an average of ~1 post per month. At the time I was at a crossroads about generative AI, so I thought about writing something examining my stance towards it, because I thought I had interesting takes. After a while I realized that, being a people pleaser and a softie who doesn't want to offend anyone, I was writing a giant essay with smooth words that didn't say much. So I started splitting it up into smaller pieces, each focused on a specific aspect of the problem. That's how I managed to put out two articles in April, one week apart from each other. But I never finished what I set out to do with that AI series. The more I thought about the subject2, the more I was starting to dissociate from programming (which is something of a problem for a hired software engineer), but also from everything else. This crawling burnout culminated in a brief online meltdown in early July: Why should I write? Why should I have opinions? What does it change? What can I change? I spiraled on social networks for a few hours, before getting even more pissed at my friends replying, so I logged out, for less than one whole day, as one does. Maybe "posting through it" before cutting myself off reminded me that I did, in fact, have something I wanted to say? This is how we get to me getting verbosely mad at car games. Somehow, people find this kind of writing bearable3, with some even describing it as fun. I might even stick to it. I signed up at nearly the last viable moment for Blaugust. It's a challenge to write 31 blogs in 31 days. Part of my reason to join was definitely a weird sense of melancholia for the originator of the event, whom I clearly didn't know, except as a name of a friend's fedi server's admin, whom I only truly learnt about from an obituary on Massively Overpowered. But no, I think the real reason was to just have another challenge keeping writing in the back of my mind (it's clear by now that a 3 months overdue task in Todoist is not enough for that). There was never much of a chance to hit the maximum goal of 1 per day. I started August at the NH film festival, coming back to hotel before 1am every night, only to leave at 8am to watch another 5 movies. I had to come back from my paid time off vacation before I could find some time for writing. That said, by 31st, I had 6 entries published in August. I started scribbling this one you're reading now on 31st, but I fell asleep before I could finish it. Which describes most of my August: trying to get some words in, but falling asleep instead. It is now 4am, on a September day, and I'm finishing this post up because for a change I can't fall asleep. There's no question that I'm improving, if very slowly. I am glad to have tried. I absolutely flunked the "connecting with others' writing" part, but maybe that is for another time. I made a very small pass at reading other blogs, but mostly to gauge something else: how do these people succeed at writing more. And the answer, as I see it, circles back to what I mentioned here at the beginning: having a medium length option, between a social site quip and an essay. I'm not incapable of writing like that. No, certainly I can do medium length, I just don't. I think I'm just wired up for putting that into socnet threads. I just have to try harder not to succumb to that. Thanks for reading me, thanks for making me write, and of course thanks to Bel and Blaugust organizers. I say this affectionately, because we were texting, but at a cadence of post office deliveries. Vaida is one of the two Certified Readers™️ of all my blogs and always sends me comments and I am deeply grateful for that.↩ (Usual disclaimer: opinions presented are mine alone and not my employer's.) I am adamant there's no room in my life for generative audio/video content. I'm more divided about text: code generation I see at work can be useful, and so are code analysis tools or even whatever the mechanism is when you ask a search engine a question and it makes the relevant queries and extracts the answers. I don't really care to read generated stories or blogs though. And no matter the usefulness, I despise the externalised costs of LLMs: insane price bumps on computer parts, environmental costs of all the compute (both for training and inference), societal costs of cheaper manipulation and the entrenchment on both sides, and the questionable ethics of how all the training input was obtained.↩ get it, because it's on a bear blo— [the user was banned for this post]↩