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Entries tagged 'cat:Writing'

Telling Old Stories For No Important Reason

I think I'm prone to telling stories from my past when I'm left with the choice of topic but there is no obvious topic right now that has to be discussed. So at moments at which I want to write something on here but not because there is a specific thing that I want to say or explore, I may fall back to telling about things that I did or made or remember from 20 years or so ago. That might seem nostalgic at (many) times. BNut I don't think that that's a bad thing at all. When I write about things I remember fondly, I welcome the feelings such memries evoke. Yearning or unfulfillable longing something from the past that can't be brought back isn't usually part of this. I like sharing some memories, like how my PC hobby was like decades ago were the industry and especially the tech itself was different. And on here, I decide what's worth talking about. Yes, this is a bit of an apologetical entry. Whatever.

I'd love to read from you if you either had different or the same experiences of things that I write about. There's a link for e-mail comments beneath each entry.

When somebody says they're reprocessing old memories it's expected to mean that they're looking back and coming to terms with their past. I think can also be meant in a good way. I'm remembering something and decide to explore my memories of it further; maybe because I'm inmdtrigued of the feeling of remembering something that I had completely forgotton about for 20 years, or simply because it's a nice memory. Maybe I'm looking at old photos of things that made, people I've met, places I've travelled to; and while more and more memories from that time come back, I eventually put them into my new perspective. I know I'm also changing my memories when I do this. The psychology of how memories are formed, saved, remembered and altered (and sometimes faked entirely) is very interesting. There are so many papers to read about memory-related researtch that suggest that most people most of the time assume that (at least their own) memory function differently from what it actually does and is granted much more credibility than it deserves. But anyway, it can be vbery interesting to bring memories from way back into connection with what you've experienced since then and your reality today.

What I'm doing here when I wriote about an idea for something that I had 20 years ago or something that I made back then, I'm slowly catching up with my desire to document certain things from my head. Text is the medium that feels right for that. A few years ago I've accepted that I will never have the perfect website which contains everything that I want it to, complete and structured and nothing boring. Because I never got anywhere when that was my goal. Now I'm just putting thing in entries and that's that. That also includes things that even 20 years ago I wanted to publish on the web but never did properly. I'm not doing it in the way that I decided then was the proper way. I'm just writing down thoughts and memories so that these memories don't belong in the "Oh, I never ended up deing this. Maybe I should at some point." category in my mind. Sometimes it feels like I have accomplished something that I had in the back of my head for 20 years simply because I write here that I once had this idea and still think it's a kind of neat idea but never did anything with it. And sometimes I delete it again right away because it really wasn't interesting in any way.

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Topics I Could Write About But Won't

When I made the resolution to write blog entries more often I thought tzopics to write about would come up and suggest themselves from everyday life, thoughts and things I hear and read about. Especially because I don't impose any rules on what is worth publishing and what isn't. I was right. Topics to write about come up all the time. But I didn't expect my idea of what I deem worth writing about to change so much that I feel shy about writing about anything. It is something I should have expected because it happens over and over. I've published shitposts with a sentence or less, then tried to only write interesting things for a while, then nothing for a long time - over and over. I think it's like a cycle I go through with varying speed. But I don't always intuitively know at what point of the cycle I am. But now that I try to write here regularly, I notice the periods where I don't write anything because nothing feels interesting enough. I intend to not care about whether what I write about is interesting. But I keep forgetting that I intend to not care.

Sometimes I think about a topic that can not be explored in a simple blog enty; or a single book; or by thinking about it for a year or five. Whenever I get into a conversation related to such a (often philosophical topic or one essential to human coexistance) I get a boost from new input, other view points, relativisations or new idea. I might feel intrigues, challanged, disrupted, supported or something else; and from the new input and the thoughts they lead me to in the following days and weeks I get a little bit closer to being able to write a book about such topics. But I would never.

The more I advance into society acting as a normal human being the more people talk freely to me about their beliefs, fears and ideas. And the more I get exposed to ideas that could be described as outside of my world view. And the more thoughts that I categorise as philosophical get fueled by foreign ideas. It's not often that I genuinely think about such topics deeply enough to get to have new thoughts, ideas or even beliefs. But most of those times has been in the last couple of years. Second most times were when I was around 16, 18, maybe 20 years old and talked to friends about pretty much anything freely and naively. I wasn't afraid to to weird out others. If they took offense by my thoughts and ideas (I didn't practicve having beliefs until much later, I believe.) I'm sure they henceforth avoided me or something. (I wouldn't have consciously noticved at the time.) Nowadays it takes the exact right situation plus a fairly large pile of motivation to steer a conversation to a point where fundamental political or societal topics (such as radical or controversial ideas) are accepted as a topic. What the motivation is may differ. I think it's good when convincing somebody of something is not part of it. But when you have ideas, that wish is hard to suppress. It usually at least peaks to the surface, be it only in the form of somebody saying that convincing somebody of something is not their intend.

This entry probably could do with a lot more structuring. It's one of those where I know that there's something that I want to say. But I don't exactly know what it is until I've built dozens of sentences. I think I'm going to just not re-write this entry and see if it makes sense anyway. I bet it will, to me.

One of my greatest desires (Good thing that "one of" can mean almost any number of desires as long as the total number of existing desires is not defined.) has always been to understand those world views that clash with my own. Experiences and beliefs that contradict what I perceive as reality, thought processes that are clearly not rational, beliefs that seem like they must have come from incomplete or wrong information and societal goals that don't line up with what I always come back to assuming to be what's best for society intrigue me. There is a lot of room in the latter, of course. And I'm not one who reads books to get the complete picture oif everybody's world view. I don't know what Nietsche really went on about for so many pages that those that made me loose my interest in reading what he had to say. I don't tend to read what religious fundamentalists on a mission tell me to read. But I peek into all sorts of stuff. I've listened to long lectures/monologues and conversations with Jordan Perersen on YouTube (before he got onto his current, rather close-minded, path of publicity work). I've listened to recordings from a weirdly praised guru (what people call a guru nowadays) and, and I give weird film, music and writings several chances before I really file them under "not for me" or "too weird for me" or "well, I'm a data hoardewr, so I'm not going to delete this, but it doesn't feel great that this is on my hard drive". Mein Kampf is much much more abstruse that most people who haven't read it believe. But it is in good company in my collection of bits. But most importantly - in my current belief - I use chances to talk to people who say things that are "out there" or contradict basics of my world view. When a clearly clinically ill paranoiac came to the hackerspace asking for help in securing his system, I was the one that bought up the patience to show a Windows user how to set up his firewall in BSD. (BTW, I really believe that I'm not trying to boast here, or something. This is just context for the next paragraph, I think.) I've spent many hours discussing spiritual topics with a person who confidently states that she does not want to trhink rationally, because rational thinking is against what she feels to be true. More than once I've ended up discussing politics with a right-wing skin head when I came for a anti-fascist counterprotest. I'm the one who stays when a (watch out, pigeonholing ahead) smelly drug addict asks everybody at the bus stop if they can do a web search for them because they wonder what colour snow is in Australia. I feel solicited when a magazine titles with "Psychology of the Evil". Because I want to understand: How other people think, how basic assumptions can be the opposite in another person's world view, why their normal is so different from mine, what information they base their beliefs on and - if it's the same information I have been exposed to - especiually how they can come to a different conclusion.

Recently I had a talk with somebody who I know also tends to explore different various extremes when pondering over questions of humanity, the coexistance of different types of beings (brains, humans, species, things). To my surprise they drove the converation to question many things that I assumed as given necessities of human wellbeing. Without being specific (for reasons the beginning of this entry may or may not have explained well), I was presented with reasoning and detailed explanations of thought preocesses that lead to conclusions that contradict several of my core beliefs including the assumption that humans generally consider well-being (happyness, satisfaction) as something that is desireable, if not the main goal of the human existance. I like to believe that many things were said against the sayer's belief in order to breaden the listener's horizon or field of thinking. But the fact that I don't know what ideas were shared out of a liking for open-mindedness and free thinking and what parts were shared out of conviction powers many of my late-night trains of thought since then.

Maybe (very probably) I'm interacting with people who would fierely disagree with me, if not hate me, if they knew my political opinions. I'm in contact with so many different people for work. The fact that we get along on a professional level despitze our differences could be food for thought in itself. I am glad that I don't know their political views because it would distract me way too much to try to understand where they're coming from or why they're so wrong while believing the opposite to be true. But I cherrish those moments in which I'm led to undertand parts of the reasoning behind world views that are very different from mine withoput feeling like I'm being guided or steered to such an understanding. I don't want to risk being manipulated into a realisation without taking all the necessary considerations into account.

I think the main reason why I wanted to write this entry is because my mind is still blown over the fact that I could now probably (in principle) rationally advocate for a genocide for the benefit of humanity.

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Writing To Think

Over the last two years or so I slowly realised that blogging is something that I want to do more often. Or writing in general. Often it was when I read other people's personal blogs that that realisation became a little push. One blog post in particular helped me realise what sort of mental processing the activity of writing evokes. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find it to link to it from here. Instead, here is another short blog post on the topic: "The two kinds of writing" by Herman Martinus. The principle that writing forces you to think wasn't an entirely new one to me. I just hadn't ever deemed it relevant to my life before and so never thought about it. Maybe I still haven't properly, because I never forced myself to do so for more than a minute at a time. But I'm writing about it now, so …

In a way, writing forces you to think like explaining something to somebody else forces you to understand what you want to explain first. Sometimes it is in the middle of a conversation that I realise: What I'm saying, or was about to say, is actually not a well thought through concept; but I hadn't realised this before because I never properly thought about it. But the conversation usually flows on. Even if you do take the time to think something through before you continue to talk, somebody else will likey use the pause to interject what they think at that moment. At least most people tend to do that. But when I write, I can pause however long I want, think about what I was about to say, what words are the best ones to describe what I know already but have never expressed, think about the relevance of my next thought and in what context it stands to what I wrote beforeand so on. I can fact-check something, search for a name, title or quote, read what I've written so far and in general take the time that I need overthink my thoughts before they are out there. That doesn't mean that I always do all of this for everything that I write. For example I often don't re-read immedietely after I wrote something, which leads to a lot of typos living permanently in my blog. I don't research what I write about for a post like this. But to put things into words and to structure thoughts itself already benefits my thinking. It takes a long time for me to write. Even a sentence like the last one can have several pauses and a tree of thoughts that may all end up being bretty much irrelevant to finishing the sentence. But I couldn't have known that for sure before thinking them through. I'm a slow writer, which is part of the reason why I don't write as much as I did when I worked less hours. For a long time though I didn't realise that writing it itself can be a recreational activity and that the very reason why I write so slowly is something that can help me in my life. Granted, with a topic like this, I'm not getting much therapeutic value out of it. It's mainly throttling my perfectionist-like attitude on forming sentences that slows me down, as well as dismissing thoughts that I eventually regard as not belonging in the entry. But who knows what some of those thoughts can do in the future. Having had them once may help me make the right connection in a completely different situation some day. But when writing a diary, forcing yourself to think about things can do a lot to set you onto a track to improve your life.

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At least 100 new entries will be published here over the next year.

I'll write more regularly here from now on. I won't have more to say than in the past. My thoughts put into words won't be more interesting or important than before. Nor will I have more time or deem writing blog entries more important. The only thing that has changed is that I have decided to write a new entry more often for a year, starting now. After the year: Who knows!

The idea that I'm following with this is that of #100DaysToOffload, a project - apparently started by Kev Quirk - that encourages to make exactly the decision that I just made. I feel that it is just the right form and amount of goal-setting that I need right now. It is voluntary: I'm not forced to do it by anything other than my will to do so. It's free: Nobody tells me what to write, or how long posts must be, or about what. It's forgiving: I don't need to have a 365 or 100 day streak or stick to a strict plan or routine throughout the year. But it's challenging nonetheless: If I would like to be able to sincerely feel that I have accomplished this goal, I need to do something about it multiple times a week. I need to take it seriously and not put it off for a week or two. The routine and fixed plan that I'm glad is not predefined by the challange will have to emerge sooner or later if I don't want this to turn into a new source of constant stress in my life.

I found this idea (and indeed the necessary nudge to write this here entry), from JCProbably's note from yesterday, which kicked off their #100DaysToOffload. This is how I found that note coincidentally: I subscribe to the blog of Herman Martinus. He wrote and runs the blogging platform Bear, which is, judging from the output it produces, a really neat, clean, lightweight, no-nonsense, cool weblogging tool, in case you've never checked it out. Sometimes when I read a post of his I take the time to see what else has been written on his platform recently. Just to give myself the chance to discover something new sometimes. And there on the discovery feed of Bear was the title I’ve been living inside my head too much, which got slightly tangled in some of my neurons when I read it. That feeling always makes me interested enough to click something. And in the case of a Bear blog entry, it's always a safe click without either bate or hate. It's generally a very friendly platform.

I don't know yet what I will write about in the coming year. The character of the blog will not change because I write more. Or maybe it will, if you consider the fact that absence of character is what my blog so far amounts to. Then more regular writing may allow the blog to develop its character in the first place. Anyway; There will be shitposts, incomplete posts, lots of typos, short thoughts and unfinished

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